XOM-B (22 page)

I roll over and look up at a giant mustard-yellow armored man standing above us. The chain retracts into his oversized left forearm.

Not a man,
I realize.
A robot, like the tall soldiers.
But if that’s true … “Why is it attacking us?”

“He’s infected,” Heap says, pushing himself up.

“Infected?” The word makes me flinch. “He’s a
robot.
”

Heap fires off a few rounds, destroying two more living dead. “There’s a man in there somewhere.”

“Like your armor?” I ask.

Heap’s lips turn down. “Right.”

“But if he’s infected—”

“There isn’t time to play detective!” Heap shouts before pushing me to the side. The metal ball snaps free from the building and grinds across the street where we stood just a moment before.

Three rounds explode from Heap’s weapon, each striking the robotic suit, which I believe is used in construction, or more accurately demolition—probably of the Masters’ ruins. This deduction is in part because I can’t think of any other use for the ball and chain, but more from the large
CAT
stencil across its chest. I now understand why Councilman Cat was so concerned about the undead breaching his compound. The bullets have no effect. They just ricochet off the steel head with metallic pings.

A shuffle of feet behind me tickles my ear. I spin to find three undead lumbering toward me, eyes lost, arms reaching, clawing at the air. They approach in a haphazard line, swaying back and forth. I raise my weapon, take aim and rather than pull the trigger, I wait, looking beyond the closest of the dead, a man whose body is shredded, like grass chewed by a cow. My pause is just a fraction of a second, but long enough for the perfect alignment.

I pull the railgun’s trigger.

Nothing happens.

Remembering the power switch, I snap it forward and feel a subtle change in the weapon’s temperature as it heats up. I’m not sure if the weapon is ready to use right away, but I don’t have a choice.

I pull the trigger again.

This time there is a slight jolt in my hands and a sound like a snapping branch coupled with a
twang
and the sound of a projectile slipping through the head of not one, but seven undead. The perfectly aligned dead fall as one.

Seeing this, Luscious looks at me with surprise in her eyes, but the expression is suddenly replaced by understanding. She takes aim, pulls the trigger and downs three zombies with one shot. A slight smile emerges on her face for a moment and then she’s firing again.

Heap’s weapon, which has more bark than the railguns, thunders behind me. Undead drop with each shot, their heads snapping back. Still firing, he points up at the demo-bot and shouts, “Aim for its head!”

Of course! While Heap’s weapon is fine for the undead, it’s not powerful enough for the armored monstrosity. But the railgun, which can punch through buildings, shouldn’t have any trouble. I aim up and fire, just one. The round is imperceptible as it cuts through the air, but the effect on the giant’s head is easy to spot. A fist-size hole suddenly appears in its forehead. An explosion of debris sprays from the back of its head.

I realize too late that our plan is illogical. If this is just a suit, armor for a smaller man, it’s unlikely he’d be crammed up in the thing’s head. Despite the smoke now pouring from its cranium, the construction robot raises its left arm and throws the giant ball toward me.

The hard steel of the street greets me harshly as I dive to the side, but it’s better than being pulverized. The giant steel ball clangs off the street and strikes the building once more, creating a new hole. Undead are already flooding into the first, no doubt racing through the building and increasing their numbers. I glance up at the tall tower. How many people are inside? A thousand? Two thousand? Probably more.

The chain snaps tight as the construction robot attempts to retract the ball from the building. After shoving myself up, I take hold of the chain and pull myself atop it. The linked rings are thick and a half-foot across, making them easy to balance on.

“What are you doing?” Heap asks, firing away.

My reply is drowned out by a nearby explosion, the result of some other life-and-death battle playing out. When the explosion repeats again and again, fading into the distance, I realize that the string of destruction was caused by one of the giant soldiers firing its railgun. In my mind’s eye, I see the Spire under assault. If all those soldiers continue to fire, they might bring the city down around them.

We need to escape this place, and soon.

I charge up the taut chain, aiming for the head once again, just in case, but when two new shots have no effect, I aim lower, for the chest and fire again. And again. And again.

