Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern (22 page)

At the last instant before impact, Mal tossed his body across Zuz’s, protecting the man as much as possible from additional blunt force trauma. The choice caused the cyborg to lose hold of his ex-fiancée, who used the commotion to make her move. Before he could stop her, Kristin dove out of the backseat and avoided Mal’s attempt at subdual. Three steps later, she spun on her heel, firing three more rounds into the nearly junked car, blowing out the tires on its passenger’s side.

“Zuz, I’ve got to get you out of here,” said Mal, worried about the vast amounts of blood oozing from his friend’s midsection. Faster than the blink of an eye, Mal kicked open the bashed in, unresponsive door at his side, slid over the hood of the car and pulled Zuz from the vehicle, cradling the man in his arms. “Hang on, Zuz…I’ll get you to a hospital.”

Mal’s eyes darted around the area, taking in every piece of information he could, trying to figure out how to save the dying man’s life. A bullet shattered what had to be the Cube’s last remaining piece of unbroken glass, forcing Mal to keep is head down. Nearby, the sound of the automatic doors of a large local pharmacy opening and closing caught Mal’s attention. Immediately, the man was in motion, with Zuz held tight against his body, heading across the large open parking lot and into the awaiting air-conditioning of the store.

Five bullets chased his mad dash across the charcoal-colored asphalt, gouging chunks out of its surface in a tight line behind the fleeing super-soldier.

“Unit Galatea reporting,” said Kristin into her phone as she ejected the spent magazine from her pistol and replaced it with a loaded one. “Target David Anthony Zuzelo has been injured and his vehicle incapacitated. Designate Cestus is attempting to flee the scene on foot. Back-up required near the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Cedros Avenue in Sherman Oaks.”

“Confirmed, Unit Galatea. Designate Gauss in route. Keep eyes on target and standby for backup to arrive,” responded an emotionless female voice over the cellphone’s speaker.

“Affirmative.”

Sprinting across the parking lot, high heels flying off in her wake, Kristin headed for the threshold of the shop only to be blocked by a mob of people, terrified and screaming, rushing out directly into her path and slowing her down.

Mal’s own entry into the large, brightly lit emporium had been as loud and violent as he could make it, in hopes of using the turmoil to get some time to stop Zuz’s bleeding. He scoured the wide, quickly emptying aisles, looking for bandages. Mal knew the only chance Zuz had was at a hospital, but he also realized there was little hope the man would make it to an emergency room without a field dressing to staunch the flow of blood from his wounds.

The urgency of the search was reinforced by a series of gunshots from the front of the building announcing Kristin’s arrival, and continued general mind-controlled attitude, inside the commercial establishment. The screams and commotion had gone quiet, with only the store’s security alarms blaring filling the otherwise vacated building.

The quest for gauze and sterile pads led Mal on a mad rampage up and down what seemed like countless aisles containing foodstuffs, make-up, office supplies, and a million other things that were of no use to Mal. A trail of Zuz’s life’s blood spread out in a crimson river as they went.

Near the east corner of the store, next to the pharmacist’s window, the cyborg found what he was looking for, stacked neatly on a half-sized block of shelving-units. Mal made quick work of tearing through a box of gauze and surgical tape, going to work on stemming the tide of gore leaking freely from Zuz, all the while keeping an ear open for the ever approaching footfalls of his pursuer.

Before he could complete his work, a cold sweat broke out on Mal, rolling down the back of his neck and following the curve of his spine, as Kristin’s voice, monotone and emotionless, rang out, reverberating throughout the store and filling the cyborg with heartbreak.

“Designate Cestus,” called the voice, sounding more like an unfeeling recording than the woman Mal had loved so dearly. “You are hereby ordered to power-down and await the Project: Hardwired sanctioned retrieval team.”

Licking his lips, Mal finished his makeshift battle dress and darted down a back hall heading for the loading dock, trying to get as far away from the cruel voice as much as from the mind-controlled woman hunting him.

The voice followed him.

“Failure to submit will result in immediate termination for you and Citizen Zuzelo.”

A living metal arm punched through a wall-mounted fuse box, showering the cyborg in a torrent of sparks and killing all power within the drugstore. Aware of Zuz’s rapidly degenerating condition due to constant updates on the man’s blood pressure and heart rate from his cybernetic senses, Mal stopped with his hand inches from the back door and freedom. He had to save his friend—the man who had saved his life more than once since he escaped from the lab—but what about Kristin? She needed him, too.

