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THE RVTS ADVANCED IN a staggered line—or a staggering line, depending on your perspective. By my estimate, they were fifty meters and closing. Wind chilled the sweat on my forehead, and my teeth chattered. The lineup of Children shuffled and murmured, breaking into nervous clusters.
“Are those things going to try and arrest us?” Goldie clenched her hands together as if praying.
The Revivants halted with a ragged thumping of mistimed stomps.
“Millie...” I warned. “I think it’s time to leeeeave.”
“Agreed.” Snapping into command mode, Millie yelled, “Everybody! Scatter! Now!”
In a rippling crackle, like a thousand hailstones battering a tin roof, the Revivants opened fire. Dozens of copper-jacketed hornets zip-cracked past me, a tsunami of deadly force. Goldie jerked, and the back of her head came apart. She crumpled like a used napkin. Millie made a small “oh” sound, though I heard it distinctly over the snap of passing rounds, and stumbled to one knee. Shrieking people scattered in every direction, some holding their hands over their heads, as if that would protect them from the storm of bullets.
A round plucked my sleeve, and another burned a groove across my ear before my survival instinct kicked in. I grabbed John’s shirt and dragged him down behind a parked car while pushing Millie to the ground under me.
“Get behind the car’s battery,” I demanded. We piled together on the sidewalk, shielded for the moment from incoming fire by a solid wall of Ford batteries.
Bullets cracked and zinged on the concrete. Chips of brick spewed into the air, fine as dust. Glass shattered, metal pinged. I tasted copper and smelled blood.
People screamed.
The guy I thought was Sterling lay a meter away, his mouth working like a landed fish. Blood spurted from his neck between clenching fingers, and his eyes dimmed. The flood dialed back to a trickle, and he died without another sound.
“We have to get out of here,” John panted. His breath smelled of spearmint gum.
“There!” I pointed to the hotel’s service entrance. Double steel doors inside a utilitarian alcove. Between us and the alcove, six meters of open sidewalk.
The vehicle we huddled against shuddered as bullets flayed it from the other side. Pock marks peppered the hotel’s wall, and more rounds shattered against it every second, like so much deadly sleet. Chips of glass rained down from the car’s windows, some of them trickling under my collar or sticking in my hair.
“It’ll be locked!” John yelled over the clamor.
Shit.
My kingdom for a crowbar. The stuttering ripple of incoming rounds tapered off as the RVTs’ magazines ran dry. I popped my head up for a look through the car’s shattered windows. “Fuck me, they’re reloading. How’d they learn to do that?”
“How’d they learn to shoot?” Millie said.
I hunkered next to her. “Are you okay?”
“No.” She snorted. “I’m fucking shot.”
Sure enough, Millie wrapped both hands around her upper thigh, where blood soaked a patch the size of a sand dollar. She hissed through gritted teeth, and cobalt fire flared in her eyes. She was tough enough, no doubt. I’d have curled into a ball and whimpered like a baby by now.
John told me, “We need to make a run for it.”
“Where?” Millie asked him. “We go east or west, we’re exposed the whole way.”
“Some made it.”
John spoke the truth. Of the twenty or so original protestors, eight lay prone along the sidewalk. Moans and small movement attested four were wounded. Goldie stared at the sky, an expanding pool of blackened blood under her head and soaking her gray hair. That the spray of bullets from ten automatic rifles had accounted for only six hits was a miracle.
“The service entrance is closest,” John said. “We’d need a thumbprint to open the—”
“Wait,” I said. “Did you say you had people around front?”
Millie frowned. “Yes, but...”
“Can you contact them?”
“Sure, we could, but they can’t—”
“Would you shut up a minute?” I snapped. Being under threat of imminent death made me surly. “Get someone on the line. I need them inside the hotel, right fucking now.”
“Excuse me?” Millie’s face changed to mule-hard and thunderous.
“Please, Millie! Listen to me for a second. Tell them to find a fire alarm and pull it.” When she hesitated, I grabbed her shoulders and locked eyes. “Trust me.”
John said, “We don’t need the fire department, Joe.”
“Not the point.” At that moment, the line of Revivants opened fire, the din drowning out my words at first. I screamed it out so they understood. “The locks open automatically in the event of a fire. It’s a safety precaution built into the old mag locks. Assuming they haven’t upgraded in the last dozen years, the service doors will pop open the minute that alarm goes off.”
Millie grunted acknowledgement and touched the bud in her ear. She started yelling instructions to someone on the other end of the connection.
