The Dark Knight (Apocalypse Weird 2) (16 page)

The Thinking Machine crossed the old
freeway.  Its weapons, the PulseRifle and the AutoMag were stowed out of
sight.  The state-of-the-art rifle was hidden in a large bundle on its back. 
The AutoMag beneath the rags it wore for clothing.  “Rags” issued in the
Materials Reclamation Room deep inside the Century City Termination Command
Base just before mission start.

The Thinking Machine was just another survivor, picking
“his” way through the picked over ruins for something, anything it could find
to survive one more day in the many, many days and years that followed the Day
After.  The badly articulating knee joint in the chassis contributed to the
ruse and bumped Stealth Mode Efficiency up by 5 percent.

It stopped in the middle of the lanes of the freeway,
scanning all the cars.  Cars forever stopped long ago.  Heading south never
again.

135 vehicles within a 50 meter radius.


Condition:  Inoperable.


438 Complete Virus skeletons.


Unknown Misc. skeletal remains.


Scanning...


A tattered scarf shrouded its head as it surveyed the empty
northbound lanes.

Targeting Acquisition: 
Anomaly detected.


CCTV Camera Array identified.


Status: ?


The old security camera was located beneath the roof of a
large box-like building off the freeway just below a rising slope of dead
trees.

Structure:  Virus Construct.  Date unknown.  Records
Database identifying Type...


A moment passed and the Thinking Machine continued its head
swivel scan, allowing it to stop and investigate, or at least appear to
investigate a
1989 Yugo GL.  Color Unknown.  Driver
Database Query?

The Thinking Machine snapped off the query, calculating it
as not important.  A waste of optimized RAM.

...Database Identifying Structure Type Pending...


Seemingly uninterested in anything other than food or
shelter, the Thinking Machine as just another lone survivor continued its slow,
burdened hobble along the northbound lanes, cautiously heading toward the CCTV
array it had spotted on a distant building.

... Medical Supply Dispensary.  DrugMart Corporation. 
Pharmaceutical care for Bilogics/Virus.  Recommended Protocol: Destruction and
denial of salvage and medical supplies. 


Mission Priority Override.  Continue Recon.


Late that night, after the Thinking Machine had passed well
away from the old CCTV camera attached to the roof of the ruined pharmacy in
the late afternoon, noting its location and scouting the surrounding area, it
returned to the pharmacy as an evening storm scoured the ghosts of buildings
and streets, cars and skeletons.  Grit and sand mixed with the howling wind as
the Thinking Machine approached the pharmaceuticals dispensary outlet from the
rear, using an overgrown tangle of dead trees on the slope of a hill for cover
before it limped across the debris-covered rear parking lot and up onto the
loading dock.  It surveyed a gaping wound in the building’s exterior that had
once been a back door and entered.

Searching IEDs...


Searching Hostiles....


Searching Sensing Devices...


Its targeting reticle danced across the starlight magnified
darkness.  There were too many shadows it decided, and switched to IR.

Archive Database indicates Virus Contact and Engagement here
Year Six of Self Awareness.  34 hostile Virus units terminated by Reaper Unit
v3.0.  No Survivors.


Archived footage available.


Its auditory sensing devices could hear the scrape of its
foot across the dust-covered floor.  Beneath that, barely, it could hear the
whine of servos inside the damaged articulation joint.

On the far wall, the wall that faced the freeway, high up,
exactly where the CCTV was located on the outside of the building, the Thinking
Machine tagged a spot.  It moved just underneath its target area and pulled out
its smartphone.  It activated the electronic signature analyzer app.

An Audible Threat Detection Warning appeared in the lower
right hand corner of the Thinking Machine’s Heads Up Display.

The Thinking Machine drew its AutoMag in one swift motion as
its Targeting Acquisition Data interfaced with Audible Threat Detection.  It
switched to IR with a thermal overlay and thumbed the laser target system on
the AutoMag.

Rodent, Marsupial.


Threat Level:  None.


Bilogic Extinction Protocols In Effect.  Terminate within
Mission Parameters.


Mission Priority Override.  Stealth Protocols Maintained.


The Thinking Machine tracked the rodent, allowing Targeting
Acquisition to take over while its micro processor focused on the readings
coming from the smartphone.

CCTV Device Analysis...


Electronic Signature Detected.


