Earth Zero: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 2) (11 page)

“Why are you afraid of possibilities?” the Zap asked DeVontay. “Think of the medical benefits of organic fabrication. You can replace defective organs, cancerous tissue, and injured limbs. Eventually we could manufacture an eye for you.”

DeVontay’s hand reflexively went to his glass prosthetic, touching his left temple as if to remember part of him was missing. “I don’t want your monster meat in my body,” DeVontay said.

“But you ate it and derived the energy needed to replenish your cells,” the Zap said. “I don’t understand the difference.”

“And you never will. Because you and your knob-head friends aren’t supposed to be on this planet. You’re an evolutionary mistake. A fuck-up of the first magnitude.”

The machines continued their whirring and slicing as another animal was plucked from the bin. This one was a cat, with no visible mutations, a mottled tabby with wide, startled eyes. DeVontay charged for the machine to free it.

“No!” Rachel said, wrapping her arms around his waist and holding him back. “If you cause a malfunction, the Zaps will come see what’s wrong.”

“Let them come,” DeVontay said. “I’ll show them what’s wrong. I’ll yank one of these arms off and beat them back to the Stone Age with it.”

But before DeVontay could reach the yowling and hissing cat, a muffled voice came from the next room.

A human voice:

“
Help!”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Rachel sensed what was behind the door before she heard the scream.

This prolonged exposure to the Zap—or maybe it was the proximity to their massive energy source—had cut through whatever shield had blocked her telepathy. The signals weren’t distinct, but enough impressions burned through the fog for her to react.

DeVontay was right behind her as she struggled with the doorknob. The Zap hung back beside the rows of machines, a gray shadow with burning eyes. “Open it!” she shouted at the mutant.

There were other voices now, their words indistinct but their anguish loud and clear. DeVontay nudged Rachel aside and tried the door himself, to no avail.

“This is what you brought us here for, isn’t it?” Rachel shouted.

The Zap turned away from her and headed for the larger lobby and the three-dimensional printers. “He’s leaving,” Rachel said to DeVontay, who slammed his shoulder repeatedly into the thick metal door.

“Look for something we can use as a crowbar,” DeVontay said. “If we can’t get the door open, at least we can knock that freak’s brains out.”

Rachel looked around the room, hoping to find spare parts or scrap metal left over from the construction of the butchering machines. Even in the darkness she could tell that the builders of the assembly line had employed extraordinary efficiency. All the while, the carnage continued, the cat screeching as it was drawn into the living dissection of the meat factory.

For all the desperation of the humans trapped in the adjoining room, the cat’s green eyes glinted with such misery and fear that Rachel seized the robotic arm that held it by the neck. The arm was the thickness of a broom handle but was incredibly strong. She yanked at it and the articulated joints resisted, still going about the job. Rachel braced both feet against the side of the machine and levered backward with all her weight.

The arm snapped at a couple of joints and the callipered fingers flew open. The cat dropped to the floor on all fours and scurried from the room so fast that Rachel wasn’t even sure it had escaped. She lost her grip and tumbled, slamming into the stainless steel table. Sheaves of meat flopped down onto her and she batted it away, feeling its moist stickiness slide across her skin.

“Rachel!” DeVontay ran toward her as the robotic arm waved spastically at the air, the other arms waiting to receive more raw materials to process.

The Zap returned as DeVontay helped Rachel to her feet. The mutant lifted its arm and, for one horrifying moment, Rachel thought the device was aimed in her direction.

The air pressure in the room changed and Rachel’s skin tingled. Then the locked door shattered into several large pieces. One chunk hung from the upper hinges and a triangular piece containing the knob stayed mated to the jamb. The wall around the door frame sported jagged cracks, plaster leaking from them. Aside from the rending of the wood and gypsum, the device hadn’t made a sound.

The voices inside the room were now audible—a man and a woman. Rachel was sure it was the two people they’d met in Stonewall. The girl, Squeak, was practically a mute, but she was likely in there as well.

Rachel and DeVontay dashed through the wreckage into another darkened, windowless room. Rachel’s radiant gaze swept over another row of the same kind of machines as in the previous room, although twice as large and with so many articulated robotic arms that they seemed like cybernetic octopi.