Where are you?
I think, wondering where a man could sit inside this monstrosity. Even if I knew, without seeing the man, I’m not sure I could strike his head. The real question is, how can an infected man think straight enough to operate this machine? Some of the others have trouble walking. Is it because he’s recently been infected, like the soldier? Or is someone exerting some kind of control over the higher-functioning dead? If so, things are going to get a lot worse very quickly as the dead spread their plague to all of the strong and healthy Liberty residents.

The center,
I decide, aiming dead center at the demo-bot’s chest and loose a barrage, tracing a line straight down the giant’s torso, hoping I’ll strike the man inside at some point. But before my plan garners results, the ball comes free from the wall behind me and the chain quickly retracts. My feet are pulled forward and I find myself flipping over backward. I reach out as I fall, grab hold of the chain and am yanked straight toward the giant.

I let go before being sucked into the construction bot’s arm and am slammed against its torso, my body acting as an exclamation point on the big CAT. Before I fall twenty-five feet to the ground, I manage to cling to one of the massive machine’s many nooks. I’m nearly shaken free when the thing takes a step forward, closing the distance between it and Heap. Before it can take another step, I spot the line of holes my weapon punched in its chest. After holstering my railgun, I swing myself over and catch hold of the open hole. As the giant leans back, preparing to throw its ball and chain once more, the chest angles back and I find climbing the line of holes reasonably easy.

Suddenly, the giant pitches forward and I’m nearly flung from its chest. My feet dangle over open air. The chain rattles as it unfurls from the oversized arm. It’s followed by a loud crunch that I fear is Heap, but don’t look back. Instead, I climb higher, reaching the machine’s top, thirty-five feet above the ground. It’s oblivious to my presence.

As the chain retracts, I stand atop the thing’s shoulder and turn around. The scene below is nauseating. I can see down the street for miles. I can’t really tell undead from living at this distance, but they’re everywhere and I have no doubt that soon, they’ll just all be undead. I spot a few larger bodies moving through the city, some yellow, some green, others black. In the chaos it’s hard to tell who is fighting whom and which people are simply running for their lives. Smoke fills the sky. Explosions resound with a constant vibration and are the only things capable of drowning out the constant moaning of the dead and screams of their victims.

Directly below me, I see Heap. His back is turned to the giant as he wrenches a zombie away from Luscious, pins it to the street and shoots its forehead. The chain begins to retract, revealing Heap’s crushed HoverCycle.

The chain snaps back into place and the construction bot winds up for another strike. I cling to a rail on its shoulder, draw my weapon and fire down into the thing. It pitches forward, completing its strike, which I suspect is aimed at Heap and Luscious.

I hold the trigger down, letting it fire a stream of rail rounds into the machine’s core. But it doesn’t slow. Doesn’t stop.

A sound like approaching thunder reaches my ear a microsecond before an impact shakes the demo-bot’s body. The massive machine jolts hard, staggers once and falls forward. As it falls, I catch a glimpse of a nearby building through which a ten-foot hole has been blown. For a moment, the holes of multiple buildings align and I can see through nearly a mile of ruined buildings, all the way to the soldier that fired the rail bolt.

Then, we’re falling.

I scurry over the machine’s back and stand, riding it all the way to the street where it crushes a fresh throng of undead headed for Heap and Luscious. I absorb the impact by bending my knees.

When the dust clears, I find an astonished Heap looking from me to the massive hole in the machine’s back. “How?”

I leap down from the construction bot’s back and then point to the giant holes on both sides of the intersection. “Wasn’t me.”

Heap fires two shots. “Let’s get out of here.”

“You’re driving,” I tell him, motioning to his ruined cycle. He frowns briefly, but then rushes to my HoverCycle, twists it around and shouts, “Get on!”

Luscious climbs up behind Heap while he opens fire with the cycle’s cannons, punching down scores of undead. But more are quickly taking their place, the freshest of them pouring out of the nearby buildings—the citizens of Liberty turned into monsters.

I jump on the back, reach around Luscious and grip Heap’s sides. He must feel this because I don’t even have time to shout, “Go!” The turbine kicks in from a dead stop, yanking my head backward and quickly accelerating, but I nearly fall off when Heap once again engages the turbofan jet, rocketing us forward.

