Gravewalkers: Dying Time (22 page)

Unconcerned about the fire,
Carmen said, “Don’t worry. The main reservoirs underground probably
won’t explode.”

“
Probably?” he repeated.
“Well, that’s just fucking great! What the hell do we do
now?”

To answer that, Carmen
waved and shouted to all the ghouls below them, “Here we are, you
stinky naked devils! Come and get us! Come take a bite out of the
tasty marshal!”

“
Alright, smart-ass,”
Critias had endured enough of her jesting. “Two can play at this
game.” He stopped shooting his rifle down the column to take aim at
the half-demolished building. The still-intact left corner of it
had a padlocked metal-cage that contained stacks of propane
canisters that used to power cooking-grills or camping equipment.
He put a hypersonic slug through the bunch of them with the force
dialed up high enough that even in his mechsuit the recoil was like
an elephant gun. The result was an explosion that blew the
remainder of the station to flinders and toppled the throng of
infected all over again. A half-meter long steel rod spun up at
them to slash a hole through the billboard over their
heads.

Jim called them by radio,
“Are you still alive? It sounds like a world war over
there.”

Critias radioed back,
“What? Can’t you hear Carmen’s singing? We’re doing well enough.
How are things with you two?”

Jim had good news, “Hatchet
backed up our rear hatch to the door of their building. We’re
loading the survivors up now. We should be heading back to you
shortly.”

One of Carmen’s radios was
a hardware implant that she converted to classic wavelength
communications so that she could internally follow the
conversation. She transmitted, “Hatchet, come around the side to
the diesel depot and we’ll get on from there.”

“
Roger that,” the man
replied. “We’re on the way.”

Critias gazed off to the
east where the roof over the diesel pumps was below them and some
goodly distance away. “That is pretty far to jump,” he told Carmen.
“What makes you think it will even support our weight?”

She pumped slugs from her
pistol down the column to keep the horde from ever reaching their
catwalk. “It will have to,” she reasoned. “After I drop these other
two grenades, this whole platform is going for a ride. We sure
can’t stay here unless you want to go along with it.”

He told her, “Leave
dropping the grenades to me then and you go first. If I can jump as
well as you can, I need to see it done.”

Hatchet plowed through a
fence behind the station to reach the pickup point.

“
I’ve never had so much
fun even with my clothes off,” she grinned behind her mask to the
truth of it. “You come right behind me.”

“
You can believe that,” he
answered. “I’m sure as hell not staying here.”

She took a short run,
hopped to the top of the railing, then leaped through the air
toward the distant rooftop. Carmen tucked into a roll then hit the
roof with an acrobatic tumble so that she came up on her feet
sheathed sword in hand that she waved for him to follow.

Critias popped two grenades
then dropped them down the column before he leaped after her. He
didn’t tuck into a roll or land acrobatically, but he at least
covered the distance. If anything, he had jumped too high and the
arc of his flight-path made him come down like a meteor.

Carmen opened her arms wide
and did her best to catch him. She did an admirable job of trying
to control his reentry, but unfortunately, the impact punched them
both through the roof to fall to the ground below it where the
pursuing infected would bury them.

The two grenades he had
dropped went off at the same time that he and Carmen crashed to the
ground. Electrical arcs surged like a net of tendrils before the
whole column with its billboards spun away through the sky along
with the skeletons of thousands of ghouls whose flesh could not
contain the velocity of their own ballistic bones.

Carmen came up with her
unsheathed sword, “That could have gone better.”

“
You think,” he said as he
switched his rifle to fully automatic so he could spray bullets
into the lucky ghouls that had been just out of range of the
grenades’ fluxing fields.

The Rhino approached them
then and Jim cut loose with the military machinegun. The weapon was
loud as bombs and each one of its anti-vehicle explosive bullets
delivered punishment that put even Critias’ amped-up teslaflux
rifle to shame.

While she covered their
retreat with her shogunate blade, Carmen shouted, “Jump to the
roof!”

Critias had to be sure to
avoid the heavy gun but he leaped to the top of the Rhino easily
enough. He watched as Carmen sliced off the heads of a half-dozen
ghouls with precision. She kicked one in the face so hard that it
spun through the air. He caught her as she back-flipped up to land
in his arms. A moment later, they had dropped down through the
roof-hatch then locked it from the inside.

When safely inside the
Rhino, Critias removed his helmet to meet the five new survivors.
They were two men, two women, and a boy about Jim’s age. The doughy
face of the portly boy was a striking testament to his ample diet.
One of the women was young and admirably beautiful despite some
obvious lack of nutrition. The other woman was older and
well-nourished though not to the point of excess. The two men were
lean and hardy in appearance.

The plump youth was first
to speak, “You two must be retarded to run around out there like
that.” He had seen part of their dangerous exploits from a
gun-port.

Carmen stripped off her
goggles, respirator, and diving hood then shook her violet hair
loose. “You’re welcome,” she told the boy with restrained
irritation over his insult.

One of the men studied
Critias, “What is that armor you’re wearing? Is that some kind of
bionics? I’ve seen some of the better prosthetic prototypes in my
day, but nothing nearly as advanced as that.”

It impressed Critias that
the man would know anything about such science, “Where have you
seen things like it?”

“
I was an aerospace
engineer before all this,” he revealed. “I know a lot about those
kinds of things and what you’re wearing is way beyond anything I’ve
ever heard of. It almost looks organic.” He offered his hand, “My
name is Wernher Hindemith PhD. Everyone calls me Vern.”

Critias told him, “Someone
as smart as you will surely come in useful. I’m Critias and this is
my partner Carmen.”

