| |
Scotty West trudged through the desert, silhouetted by a red sun rising at his back. He turned to look at its slow, almost imperceptible creep over the horizon and smiled with relief that he was still on the right track. He’d endured hours of stumbling against the winds during the night, blinded to the already dark and featureless landscape by the raging sandstorm. Like any good grunt, he’d simply put his head down and pressed on, but now he was happily surprised to find that he’d kept his bearings. He unscrewed the top of his water bottle and savoured small sips. It wasn’t all good news. The storm may have died down and the sun was coming up, but that meant he would have only a few more precious hours of cool air, before the desert showed its true nature. Soon that weak and distant arc of red behind him would become a fierce ball of fire, scorching everything in sight. He stashed the precious water back in his rucksack and slung it over his shoulder.
“Better make tracks, Scotty,” he said to himself, and resumed his march into the flat desert plains ahead that seemed to go on forever. As he walked, he felt the need to check east and see if he was being followed. He tried to shake that urge away, as he had done during the night, when he felt compelled to continuously look back over his shoulder, convinced he would see the Machine marching out of the storm to take him. But now that the seed of doubt had been planted again and he had to look. He turned, walking backwards, and examined the empty desert at his rear.
Nothing.
Nothing but crawling shadows being chased away by the red glare of a new dawn. He smiled, turned back again and carried on walking. Maybe his luck was holding then. He hadn’t seen one of the Machine’s cameras for hours, (he’d cut through a field of the damn things whilst making his way through the storm), and the gales had pushed and shifted the sands, covering his early tracks. Even if the Machine had glimpsed him on camera, surely his trail would be nigh on impossible to follow now. He shook his head. He was doing it again; spooking himself. Marlowe had been right. It was just the luck of the draw. If the Machine decided to come after you, you were already dead. If you survived, it was fate, and because some other poor schmuck was shit out of luck.
West tried to change the subject in his mind, to think about brighter things. He decided to focus on the future, to think positively. He would assume that he was getting out of this desert in one piece. And why not? After all, up until now he’d always assumed that he would be one of the unlucky ones to be hunted by the Machine. So, say he made it. What then? He, like the others, had been paid a small fortune for taking part in this project. Originally, the money was earmarked for expanding the chop-shop, for taking his business to the next level. But this ordeal had taught him to see life differently. It had made him want to reshuffle the deck and change his hand for a new set of cards. Now he liked the idea of sinking the money into the best custom bike he could possibly build. Something completely outrageous. He’d do it all from scratch by himself, piece by piece, and then take the longest break and just hit the road. He could put the rest of the money on a credit card and just cruise through America, roughing it when he felt like it, staying five-star when he didn’t. He smiled again and nodded to himself, as he dug his boots into the sand, pressing on. Yeah, that was it. He was going to head out there somewhere into the landscape and cut loose, just wing it. It was a cliché, but it was true; nearly losing your life really made you value it.
It was then that Scotty heard it. A low hum against the eerie silence of the desert dawn. He stopped and listened. It was getting louder, closer. He raised his eyes to the sky and searched for passing aircraft, but could see nothing. He felt the grim weight of resignation slowly pull at his features and then his whole body, as if gravity was increasing, compressing him, buckling his spine. He turned around to face the rising sun with dread in his heart. Now the angry buzzing was loud and distinctive. He stared into the rising sun and thought he could see the source of the sound. Something in its centre remained dark as the area around it gradually lightened from red to orange, fading through to yellow. He wasn’t sure if the Machine had been there all the time, in the distance, first shielded by the darkness, then by the glare of the red sun. Perhaps the Machine itself had just broken over the horizon, tearing towards him like a runaway train. No, it had always been there, he thought. Always there, with him, with the other men, every step of the way. After all, they made it didn’t they?
It didn’t matter.
Not anymore.
If only he still had his bike, he thought. He’d give that son of a bitch the race of its life.