“Head down!” Heap’s voice mixes with the wind, but I’m able to hear the urgency in the command well enough to quickly obey it. Luscious and I pull forward against the wind and lean down.

A deep resonating rumble fills my body as the cycle plows through everything and everyone in its path. I can’t see anything. The rushing wind washes out the sounds of battle and death. My senses are completely overwhelmed. But through it all, I can feel Luscious shaking.

I pull myself against her, holding her more tightly and pressing my lips to her ear. “I have you,” I tell her. And again, “I have you.” I repeat the phrase until her shaking subsides, which is a full twenty minutes after the cycle smashes its way through waves of undead, tears through miles of dense forest and comes to a sputtering stop.

28.

“Stay here,” Heap says, motioning to the pine needle–covered forest floor. “I want to see what’s ahead.”

We’ve been walking for seventy minutes. The cycle, having bludgeoned its way through countless undead and two roadblocks, not to mention completing a leap back across the river, had performed admirably. But it had endured more abuse than it, or any vehicle short of a tank, was designed to handle. The hood was caved in, crushing the electronics hidden inside, and the front repulse disc had sustained irreparable damage. So we started walking, a slow mode of travel made sluggish by Heap’s insistence that we pause every twenty minutes so that he could scout ahead. “Better that I discover an ambush on my own,” he said. But we’re all keenly aware that the undead can come from any direction, which is why Heap adds, “Keep watch. If I do not return in three minutes, head—”

“I know what to do,” I assure him. During the first thirty minutes of hiking, we came up with a backup plan in the event that we are unable to find the radio transmission’s source. Head due east. Find a boat. Escape to an island two miles off the coast, the coordinates to which he had me memorize. It’s a temporary solution, but we both agree that the undead will eventually rot and die for good. Survival might simply be a case of finding a secluded spot to outlast them.

Not that I would follow this plan. I have no intention of abandoning Heap, Mohr or even Sir. But Heap doesn’t need to know that. He and Mohr have kept plenty of secrets from me, so I feel little guilt about keeping one of my own.

“Go ahead,” I tell him. “We’ll be fine.”

Without another word, Heap stomps up the pine tree–laden hillside. Branches break, saplings bend away from him and the ground compresses beneath his feet. It’s a good thing the undead lack intelligence or we would be easily tracked. Heap’s armor was built for protection and power, not for stealth or subtlety.

When I turn back, a flash of panic momentarily grips me, like hands around my neck. Luscious is gone. But then I spot her toes and find her sitting on the ground, leaning against a tall pine. She hasn’t said much since we left the city.

I crouch down next to her, pressing my hand into the soft earth for balance. I’m momentarily distracted by the textures beneath my fingers. The crispy layer of dried pine needles gives way to soft decay and then cool, damp soil—the sweat of the earth.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Fine,” she says, showing no trace of emotion beyond stunned silence. When I raise my eyebrows at her, she adds, “I’m not hurt.”

“But are
you
okay?” I ask again.

“I already told you—”

“Not your body,” I say. “The you that is not your body.”

She laughs, but it’s a mocking sound, not humor. “You think we have souls now? That when we die, our spirits simply float free of our bodies and live with God?”

“I don’t know what God is,” I say. “But yes.”

She rolls her eyes, which somehow communicates she thinks what I’ve said is ridiculous.

“God is supposed to be some kind of benevolent all-seeing, all-knowing supernatural being that created everything. The Earth. The Sun. The whole universe. Even people. Me, I’m an atheist, but the Masters believed in God,” she says. “Some of them. Mine did. Claimed to anyways, though I don’t think he really did or else I wouldn’t have been there.”

I’m not sure how Luscious’s presence could negate the existence of a benevolent creator. Her existence suggests the opposite. Then again, the undead … they’re hard to justify. I suppose the Masters are, too, which might be why I’ve never heard of God. Why teach me about something no one believes in anymore? But speculation on a supernatural being doesn’t change what I know to be scientifically true. “Energy isn’t destroyed, it’s only changed. The atoms that make up our bodies, store our thoughts and encase our … being will always exist. Our bodies might die, but the rest of us?” I shrug. “Maybe we’ll live on somehow. It’s possible we could even get new bodies.”