I Am Automaton: A Military Science Fiction Novel (30 page)

Smithe was writhing around on the floor squirting blood everywhere. He was screaming and grunting in pain.

Carl threw down the knife and knelt over his comrade. “I-I thought you were one of them.”

Smithe was rocking back and forth on the floor ranting hysterically. “I-I heard the…wind…I…figured you…made it in…through this room.”

“Jesus, Smithe. I’m so sorry!”

Carl got up and threw the comforter off the bed. He pulled off the sheets and began cutting strips. He went into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and placed it over Smithe’s wound. He then began to wrap his neck in the strips of sheet.

“Christ, I’m not a medic. I’m doing the best I can.”

Smithe was losing a lot of blood. Carl wrapped the wound as tightly as he could. The blood soaked through quickly, and the more pressure Carl applied, the quicker Smithe seemed to bleed out. In frustration, Carl threw his back against the wall behind him and slid down to the ground.

He put his hands to his face and stifled the overwhelming urge to scream. He choked it down in violent, tearless sobbing that shook his body like convulsions.

He didn’t know what to do. He wished his big brother was there to guide him. He wished Barnes was there to guide him. Hell, he would’ve even settled for Jorge, the hotel manager, at the moment.

But he was all alone.

As the night passed, the winds grew calmer and the night quieter. He held Smithe in his arms, but Smithe was cold and still.

The eye of the storm was approaching, a brief respite. There had been no further incident since he struck Smithe. When things quieted
down, he figured he’d go outside and check things out.

It was
00:10 when all grew silent. He awoke with a start, unaware that he had succumbed to sleep, sitting in a pool of Smithe’s blood. The room smelled of copper.

He slowly rose to his feet, every part of his body aching terribly. His head was pounding as if he was experiencing a vicious hangover.

He picked up his knife, wincing as he bent over, and wiped Smithe’s blood off on his face. He smeared the blood on each of his cheeks like war paint.

He didn’t know what made him do it. All he could say was
that, at the time, it was the only thing that made sense when one’s mind teetered on the brink of madness from extreme exhaustion and psychological trauma. He was going to war with the ID, and he wanted Smithe with him. Blood begot blood.

He left Smithe’s body on the cool tile floor and opened the door. He stepped out into the hallway and stretched his neck, rolling his weary head around on his shoulders.

He heard the echo of footsteps down the hall, but they were not the footsteps of a human, nor the shuffling gait of an ID. They were small footsteps ending in clicking against the tile. They were clawed footsteps.

A slinky form materialized at the end of the dark hallway. It stopped for the moment, appraising him in the darkness, sizing him up in the context of the long corridor.

Carl remembered that the hotel grounds bordered a wildlife preserve. This was wild life. It let out a low, menacing growl, and it slinked closer down the hallway.

Carl, drained from adrenaline exhaustion and at this point completely unconcerned with his safety, turned to face his new adversary.

The creature drew close, paused, whipping its tail around behind it in darting motions…and then it leapt at Carl. He let it take him, sending them both crashing down to the hard floor.

He
quickly rolled over on top of it and slit its throat with his knife, spilling its hot blood on the cool tile. The fight was over in minutes.

Carl stood up triumphantly over his kill. The feeling was primal, and gave him a perverse rush through his mind and body. He no longer thought. He was animal. He was a deadly automaton, clinically detached and unfeeling. His sole purpose was to kill.

He walked back into the room, stepped over Smithe’s body as if it wasn’t even there, and stepped through the sliding screen doors. He hopped over the balcony and tasted the cool night air on his tongue. The grounds were silent. He walked up to the swimming pool in the moonlight that passed through the hurricane’s eye, casting its pale light on the devastation all around him.

He looked down at the pool and saw Munger and Barnes floating on the surface of the water, faces down. They were no longer with him, casualties claimed by the violent frenzy.

Carl stood alone, the only survivor, and gazed dispassionately as several harried flamingoes dashed past him away from some unknown horror. They sidestepped him in their flight, the monochromatic moonlight dulling their wild pink.

That’s
when he saw them.

A dozen ID were ambling in the silence of the pale moonlight in his direction. Calm and steady, he withdrew his knife from his leg sheath and gripped his baton.

He looked around and saw a replica of a Mayan temple not too far away. It was the sort of thing that hotel guests and tourists posed and took pictures on.

He waited for the ID to get near. They saw him and picked up on his scent, his sanguine war paint wafting
in the air. It grabbed their attention like a dinner bell.

When they came within fifty
feet, he smiled a depraved come hither and turned, walking toward the replica of the Mayan temple.

They pursued in earnest, as he knew they would. When he reached the
temple, he began to climb the steps. He made it to the top and gazed down as the ID reached the bottom and began their clumsy but unremitting ascent.

That’s right. Come and work for your food.

There was a barrier of clouds in the near distance, the inner wall of the storm’s eye, lined with numerous little lightning storms. The air was electric as the wind began to pick up.

Carl began to step down toward his predators, now his prey, and he began to stab and smash away at their heads, necks, and backs. He stuck and moved, kicking down bodies of ID, some silenced and some who would make their way back up for more.

He worked his way from step to step and around the temple, herding them into a spiral. He worked his way down the spiral stabbing and crushing heads.

He moved like
lightning, and the drones could not keep up. They tripped on the steps and over themselves as the warrior automaton put them to shame with his single purpose.

After a half an hour there were no more drones moving
, but a dozen motionless bodies strewn all over the steps of the mock temple.