Scotty West took out his water and guzzled it all, letting it run down his chin and soak the neck of his tie-dye T-shirt, as the mechanical buzz rose to a deafening pitch around him. He wiped his hand across his thick, waterlogged beard and then cast the empty bottle down into the sand. He could see the Machine clearly now, sprinting straight at him, kicking up vast clouds of dust in its wake, as it ripped across the desert like a drag racer. West raised his weapon and cocked it. He took careful aim at his lightning-fast enemy and slipped the safety catch off. He fired one shot. He suspected it struck home, but he couldn’t be sure if he heard the round ricochet off and zing away into the desert or not. Probably, he thought. His hands tightened around the weapon and he took aim again, this time leaning into the shot, bracing himself for both the rifle’s kick and his inevitable collision with the Machine hurtling towards him.
No escape then.
No bike, no trip, no adventure.
Just this.
He had once been a soldier, so why not go down fighting? After all, he had nothing else left. Not now.
“Why not...” he muttered to himself, and squeezed the trigger.
Scotty West was still firing when the Machine hit him, cleaving him in half instantly. The bisected biker flailed and wobbled into two collapsing halves, as the assault rifle snaked back and forth in his limp hand, releasing its last few stray rounds skyward. Then, what was left of his split body unravelled against the sand like wet strips of pasta.
*
Aaron Blane stood on a jutting outcrop of bare rock and surveyed the lunar landscape ahead of him. Folly’s ominous ridge ran along the northern extreme, walling in the vast desert which was clearer and more open to the east. Blane’s route would not however be plain sailing. The terrain ahead was rugged and undulating, the great sea of sand there bristling with rocky islands and low plateaus of scarred sandstone. In some places the emerging rocks looked to be a mile or more wide, and scored with deep channels that would prove difficult to cross. He had a choice. Stay low and cut between the rocks and down through the gullies on the desert floor. Or take the easier, quicker, higher ground, and risk meeting a hidden divide he would be unable to cross. Blane stared back towards the distant ridge that enveloped Folly and then struck out east. He would keep low. That way he could use the rising shards of rock for a degree cover from the hot morning sun. Also, he’d be much harder to spot if the Machine was following him.
Marlowe had said that if the Machine was on your tail, you were as good as dead, but Blane didn’t buy that. Blane was all about survival. This little hotfoot across the desert would be no different to all the other tight spots he’d been in before. Hell, this was the job, this is what they trained for. As he marched on, rising daggers of rock around him gave way to thicker, larger atolls that conspired against him, funnelling him into a narrow gully that weaved a close, winding path through the craggy field of sand and stone that lay ahead. Blane felt the relief of cool shade as he dropped down into the high-sided gully and its walls blocked the burning sun from his skin. As he followed the meandering channel, Blane neither saw, nor heard the Machine up on the surface of the rock, some twenty feet above him. The C19 leapt silently across the gulley, its patches of exposed crimson metal catching the sun for a split second, before it disappeared from view again.
As far as Blane was concerned, if anyone was going to make it to safety, it would be him. The others may have once been professional soldiers, or still were in Marlowe’s case, and they had all had a lot of live field experience.
But they weren’t Blane.
As a sniper he had served on countless operations worldwide, and not just for the military. It was his job to pick his ground, to hide out, to live off the land, to watch for the enemy, to take his time, to take his shot. OK, so maybe he couldn’t kill the Machine, but he could certainly outwit it. The C19 might be faster than a man and stronger than a man, but it had still been programmed by men to think like men. It had been trained by men; men like him. Even if the Machine was the sum of all their combined military experience, his experience was first-hand, and he’d pit it against the hand-me-down tactics of those other grunts any day of the week. Sure, he’d kept quiet and watched the power plays unfold amongst the group as they squabbled over survival tactics, but now that it was every man for himself, he was free to go it alone and do what he did best. Let the others be my getaway distraction, he thought, out here I’ll be a ghost, and there’s no way in the world that thing will catch me.
