Star Road (44 page)

Kyros spread his arms out wide, a crazed Christ-like gesture, as if he was embracing—or blessing—everything this place was.

Annie and Jordan moved closer to Ivan, standing with him, shoulder to shoulder now.

They all fired—

To no effect.

Sinjira started backing away, staggering. An expression of fear or pure terror and amazement on her face.

But she didn’t move fast enough, and they all got to see exactly what this machine could do.

~ * ~

42

NO ESCAPE

The giant polyhedral cogs on
the walls began to turn one way, then the other, as if unlocking a combination to the inner workings of the machine.

The noise was deafening.

Annie turned to Ivan, shouting, “We have to get the
hell
out of here! Now!”

Ivan looked at Sinjira backing away but moving too slowly, back from the machine she had been looking at with such intensity.

And Kyros stood there, a man who should have been blown to pieces, unharmed, his eyes closed, his arms still outstretched.

While from the back of the machine, a filmy cloud arose and swirled around the machine, dancing, circling, engulfing Kyros.

Ivan—totally confused by what he saw happening to his brother.

Dark spots appeared on his flesh as the machine-made cloud twisted and writhed around him.

The small dots crawled and spread all over his body, some vanishing under the skin like fading tattoos while others emerged on his face, neck, and arms ... popping up from the skin in rising bumps and ridges.

Only one image came to mind ... one slim point of reference.

Road Bugs.

The way
they
moved, the machine-meets-organism way the Road Bugs scurried, but here they were moving over a human body instead of a machinery-littered section of the Star Road.

Sinjira finally snapped to and started running now, but she was knocked down by the rapidly expanding outer edge of the cyclonic cloud.

Knocked down, but crawling, she then scrambled back to her feet.

“Ivan,” Annie said. The urgency in her voice was chilling.

Jordan quiet... looking ... taking it all in.

But then Jordan went over to Sinjira, coming close to the cloud himself. He reached out, grabbing the Chippie’s hand, and she staggered forward as if she had been suddenly propelled by the front end of a fast-moving truck.

“Now!” Jordan shouted.

Rodriguez was already running out, away from this madhouse with Ruth, supporting her as she still gasped to catch her breath.

Ivan started backing away as Jordan and Sinjira came up next to him. He aimed his pulse rifle.

Directly at his brother’s head.

And then he started firing, at Kyros, at the cloud, blast after ineffective blast.

A head shot—amazingly—seemed to turn his brother’s face into an ashen stump, but only for an instant.

In seconds, his face reappeared, smiling insanely.

With each shot, a hole would appear for a moment in the swirling cloud. Then swarms of the tiny black dots gushed out of it, and the holes would vanish.

As the shimmering storm cloud swirled even more wildly around Kyros, his face twisting, reacting to the shots for a moment, and then—as if waking from a dream—his body, maybe not his body anymore, effortlessly repaired itself.

With Annie in the lead and the others running away as fast as they could, Ivan kept firing his useless blasts, and then his brother’s eyes locked on him.

This creature before him—who Ivan knew was no longer his brother— started walking slowly toward them.

The black storm cloud swirled around him, growing larger and wilder with each step.

He had said: “That’s not all this machine can do,” Ivan remembered.

Ivan ran, his arms pumping hard. His single, clear thought was that they’d be lucky to escape alive.

~ * ~

Ivan joined Jordan and Sinjira. She was hurt, but he couldn’t see where. Maybe contact with that energy cloud had done something to her nervous system.

No matter what, she was seriously slowing them down.

They stopped, and lowered Sinjira to the ground as gently as they could.

“What’s wrong?” Ivan said.

Jordan held her hand. Squeezed it.

But when Sinjira turned, her eyes were narrowed, like those of a little girl who’d gotten hurt playing in the park.

She looked sad ... frightened ... desperate.

She held out her other arm, and Ivan saw flecks of shimmering light that looked like minute flakes of metal covering her forearm.

And they were spreading ...

Like a frost, an icy morning leaving a crystalline sheen on a window, the first signs of a brutal winter to come.

Ivan looked from her eyes to Jordan and to the arm again.

The growth—whatever it was—was slowly spreading.

“Jordan,” Ivan said.

Both of them saw the obvious.

Jordan pulled out his handgun as this insane moment played out and, with his other hand, gave Sinjira’s untainted hand a tight squeeze.

He leaned forward to her and whispered something to her tenderly. Jordan, the man who said little or nothing and never betrayed emotion.

Sinjira heard and nodded, biting her lower lip to keep from crying out.

“Is the pain bad?” Jordan asked softly.

She grimaced and nodded. Her eyes were as filmed as the cloud created by the machine.

Then Jordan positioned the handgun close to the infected arm, above the elbow where the skin was untouched so far.

And he pulled the trigger.

The shiny, silvery flakes swarming over Sinjira’s lower arm blew away. Blood sprayed out of the wound.

Ivan quickly pulled off his jacket.

Jordan had dropped his gun.

Together they each took an end of the jacket and wrapped it tightly around the bloody stump.

Rodriguez had stopped running, Ruth was leaning against him, gasping.

Sinjira screamed, her feet kicking wildly.

Then Rodriguez said, in a cold, clinical voice, “These look like nano-trites. But if they are, they’re way beyond anything we’ve developed.”

