The Empty Warrior (54 page)
Authors: J. D. McCartney
He was momentarily stunned. His shoulders and hips shot molten pain into his torso from the spots where they had dug so deeply into his restraints. He looked down at the guards lying in a pile to his left and saw that one man’s head hung from his body at an impossible angle, his neck obviously broken. Reaching down, he hoped to find a pulse, but did not. O’Keefe stretched his left arm to the length of his reach to check the other guard and found him to be alive but unconscious. Across the cabin, the commissioner groaned piteously.
O’Keefe squirmed and struggled in an effort to free himself from the grip of the upholstery that held him aloft, but his every movement seemed only to tighten its embrace. At length he cried out in anger and exasperation, screaming through gritted teeth, “Let go of me, you bastard!”
The vehicle’s operating system was apparently still functional as the seat promptly, and unexpectedly as far as O’Keefe was concerned, returned to its flat shape, releasing him to land in a painful heap atop the guards. He moved to one side and pulled the unconscious one up by the body armor over his chest, propping him against the back of the seat opposite Burkeer. With more room now to move, O’Keefe was able to get to his feet and, standing on one of the left side windows, unlock the right side doors and move the control there to the open position. To his surprise, the doors still functioned and swung up and away from the body of the vehicle. He pulled himself partially through the opening with his arms, and then, using his feet to push against Burkeer’s still operating restraints, was able to extricate himself from the wrecked limo. It rocked unsteadily beneath his feet. He jumped as nimbly as he was able to the ground, rolling on impact and grunting at the pangs of distress that shot through every sinew of his so recently tormented frame.
When he was able to stand, he turned back to the vehicle and found it to be balanced so precariously that he was able, with one mighty effort, to push it over onto its mangled base. It landed with a hammer blow that shook the ground. He circled round the front, finding the forward compartment hopelessly blasted and burned. The two guards there were hideously shredded, their blackened corpses impaled by multiple shards of metal and splinters of tree limbs.
Quickly he made his way back to the open door of the rear compartment. He reached in and ordered the car to release the commissioner from her restraints, then pulled her from the limo and carried her some hundred yards away where he laid her against the base of the thickest tree he could find. Then he returned to the crash site, and found the surviving guard conscious and crawling from the wreckage. He draped one of the man’s arms over his shoulders and half carried him to where the commissioner lay. Burkeer seemed to be recovering somewhat from the ordeal, and he left the two of them to care for each other while he went to search the car for anything that might be of use. He forced open the mutilated and already unlatched trunk lid with a length of steel bracing he pulled from the front of the vehicle and began unceremoniously dumping the contents of the baggage he found there across the ground. The third case he emptied was the one carrying his personal effects.
“Bingo!” he hissed to no one in particular as he saw the Colt, still secure in its holster, tumble out amidst his keys and the scorched remains of his clothing. His elation was short lived however as he ejected the clip only to find it empty. He quickly checked the chamber and found no round there either. Cursing his haste, he fell to his hands and knees and brushed leaves aside as carefully as he was able but without wasting an inordinate amount of time. He quickly found three slugs, but several more long moments of searching yielded no more. He shoved the three cartridges into the clip, rammed it home, and strapped on the holster, the gun nestled beneath his armpit. He quickly scrounged through the remainder of the baggage until he located two jackets, and then ran back to where he had left Burkeer and the guard. He threw a jacket to the commissioner before donning the other himself. The guard seemed to be already adequately clad for the outdoors.
“Can you two walk?” he asked, breathing hard. “We’ve got to get out of here.” The guard nodded but Burkeer looked wide eyed at O’Keefe, as if she thought him mad.
“No!” she protested forcefully. “We must stay near the wreckage. If we leave it, no one will know where to find us.”
“Exactly,” O’Keefe retorted with equal passion. “You’re the police high commissioner. You are the supreme commander of all the elements that might resist this incursion. That makes you target number one. If someone does find us, the odds are they won’t be friendly. We need to get you away from here now. We’ll worry about making contact with your people once we’re sure it’s safe.”
Suddenly Burkeer lost her authoritarian manner and, despite her youthful body, seemed like merely an old woman lying weakly against a tree. “Yes, I see your point,” she said softly. “But I’m afraid I will need some help if I am to make it very far.”
“Not a problem,” O’Keefe said. “I’ll carry you if I have to.” With that he took the commissioner’s hand and pulled her to her feet, but as he did so he heard a noise behind him that sounded like Velcro strips being hastily pulled apart. He turned to see the guard raising a weapon. But before he could level the piece, a blast of light hummed through the trees. The beam, although existing for only a millisecond, gave the impression of radiating immense power, so much so that it seemed to burrow directly into O’Keefe’s nerves. He sensed what felt like static electricity shooting down the length of his arms, standing the hairs there on end. The blast struck the guard directly atop his sternum and passed through him, leaving a perfectly round hole through his chest. A fraction of a second later his body exploded outward in a boiling eruption of crimson.
