Alien Hunter: Underworld (16 page)

“What the hell, Flynn—oh, Jesus!” Mac followed him, running just as fast.

As Flynn reached the door of the shack, he threw himself into hard reverse. He stood looking at the biggest diamondback he'd ever seen. The snake lay in a great, heaping coil spread across the two wooden steps that led up to the door.

Mac came up beside him. “Goddamn, shoot it. You got the pistol.”

“It's not real.” He plunged toward it—and it snapped its head forward and struck him below the knee. It dug its fangs into the soft tissue above his ankle, and he felt the white-hot pulse of venom as it surged into him. Still, he believed that it was hallucinatory and bulled his way ahead with the snake hanging on to his leg, its outrageous fourteen-foot body whipping behind him like a drunken evil flag.

As he threw open the door of the shack, a sheet of electric fire flared in his face, and all the equipment started sparking.

Mac headed in. “Flynn got snakebit!” he yelled as he pushed past.

“Don't go in there!” Flynn grabbed him.

“My whole setup—”

“There's millions of volts being pumped in there. Same thing that burned Elmwood down.”

“There's also three hundred grand in equipment in there.”

“Help me, I think I really am snakebit.”

“Shit, the thing's still on you, man!”

“I said help me!” As he spoke, he reached down to yank the snake off him—and felt his feet dragged out from under him.

In the next instant, he was being drawn feetfirst upward into the air. Above him, the snake hung with its maw open wide and full of swirling fire. His leg was practically screaming with pain, the snake now rising with him. He drew his gun and emptied it upward, but to no avail.

He shouted to Mac, “Rifle! Use your rifle!”

In the crazy upside-down world he was dealing with, he saw Mac run over to the pickup and start positioning himself in its bed.

Then there was a shudder, and his head was enclosed in something that smelled like sweat and flesh. Arms. But whose?

There followed a struggle, the disk pulling, the person who had enclosed his head pulling back, and the snake writhing and struggling, the whole furious body of the thing twining around him, pulsing, and the head going like a crazed piston, hitting his leg again and again and again.

Every few minutes, a shot rang out, but the disk remained low overhead, a shadow with a spinning fiery heart, seemingly unaffected.

He got a hand on the snake and ripped it off, and saw the whole prehistoric length of the monster go whipping and swarming up into the disk.

An instant later, he hit the ground harder than he'd ever hit anything before. He lay stunned, trying to get the world to stop whirling and tumbling. The electronics shack belched sheets of fire.

“Flynn! Flynn! Come back to me, Flynn, come back to me!”

It was Geri. She'd saved him.

“They'll start again any second—get the hell out of here!”

She pulled him to his feet. His whole left leg was burning; he'd never felt anything like it. Then they were inside, and he dropped down onto the kitchen floor.

Mac abandoned his effort and followed them.

“Snake,” Geri said, her voice echoing faintly from the far side of his pain. “Mac, do you have any antivenin?”

“First-aid kit. Pantry, top shelf.”

“We've lost the uplink!” Diana wailed. “We've lost the uplink!”

Flynn was dizzy. He'd gotten a serious snakebite, and if he was going to survive, he would have to organize these people, give the right commands, make them do what they needed to do.

He saw Mac then, looming over him, staring down with frightened eyes.

“Don't you die on me, brother.”

“Fine, hit me with the antivenin.”

He didn't feel the prick of the needle, but knew it had gone in from the fact that his leg began to tingle as if it had lost circulation and gone to sleep. The world was whirling, Diana and Geri swirling past like figures on an out-of-control carousel, and Mac with his needle and his knife, working like a furious grandmother.

“Get downstairs,” he managed to gasp. “This is not over.”

His leg would not work, and he found himself using Geri's body as a crutch. A strange memory came to him, of embracing her in the dark sheets of night, and the moon had blessed their union, and they had been happy, laughing happy, in the small hours.

She smelled like Abby, she kissed like Abby, in bed her body against his felt like Abby's. “She's full of Abby's genes,” the voice had said.