“You’ve seen these?”

“Not exactly. They appear to be more alive than mere machine, but—”

Ivan looked at him blankly

The scientist shaking, his face bathed in sweat as whatever he was saying faded away, the possible scientific explanation incomprehensible to Ivan.

Sounds more like magic than science,
he thought,
but at a certain level, how can anyone tell them apart?

He helped Jordan pull the makeshift tourniquet tighter.

Then Jordan scooped Sinjira up in his arms, settled her, and was ready to move.

As they started walking, Rodriguez was still near-babbling.

“Like nano-machines, those things on her. But I have no idea what that thing surrounding your brother was. It’s like nothing, nothing I’ve ever—’

Rodriguez looked at Ruth, clearly approaching full hysteria.

“Okay, Doc. Let’s just calm down and get the hell out of here. All right? We’ll talk later.”

With a quick nod, Rodriguez stopped jabbering.

Ivan led the way, getting them to move as fast as they could, now reaching the place where the legion of dead bodies were sprawled on the floor. The cave exit was still a long way off.

Then he heard a voice, bellowing from behind them, echoing and amplified in the vast reaches of the cavern.

Kyros.

“There’s no escape, Ivan!”

Why not?
Ivan wondered.

They could work their way through the traps, now that they knew how they worked, so why
couldn’t
they get away from Kyros, who didn’t even appear to be hurrying to catch up with them?

Why such confidence? It was as if he knew a secret... had another surprise in store for them.

Then Ivan heard a sound.

The vines above them were stirring.

The low, throbbing hum quickly blended into a high-pitched buzz. The gentle swaying of the vines quickly changed into the wild lashing of loose lines ... like an old-time sailing ship’s rigging, whipping around in a storm.

They reached down ... down to the vast field littered with the dead bodies locked in their eternal struggle.

Or so one would have thought.

Ivan looked up ahead, then back the way they had come, and then ahead again.

The way out was still so far away.

“No escape
...”

And then, to his horror, Ivan saw what Kyros meant.

~ * ~

43

THEY RISE

Ivan’s first thought was that
the vines lashing overhead were about to reach down and attack them, wrap around them, and kill them.

But that wasn’t it at all.

As the vines swayed and snapped back and forth, they shot down spiky protrusions on long threads that emerged from inside the stalks.

But instead of attacking them, the thorns broke loose and showered down onto the field of corpses on this silent alien battleground.

They rained down onto the species, known and unrecognizable.

Ivan and his crew were moving as fast as they could, but Sinjira kept slowing Jordan down as they dodged through the spiky thorns that continued to fall down onto the corpses.

And as the thorns fell, they erupted like thousands of metallic larval sacs bursting open while a dark ooze spilled out, filling the room with a nauseating smell.

The ooze looked like the same miniscule black nano-machines that had swept over and around Kyros.

Within seconds, they covered the alien bodies, seeping into the desiccated, fossilized skin and rotting innards, painting the exposed organs and bones.

And then the bodies began to move, stirring, at first like dry leaves being swept up by a powerful wind.

“Come on! Keep moving!” Ivan said, but he realized his voice had been too low; the horror of what he was seeing so immense.

So now he shouted, his yell filling the cavern.

“Keep! Moving!”

But what could they do with Jordan, Sinjira, even Ruth stumbling and falling as they ran?

Annie turned and looked back at them as she ran, seeing the same horror show unfolding in the cavern.

The bodies were no longer dry leaves vibrating in an icy autumn wind ...

Now, they were
rising,
pulling up a knee here, raising an arm or a head there ... even,
Christ,
when half the skull was missing or had a massive hole in it from whatever had destroyed the once-living brain.

These dead beings were moving—unnaturally alive—whether by science or magic, it didn’t matter.

A dozen or more staggered to their feet as more and more spiky thorns fell all around, each hit causing another body to be quickly covered by the blackish “nano-trites” that animated them.

At the far end of the cavern, Ivan saw his brother, still surrounded by the luminescent cloud.

He strode toward them with a slow, steady pace, following in the wake of this unnatural army. He was heading straight toward Ivan, relentlessly.

Kyros more alien, more machine now than human.

And he was the master, the controller of all of this.

Looking ahead, he saw Jordan stop and put Sinjira down for a moment.

Without missing a beat, Jordan slung his gun over his shoulder so he could still hold it and shoot when he had to.

Once again, he picked up Sinjira, scooping her up and carrying her like a baby as he tried to pick up his pace to elude this undead army.

By now, scores if not hundreds of them were rising up, but Ivan wasn’t about to stand there and count them.

Whatever their conflicts with one another had been before, they were gone now ... vanished as they moved toward Ivan, Annie, Jordan, Rodriguez, and Ruth.

Ruth walked beside Jordan, holding Sinjira’s dangling hand.

Ivan thought:
As slow as they move now... once we hit the traps, they’ll catch us.

He came up beside Jordan, now also flanked by Annie.

And for a few stomach-turning seconds, amid the rising of corpses, no one said anything.

~ * ~

“Run,” Ivan finally said, his voice hard with command. “As best you can!”

And then he turned and started firing, spraying massive pulse blasts at this army of the alien undead.

Some shots blew off what remained of heads and other body parts. Some shots seared into their chests and abdomens and blasted off arms and leg.