The Silent Army (18 page)

I stepped back into the shadows as the heavy door opened, revealing a dark room behind it. A revivor stepped through the doorway, and the faint smell of sweat and decomposition drifted out behind it. Inside, I saw several sets of glowing eyes.

Before it could spot me, I slipped toward the wall next to the doorway and took the EMP wand from my belt. The revivor was male, with a heavy frame. Its head turned as it scanned the dark in front of it, trying to pinpoint my heartbeat.

I touched the wand to the back of its neck and the metal filament slipped through the skin and up its spinal column. Its body went rigid, and I caught it under one arm as it fell back. Quietly, I eased it onto the floor.

Before it could send out an alarm, I recorded its signature, then triggered the EMP. The light faded from its eyes. Using an old war trick, I looped the recorded signature through a custom transponder I’d installed back in Bontang. Revivors didn’t rely on signatures for identification purposes, and they would still detect my heartbeat, but it would keep them from attacking as long as I didn’t attack first.

I stepped through the doorway and looked around. Three revivors stood inside, each with their backs to one wall. Their eyes shifted ceaselessly, moving rapidly, almost like they were dreaming. They didn’t seem to see me or hear me as I moved into the room.

The light was low enough that even with the enhancements, it was hard to pick out details inside. I shined a flashlight beam, and swept it across the room. Shelving had been set up, stocked with towels. I saw several rolling trays that held surgical instruments, and empty vials for taking blood samples.

There was a faint thermal trace on the chair. There was no other indication that anyone else—anyone living, at any rate—had been inside.

A tent of plastic sheeting hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. I could see dark shapes inside, and a series of flashing red lights. There was a gap in the curtain near the middle, and I pushed through.

On the other side of the curtain were five gurneys, and each one had a nude male corpse on it. From behind each of their heads, a thick wire trailed across the floor. I followed them behind a bank of electronics where the red lights flashed. The skin on each body was rigid. Dark veins were visible underneath the surface from head to toe.

Revivors.
A scan didn’t produce a signature from any of them. They were dormant.

Back in the office, the ’bot broke through security and a connection opened to the main computer system. I accessed the link and began scanning the files. Most of them were innocuous—medical records of patients coming and going, payroll, ordering and inventory—but one section was isolated from the rest. A list of names and dates had been recorded there. The last four were displayed:

Subject: Harris, Erica. Female. 42. 23042091.

Subject: Janai, Ryu. Male. 30. 10052091.

Subject: Uris, Henry. Male. 32. 13052091.

Subject: Takanawa, Hiro. Male. 28. 14052091.

Subject: Pu, Sean. Male. 41. 15052091.

Sean
.

The connection to the computer broke, and the stream of data stopped. When I tried to reconnect, I found it was completely offline. The power to the system had been cut.

“Gathering for iteration six-three-two,” a metallic voice said softly from behind me. I turned suddenly, aiming the gun, and saw that the bank of red lights on the electronic equipment had turned amber. As I watched, they began to flicker and turn green.

A loud snap issued from the back of the room, loud enough to make me jump. One of the bodies moved on its gurney, then another. The toes arched back slightly, and I saw the fingers flex. Information began streaming by on one of the screens.

“Hold.”

“Gathering for iteration six-three-two.”

I felt a low hum through the floor. The gurneys creaked as the bodies arched their backs; then I picked up a signal on the JZI. It warbled and snapped into the waveform of a revivor’s heart signature. Another one quickly followed, then another as the hum’s pitch increased.

“Active,” the computer said.

Back on the gurneys, several sets of eyes had cracked open, creating softly glowing slits in the dark.

Moving the flashlight beam, I caught the face of one of the revivors who had lifted its head off of its gurney. One of its eyes was missing, leaving only a dark slit between the collapsed lids.

“Sean.”

He didn’t answer. His eye stared up from the dark, not recognizing me.

