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The pain parted like a heavy curtain and Elijah had his first coherent thought since waking up.
That’s too much blood.
It wasn’t Elijah’s first time with warm blood on his hands; no soldier got through a tour in Kazakhstan without the experience. He was a six-eight whiskey, a combat medic, and his thought was the diagnosis of a trained professional. This situation was bad, and not just because he’d been ambushed by burglars in his own bedroom. It was his life seeping through his fingers.
A round through his thigh, another through his neck. A third shattered his scapula, and that was the one that had put him down. People who’d never seen combat before would have been surprised to find him still breathing. Elijah had no idea how long he’d been on the floor, but the steadily growing pool of blood beneath him said he didn’t have long left to contemplate the experience. He tried shouting to the house’s comsystem for help, but all he got out was a gargling sound. He pressed himself up to his hands and knees.
The bedroom’s AR monitor picked up the movement and cast the time, date, and weather on the wall as if he’d waken up from a nap. 1717 hours. Hope. If he could keep from bleeding out for just a few more minutes, Ophelia would be home from work.
She’ll get me help.
Elijah pressed his shirt to his neck and tried to control his breath. He had to stanch the bleeding and lower his heartrate. He thought about crawling to the old medical kit he kept in the closet, but decided it wasn’t worth the expenditure of energy. It was all about managing resources now. For a few moments, there was only the sound of Elijah’s breathing and the low whomp-whomp of his pulse in his ears. It was almost peaceful, in a weird way, like being underwater. Then a noise froze his spine: a muffled conversation from downstairs.
They’re still here.
The city had gotten bad. Bad enough that the two teenagers felt comfortable pulling off a home invasion in broad daylight. Bad enough that they would stick around after shooting the homeowner. Elijah could hear them dumping out drawers in the living room, swiping the shelves clean. And laughter. They were in no hurry.
Elijah considered climbing to the control panel and typing in the emergency call manually, but with the armed teens still in the house, it was, at best, a Pyrrhic gesture. He and Ophelia hadn’t been able to afford an armed response contract, so all they had were the municipal police. The cops had been so neutered by the Police Reduction Act of ‘56 that they didn’t even carry guns anymore. Average response time was close to forty minutes in the city. They’d show up just in time to document his murder.
Maybe the teens would come upstairs to finish him off, or maybe they thought they’d already killed him. Elijah could lay there quietly and possibly survive. The problem was the time of day. Ophelia would be home from work at any minute, and she had no idea what she was walking into. They’d shot him without saying a word. What would they do to her?
Crawling on his belly, dragging his leg behind like an alligator’s tail, Elijah got to the closet. The pain in his neck and stomach weren’t too bad, but his back and shoulder felt like someone was jabbing him with a hot icepick. He gritted his teeth, grabbed the doorknob, and pulled himself to his feet. He stifled a scream that turned into a whimper in his sinuses.
The time projected on the wall read 1718.
No time.
With one hand, he pulled down the Pelican case where he kept his field medical kit. It dropped from the shelf and fell to the ground with a thud. The conversation downstairs died instantly, and Elijah knew he only had seconds.
They hadn’t let him out of the Army with much: a worn-out pair of tactical boots, a couple sets of BDUs, and as much olive-drab underwear as he cared to take. They’d kept all the weapons and explosives and anything that might be useful in a fight. He’d managed to sneak his field kit through the muster-out process, though, something that the US Army would have preferred not to have out in the civilian world. Elijah cracked open the case and tossed aside the pressure bandages and a power-tourniquet. It was too late for the first, and the other wasn’t much use for a gunshot wound to the neck. He paused for a fraction of a second to consider the Clotfoam. There was an outside chance it might stop the bleeding, but it wouldn’t do a damn thing for Ophelia. That decided it.
The clock ticked over to 1719.
With a trembling hand, Elijah snatched up the autoinjector he’d been looking for, bit off the safety cap, and slammed it into his thigh. The steel cylinder hissed as it dumped a thousand dollars’ worth of chemicals into Elijah’s bloodstream.
The mix burned through his veins, from his leg to his crotch to his heart to his brain, and this time, Elijah couldn’t contain his scream. He roared so loudly it seared his throat. In the wake of the white-hot fire, however, the pain transformed into a frosty numbness. As his contracting muscles forced his body into the pugilistic pose, he could hear the shattered fragments of his shoulder blade grinding together but no longer felt it. His eyes, which had involuntarily squeezed shut, shot open so forcefully that it was if his eyelids had disappeared.