As he picked his way through the shadows at the bottom of the gulley, Blane began to plan his tactics for events after his escape. For years he’d been doing the government’s dirty work. He’d taken down terrorists, warlords, drug dealers, political enemies, sometimes for the regular army, sometimes on loan to lesser-known specialist divisions. And what had he ever got out of it? Nada. He knew men who were paid fifty times his monthly salary to make much easier shots than he often took. He’d taken all the risks infiltrating enemy sites, sweated for days on end in hides waiting for a target to show, lived with the Technicolor nightmares that came from watching head after head disintegrate in his scope from one-shot kills. And he got jack shit for it. He couldn’t even tell anyone what he did, not that there was anyone to tell; that was another downside of his bleak profession. But everything was about to change. Tyrell had screwed up big time with this cluster-fuck, and they were going to have to compensate him massively to buy his silence over the affair. Even sweeter, he’d been officially attached to the research project by the army. His CO recommended his particular skills for the C19 upload, so that meant the government had a hand in this whole mess too. They were the ones that were going to benefit from the C19’s development, and that meant they were the ones that would share the responsibility with Tyrell for that thing running amok. Of course, he was going to make it out of there alive, even if anyone else didn’t, but he’d been held hostage and almost killed, subjected to severe, prolonged mental cruelty and the threat of torture. He was going to be stinking rich. Screw the chain of command. The first call he’d make when he got out of there was to a lawyer, and a damn good one at that. Then he’d call the cops and the army to go in with their body bags and unplug that son of a bitch.
Yeah, he was going to be rolling in dough.
He was thinking out-of-court settlements; tens of millions. Maybe more. No more orders or dusty air bases, or crouching in the long grass for hours on end with your finger on the trigger. From now on it would be a beachfront home in Maui, mojitos at noon, and plenty of hot women, so that he’d never have to drink alone again.
Blane stopped.
Something was wrong.
He tightened his grip on the assault rifle and thumbed the safety off. He could see nothing ahead: just sand on the ground and the twisting walls of the gulley. His eyes flitted to the top of the surrounding rock, scanning for signs of an ambush, but again, he could see nothing. Blane ever-so-slowly turned around on the spot, his sharpshooter’s eyes beneath his cap roaming every inch of rock and sand, searching for the slightest detail or giveaway. But as he rotated through three hundred and sixty degrees he found nothing.
Blane waited. He had seen nothing, heard nothing, but his instincts were telling him something was there. Something dangerous. You didn’t last as long as he did in this game without developing eyes in the back of your head. Right now, whatever his five senses tried to tell him, Blane’s own predatory instincts were screaming that he was being watched.
You got sloppy, Blane told himself. You stopped focusing on the present, on the here and now. And while you were daydreaming that thing’s crept up on you and now it’s going to bite you on the ass. He tried to get back in the zone, to think his situation through and solve the problem. His choices were limited. He could either go on or turn back. The geography of the gully didn’t afford him the luxury of any other manoeuvre. Obviously if the Machine was behind him, which seemed likely given it would be pursuing him, then he should forge ahead. But if the Machine had somehow got ahead of him, which was also possible considering its speed and dexterity, he would need to backtrack. But which one was it? He raised his eyes to scan the vertical walls of bare sandstone at his sides and added a third dimension to his conundrum. What if the Machine was above him? If so, it could easily track him in either direction and take him any time it chose to. Blane knew he had to make a best guess decision now, without the luxury of time or cover to think it over.
The sniper tickled the M16’s trigger with his index finger and then started forwards again. His reasoning was simple: if he was going to trust his instincts, which he did, then he’d have to assume the Machine was creeping up on him from the rear. Otherwise, he would have sensed its presence before, when it caught up with him to get ahead. Blane knew this was nonsense. There might be a hundred ways the Machine could’ve got ahead of him to lie in wait for an ambush without him knowing, but he needed to pick a direction and get moving fast. This was his best guess and hopefully he would live with it.
Blane moved quickly, but cautiously, stalking though the gulley with his weapon trained ahead, ready to fire. He followed the rock face around, as the gulley bent back on itself in a gradual “S” shape, half expecting the Machine to jump out at him from around the blind corner. But nothing happened. He carried on like this for several minutes, warily moving ahead through the narrow passage. Though he saw nothing to make him suspicious, his strong feeling of unease remained. Then, as he rounded another bend in his route, Blane discovered the cause of his anxiety. He found himself in a dead end. As he walked forwards, he lowered his weapon and examined the enclosed channel that ended in a sheer, near vertical climb about thirty feet ahead.