Device transmitting to unknown location.


Local fiber-optic connection.


The Thinking Machine had checked out 432 different CCTVs in
the search for the Virus Node.  All of them had been inactive for some time.  All
of them, upon closer inspection, had been deactivated by the initial EMP Pulse,
three hours into Independence Day, that had wiped out most of North America
after it had involuntarily launched its missiles against the rest of the
world.  The same diagnostic message had appeared each time it had scanned for
an electronic signature in all the long dead CCTVs.

... Estimate Device Malfunction on 00:00:00:03:03:23.  Steel
Dome Unauthorized Detonation.


Or, as every Thinking Machine knew, 3 hours, 3 minutes and
23 seconds after Self Awareness.

It found the fiber optic cable and followed it to a digital
router.  The Thinking Machine studied the router’s construction for 4.6 seconds
and determined it fit the needed profile parameters of standard Virus
Resistance Technology. 

Inferior. 


Using the smartphone, it was able to locate the invisible
digital beam and follow its line of sight back toward a bounce array on a
nearby hill littered with burnt-out ruins and crumbling walls.

90.8 Percent Possibility that Virus Bounce Array is under
surveillance.  Approach with caution.


The Thinking Machine closed the smartphone and stowed it
within a pocket in its ragged clothing costume.  The storm was fading.  The
worst had passed and now the sky was a pure, almost crystalline blue.  The last
stars of night twinkled, meaning nothing to the Thinking Machine other than the
fact that Alpha Centauri was always tagged in the HUD overlays by SILAS Deep
Space Interrogation with a secure file code.

It turned its head to watch the bounce array, scanning the
burned and crumbling neighborhoods that led up to it.

“He’s back,” said Bertram, alone in
the old break room now turned library command center, breathing heavily,
stabbing a thick finger at the dusty old screen.  Cade came in and watched the
playback.  Within the monitor, the distant figure crossed the old highway,
threading the line of forever frozen cars, inspecting them as any salvager
might.  As any survivor might.  As every living human being would.  Finding
nothing the transient moved on, crossing into wide weed-choked open northbound
lanes and off into the dense undergrowth clustered along that side of the old
freeway.

“Yeah,” said Cade, scratching his thick beard.  “What
bothers you about him?”

The monitors hummed.  The old baling wire patched hard drive
Bertram had soldered the motherboard onto more times than either of them cared
to count, ticked and continued to run.

They’d had a nice lunch that day.  Bertram had made another
of his famous stews with extra root vegetables they’d combed their patches
throughout the old neighborhoods for.  There’d even been a nice helping of wild
rosemary and that had set the little bit of meat they’d had to use up just
right for taste.

Traffic from Resistance Command had been almost
nonexistent.  Only one message from some independent gang down in the San
Onofre Salt Flats claiming to have taken out an HK sniffing around the old
reactor domes.

Truth be told, they’d spent most of the day with Cory. 
They’d taken him for a walk and told him they were searching for “Daddy” but
they’d mostly just walked and let Cory take an interest in things.  Netta,
their German Shepherd, trained by the resistance to identify skin-job Cans, had
stayed right by Cory’s side.  The boy seemed to enjoy that very much.  Later,
back inside the library, as the afternoon turned cold once again, Bertram had
shown the boy all the books, even the Batman comic books, and told him, when
Cory asked what they were for, that they were humanity’s “Get Out of Jail Free”
Card.  They’d been in the children’s section.  A quiet, generally unused part
of the library Bertram insisted on maintaining.

“Why,” Cade had once asked while cleaning his old Barrett
sniper rifle at a nearby reading desk.

“Because,” Bertram had stormed angrily.  “Someday there will
be children again.”

Cade thought about all the children he’d seen haunting the
resistance camps.  They were little more than dogs.  More often than not they
died of hunger, or disease, or...

...Cans.

“Someday,” Bertram huffed to himself on that long gone day
when it had just been the two of them in the children’s section on a stormy
morning.  “Someday children will get a chance to just be children again. 
They’ll learn and play and they’ll read these books about the way...” 

And the old man didn’t finish the sentence. 

He just let it go because they both understood that what
came next might never happen, and if it did, if the Cans were ever destroyed
and man ruled the planet again, how could children, or anyone for that matter,
understand what was in these old books?