She was crying now, and he told her to stop. “I'm a Texan—we like to get snakebit, it's good for us.”

She shook her head, her hair flowing back and forth across her face like a curtain.

“I think I got plenty of antivenin in him,” he heard Mac say, a voice echoing in a distant world. “He's a strong damn cuss. What you gotta worry about is what happened inside that disk, once they got that snake in their lap.

“We gotta cool him off, ladies, or he's gonna start having seizures.”

“Did you get it?” he asked Mac. The critical question.

“Get what?”

“The disk. Did you get it?”

“Hell no, I didn't get it.”

When they were kids, they used to range across the countryside with rubber snakebite kits in their pockets, and reassure each other that they really would use the tiny razors inside to cut deep
x
's in one another's ankles, and then suck out the blood and the venom.

There was a boy called Carl Meston, who had been bitten by a coral snake. He'd hardly felt it and gone on playing football. While riding home from the game, though, he stopped breathing, and died on the corner of Plains and Elm, his face black and a cop frantically giving him mouth-to-mouth. Another boy, whose name Flynn had forgotten, was bitten by a diamondback and lost a foot.

“Okay,” Mac said, “come back to us. There's enough antivenin in you to make a horse dance.”

“Will he be all right?” Geri asked, and he heard the tremble of real fear in her voice.

“Dunno. That much venom, they're liable to just croak, and there isn't one damn thing you can do about it. Flynn's a tough bastard, though—right, Flynn?”

“Tough bastard, that's right. I need a glass of water.”

Diana brought him a bottle of Evian from the bar, which dominated one wall of this very luxurious basement. He took it and drank the whole thing down in a gulp. She went to get more, but Flynn said, “Not yet. If I flood myself with water and my sodium level goes too low, I won't be able to metabolize the antivenin. I can't see my leg, but it feels like a blimp full of lead.”

“There's some swelling,” Geri said.

“Blackness around the wound?”

“A little.”

He knew what that meant. Necrosis. “Cut it out.”

“Excuse me?”

“Mac, cut it out. You know how.”

“It might run deep.”

“No matter how deep it runs. I'd like to hang on to the leg as long as I can. For life, preferably.”

Mac turned on the gas fire and burned a knife red in it. “Okay, buddy. Somebody give him something to chomp on—this is gonna smart.”

It didn't smart; it hurt in the way that profound torture hurts, with bright waves of pain flowing through his body, up to the top of his head and down to his feet again and again, back and forth, a whipping tide.

Nobody had anything for him to bite down on. In any case, he had no intention of screaming, although it was a serious temptation.

Mac gathered the necrotizing tissue into a handkerchief, a steaming pulp of blood and flesh. “Something else in there, man?”

“What're you talking about?”

“Somethin's in there. Looks like metal.”

“I need a doctor.”

“Oh, yes,” Diana said.

“The snake is back. They dropped it, and it went to the barn. The horses are calm, so it's staying away from them. I'm gonna want to find it and get rid of it.”

“Don't kill it, Mac—they're getting scarce.”

“Fine, I'll have Carlos take it down into Big Bend and check it into a snake resort. Shall I get it a suit and tie, and a pair of cool dark glasses?”

Something was dripping through the ceiling. It took him a moment to understand. “The bodies up there—how many are they?”

“Four,” Geri replied immediately.

Diana was binding his wound.

“You about finished?”

She sat back. “Done as much as I can. But Mac's right—it's all strange. I've never seen a wound like it.”

“Will somebody please describe what's so strange?”

“There's only a single puncture, for one thing. But a doctor needs to look at it.”

“We got no phone, and we got some mighty good hunters waiting for us in the sky, so we'll just have to table that, won't we? And there's something else we need to do right now, which is to burn those bodies. The damn things have a bad habit of coming back to life.”

“They have multiple damage-recovery systems,” Geri said. “They're extremely durable.”