He’d been turned, and there was no way he’d gotten wired for it willingly. Sean was like me on that score. If we hadn’t decided when we joined up, then a few years of dealing with those things settled it for both of us. Sean turned out to have a secret, but I knew the man and I knew he was afraid of revivors. He never voiced it, but something he saw when he looked at them scared him. Whoever took him wired and then killed him.

I looked in his remaining eye for some trace of Sean, but it wasn’t there. Unlike Faye, he hadn’t been processed at Heinlein, and it looked like a hack job. As he worked at the restraints, I watched and I couldn’t look away, even though it felt like a block of ice was sitting in my gut. I’d known Sean longer than anyone else in my life. He’d pulled me out of that hole back in the grind and saved my life. Even if he had lied, he’d . . .

“Sorry, Sean.”

I moved next to the gurney and removed the probe from inside my coat. Turning his head away, I pushed it through the skin near the base of his skull.

The system tree came up, but only partially. For some reason it was having trouble reading the components. For the ones it could identify, none were tagged with manufacturing codes.

I managed to isolate his JZI. I found a socket and opened a connection.

Link established.

The connection triggered something; a routine executed, sending a text message across the link.

If you’re reading this, they’ve taken me. I have verified; Fawkes will launch a major strike in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. I wasn’t able to learn specific targets, but he will attack on two fronts; part of his army will come by sea, most likely by way of Palm Harbor. I intercepted the ID of a ship, ISO 10927718240, and I believe the bulk of his forces are there. Find the ship and you’ll find them. The second part of his army is already here, inside the city. I have no idea where he’s managed to hide so many, but there are already hund—

The message ended abruptly. I felt Sean’s jaw clench underneath my palm. His skin was cold.

His heart signature drifted in the periphery of my vision. There was something different about it. It had an arc that was more elegant than the standard waveform.

Hundreds.
It didn’t seem possible, but I knew Sean. Something made him believe it. If Fawkes really had hundreds of revivors already inside the city, with potentially thousands more coming in by sea, it was going to be a bloodbath.

I managed to locate Sean’s revivor communications array, and opened the spoke connection.

Link established.

Immediately, a rush of data came streaming in. Before I could react, half the JZI’s buffers had filled up. It was as if hundreds of individual data streams were bleeding back over the connection. My systems weren’t designed to handle an influx like that, and I struggled to abort the link before—

“And stop,” the soft, synthesized voice said. The connection broke, and the flow stopped.

What the hell was that?

The bodies all relaxed on their trays. The light in their eyes began to fade. One by one, their signatures winked out.

“Checking signature ...”

“Signature is gone.”

“Commencing cool down.”

I removed the probe. The revivors had gone dormant again.

They’re being cycled over and over, between animate and inanimate. Why?

I checked the rest of the bodies. Besides Sean, there were four others. One looked well kept, a first or second tier. The other three showed signs of exposure and malnutrition. One had track marks in his forearm. One had a thick scar running along one side of its face, trailing from the chin, up over the cheek, all the way to the ear. It looked like a cut from a knife, maybe.

Wachalowski, head’s up; we just got a report of an explosion across town. They think it’s tied to your location.

What was it?

A free clinic was just bombed. Healing Hands, over in Dandridge. Second Chance runs that one too. They know we’re on to them and they’re covering their tracks. Get out of there now.

“Initiating download and purge,” the metallic voice muttered from off to the side. I looked over and saw the counters had all reset to zero. The data was no longer being collected. The green lights had turned red again, and I was watching when they all went dark.

Hang on.

Wachalow—

I cut the connection as an electric snap came from the bank of electronics behind me, and the low hum began again. The metal gurneys creaked under the bodies. One by one, the heart signatures reappeared.

“Active,” the computer said. Their toes began to arch, fingers curling into fists. The glow behind each set of eyes got brighter.

The lights on the equipment went dark, and the hum stopped suddenly. One of the revivors sat up on the tray, the electrode wires growing taut, then snapping. The one next to it sat up as well.