He wouldn’t just leave her. If he could incapacitate her, they could put her somewhere safe while Zuz got medical attention, and Mal could figure out how to break whatever conditioning she’d been put through. Pushing open the door to a darkened back room lined with broken-down boxes stacked chest high in some places, Mal made up his mind, deposing the unconscious body of his friend, blood already seeping through the make-shift bandages wrapped tightly about his abdomen and chest.

A minute, he thought. Maybe less. That was how much time he had to take Kristin down and get the three of them back on the road and to a hospital. Any longer and Zuz was as good as dead—there’s no way he could hang on beyond that.

“If Hardwired took control of Kristin, her files should be in my head somewhere,” thought Mal as he stalked out of the near total darkness of the ‘employee’s only’ area of the shop. Kristin was trying her best to operate in stealth mode but she was still human and no competition for Mal’s cybernetically-enhanced senses. As Mal turned from hunted to hunter, he ordered his computer to pull up all information on his ex-fiancée. He wanted every bit of information Project: Hardwired had on her.

“Records for Kristin Julia Meyer, now Meyer-Morrell, located. Access denied,” responded the computer embedded into Mal’s cerebellum.

“‘Access denied?’” came Mal’s nonplussed reaction. “How the can files in my head be ‘access denied?’”

“Records sealed by Project: Hardwired Director, Gordon Kiesling. Executive order Alpha-nine-one-seven-two-beta-five.”

“‘Sealed?!’ What kind of super computer are you? Can’t you just open the damn things—hack them or whatever it is you and Zuz do?”

“Negative. Encryption encoded with a 512bit key. Only Project: Hardwired Director, Gordon Kiesling, possesses the key.”

Mal shook his head, annoyed, and ducked down to remain out of Kristin’s line of sight as she hunted the darkened store for any sign of him.

“So, I’ll have to make him give me the key,” thought the cyborg grimly, edging his way closer to the woman, deadly silent.

Mal’s internal systems chose that rather inopportune moment to deliver news that brought the amount of crap the cyborg was in to a whole new level.

“Four Apache AH-64D helicopters inbound to present location, heading north-northwest at approximately one-hundred sixty-five miles per hour. ETA thirty seconds.”

There was no way he could take Kristin down and still get away safely with Zuz before the cavalry arrived. Mal swore to himself, more loudly than he had intended. A pair of bullets struck uncomfortably close to where he knelt in the shadows. The cyborg was forced to tear through an eight-foot high steel shelving unit filled with assorted bread products, all labeled as ‘fresh baked,’ to avoid taking three more bullets to his chest from Kristin who barreled around the corner gun blazing in response to his poorly-timed exclamation.

Turning to see where his ex-lover had gone, Mal took a thrust kick to his stomach, toppling him over amongst the damaged baked goods. He barely recovered in time to avoid another series of shots to the flesh portions of his body, swinging his living metal arm up to deflect the bullets. A quick leg sweep sent Kristin flopping on to her back, but the woman was able to hold on to her gun and fired again, nearly taking Mal in the temple.

The two squared off, Mal dropping into a low defensive stance to protect himself, with Kristin thrusting her gun nearly into his face.

They were at a stand-off that ended as quickly as it began.

Mal cursed again as the sound of approaching helicopters was now audible to his human senses. They were close—too close—and the cyborg knew his time was up. He had to do something fast or they’d all be captured and Zuz would die.

Evading a pair of shots that emptied Kristin’s clip of rounds, Mal flipped himself over the woman, knocking the gun out of her hand along the way, and landing on his feet in a full run. Lurching around the corner, Mal stared down a row of frozen goods, smiling as he trotted to the opposite end and waited.

Kristin appeared, hot on his tail, completely ignoring the fact she was unarmed and ordering Mal to surrender.

As Kristin charged down the cold aisle toward him, Mal gripped the freezer unit to his left with both hands and pulled, straining every muscle in his body. The woman leapt at him with a flying kick, too late, as the entire structure gave way to the irresistible force of his cybernetic strength and capsized onto her, pinning Kristin to the ice-chilled floor.

Praying to God that Kristin would be all right, Mal turned and headed back to where he had hidden Zuz to collect the man, who had grown deathly white in the cyborg’s absence. At first Mal was afraid he was too late but his computer sensors picked up a heartbeat, faint and nearly imperceptible even to his superhuman senses.