“Get me out of here!” Lars Olsen screamed, whipping his long, dirty-blonde beard back and forth. Like his companion, he was nude, his gaunt figure as pale as a fish. He was restrained by one metallic arm at each of his four limbs, held aloft with his back several feet off the floor.

Tara was held in a similar apparatus, but she was in motion. The arms were carrying her within reach of the next set of arms, which hovered over a rimmed chute wielding flashing scalpels. Tara wriggled and screamed as the machine coldly prepped her for slaughter.

The room reeked of sweet coppery blood and rot, the floor slick with viscera. A wire basket of chipped bones lay beside the machine, and several bulging plastic vats were stained with flecks of gore. Other sets of empty restraining arms suggested these two weren’t the first guinea pigs.

Human corpses in various stages of decomposition were laid out in a row like cordwood. The piles of their clothes and personal effects heaped beside them reminded DeVontay of documentary footage he’d seen of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

My God, they’re cutting them up for scraps.

Any empathy Rachel still held for the mutants faded in that chilling moment. She didn’t know how many humans had been carved up in this unholy abattoir, but there could be no co-existence now. This would be a war to death, one way or another.

“Stop it!” Rachel yelled at the Zap, her words barely audible over Tara’s shrill cries.

The Zap stared down at the device in its hand as if not recognizing it.

“Blast that piece of shit back to the junkyard,” DeVontay said.

“She will be killed if I do,” the Zap said. Rachel sensed its confusion but she had no compassion left.

“Give it to me, then.” Rachel reached for the device as DeVontay tried to hold her back.

“You don’t know what that will do to you,” it said.

“Do you think
she
wants me to risk it?” Rachel nodded toward Tara, whose feet were mere inches from the descending blade. The woman seemed delirious and barely aware of their presence. All her attention was focused on the descending blades above her legs.

“Blast the hell out of it,” Lars yelled, his voice crazed and cracked.

“Do it,” DeVontay added. “Full speed and fuck it.”

Rachel pointed it, searching its smooth surface for some type of switch or depression. Perhaps it worked like a touch-screen device, but she suspected the device was dependent upon energy routed through its Zap operator. There was seemingly a mental component to its operation, a telekinetic circuit to tap.

Well, I’m still part Zap, aren’t I? Abracadabra. Fire. Shoot. Go boom boom.

With each thought, she waved the device as if it were a magic wand that would spit out a stream of punishing hellfire to cleanse the world of evil.

Nothing.

DeVontay limped to the machine, but its arms were moving too fast for him to grab one of them. The blades whirred in the air like silver bees. Electronic eyes on both sides of the chute analyzed the task and calculated the angles of approach, a complex contraption that would’ve been a marvel of engineering in other circumstances.

“Move away,” Rachel commanded as DeVontay crouched and tried to grab Tara around the waist from below. DeVontay ignored her and was carried toward the processing chute along with Tara.

Rachel glanced around for Squeak, refusing to entertain the thought that the young girl—or rather, the pieces of her—resided in those slick barrels of offal.

The first blade nicked the tip of Tara’s big toe, shearing off a piece of skin and peeling the digit down to a raw nub as if it were an overripe banana. Her agonized squeal seemed to shake the walls, adding to the buzz of energy in the air.

DeVontay tried to twist her free of the mechanical arms, but they were firmly locked on Tara’s limbs. She arched her back in a desperate thrust and DeVontay lost his grip on her sweating body.

Lars bellowed incomprehensible syllables and Rachel was sure that the Zaps around the plasma sink could hear them through the walls. She put both hands on the device and tapped wildly at it as if this was a television show and she could remotely change to a more pleasing channel.

The blades whisked across Tara’s feet and legs so swiftly that Rachel wasn’t even sure if they were cutting. The air clotted with a fine red mist and Tara’s eyes bulged, mouth gaping but unable to utter a sound. DeVontay rolled away from the carnage, spattered with the woman’s blood.

In her frustration, Rachel was ready to fling the little device at the murderous machine. She pirouetted and leveled it at the Zap. “Stop it or you’re dead, and I know you don’t want to die.”

The Zap hung its head, eyes dimming to a dull orange glow. “I can’t. I’m not the one who built it.”

The machine whittled at Tara as she slid onto the chute and was pulled into the dozen or so arms that plucked at the flayed parts, separating skin from flesh and sorting the harvest into various piles. The woman’s cries fell away to groans and then to whimpers before she mercifully fell unconscious or perhaps slipped into shock. Her torso sagged onto the chute as she surrendered to the slaughter.