Keeping the flashlight trained on it, I fired a burst at the first one, and it crashed back onto the gurney. I managed to get the second one before it could get up, and caught a third as it placed its bare feet on the floor. It staggered, then fell into the rack of electronics before landing on a rolling tray and scattering surgical tools.

Sean and the remaining revivor were on their feet. They split up and moved toward me.

I backed through the plastic curtain, and Sean followed. The three revivors along the walls still weren’t moving, but the jittering of their eyes had gotten more frantic.

Through the gap in the plastic tent, I saw white smoke billow up from the floor. The revivors I’d put down were dissolving.

Sean took another step toward me and I fired, putting a bullet into the middle of its chest. He didn’t stop. There was no recognition in his eyes as he lunged, clamping one cold hand down between my neck and shoulder. With his other hand, he tried to grab my gun. Twisting the barrel down, I shot him in the kneecap. Revivors didn’t feel pain, but the joint gave out and it started to fall to one side.

I lost my footing and came down on top of him. He tried to get up as the second revivor approached from my left.

I aimed and fired a burst. The first bullet caught it in one eye, and the next two tracked across its face, blowing out the back of its skull as it fell backward into a rack of equipment. Sean’s hand reached up, pawing at my face.

My JZI flagged a warning as it picked up heat signatures from around the room. They were sourced from the three revivors along the walls. In each one, a ton of energy was being rerouted to a component inside the torso. I fired several more shots as warning codes began spilling by. Sean’s hands slipped away as I staggered back from the body.

“Shit!”

The eyes of the three revivors began to glow brighter. Their faces turned dark, black veins standing out as pressure built up somewhere inside.

I stood up and scrambled past the chair, back out through the heavy door. Grabbing the handle, I pulled it shut as a set of fingers slipped through and the metal crunched down on them. Another hand wormed through the crack and began to pull it open. I stuck my gun barrel through the space and fired several rounds, then turned and ran for the fire exit.

At the end of the hall I hit the door and shoved it open. A gust of cold wind hit me, and my foot splashed down into a puddle. My heel slipped on a patch of ice and I fell back onto the blacktop, skidding toward a metal Dumpster.

I hit the rusted metal and rolled as a thud pounded through my chest and an explosion ripped through the wall behind me.

Calliope Flax—Wilamil Court, Apartment #516

I sat up on the couch and grabbed the pint bottle off the table next to it. I took a swig of hot whiskey and blew fumes out my nose. My right hand hurt like hell, and the left one kept ticking. I cut open the knuckles on both of them when I beat down that fat piece of shit the night before. The last thing I needed was another assault charge, but the cops never came.

The reminder to check my files popped up in the dark behind my eyelids. I pulled up the text from where I’d buried it. There were three notes:

Called Buckster. He’s coming over.

I remembered that one. The other two, I didn’t.

There’s a padlocked door behind the flag. Wooden door, three locks. It was here the whole time.

Started a JZI record.

I opened my eyes and sat up. I checked the JZI buffer. It was empty.

Son of a bitch . . .

If I didn’t remember it and the JZI record was wiped, then someone who knew I might be recording was fucking with me.

There’s a door behind the flag.

I could see the flag from the couch—black and red with a green shield on it. I’d ripped it off the wall of a bomb-shelled office in Juba after we took out a pack of rebels inside. I used it to wrap the naked girl when I took her out of there. It hung ceiling to floor on the wall right across from the shitter. I knew for a fact there was no door behind it.

Didn’t I?

I put down the bottle, then got up off the couch and walked across the room to the wall with the flag. After a minute, I pulled up the file and made a note:

I’m taking down the flag. I’ll move it somewhere else. I’m starting a JZI record. The next time you read this it should be moved, and if there is a door behind it you’ll know.

The buzzer went off at the front and I jumped.

“Shit!”

I stood there for a minute. My hand was still out, hanging there like I was scared to look.