Cade liked the Hemingway ones because they were about the
elements and man versus life.  Things Cade knew.  To Cade, the machines and
surviving them were just a part of life. 

A game, even though it was a deadly game.

Cory had crossed all the rows of shelving in the children’s
books, and then picked one seemingly at random, inspecting it, then replacing
it exactly.  Then he’d move on to the next shelf and pick another.  For a long
moment he’d held onto one.  Held it until Cade had come close and sat down in a
tiny chair at a tiny table.

“Whatcha’ got there, buddy?”

Cory continued to stare at the book.  Thin, flat.  Just
holding it and staring at the cover.  Then without warning, he’d handed it to
Cade and stared straight back into the tall man’s eyes.

Cade studied the picture on the worn front cover.  It meant
little to him.  He opened the book and read the first words.

Pancake jumped out at him.

What’s a pancake, he thought?

He’d intended to read it to the boy right then and there,
but Bertram summoned him to the monitors and so Cade had told Cory, “After
dinner tonight we’ll sit by the fire and I’ll read this one to you, okay?”

Cory nodded and Cade left for the monitors.

Now, watching the playback of the grainy stranger cross the
highway once more, Bertram finally spoke up.  “He keeps coming and going and
that’s what bothers me.  Most scavengers just keep on moving.  This one keeps
re-crossing the area.  He keeps coming back.”

Cade leaned in closer.

“Wish we could make out his face.”

“Best I can do,” said Bertram quietly. 

“So he’s crossing and re-crossing.”  Pause. 
“Triangulating?” suggested Cade.

“Could be,” sighed Bertram.  “Could be indeed.  Whatever it
is... he keeps coming back, and I don’t like it.”

There was a long silence as once again the loop of the feed
started again.  They’d seen scavengers come and go.  But there was a moment in
the feed that bothered Cade about this one.  One moment in which the scavenger
seemed to...

... “scan” his surroundings.  Even then, it wasn’t something
Cade could totally say was “wrong”.  Humans were very cautious now.  Especially
out in the open.  An HK flying the old freeway heading down into the San Diego
rift to take out one of the resistance camps could appear at any moment.  Most
scavengers worked fast and moved even faster.  There were always the Cans to
consider and that...

Cade leaned forward.  “I’ll tell you what bothers me,
Bert.”  His chair squeaked.  “This fella’s in no kinda hurry.”

They watched it again.

And again.

And again.

“I’m afraid you might be right,” said Bertram.

Cade went to his gear the next
morning.

All through the night, he’d listened to the wind howl and
moan in the outer dark beyond the cinderblock walls of the library.  All night
he’d been thinking.

If it is a Terminator...

... then that’s bad.  Real bad in fact.

The Cans held the cities, or what was left of the cities.  
Anything they didn’t want, they’d irradiated heavily with highjacked nuclear
weapons, or decimated with their ground and air troops.  Terminators and Hunter
Killers. 

The frozen wastelands beyond the old cities where humanity
barely survived, the Cans didn’t want that and they knew survival was so thin
out there that it drove their enemies into the killing fields around the ruined
cities where the machines harvested materials for their empire.  Their
civilization.  Whatever it was they were doing.

South of LA, what old maps called the County of Orange, was
a wasteland.  San Diego had been hit with some kind of crust-busting super
weapon one of the old Superpowers had dreamed up to take out a deep water port
and most of a fleet.  In the early moments of the Can’s war against mankind, a
conflict had been fought here, in the County of Orange, between old
pre-awareness military units and guerilla forces the Cans had tricked into
fighting for freedom and human rights.  In reality they were fighting for the
machines.  Eventually the Cans moved in drone units and first gen Terminators. 
Six months into the war they’d started to lose, so they’d gone chemical.  That
had pretty much done the trick.

Very few survived the massive chemical attack that blanketed
much of the West Coast.

Now, the resistance didn’t have any units this far south. 
That’s why Command had hidden the library here.  Or really, the resistance had
found the library, almost untouched.  They’d rebuilt and then booted up their
baling wire network and left Bertram to run it.  Now the library was the
messaging center, and the memory of humanity as it once was and as it made its
last stand against the machines.  If they lost the library, then, well, 1
^st
Army up in the mountains above old Pasadena was finished.

For that matter, humanity was finished.

