Chrono Inquisitor (Gods Be Damned) (27 page)

I bent down, lifted his pant leg, and unstrapped the gun. It was a .22. Not very powerful, but better than nothing. Besides, we only had one more robot to dispose of.

Speaking of which, the damn thing had reached the door. Instead of fleeing though it was welding the door to the frame with a blowtorch embedded in its finger. The bastard. Why the hell did it have a blowtorch for a finger? How would that come in handy for hotel guests?

I aimed and fired. And kept firing as I approached it. It took all the bullets I had plus a couple of Ranger-son’s before the damn thing fell.

“This is exactly why robots were outlawed,” he said through clenched teeth.

While he inspected the door, I turned and looked back on our robot attackers. Two of them were twitching. He gave me his other gun and I put an end to that.

Somewhere in the dark a humming started and quickly grew in intensity.

“I knew it was too good to be true that they were the only ones to go homicidal,” he said.

“My thoughts exactly.” The robot who’d been welding the door hadn’t gotten very far in its efforts, but it was enough that we couldn’t open the door. I picked the damn thing up and used it as a battering ram.

The weld finally broke and we got the door open.

I turned and looked back into the darkness, as stupid people often do rather than just moving forward. I could see dozens of little red dots coming towards us.

“Go!” I yelled.

He went first. We entered the stairwell and started to run up the stairs.

Then I heard the sound of footfalls coming down. Someone, or something, was coming our way from above.

I stopped Ranger-son. We hadn’t even made it halfway up the first flight. I still had his main gun. I wasn’t sure how many bullets were left. If there was even one.

I looked back at the door where the robots would be coming through any minute. Nothing yet.

I looked up the center of the stairs trying to see what was coming to cut us off. I caught a flash of red hair.

“Ranger Alvarez, is that you?” Ranger-son yelled. I guessed he’d seen the same.

“Stevenson?” she shouted back.

I wasn’t sure if I should be happy of her arrival, or if I should turn around and risk that the robots would do me less damage.

“Yeah, it’s me,” he said.

“Security is down again. Elevators as well,” she said as she came around the corner where we could all see each other clearly. “What happened?”

He was cradling his wrist. It looked bad. It was already beginning to swell and discolor. His pinky and ring fingers were sticking out in a not normal fashion.

“Robots,” he said, and began to climb the stairs again. I followed.

“What?” she said.

“We don’t have time. There’s more coming.”

As if on cue, the first robot entered the stairwell.

I stopped on the mid-floor landing.

“Go get help,” I said, looking at Ranger-son. “Alvarez and I will delay them.”

“There’s too many,” he said.

“I think we can bottleneck them at the door and shoot them from here. We can’t let them get upstairs to the guests. We’ll do what we can until we run out of bullets, or you get back with reinforcements.”

“I’ve got men stationed at the entrance to the hotel,” Alvarez said. “It should only take you a minute to get them and get back down here.”

“Then what am I waiting for?” he said and started running up the stairs.

“You got an extra gun I can use?” I asked.

I expected her to make some sort of comment about not being able to trust me, considering what happened the first time we’d met. I would have. But she didn’t. She simply handed me one of her guns and three clips without hesitation.

“Sorry about earlier,” I started to say, but she cut me off.

“We’ll talk about it later. Focus on the task at hand.”

She crouched down and with deadly accuracy put a bullet between the optical sensors of the first robot. She did the same for the next. And the next.

I just stood there feeling useless.

As soon as another robot came through the doorway, she shot it down. One bot. One bullet.

In no time at all the doorway was littered with mechanical carcasses. They were beginning to pile up, forming a wall that slowed them down.

Then one of them got smarter. It picked up one of its fallen comrades and used it as a shield. Then others started doing the same. That’s when I stopped standing there dumbstruck and started shooting as well.

A minute doesn’t sound like a whole lot of time, until you start counting every second.

I really wished I had my maelstrom. I wished I had my vault.

A few seconds shy of a minute since Ranger-son had left for help, both Alvarez and I were already down to our last clips, and the bots weren’t letting up. They’d reached the bottom of the stairs and were beginning their ascent.

“We should start retreating,” I said.

“Agreed.”

We started to climb the stairs backwards, going slowly so we didn’t trip. We moved at almost the same pace as the bots. Almost. They were moving slightly faster, and more of them had made it through the doorway.

When we reached the first level basement, Alvarez and I were out of bullets.

“Time to run,” she said.

She grabbed something from her belt.

A grenade.

“Why the hell do you have a fucking grenade?” I said.

“It’s EMP.”

“Oh.” It still didn’t explain why she had it.

She pulled the pin and threw it down amongst them. There wasn’t an explosion. No boom. It was more of a tick. And then all the bots in the stairwell dropped.

It was impressive.

Luckily they weren’t military grade, otherwise it wouldn’t have worked.

Unluckily, it had a short range. A second later more came through the door. At least they’d be slowed down having to step over the dozens of non-operational bots.

“Let’s go,” she said.

We started up the stairs and heard thundering footsteps coming from the floor above.

Please let that be the cavalry, I thought.

The sight of who was coming wasn’t what I was expecting.

It was better.

The four Horsemen had arrived like the angels their namesake were supposed to be.

Each had been a soldier during the robot wars instigated by
Kremalakin, and they’d each lost various body parts in the process. On the verge of death, rather than opting to be dispatched to a possible afterlife, or released from their call of duty, they had opted to keep on fighting, and they wanted to do it on the robots level. They’d allowed themselves to be cybernetically enhanced in order to compete with the superior strength of the bots. They were as much machinery as they were men, and they hated it.