He still had time!

With Zuz in his arms, Mal crashed through the heavy wooden loading dock door and moved into the late afternoon sun shining down on the worker’s parking lot behind the building. The roar and whine of landing helicopters masked the sound of a shattered window as Mal found a car to ‘appropriate.’ Mal had the vehicle hot-wired and in motion mere seconds after placing Zuz delicately into the backseat, peeling out and punching down hard on the gas in a race against the clock.

*****

Thick-soled combat boots ground the broken glass littering the pharmacy’s tiled floor into a fine powder beneath them as a veritable army of battle-ready Project: Hardwired soldiers swarmed into the building. The men, machine guns at the ready, swept through every inch of the building, securing entrances, exits, and everything else in between. A moment later they were joined by a tall muscular man with shimmering metal arms and a silver cybernetic eye.

Gauss surveyed the situation for a moment, analyzing the information being fed to him by his ocular enhancement. Nearly every inch of the store’s interior was destroyed—the whole place virtually reeked of Cestus’s handiwork. He’d been on enough missions with the rogue cyborg to recognize the sort of mess the man tended to leave behind.

“I need a sit-rep?” demanded Gauss of a group of GMRs working their way through the clutter. “Where is he?”

“No sign of Designate Cestus, but we have two squads canvassing the immediate vicinity now, sir,” answered the top ranking GMR present, his name-tag read ‘Lambda-One.’

“Ran away again, Cestus? This is getting redundant,” muttered Gauss to himself, then demanded to know where the girl was.

“Unit Galatea is trapped beneath one of the freezer units near the center of the store,” responded Lambda-One. “Tau-Unit is bringing in equipment to free her now.”

“Don’t bother.” Gauss stormed past the lower level Project: Hardwired grunt. The lack of initiative programmed in the Gomers was a real pain sometimes, thought the cyborg, stomping his way to the area where Kristin’s struggling form was still pinned beneath two tons or more of heavy machinery and rapidly defrosting boxed dinners. “Fall back and secure the front of the building—I’ve got this,” he ordered the ten or so GMRs of Lambda-Unit loitering around the mess of broken metal and spilled milk.

Reaching out with his mastery of magnetic fields once the area cleared out, Gauss slid one hand underneath the fallen refrigerator and flipped it across the room as if it’s almost five-thousand pound weight was nothing. Splitting in half, the ten-foot long icebox crashed through aisle after aisle, sending shelves toppling and smashing into one another before hammering into the rear wall.

Gauss stared down at the unconscious figure splayed out on the ground in front of him. A small groan escaped from her lips, causing the cyborg to grin, revealing his perfect white teeth. Mirror-finished titanium fingers slid through Kristin’s long golden hair, reflecting back the tight smile carving itself into Gauss’s face.

“But now that he knows we have you, Cestus won’t be running for long.”

*****

Mal watched the emergency room staff so intently as they wheeled Zuz’s nearly lifeless body down the ammonia-scented halls of the Encino Hospital Medical Center that he completely missed the fact one of the nurses had stayed behind and was attempting to get more information out of him. It took her no fewer than nine ‘ahems’ and four more ‘excuse mes’ before she was at last able to grab his attention.

Referred to as a ‘fireball’ by her co-workers, Heidi Jensen was small, compact, and full of a seemingly endless amount of energy and attitude. Unfortunately for Mal, he was the target for both.

“I said, we’re going to need you to fill out an incident report and wait here for the police,” the tiny woman had gotten so worked up from being ignored that her dirty-blond ponytail was snapping back and forth faster than a whip. “What exactly did you say happened to Mr. Zuzelo?”

Looking down quizzically, Mal answered as if on auto-pilot, “Carjacking. They tried to take his car.”

Unconvinced, Nurse Jensen gave Mal the once over again for the eighth or ninth time since his arrival at her emergency room: he was tall and good looking in that sort of way that you’d regret the next morning, dressed in jeans and an old, threadbare Christmas sweater with tiny reindeer and snowmen on it—something Mal had scrounged up in the back of the Volkswagen he’d stolen from the pharmacy’s employee parking lot. All of that in and of itself was enough to set off the nurse’s finely-tuned trouble alert, but when combined with the burns and copious amounts of blood covering nearly every inch of his body, Jensen’s alarms were blaring away at full volume.