His leg screamed its agony, but he refused to give up; it wasn't in him. One by one, he climbed the steps.

The kitchen stank of alien blood, a garlicky mixture of meat and some kind of chemical. They even smelled poisonous.

“We need to do this. Let their friends see what they're up against.”

Geri went down on one knee, examining a nearby body with careful, practiced hands. She had done examinations like this before, clearly.

She looked up at him. She was cradling a head, its eyes glassy, dull with death and sadness. “These are an older generation,” she said. “No buffers programmed into them.”

“What are buffers?”

“You call buffers ‘conscience.' These don't have that.”

“So where are they from?”

“They were built here, Flynn. Had to have been. They're from right here on Earth.”

Just then, Mac came over. He said, “I'm never gonna be good enough to shoot that thing down. So what's next, Flynn? What do we do?”

“Mac, I am sorry to say that I just don't know.”

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

HOPING THAT
maybe something about the creature would reveal some vulnerability, they did a dissection in Mac's kitchen, on the big table in the center of the room, using Mac's kitchen knives, a box cutter, and a saw Lupe used to open bones for marrow.

“They dissect these things at Wright-Pat,” Mac said. “So I've been told.”

“No idea,” Diana replied.

“We've dissected five so far.”

“Flynn, that's—”

“Classified, but Geri obviously has need-to-know.”

“Mac, leave the room!” Diana snapped.

“He stays. He's working with me. Also need to know.”

She fumed.

The body was about four feet long, with the same narrow frame and dark eyes of the others Flynn had seen.

“How, exactly, do you know it's not one of yours?” he asked Geri.

She split the chest, drawing it wide and exposing the heart and lungs. “These are typical organs. And look—” She scraped at a rib, which revealed bright silver where bone should be. “That's titanium or maybe stainless steel. This is an old unit. We haven't used those materials in years. We use a living composite bone now. Artificial, but alive. Far more durable and flexible than this stuff.”

“So, can he build more?”

“Judging from what he's using, no. We're looking at an old, out-of-repair disk and robots that are four or five generations back. This is a shoestring operation here, Flynn.”

“A few crumbs of incredible technology are worth a whole world of primitive weapons like ours,” Flynn commented.

As he looked at the biorobots, he found himself coming to a very large question, not about them, but about himself. “Do you have devices that would enable voice commands to be projected into a human brain? Words?”

“The biorobots are equipped with transceivers. They use burst telemetry, but I guess voice would be possible.”

A slow, creeping coldness spread through him. He was carrying a transceiver.

If he could be communicated with, then he could be tracked, too. He could even be vulnerable to mind control. It wouldn't be gross, but subtle, causing him to make the wrong decisions, to walk into traps, to make himself vulnerable—which was exactly what he'd been doing since he went rushing off to Mountainville.

He decided he'd have a full-body MRI scan as soon as possible, under the most secret conditions he could manage. No Diana, no Geri, nobody but him and the MRI technician. He'd read the scan himself. Only if he was unsure would he seek out a radiologist. If he was implanted and it couldn't be removed, he would have no choice but to inform Diana, but until then, his degree of exposure would remain his problem, and his alone.

Right now, he had more to learn.

“Geri, what happened on Aeon, when you say they rebelled?”

“Nowhere in intelligence theory was there anything that suggested they could gain independence of thought, let alone an ego and the hopes and dreams that go with it. Then, one day, a group of them took over a refurbishing facility. That's a place where used ones are broken down into component sections, and the least worn parts combined together to create new ones. They killed the operators and barricaded themselves in the facility. From there, the rebellion spread. Now, they're in control of half the planet. More than half.”

“And Morris? Is he a biological robot, or something like you?”

“I'd appreciate ‘someone' rather than ‘something.' We're the outcome of long biological evolution just like you, and just as valid as you are. At home, Morris is a criminal under investigation for four murders that took place during a raid on a robotics facility. That was where he stole the elements he's used to build his robot soldiers.”