They’d earned their moniker due to their appearance and the savagery in which they’d fought. Originally there had been more than four, thirty-one to be precise, but by the end of the war only six had survived. Over time
ChronoGen hired them on as their own Internal Affairs investigation unit. The Horsemen were the Inquisitors of Inquisitors. They were the things reapers feared. Unless of course they were coming to your rescue and you happened to be fighting bots, which the Horsemen had an insane blood lust for, or in their case, grease lust.

Without even a concern, the four of them charged into the oncoming wave of bots. They didn’t even bother pulling weapons, preferring to rip the robots mechanical limb from mechanical limb, barehanded.

I stopped and stared in utter amazement at the ferocity of our saviors. I was so enthralled by them that I’d failed to notice Ranger-son had returned along with the Horsemen, and had come to stand beside me.

The three of us; Ranger-son, Alvarez, and I, stood there, caught up in the carnage before us. I had the thought that people would probably pay exorbitant fees to see such a spectacle, and we were witnessing it for free.

In no more than ten seconds, the Horsemen had ripped apart all the machines that had made their way through the breach. They then tore their way into the warehouse to continue their robot killing spree.

“There goes several billion dollars down the drain,” Alvarez said. I turned and looked at her. She looked genuinely disheartened about it.

“Mr. Cook has fled,” He said.

“Huh?” I said, realizing he was there. “Why would,” I started to ask and then stopped realizing the implication.

It didn’t make sense though.

“The hotel had another breach in the security system,” he said. “It’s why the elevators malfunctioned. He managed to escape while we were having issues with the elevators and our friends there.” He pointed to the hunks of metal, plastic, rubber, and various fluids littering the staircase.

“Still think he’s innocent?” he asked.

“I never said he was innocent. I said I didn’t think he was our guy.”

“Looks like you were wrong.”

“Looks like. But then, how do we know it was him?” I asked.

“I ran into Ms. Park upstairs. She told me that as soon as the system went down she started making security rounds. She spotted him running across the golf course.”

“And she found that odd?” I asked with a little bit of sarcasm.

“Don’t you think that’s odd?” He gave me a look of ‘don’t start your shit, I’m not in the mood.’

“My bad,” I said. “Continue.”

“She said she pursued him but he had too much of a lead and he had an off-road vehicle waiting for him. She was on foot and radioed her team, they relayed the message to the Rangers. Blayze and Fausett are in pursuit now.”

“And she’s certain the man she saw was Cook?” I asked.

“There aren’t many who fit his description. Besides, Shepard Cook is no longer in his room, or the hotel as far as anyone can tell,” he said.

“So you think Cook disabled the security systems, killed Beit, and now because we questioned him, he decided to run and tried to kill us in the process?” I said.

“I do. This whole things smells of revenge. I think this last incident was too much for him. He has a history of PTSD from the war, and I think he finally snapped. He killed Julius because of what happened with the Harlan contract.”

“The man is dangerous,” Alvarez added. “He’s on several agency
watchlists.”

“We already know he’s capable of disabling the security systems,” He continued. “I think he did it because it was the only way to get away with the murder. Not to mention it was a way of spitting in the face of the company he’d lost the contract to. Not only did he murder the man who wronged him, but he also made it known that he’s better than the company that did get the job.”

It sounded right, but… I shook my head. “It just doesn’t feel right. I mean it makes sense, but why would he run now? We just got done talking with him and we didn’t remotely lead him to believe that we thought he murdered Beit.”

“You have heard of The Tale
Tale Heart?” Ranger-son asked.

I had, but I didn’t buy it.

“Come on, you’re telling me that his guilt got to be too much for him, so he decided to run as soon as we got done talking with him? I was there remember, and yes, he did seem a little uneasy and was trying to be too friendly, but trust me, no way was there any sort of guilt emanating from him.”

“Then why did he run?” Ranger-son asked.

Before I could come up with a reason, the Horsemen returned. Their boisterous cheering drowning out everything, my thoughts topping the list.

“Bout time we had a decent fight,” said the semblance of man adorned in fiery red armor. War.

“Yeah, what little muscle I have left was going into atrophy,” said the man in black. Famine.

The man decked out in white, speckled with the blood of the machines, oil and hydraulic fluid, pushed the two aside. “Maybe next time you two will pull your weight, and Death and I can take a break for once,” said Victory, their leader.

The fourth man, who appeared like a corpse, and was more machine than it seemed humanly possible, said nothing as he began his climb up to us. Death.

“Is it so wrong we enjoy our jobs and take a little extra pleasure in what we do?” asked War.

“Yeah man,” Famine said, “we were just having some extra fun. It’s been so long since I crushed a bot with my bare hands.”

Victory whacked him upside the head. “Yeah, and you nearly got your head bashed in while being caught up in your ‘just having some extra fun’ kick. How many times now has Death saved your ass?”

War started to say something, but Victory pointed his clawed finger at him and gave him a threatening, ‘Keep your damn mouth shut, because I’ll take you to task quicker than Mnemosyne can digitize your synapses firing’ glare.

War said nothing.

“Inquisitor Yan,” Victory said turning back to me. “You’re lucky we arrived when we did.”

I thought of saying something smart-
assy, but didn’t. Couldn’t. These guys were my heroes. My idols. I’d spent the last decade doing everything I could to join their ranks. I’d never been this close to them before. Sure, I’d seen them at company functions, but I’d always felt like an embarrassed kid when they were around and never had the guts to approach them.