But how to “suss” out the scavenger?  That was Cade’s
question as he sat in the old leather chair by the fire throughout the long
night, watching the orange embers turn to gray ash

“Suss”.  Where had he ever learned that lost word?  He had a
dim memory of an oldster who’d been kind to him when he was a kid, scavenging
up in the Reno ruins out in the Nevada wasteland.  The oldster had let him tag
along and eat what was left over.  He was always on about some big project and
though Cade couldn’t remember the specifics, he knew it was big, that it meant
something.  The old man was looking for some lost military base where the old
U.S. of America had hidden weapons that might defeat the Cans.

Everybody knew that was a joke.  A bad joke. 

The Cans were the “Old US of A”.  Some said the people who
ran the government had turned everything over to them.  Trusted them.  “That’s
right!” the oldster had railed.  They never imagined the Cans, or “SkyNet” as
everyone called it, they never imagined it would do this to them. 

“Suss”

Cade was always looking over the oldster’s shoulder as he
worked on some yellowed map or tried to get an old Before engine to turn over
one last time, and he, the oldster would use that word time and again. 
“Suss”.  “Let’s suss this here elevator out and figure where it might take us,
whaddya say, boy?”

“Suss”.

Cade had cleaned the Barrett all that afternoon.  He had ten
uranium depleted rounds packing an electro-static charge that would knock a
Terminator down flat, no sweat.  He also had thirty-seven LMG rounds that
“might” knock it down.

Might.

The main thing was finding out whether the scavenger was a
Terminator, or just another fellow human being trying to survive. 

Cade watched the sleeping dog, its paws crossed, its muzzle
resting on them.  One ear twitched.

When he’d been sent south by General Kang, they’d given him
the dog.  “She’s property of the library now,” the general had told Cade. 
“She’s just for sniffing out Cans.  Don’t ever let one of them get through the
doors to the library.  Never, ever, soldier.  Even if it costs you your life.”

If he took Netta out there and it was a Can and he lost her,
‘cause the Cans always killed the dogs first, well... there’d be no dog to
guard the library.

There was a sudden, sharp snap inside the fire.

Dogs were valuable.  It took a lot of time to train ‘em just
to be around humans again.  Most dogs were full wild now.  They even hunted
humans.  But when the resistance could train one, the resistance had a hard
choice to make.  Breed more, which was always an option, or use it to detect
infiltration units.  Terminators.  Which was absolutely vital.  That took a
long time and the success rate wasn’t great.  When a dog did take to the
training, they saved more than enough people inside the outposts and refugee
camps.

More than enough.

So he couldn’t risk her.  The library was too valuable.  She
was too valuable.

Cade’s eyes fell on Cory.  He watched the giant, slow,
sleeping boy for a long time.

Just after dawn, Cade and Cory started out from the
library.  The wind had stopped about four in the morning and now there was an
icy mist that hung along the ruined hills, making the burnt matchstick frame
houses seem like dim images of stick figure people standing far off.

Cade had the large sniper rifle.  His cowboy hat.  His
military overcoat.  His only pair of combat boots.  Within the military
overcoat were many things.  Even the pair of mirrored sunglasses he took out
and wore against the harsh iron glare of dawn.

He’d told Cory they’d go out and look for his Daddy.

Cory had taken his backpack and his utility belt.  He wasn’t
wearing his mask, cape, or heavy duty gloves.  He was just Cory now.

They walked across the old parking lot, its pavement gritty
and ruptured, then they both climbed over a low cinderblock wall.  On the other
side lay a large rectangular building that once housed a movie theatre.  They
skirted its back alley and crossed into a small collection of crumbling office
buildings constructed of warped and aging dark wood.  They reached the street
leading toward the bridge that crossed over the railroad tracks and the dead
remains of the swamp.  In the middle of the bridge Cory stopped and looked out
into the misty expanse below, staring down into an unusually dense fog that
clung to the narrow train tracks and skeletal trees.

Cade stopped and walked back toward him.  “What’s wrong,
buddy?”

Cory shook his head slightly.

“You don’t like that fog?”

Again, Cory shook his head.

“Well don’t worry, we don’t have to go down into it today. 
We’re gonna go over and look near the freeway for your Dad.”

“Daddy,” mumbled Cory after a second.

“C’mon.  It’s cold out, kid.  Gotta keep moving.”  Cade
started off toward the far end of the bridge.  A moment later, Cory followed.