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Walker and Alvin began their ascent in silence. Both men had grave, but ultimately determined expressions on their faces. They picked their way up the scree slope at the foot of the Machine’s mountain, wary of the tide of loose rock there. Walker didn’t speak. The action of climbing without stumbling on his injured leg or falling into a slide on the treacherous layer of rubble, was more than enough to occupy his attention. This was fine with him. He had nothing to say anyway. Johnny was dead, the Machine was still out there, and their rescuers had turned out to be their murderers. There was nothing to talk about. Things were as bad as they could be. All he and Alvin could do now was head for the summit and see this through to the end.
In his mind it was simple. If the soldiers stopped the Machine, he would kill them (or more than likely he would die trying). If the Machine despatched the soldiers, he or Alvin would try and use whatever hardware the death squad had brought with them to take it down. Again, this would most likely end with them dying, especially as they didn’t even know what the equipment was, or how to use it. In addition, there was an unspoken agreement between the two men that, should the latter scenario look likely, they would finish each other and Flashback Jackson, before the Machine could close in on them. Neither man wanted to end up like Shelly, so when the time came, they would deprive the Machine of its sadistic pleasures. But they had to at least try to stop it first.
Walker scrabbled up the slope, wincing every time his splinted leg slipped from underneath him. His mind focused on Johnny. His friend’s death still seemed unreal, dreamlike, and he still had trouble absorbing what he had seen. Johnny had always seemed indestructible, at least to him. He had risked his charmed life hundreds of times for sport and pleasure and had always cheated death. Even now he half expected his old friend to call him back down from the foot of the mountain and explain with a winning grin that he’d fooled them all; that he was just playing dead and that the joke was on them. Walker’s frown hardened against his features as stony grief set into him. Suddenly his arms and legs felt like lead, and he just wanted to sit down right there and weep. It was only the thought of putting a bullet in Johnny’s killer that kept him moving, kept him hauling himself up over the rocks, slowly dragging himself towards the summit to reach his goal.
He finally broke the silence.
“I can understand the Machine,” he said. “You polluted it. You gave it a mind for violence and nothing else. You made it what it is. But those men, the ones that killed Johnny. They’re worse than it could ever be. They’ve got a choice in how they behave.”
“They’re just soldiers, doing their job,” said Alvin wearily. “Following orders.”
“And that’s OK?”
“No. But to be honest I half expected this. When the Machine started killing people, I prayed they would send someone to come and get us. Then, as time went on, a small part of me began to hope they wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, well they came alright. And if there’s anything left of them when we get up there, I’m going to kill them myself.”
A couple of small rocks slid and tumbled loose from the mountain high above them. Walker looked up. He couldn’t pick out the soldiers from this angle, though he knew they were up ahead, tracking the Machine.
“I think it’s got a cave or a shelter at the top,” said Alvin. “It seems to stay close to the crucifixion site.”
“Maybe it likes looking down on you,” said Walker. “Like a god.”
“Maybe,” said Alvin. “Maybe it’s just easier to keep watch from up there. Either way, I’ll bet you a dime to a dollar that they’re tracking it back to that position.”
“Why would it lead them up the mountain,” said Walker. “Isn’t it supposed to be clever, tactical? It’s cornering itself.”
“Whatever it’s doing,” said Alvin. “I doubt it’s running scared.”
Walker halted for a moment. He leaned forwards against the slope, breathing deeply.
“Do you think they’ll be able to stop it?”
Alvin screwed his face up and pulled out the device he took from the dead marine in Garris’s squad. He threw it to Walker. The Englishman turned it over in his hands and examined it.
“Any idea what it is?” said Walker.
“I was hoping you might tell me,” said Alvin. “We just carried rifles and grenades in my day.”
Walker tucked the controller into the waistband of his jeans and started back up the slope again.
“I suppose we’ll have to find out the hard way.”
*
It was late in the afternoon by the time the two men reached the Machine’s lair. The sun began to ripen and sink, as they held up outside the large, gaping mouth of a cave, just below a plateau at the mountain’s summit. They stared into its black interior. The cave mouth stretched double their height and three times their width before them, yawning, bristling with stalactites and stalagmites that sat like poised, jagged teeth. Beyond this was an impenetrable gloom. Alvin stared at Walker then produced a torch from his combat jacket. He flicked it on and swept the beam around the darkened interior, picking out more ragged rock formations and a series of tunnels that seem to twist away from the mouth and out of sight.
“Looks like this is it,” said Alvin. “You ready?”
Walker stared at the old man’s haggard face. He could see the ex-soldier was weary and finished with this business. He just wanted resolution; an ending. Walker nodded and pulled his pistol from jeans and cocked it. The two men stepped into the cave mouth. They followed Alvin’s torch beam, as it picked out a winding route through the dark clusters of rock spikes above and below them.
At the rear of the cave Alvin’s torchlight revealed a gaping tunnel, but as both men drew closer to it, they found themselves hesitating. Walker crept around the cool, bare rock at the tunnel’s entrance and peered into the blackness that lay in wait there. He squinted to try and concentrate his vision, sure that there was just the faintest trace of light leaking from deep within.
“There’s something through there,” he whispered.