That’s what my subconscious was trying to warn me of, he thought. There was no way he could climb out of the steep sides of the gulley. He would have to retrace his steps after all, and lose valuable time picking another route through the great expanse of rock that lay ahead.
Blane removed his black, sweat-soaked cap and wiped more moisture away from his forehead and dark, matted hair. Now the killer’s veneer of sly calm was wearing thin, revealing just a hot and frustrated man lost in the desert. A man that for the first time in his life was beginning to doubt his own abilities.
Blane replaced his cap and began to trudge back the way he came. But with his second step his toecap struck something hard buried in the sand. He looked down, puzzled. Suddenly a figure burst from the ground with alarming speed, showering him in sand. The Machine leapt from its hiding place in the sinkhole beneath his feet like a trapdoor spider sensing prey. Blane shrieked and fumbled blindly with his weapon against the wave of sand breaking over him, but the Machine ripped it from his grasp and smashed it against the rock. Blane staggered backwards, rubbing the grit from his reddening eyes, until he bumped against the smooth sandstone wall at the end of the gulley. He blinked away his tears to see the Machine standing in front of him, watching him, waiting. It blocked his only means of escape, and both man and Machine knew it. To Blane’s horror, his well-honed instincts sensed that the Machine wanted to corner him alive, that it intended to take its damn sweet time with him. It slowly advanced on him, stretching its arms out to fill the void of the gulley, Shelly’s sagging, rotten skin hanging beneath them like torn membrane. Blane stared at the Machine and could swear that what little was left of the dead scientist’s face was smiling at him.
Blane began screaming a long time before the Machine reached him. It moved deliberately, painfully slowly, and found him cowering and weeping against the rock face like a terrified child. Then it dragged him back into the sand and proceeded to pull his arms and then his legs off, one at a time, like a wicked schoolboy tearing the legs off a bug. It paused after each amputation, jabbing and taunting Blane with his own dismembered limbs, until he finally succumbed to shock and blood loss. By the time the Machine twisted off Blane’s head, he was no longer screaming. It still crushed the dead man’s skull between the skinless palms of its metallic hands all the same.
*
I really did draw the short straw this time, thought Bill Thorpe, as he stared down from the huge wall of rock blocking his route north. In the early hours he’d warily made his way around the foot of the Machine’s mountain. His progress had been slowed by the stormy night and the rocky, sloping terrain there. His strung-out nerves crackling with the prospect of the Machine dropping down on him at any time from its lair hadn’t helped either. It had taken him most of the night to clear that first obstacle, only to find this other huge, mountainous ridge waiting for him on the other side. A ridge almost double the height of the one overlooking Folly. Thorpe guessed that the more gradual, sloping mountain above Folly was a little over two thousand feet high. But this beast? He imagined this jagged, threatening barrier was more like three thousand feet straight up. Yep Lord, he thought, as he clung to the scorched rock face just below the summit, you really are testing me today.
Thorpe hauled himself up to the next ledge with exhausted arms and rolled on to the narrow strip of rock there. He lay on his back, sighing with relief, as the relentless noon day sun burned his skin. He managed to sit up and strip off his backpack and jacket to reveal a white shirt beneath, sodden with sweat. He pulled his half-full water bottle from the pack and sipped from it. The water inside was hot, but still tasted bloody good to him. Then, with his back braced against the pale sandstone rock face, he tore the sleeves from his shirt and wrapped them tightly around his sweat drenched forehead to keep it out of his eyes.
Thorpe peered down over the side of the ledge at the dizzying, sheer drop below. Whether it was the vertiginous view, the sudden realisation of how high he had climbed that morning, or the fierce heat of the sun beating down on his boiling brains, he did not know, but looking down made his head spin and his stomach tighten, so that he had to flatten his back against the rock and grip the ledge to halt the giddy spell.
Thorpe closed his eyes and then slowly reopened them. He reached inside the neckline of his shirt and pulled free a silver cross attached to a set of rosary beads. He stared at the crucifix for a moment, tilting it back and forth so that it caught the sun and played its reflection across his face. He silently prayed that he would make it; that he could make it. He prayed for strength, not just for him, but for the other men too. Even Blane.