John crouched even lower as more shards of glass sprayed from our barricade. “And if they have upgraded?”
I shook my head. Some things weren’t worth thinking about.
“Okay,” Millie shouted, disconnecting. “It’ll be a few minutes.”
The battering ram of sounds made it hard to think, like somebody put a metal pail over my head and beat on it with clubs. Rounds thudded into both the living and lifeless bodies on the sidewalk, smacking flesh with a gruesome, meaty sound. Wounded people screamed again, or convulsed. My guts clenched with every impact. Millie’s eyes glittered, either with pain or anger, I couldn’t tell. Maybe both. She mumbled something I couldn’t hear; when I bent closer, I understood it to be the Lord’s Prayer.
“We may not have a few minutes,” I said to myself. Pretty soon, these pricks would advance and find us cowering behind a beat-to-shreds Ford Future.
Firing ceased as the remaining protestors stopped moving. I risked a quick glance and found the line of Revivants advancing again, line abreast. One got tangled in the low-hanging branches of a tree. In his dogged movement forward, a limb scraped the gizmo off his head, and the instant it did, the Revivant halted and froze. I ducked back down.
“I think they’re being controlled,” I said. “Revivant nanos are not the most versatile beasties in the tech world, so this level of coordination has to be driven by some other... thingy.”
“Ooh,” Millie crooned. “I love it when you talk techno-speak.”
“All right, John.” I clapped the big man on the shoulder. “When that alarm goes off, you grab Millie. It’s your job to carry her out of here.”
“No, leave me.” Millie squeezed her thigh with both hands. Sweat damped the hair on her forehead. “I’ll only slow you down.”
“Got it.” John seemed happier with a plan laid out in front of him. He patted Millie’s shoulder. “You won’t slow me down one bit.”
“I’ma gonna hit those doors like a jackrabbit—”
“A scalded-ass jackrabbit,” Millie reminded me.
“I think she’s getting loopy from shock,” I told John. “We should find something to wrap that leg so she doesn’t bleed out any more. I’ll run interference, but anything bigger than a fruit fly is gonna give me trouble. We may have to switch off on the other side if security is there in force.”
“Yup.” John busied himself stripping off his outer shirt and ripping a sleeve loose to use as a bandage. He wore a white tank top undershirt, leaving his upper arms bare. His biceps were bigger than my waist.
Another quick glance and my stomach sank. The Revivant line had reached the other side of the street. Nine stiffs in black uniforms, spread along fifty meters, four one way, four the other, and one directly across from our fucked-up Ford. At this range, they’d blow us apart like confetti from a cannon, if they had time to aim. There had to be some lag between the controller and the—what?—Revivant drone. Didn’t there? If I led the way, they probably (probably!) wouldn’t have time to nail me, but anybody behind me...
“Change of plan.” The words were out before I realized what I’d said. “You’re going first, Big Guy. Grab Millie, throw her over your shoulder—” The fire alarm shrieked, a warbling scream so loud, they probably heard it in Canada. Even knowing it was coming, I nearly shit myself.
“Go!” I shoved John, and bless him, he didn’t wait to ask questions. He snatched Millie off the ground as if she were a plastic doll and bolted for the alcove.
Instead of following him, I hopped up from behind cover and did jumping jacks in the other direction. “Hey, you ugly dead sonsabitches! Over here! You pud-knocking thunder-cunts couldn’t hit the ground with a turd!”
What are you doing, Joe?
Nine sets of dead eyes swiveled onto me. Nine rifles rose to nine shoulders, and nine muzzles rotated toward little Joe Warren and his bag of endless insults. Out of the corner of my eye—John and Millie ducked into the alcove. I had to keep the Revivants’ attention away from them for another couple of seconds.
“Yeah, you’re a bunch of crusty scabs on a dead dog’s dickhole. You—Oh, crap!”
I dove into the concrete behind my favorite Ford with an impact that knocked the wind out of me. Overhead, the world blew apart in a holocaust of incandescent chaos. Light strobed the back of my eyelids, and giant hammers pounded my eardrums. The world shook and shuddered and rang. Concrete, glass and steel—chewed up by copper-coated lead and spat into the air—speckled me in tiny patters of falling grit.
“Fuck! Me!”
Concentrate, Joe. Figure out how to get out of here.