Alvin stared at him for a moment and then flicked off the torch. Raising his Beretta, the old man slowly moved forwards and disappeared into the darkness. Walker took a deep breath and followed him. The tunnel was easily wide enough for a large man, yet Walker still felt claustrophobia swell in his chest. Though there was a very faint and distant glimmer of light up ahead, it was all but blocked by Alvin’s lead, so Walker had to stumble forwards blindly. He stretched his arms out and dragged his fingertips across the dank walls of the tunnel to guide himself, as he followed the old man deeper into the mountain.
Finally, Alvin’s silhouette reached the end of the tunnel and stepped out and to the side, revealing to Walker a huge cavern lit by the dim, flickering light of a single campfire. The cave was roughly the size of a large school classroom. It was filled with stalactites and stalagmites that dripped from its ragged ceiling and floor like molten daggers of wax. As they moved to the centre of the cave, they could see that there seemed to be more tunnels and chambers leading off from its rear, but they couldn’t be sure. The campfire’s incandescent glow didn’t reach far enough back to penetrate the shadows there.
“So this is home,” whispered Walker.
Walker and Alvin wandered the flickering cave. Walker stared at the fire and realised that there were clothes draped over some of the rocks around it, left there to dry. He drew closer and picked one of the garments up, dropping it instantly when he realised what it was. Another leathery human hide flopped back against the rock and an eyeless face stared back at him. Walker backed away from the skins and turned to see Alvin examining the far wall with his torch.
Alvin panned the beam over a series of cave paintings, gradually revealing a grotesque gallery of crude drawings. The pictures were childish and violent. They depicted battlefields and stick figures fighting with rifles and knives, as cartoonish warplanes rained bombs down everywhere. The drawings reminded Walker of the angry scribblings of disturbed young boys; drawing in characters and then scratching them out with lines of tracer fire. The drawings were coloured red with explosions of blood. There were crude scenes of firefights, tank battles, snipers shooting victims, villages being burned, a soldier being blasted apart by a grenade, his limbs scattering over the cave wall in another spectacular wash of red.
Walker’s eyes fell to a series of metal bowls, presumably taken from the facility, which sat at the bottom of the wall. Even in the poor, flickering light of the cave’s campfire he could see that they were filled with blood. He looked back to the drawings and supposed the Machine had scratched the dark outlines of its crazed figures with its diamond-hard fingers, then added copious amounts of blood to bring them to life.
As he stared at the drawings again, he noticed that Alvin had moved the torch beam over to the last scene in the Neanderthal storyboard and was staring at it in shock.
“What is it?” whispered Walker.
“I’ve seen this,” said Alvin, his eyes showing no surprise.
Walker examined the drawing. It showed soldiers hanging from X-framed crosses, like the one presently above them used to crucify Flashback Jackson. The unfortunate stick figure soldiers had bloated round faces perched on their Lowry-like bodies, wore upturned mouths and wept fat tears on to the ground. A passing plane was dropping sheets of fiery napalm on to the whole area, and some of the soldiers were screaming and burning, still tied to their crosses as they cooked.
“I was there,” said Alvin blankly. “We were caught behind enemy lines and took to a camp where they began torturing us. They did this shit, with the crosses.”
“What happened?” said Walker.
“The rest of the unit called in an air strike and lit the whole area up. I watched more than a dozen of my men burn alive strapped to those crosses. A couple of us got free, untied some of the rest and we ran. Flashback was there. Lynch was with the team that picked us up.”
“So the rest of the pictures are from the others’ memories?”
“I guess so. Walker, that thing must be totally insane.”
Walker took a few steps back and looked at the cave painting comic strip of suffering and death. He then turned and let his eyes roam the cave: the campfire, the bowls, and the human skins drying over the rocks.
Then it hit him.
“It’s trying to be a man,” he said.
“The Machine?” said Alvin. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it thinks it is a man because of all those false memories it’s inherited. Maybe it wants to evolve. But that’s why it skins people and wears them. It’s trying to achieve something.”
“I thought it was just another tactic,” said Alvin. “I thought it was just a way of frightening us, making us suffer more.”
“Maybe,” said Walker. “But why live up here in a cave when it’s got the facility in the mountain? Why build a fire when it doesn’t get cold? It’s like it’s trying to retrace the early steps of man, trying to copy our evolution. Shit...”
“What?” said Alvin.
“It’s going back to the beginning,” said Walker. “It’s trying to start again. It’s reformatting itself.”
“Why?”
“To get rid of the memories. To erase all the nightmares you gave it.”
Walker watched Alvin’s disbelieving expression waver against the light of the fire as its flames danced and crackled. He watched the old man absorb this theory, just as he had digested the uncomfortable knowledge that it was he who had helped school the Machine in sadism. When Alvin’s pale blue eyes flicked back to meet Walker’s, they were both sure that he was right. They both knew that the Machine was punishing them, torturing them to make them reclaim the nightmares they had given it. And if that didn’t work, plan B involved forcing itself through a twisted, fabricated emulation of man’s evolvement, so that it might restart and develop beyond its past to escape its torment. Wild as the theory sounded, both men believed it now that it had been voiced. It was written all over their faces, as explicit as the mayhem on the surrounding cave walls.
Then the screaming started.