The first teen stumbled into the room with his gun held out in front of him in that ridiculous cant all the young AR gamers used. The kid seemed to be moving in slow motion. Elijah grabbed the open Pelican case by the handle and slung in overhand. The case gave him an extra three feet of reach, and it caught the teen on the wrist hard enough to warp the shape of his forearm. The gun clattered to the floor, and without a second’s hesitation, Elijah brought the case around in a backhand and smashed the teen’s face.
Blind gunfire erupted from the hallway outside the bedroom. The rounds tore through the first teen’s torso and he went down in a heap. One slug caught Elijah in the cheek, but it hardly turned his head. In his current state, it felt like little more than a hard slap.
Elijah charged, attempting to leap over the fallen burglar to get to his accomplice, but his foot went out from under him and he fell face down, hard. His brain was an electrical storm, and he was thinking more clearly than he had any right to under the circumstances. It was like he’d had a year’s worth of coffee in one go. As he was falling, Elijah had the free bandwidth to notice that he’d slipped on his own blood. Ironically, the fall had helped him avoid the hail of gunfire passing over him.
Elijah heard the slide on the gun lock back. Empty. He bounced up from the floor, turning his fall into a closing movement, and slammed into his attacker. The teen didn’t move nearly as much as he should have. He was huge and dense with muscle. Even with the edge the Army’s secret sauce was giving him, Elijah wasn’t nearly strong enough to bowl him over.
Okay. We’ll do this the hard way.
With the autoinjector still clutched in his fist, Elijah punched the teen right in his ear. Elijah was too numb to feel the impact, but with his heightened senses, there was no mistaking the ringing noise as anything other than the sound of bone crashing into metal. Elijah looked in his attacker’s face for the first time. The kid was borged-out, half his scalp covered in low-end anodized plates grafted directly onto his skull.
A hand shot out and caught Elijah by the throat, smashing him back against the doorframe. He grabbed at the fingers hoping to peel them away and found only cold metal digits.
Transhumeral prosthesis. An old Grumblin Model A.
Elijah knew the replacement arm well. He’d seen enough soldiers with them in the early years of the war when the locals used to put small explosives in canned energy drinks. Servos whirled and he heard his windpipe collapse like a crushed beer can. It was a pointless move, but the teen couldn’t have known that Elijah was past the point of breathing.
Most vets those days had Model Cs or even Balitek’s new carbon fiber model. That was because the Model A’s had a flaw; the aluminum plate that covered the back of the elbow joint tended to pop off after a few weeks leaving the release pin exposed. Elijah reached for the elbow and, sure enough, the plate was gone. He hooked the loop on the pin with his ring finger and pulled hard.
Instantly, the prosthetic arm sluffed off and fell from Elijah’s throat. The teen let out a stream of surprisingly coherent profanity equal parts disbelief and anger. He never got the opportunity to finish his exclamation. Elijah jammed the pin into the soft part of his attacker’s neck once, twice, three times.
He’d been a soldier, but other than basic training, Elijah’d never gotten any hand-to-hand combat training. He had a more than passing familiarity with how a body worked, though, and he knew from experience that one wouldn’t function for long with a perforated carotid artery.
The teen collapsed, desperately clutching his own bleeding neck with his remaining hand. He was out of the game, never to burgle or murder—or anything—ever again. Elijah stood over him just to be sure. He opened his hand and let the pin slide off his finger, but he held onto the autoinjector as if it were a talisman.
The Army had a numerical designator for it, but the soldiers called it Hero Juice. There was a touch of raw adrenaline in the mix, a vasoconstrictor, and a healthy dose of industrial-grade painkillers, but what made the cocktail special was the mystery ingredient that temporarily forced the body’s essential organs to cannibalize themselves for oxygen. Elijah barely understood the science, but he didn’t need to in order to understand what it did. For five minutes or so, it held off death. A user didn’t require his lungs or liver or even a fully functioning heart. It made a soldier practically unkillable. But Hero Juice was a Hail Mary, an option of last resort, because once it was in the body, there was no going back.
They had another name for Hero Juice. The combat medics called it Reaper. For all its benefits on the battlefield, the survival rate was nil.
The clock read 1720. Shadows framed the edges of Elijah’s vision. He fell to his knees and then to his side, and he didn’t mind it all that much once the front door squeaked open and he heard Ophelia’s voice, concerned but not frightened.
“You there, Eli? I’m home.”