Whoever controlled the line of dead soldiers didn’t have a terrific grasp of tactics, or else trigger pull on these geeks was either on or off. They seemed to blaze away until empty, reload, stomp, repeat, which meant, if the pattern held true, I would have a few seconds of breathing room after they ran dry to make a run for it. The way they acted in concert made me think only one person controlled the entire batch. (Government think: Spend a gabillion dollars on robots, cheap out on the human controller.) If they’d been able to pin us down with one group while another advanced, they’d have killed all three of us by now.
Which way to run, now that was the question. Simple answer: the nearest shelter.
The fire hose of incoming hell slowed, died.
Now.
My legs refused to budge. Without the percussive battering of automatic weapons, the wail of the fire alarm registered over the ringing in my ears. Beyond that, an emergency siren in the distance. The fire department, I supposed.
A clattering of metal on pavement—nine empty magazines dropping to the ground—made my ass pucker. I wanted to curl in a ball, tighter and tighter until I disappeared into an atom with the mass of Joe and sink into the pavement.
Move, goddamnit!
This time the body obeyed. I bolted for the service entrance.
Quick glance left. Each Revivant poked full magazines at the weapons they carried. Some had trouble with the process, stabbing away at the receptacle like a teenage boy trying to jab his pecker home. Others were ready, but apparently had to wait for their slower cousins. Design flaw, you twerps.
I hit the alcove at a full sprint, hooked the corner to change trajectory and smacked the doors face first, expecting to burst right through. Note to self: Doors in public buildings open out. Fumbling at the handle delayed me a few centuries. Behind me, a collective ratcheting told me the Revivant soldiers were all loaded and ready to fire. I gripped the handle and jerked the door open, nearly slamming it with my face, but the motion threw me back, and I lost my grip, sending the door swinging shut. I snagged the edge as it was easier to grip and flung the fucking thing out of the way, leaping through the opening into the cool light of a receiving area filled with supply boxes, and electrical switches with lever handles longer than butcher knives.
I juked right the instant I cleared the door. A spattering of angry wasps zipped through the space formerly occupied by my skinny white ass and smacked into a mountain-high stack of toilet paper supplies against the opposite wall. Cotton puffed from a score of holes punched into the cardboard boxes. Tissue-paper snow drifted down.
The door swung shut. My head spun, and I held onto a shelf to keep from face-planting. My heart jackhammered away, and I couldn’t get enough air. A single thought kept running in circles on the hamster-wheel in my head: How the hell did that work?
A vicious pelting hammered the other side of the door, as if the bullets were pissed they couldn’t get in. “Yeah, well,” I shouted at the door between pants. “You missed.”
Until the bad guys cross the street and open the door, Joe. Use your head for more than a hair display. In a matter of minutes, the feds would waltz in right behind me, stick a gun up my nose, and paint the ceiling with a fresco de la Joe. I needed to lock the door.
The room turned out to be more of a corridor than an actual room. A floor-to-ceiling cage blocked off the left side, full of packages with shipping labels. A thumb-key microlock secured the cage, so there was no joy there. In the opposite direction, stacks of supplies (now perforated) lined the back wall, and electrical service junctions ran down the other. Silver snakes of conduit flowed upward from the electrical boxes and disappeared into the ceiling. At twenty meters, the hall turned left and went... somewhere.
I needed tools. A chain and padlock would be nice. While I was at it, maybe an arc welder and a fucking jetpack to fly me out of this shit. What I really needed was for the freaking fire alarm to stop for ten freaking seconds so I could think! I needed...
A ladder.
Thank you unknown maintenance man, whoever you were, for leaving your two-meter stepladder parked right between two electrical boxes.
The exit doors were hinged on the side and joined in the middle. Crash bars opened both doors from the inside, levering down to disengage Mr. Tongue from Ms. Strike’s warm slot. The feet of my new stepladder fit into the space between the bar and the door, one foot on each side, jamming the crash bar in place.
“There. Take that, you ass-boils.”
Bam!
The doors jumped as someone jerked the handle from the other side, and I leaped about a meter straight back. The ladder held. I paused to find my heart, as it had exploded from my chest and bounced off four walls and a box of double-ply toilet paper.
Bam!
The ladder rattled but didn’t fall out.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
“I think it’s time to fly, little jackrabbit,” I told myself. I ran.
I sprinted along the maintenance corridor, hooked a left at the turn and ran for a single door at the end of the hall. This one had a crash bar as well. I hit it at approximately Warp Factor Five Hundred, almost blowing the door off its hinges...
. . . and whacked the back of a security guy holding a gun on John and Millie.