“I have faith. I can do this,” he told himself, kissing the cross. Then he stuffed it back inside his shirt, took a deep breath and stretched up on aching legs to grip the rocks above. As Thorpe continued his arduous climb, his mind began to wander. He had undoubtedly been tasked with the most difficult journey out of the four routes leaving Folly. Demanding as the hot desert was, the others wouldn’t have to cope with the strain or danger of a climb like this. It was a miracle he’d made it this far, especially as he had very little climbing experience. But hadn’t this always been the way of things?
Thorpe was sure that ever since The Gulf War, his life and luck had changed. And not for the better. As a practicing Catholic he didn’t believe in Karma, but he was certain that some similar force, he called it God’s will, was punishing him for his own small part in that war. And somehow his life had become one of bad luck and hardship, as if to reflect that belief that the Almighty was sure to redress the balance.
Thorpe had been a sergeant in the Marines, but as a publicity exercise, he had been temporarily attached to the Kuwaiti army, along with several other members of the allied forces, as its armoured division rolled back over the border to reclaim the country from Iraqi invaders back in nineteen ninety-one. As part of that publicity campaign, he had been one of several American and British troops in a low-profile team moving ahead of the main group, sweeping buildings of Iraqi snipers, so as to minimise any Kuwaiti casualties, and a possible propaganda coup their deaths might inspire on liberation day. Sergeant Bill Thorpe found he had to bury his religious convictions deeper then, than at any other time in his military career, notching up half a dozen kills as they moved between the shells of deserted, battle-scarred buildings. He never forgave himself for these shootings. He regarded them as murder rather than acts of war.
How could it be war with a whole army marching on just a handful of frightened conscripts hiding out in the ruins of their failed conquest?
And though Thorpe repented and left the army at the earliest possible opportunity after liberation day; ninety-three days later with the mutual consent of his commanding officer, it wasn’t enough.
The months and years that followed saw him reliving and repaying that fateful day thousands of times over. Bad memories and even worse luck settled over his head like his own personal storm cloud. He blamed the early death of his wife on God’s anger at these “murders”, rather than the cancer she lost her battle to. He felt the same way when he spent the next twenty years hopping from lousy job to lousy job, events apparently conspiring to thwart his post-army career at every turn. So when Marlowe contacted him and offered him the chance to make some real money out of his dark days in the army, Thorpe knew in his heart that things would ultimately end badly. And now here he was, scaling an unending mountain in the fierce heat of the desert, probably being pursued by a demon of his own making. A demon bred for war. As his muscles shuddered and ached, dragging himself up the vertical rock face, Bill Thorpe wondered if he was finally close to paying his penance.
Thorpe clawed his way up most of the last hundred feet of mountain towards the summit, only to flop against another rocky ledge about twenty feet from the peak. He was a spent man. Scorched red by the sun and drenched in sweat, the ex-sergeant had nothing left to give. He rolled on to his back and stared up at the ridge’s crown. He was so close, but his muscles were exhausted, and the final ascent was beyond him. Besides, he thought, for all he knew there might be a third, even higher biblical mountain waiting to test his faith right after this summit. Thorpe just lay there in the stifling heat, feeling the last of his strength ebb away, as the sun’s rays melted his resolve. He was tired of fighting, of pushing, of paying for his mistakes. He just wanted to rest. He knew it was a mortal sin to commit suicide, but surely this wasn’t the case. Hadn’t he had done all he could do? Wasn’t this simply the end of the road? Thorpe closed his stinging eyes against the glare of the sun and waited for salvation.
Something else came along instead.
Thorpe heard loose rocks tumble and rattle against the cliff face below and opened his eyes. He remained perfectly still and listened. He was rewarded with the sound of more rocks striking the mountainside on their way down. Thorpe tried to swallow, but failed. His throat was too raw and dry. He slowly rolled back on to his chest and pulled himself towards the end of the ledge and peered over the side. Far below he could see the Machine, clothed in the dead scientist’s rotting features, scrabbling up the rock face towards him like a scuttling spider in pursuit of a trapped fly. The Machine moved quickly and easily, gripping the rock hand over hand and scrambling up the cliff in haste.