Carl stood on its zenith, triumphant and looking for more
adversaries, but there were none left. He had won, and the storm was regrouping, gathering its strength for one last hurrah before leaving the area.

Carl casually stepped back down the temple, passed the pool, and re-entered his building. He stepped into the room where Smithe’s body lay in rest, and he lay wearily down on the bed. He closed his eyes and let the thundering roar of the storm lullaby him into deep slumber.

Carl was woken by a paramedic who was questioning him in Spanish. He sat up on the bed, his body still aching, but less so. The man was taking his vitals.

Carl let him finish. Then he pushed the man aside and got to his feet. There were Mexican military in the room. He looked out the broken sliding glass doors.

The storm had ended, but the resort was a wasteland of torn thatched roofing, broken tile, and smashed furniture strewn all over the grounds. Strange animals from the zoo next door wandered around disoriented.

“Do any of you speak English?” Carl asked rather authoritatively. He did have authority. He was the last surviving member of his platoon and was now acting lieutenant by process of elimination. The army called it field promotion.

One of the soldiers gestured for Carl to follow him. They walked out of the room, down the hallway, and out of the building.

Carl’s escort was armed, but none of them trained their weapons on him. Peter always said they were working in conjunction with the Mexican military.

They arrived at a closed tent in the middle of the grounds. There were soldiers and relief workers everywhere. Carl saw them helping the tourists out of the Convention Center.

The lead soldier gestured for Carl to enter the tent. Carl nodded and passed through the slit. Inside there was a man sitting down at a folding table covered with papers. There were two other men poring over the papers and talking on Mini-com Field Phones.

“Please, have a seat,” the man told him in a heavy accent.

Carl sat in a folding chair in front of the folding table.

“I am Colonel Rojas of the Mexican Army,” the man continued. “And you are…”

Carl was about to say Private Birdsall, but he corrected himself. “I am Lieutenant Carl Birdsall of the United States Army.”

“United States. I did not recognize the uniform.”

Carl didn’t offer a response.

“What exactly are you doing in Xcaret, Lieutenant Birdsall?”

“Helping with the relief effort.”

Colonel Rojas looked at him with obvious disbelief.

“The hotel management reported that you stormed the Convention Center, frightened the tourists, left and told them to keep the doors shut. They then heard gunfire, screaming, and an explosion. There are dead bodies everywhere, some that looked like they had been dead longer than others, some in suits similar to yours. We find you here in one of the rooms sleeping on a bed with a dead man on the floor dressed in the same uniform as you.
So as you can see, Lieutenant Birdsall, I require more explanation.”

Carl was stoic. There was no explanation he could possibly offer that would have glossed over the ID and the mutinous Lorenzo and Lockwood and made any kind of sense.

“I see. So you don’t want to answer me?”

Carl just looked at him.

“Well, Lieutenant, let me offer an explanation based on how all of this appears to me.”

Carl didn’t even nod. He sat there like a statue hewn from stone.

“I see a lone survivor with the dead body of a fellow U.S. soldier at the foot of his bed. I see the bodies of other fellow soldiers all over the Business Center. I see skeletons, bones picked clean in the gymnasium. I think that you were down here for an operation of some kind, maybe with the knowledge of our government, but I think you flipped. How you say? Went berserk. You killed your unit. And now we found you in one of the hotel rooms with blood smeared all over your face and large knife on the end table.”

Carl knew that was how it appeared. If he had been in Rojas’ position, he would have put it together in the exact same way. But a switch inside him turned off…or perhaps on. He was weary, his body ached, and he lost his brother.
He could say nothing to explain it all effectively to this Colonel Rojas.

He no longer cared about his college
loans; he no longer worried about unemployment. These things were all trivialities, mere distractions. He knew how he looked at the moment, and he knew he was in deep trouble, but for some odd reason none of it mattered.

A normal individual would be terrified by this sensation, but he felt emancipated. A shrink would say he was numbed by severe trauma or that he was in some kind of dissociative state.

However, he knew he was not dissociating or psychotic, at least as much as any man could know that (most psychotics don’t think they are psychotic). There was a sudden quiet. Not peace, mind you, but a steadiness that one could only achieve from truly horrific experience, the ultimate perspective a man has for a split second before he knows he is going to die.

“The fact that you seem completely unmoved by the fate of your friends leads me to believe I am right about you, Lieutenant.”

Carl smiled to himself. This man knew nothing about him. He knew nothing of loss or pain. He knew nothing of sacrifice. He was just some soft officer in a bullshit army.

“There are a couple of men from your army here to take you into custody. They will take you back where you came from and out of my hair. I thank God that none of the tourists
was hurt. It was a good thing they locked themselves in the Convention Center. They didn’t even want to let
us
in.”

Carl smirked to himself. Rojas was unsure if it was even in response to anything he just said or if Carl was having some perverse private moment, lost in his own dementia.

“Personally, I hope they nail you to the wall. Perhaps an execution. But it is not my problem. We have enough to deal with between the drug cartels and corrupt law enforcement. We don’t need some American cowboy stomping around killing innocent people.”

Carl sat in his folding chair cool as ice, waiting for this yahoo to stop jabberjawing and dismiss him already. He felt he had humored this small man long enough.

Rojas said something in Spanish, and one of the men standing next to him left the tent. In a few moments, he returned with two U.S. Army. Carl smiled like a recalcitrant problem child.

“Lieutenant,” Rojas said, “Sergeants Lockwood and Lorenzo are here to take you out of my hair.”