“Get me out of here,” Lars yelled, writhing against his restraints so frantically that Rachel thought his arms might be torn from their sockets.

Rachel gave the device to the Zap. “At least put her out of her misery. If there’s any human still left inside you, you’ll do that much.”

DeVontay had turned his efforts to Lars, beating at the imprisoning metal arms with his fists. Rachel joined him, glad to turn her back on Tara’s vivisection, even though the wet sounds of the busy blades were nearly unbearable.

“Where’s Squeak?” Rachel asked Lars, whose gaze kept flicking down the length of his prone body to the mutilation that he would soon undergo himself. He shook his head, damp hair stuck to his forehead, naked chest rapidly rising and falling.

“Tell me,” Rachel repeated. “Was she—did she already go through?”

“He’s out of it,” DeVontay said. “Guess God’s not a total psycho cruel son of a bitch after all.”

The blades were now down to bone, chipping away at Tara’s cartilage with a hollow, wooden sound. There was a clatter as the amputated bones were kicked out into the wire basket. At least for Tara, the horror and pain was over.

Poor woman. Five years of surviving the worst the universe has to offer, and this is your reward.

Rachel’s faith, so strong in her youth and early adulthood, was now barely a distant memory. She no longer felt the presence of a higher power, a loving creator she could entrust with her life. All that was left was a cavity, the ache of its absence like a sweet tooth rotted away and leaving only the taste of bitterness.

“Th-they—they took her,” Lars muttered.

Rachel wasn’t even sure the man was aware of their presence anymore. She wished she had the man’s axe at that moment, the heavy weapon he’d carried like a shamanistic relic of his Norse roots. She would love to feel those brittle robotic arms cleave and fold under her raging blows.

“Where did they take her, Lars?” DeVontay asked him, with all the calm of a bedside doctor whose patient was hopelessly terminal. He even cupped the man’s clenched hand and squeezed.

“Dunno. Away. The baby.”

“The baby Zap?”

Lars craned his neck, trying to see the awful fate that was awaiting him. The mechanical arms moved him a few inches forward as if sentient enough to be impatient. Rachel dared a glance at the chute and saw a river of red rolling from the shiny surface in thick sheets. Apparently the mutants saw little value in the liquid derived from their livestock. Plenty more where that came from.

The Zap waited by the door, still clutching the handheld device. Rachel wasn’t sure why the Zap had brought them here. Despite its apparent sense of self and identification with humans, it had done nothing to stop Tara’s death.

Maybe it brought us because we’re next.

She warily eyed the extraneous arms that dangled from overhead tracks on the opposite side of the room. She expected them to swoop in at any moment like metal pythons that would squeeze the breath from them both and hug them in a cold embrace until all hope vanished from their hearts.

Suddenly the blades stopped their whirring and the arms transporting Lars froze in place. The machine’s whining dropped in frequency until it was little more than a soft whir, like an oscillating fan drafting a breeze from still summer air. The dull, low pulse of the plasma sink returned to fill the near-silence.

“What now?” DeVontay asked.

The air was still charged with energy but was also moist from the liquids and gases exuded by Tara’s corpse. The automated surgeons had nearly finished their grim autopsy. All that remained on the steel chute was a gleaming skull and a wrinkled rope of pink intestine.

Rachel sensed them before she saw them.

The figures came through the shattered doorway and fanned out to block any escape. Six Zaps, holding those mysterious weapons.

A seventh mutant entered the room, carrying Geneva in its arms. With them was Squeak, who studied the bloody machine and its horrible contents with childlike curiosity.

“We know how to take you apart,” Geneva said. “Maybe one day we’ll learn how to put you back together.”

Rachel wanted nothing more than to wring the baby’s neck and toss her onto the autopsy table. “Humans aren’t the only ones who bleed.”

Geneva batted her hands together with joy. “Oh, yes, most definitely. Just ask the other babies who wouldn’t let me have my toys. They can’t answer, though. I’ve taken their tongues.”

Geneva’s wild cackle was a sharp contrast to the other Zaps, who stood with blank, stolid faces and smoldering eyes. If they had any opinion about their tiny leader, who was as deranged as any inbred emperor of ancient Rome, they didn’t show it.