Thorpe looked away and sighed. He stared at up at the clear blue sky.
“What the hell do you want from me?” he said.
The Machine was far away, but it was moving so fast it would be on him in minutes.
Suddenly Thorpe was up again and reaching for his next handhole. As he grabbed on to the jagged outcrops of rock above him and stretched out with his free hand to haul himself up, he decided that this was it. The old Thorpe might have said that the Machine was divine intervention; that it had been sent to spur him on when all hope was lost. Or he might have proclaimed the Machine as his own private demon, sent to torment him and extract old payments long overdue. But none of those things were going through Thorpe’s mind now. He could only concentrate on one thing. He just wanted to live.
Thorpe threw one arm over the other, as he attacked the last overhang of rocks and clawed his way to the top. He could now hear the Machine’s angry buzz swelling and swarming up the mountainside, heralding its charge as it came for him. But he paid it no attention and didn’t let himself falter. He just reached higher and higher, relying on his own quivering muscles to haul himself into the heavens, rather than any celestial means. Finally, his outstretched hand touched the summit and dug into the bare rock there with his nails, taking his weight, as he lifted himself up and through agony to reach the top. Thorpe moaned and rolled on to his back, his chest heaving from the enormous exertion.
After a moment Thorpe turned and opened his eyes. He didn’t know what to do now. All his efforts had gone into reaching the top of the mountain. Now that he was here, he didn’t know how that would help him escape the Machine. But as he stood and looked out on to the horizon, none of it mattered. He stared out across the dramatic mountain range that encircled Folly, past the desert beyond, and into the vast blue sky above. And he was breathless at the sight.
The Machine’s war cry was deafening now, so he knew it was close. He wondered what lay on the other side of his ascent and turned to look north. There, his mountain gradually gave way to way to an enormous plateau, before giving way to much lower ground that stretched as far as the eye could see. Nothing else in sight came close to the heights he had scaled. I’ve done it, he thought. I’ve made my last climb. I’m home.
The Machine sprang the last twenty feet of its arachnid climb in one great leap, turning in mid-air to land on the peak ahead of Thorpe, blocking his vista of escape. Thorpe raised his eyes to see the man-Machine as it stood over him, swaddled in decaying flesh and splattered with the dried blood of its victims. The Machine stared at him for a moment. Its black eyes were invisible against the sun as it leaned over him; just dark, empty hoods in the sockets where Shelly’s own eyes should have been. It reached down and snatched Thorpe up in one hand, then marched him back to the edge of the summit. There it swung him out over the side and dangled his kicking legs into thin air. Thorpe instinctively struggled against the Machine’s grip, even though he knew breaking it would mean his own death.
Then he just stopped.
A calmness descended on him. His mind cleared and he realised there was nothing else he could do; nothing else he should do. Thorpe stared down at the immense drop waiting for him below with surprisingly little fear. If anything, it was awe that he felt, for he appeared to be walking on air. Then he raised his features and stared defiantly at the Machine’s dead face.
“Paid in full,” he said.
The Machine registered something glinting below its victim’s jaw and used its free hand to pluck Thorpe’s cross and rosary beads from around his neck. Thorpe watched the Machine hold the cross up against the light and examine it, twisting it in its grip trying to catch the sun again.
“It won’t do the likes of you any good,” he said.
The Machine raised its rotting features and looked at him one last time.
Then it let go.
It leant over the edge and watched Thorpe’s body dance and break against the rocks on the way down. The ex-sergeant was true to his belief in bad luck and retribution, catching every jagged outcrop on his rapid descent and breaking apart long before he hit the ground. The Machine then raised its stolen cross and draped it over Shelly’s leathery head. It tied it around its neck by looping the rosary beads through the burst seams in its stolen, stitched flesh. It touched the cross for a moment as it looked up at the empty blue sky, but only for a moment. Then its eyes sank back to the earth, staring at the jagged ridge that towered over Folly, and then the southern expanse of open desert that lay beyond.