“
Critias sounds like a
stupid name,” the tubby lad said with scornful distaste, “almost as
silly as her ridiculous hair.”

Carmen shut his mouth with
her glower, “Critias was the uncle of Plato and leader of the
Thirty Tyrants of Athens, an evil despot that liked to feed fat
little boys to the ghouls for talking too much.”

“
Find your manners,
Danny,” the older woman told the youth. “They risked their lives to
rescue us.” Her words silenced the boy so that he went back to
peeking out a gun-port.

“
My name is Nadia,” the
younger woman introduced herself with a mild Russian accent. “I was
in Denver at the airport waiting for a flight home when things went
bad. I studied classical music in the real world, so I’m afraid I’m
not very useful.”

Jim thought she would be
valuable, “Can you play instruments?”

“
I can play most of them,”
she said without pride, “but prefer the cello, violin, or the
piano.”

“
Excellent,” Jim praised
her talents. “Perhaps you would be willing to teach the children.
It would be a great shame to lose the fine arts. What’s the point
in surviving without music in our world?”

“
My name is Bertram Gray,”
the last man introduced himself. “I’m the pilot that got our plane
here from the Denver airport. Have you heard from any of the others
who were on the plane with us? There were twenty-eight of us when
we landed, but we found the place swarming with shriekers. The five
of us filled one of the cars we salvaged. Most of the others also
made it into vehicles, but we got separated in the chaos of the
escape.”

“
I guess none of them had
radios better than yours,” Hatchet commented
contemptuously.

“
I don’t think any of them
even got out of your airport,” Vern confessed. “It was a miracle we
ever found an exit to an unblocked street. Those creatures have
little trouble smashing out the windows and then you’re done for.
The battery was dead on our radio, but I managed to rig it into the
car battery and here we are. I for one am eternally grateful you
came out here to help us. You can tell this King of yours that I am
forever one of his loyal men.”

A subtle glance from Jim
kept Critias from inviting the man to tell the King
himself.

The chubby youth spoke up
and said, “My sister Clara is one of the best organ-transplant
surgeons in the world and the only one anymore. You had better
treat us with the proper respect if you ever want us to cure you
when you get sick.” He spoke of the older of the two women. “That
goes for your King too,” he added boldly.

His commentary made the
woman nervous, “I told you to shut up!”

“
Our new friend Kevin who
just arrived is also a talented surgeon,” Jim referred to his new
android that could repair human bodies among his many other skills,
“but I’m sure the King will be pleased to have another medical
officer to tend to the sick.”

The news made Danny frown
as he sensed his advantage slip away.

Carmen eyed Danny’s fat
ass, “Why did you leave this Denver place? It seems to me like you
had enough food to just throw it away.”

“
The bunker there under
the airport was a better place for some than others,” Nadia
commented darkly, as though she had been part of the latter. She
gave Critias a sorrowful expression as she asked, “Will I have to
let your officers fuck me if I want to eat clean food?”

Her question shocked
Critias until Carmen shot him a harsh glance that reminded him that
he actually could imagine how such cruel relationships could come
about. “That will absolutely not happen,” Critias assured Nadia.
“We all eat and have the same inalienable rights under the King’s
Law. You never need fear anyone treating you like that
again.”

Their honest way of life
shocked Danny, “Your King lets the whores eat with the important
people? President Blieberman would never have allowed
that.”

Jim wanted to hear more
from Vern, “President?”

“
Yeah,” Vern nodded
seriously, “the President of the United States of America and what
is left of the Federal big-wigs are all down in their secret city
under the Denver airport. Maybe half the food is gone, but far from
all of it; some people are really living it up in fact. The
President and his soldiers decided to stop feeding everyone else
any of the real food unless they can find some way to pay them for
it. One of the military officers staged a coup. It started with
words that quickly progressed into all-out war, gun against gun.
After the President regained control of the base by driving his
enemies out to the surface, things worsened to well beyond
barbaric. There’s no word for some of the sadistic-shit going on
down there unless rape-stew is your idea of an evening on the town.
Some of the saner people from both sides grouped up then flew out
here to your airport. We heard a radio show some time back, about a
great man called King Louie that was here rebuilding
civilization.”

“
Let me guess,” Carmen
offered a cynical observation, “Clara, and her brother Danny were
on the side of this President Blieberman.”

Nadia began to cry on the
border of hysteria as all the iniquity of her existence overwhelmed
her. “Just look at her brother!” she sobbed. “I sold my body for
scraps of garbage rather than starve to death or eat other
people!”

Clara saw that everyone
gave her distasted glances. “I have a valuable skill,” she condoned
herself. “I took care of myself and my family. It’s not my fault
that Nadia’s only talent was for being on her back.”

Carmen looked at the
ceiling as she orated as Cassius when he spoke to Brutus. It was a
quote from her endless memory of humanity’s books that constituted
her android’s soul. The more life she lived rather than read about,
the more the words took on real meaning for the first time. “Shall
we now contaminate our fingers with base bribes and sell the mighty
space of our large honors for so much trash as may be grasped
thus?” At that, Carmen spun about to seize Clara by the throat then
squeezed so that the woman’s eyes bulged, “I had rather be a dog,
and bay the moon, than such a Roman!”

“
Stop this,” Critias put
his hand on Carmen’s shoulder, which felt solid and immovable as a
statue. “Of these two women, you prefer punishing the one over
comforting the other.”

“
Perhaps in death both
needs shall be met,” Carmen answered with a cock of her head as she
increased the pressure so that Clara was on the verge of passing
out. Carmen could casually kill the woman in an instant, but
preferred it to be as slow and terrifying as possible.