O’Keefe wiped the spatter of blood from his eyes and stared aghast at the appendages and bits of flesh that littered the ground around him. The still helmeted head of the guard lay at his feet. Beneath the visor, the man’s frozen mouth gaped mutely in a rictus of shock and horror.
For a moment O’Keefe’s eyes clamped shut, refusing to take in the sight of such gore. But just as quickly they were open again and staring down the path of the beam where he discerned, if only by their movement, two camouflaged and airborne robots weaving rapidly through the trees toward where he and Burkeer stood. They were approaching directly from the site of the crash. Instinct brought O’Keefe’s hand halfway to the grip of his pistol before his conscious mind, still imprinted with the sight of the guard’s gruesome death, stopped it and lowered it back to his side.
The machines came to a halt about twenty feet from where he and the commissioner stood. They hovered there silently. Neither of the two humans spoke or dared even flinch. At last one of the mechanical horrors modulated a question in a distinctly electronic voice, a voice clearly that of a machine. “Police High Commissioner Burkeer?” it asked.
The woman fought to stand more erect and then answered unsteadily, but with as much dignity as she could muster. “Yes?” she responded.
Her tacit admission brought the interrogation to an abrupt conclusion. One of the robot fighters loosed another fearful bolt and the commissioner’s body also disintegrated, covering O’Keefe’s left side with sticky cruor and tiny bits of flesh and bone.
At nearly that same moment a tiny whistling sound reached his ears and he felt a slight impact against his chest. He looked down, and he could see he had been impaled by a small, needle like dart that protruded from his jacket. He reached up to pull it out but his arm seemed to radically slow with every inch it traversed. In half a second it would hardly elevate at all; it moved as if submerged in viscous syrup. And even as he strove to command his arm, his torso seemed to be falling off to the left. He tried to right himself, but his leg moved no more quickly than his arm, and he was unable to regain his balance. The thick carpet of leaves that covered the forest floor seemed to be slowly rising to meet his face, but he felt no blow. His mind slipped away before his body hit the ground, where it struck with the heavy thud of utterly dead weight.
Awareness crept back into O’Keefe’s brain in small increments, leaving him not entirely sure where nightmares ended and reality began. At length his perceptions stabilized, and partial acceptance became complete surety. He was revived and back in the real universe, and his new reality was hellish.
He was standing upright on a deck of steel grating, in a darkness relieved only by a faint crimson glow of indeterminate origin, and bound to a pillar at the waist and the neck. His hair was wet, and draped over his eyes in a way that made it difficult to see. The smell of urine and feces swam loathsomely through the air. In his mouth, there was a foreign object that had been shoved between his teeth, forcing his jaws widely and uncomfortably open. Whatever it was, it was unyielding, and had the feel of brittle plastic against his tongue. It was held in place by a strap around his head. The thing seemed to extend down his throat, but how far he could not say, as he could feel no sensation beneath his larynx. He only knew that he was restrained by the sight that spread out before him.
Row upon row of thick, metallic columns rose from the floor upon which he stood, the limits of their expanse stretching farther than the range of his partially obscured vision. To each of the closely spaced pylons was strapped a man, and each man hung from the straps that bound him at his neck and waist as if he were lifeless. All had been stripped naked below the waist and all appeared to be soaking wet, the upper body musculature of those wearing light fabrics showing in stark relief through the clothing that clung tightly to their skin. Only the slight movement of heads from side to side assured O’Keefe that he had awakened into a prison rather than a morgue.
He shook his head savagely, trying to fling to one side or the other the thick black locks that hung over his eyes. The attempt was largely unsuccessful, but he at least had added some separation to the strands he was forced to peer though, clearing his vision to some small degree. He turned his head to the right and looked down at the prisoner by his shoulder. The man appeared to be typically Akadean, short and brown, with hair that still curled in flowing waves despite the water that dripped from it. His cheeks were puffed out by whatever was in each of their mouths. All O’Keefe could see of it was a short white tube extending from between the man’s lips. It looked like the narrow end of a funnel. Complex instrumentality was integrated into the strap that held the man by the neck, while a proboscis protruding from it pierced the man’s skin just above his vocal cords. It was no doubt the cause of the man’s paralysis. Probably the Vazilek version of a neural inhibitor. O’Keefe was certain there was an identical arrangement in place beneath his own chin.
As if the man could feel O’Keefe’s stare boring into his temple, he turned his head as far as he was able and looked up at the Earther. The two men’s gazes locked, and in the too wide expanse of the Akadean’s bulging eyes, O’Keefe could see nothing save abject terror. An instinctive desire to steady the man rose in his breast, but all he could do was nod and shrug with his eyebrows before he had to look away. He did not look back, nor did he look to his left. He was close to the edge of panic himself, and while one man’s fear was enough to shake his already precarious grip on lucidity, two doses of the same might be contagious enough to send him diving off the precipice into a chasm of unthinking dread.
Suddenly loud, clanking noises of metal on metal diverted his attention. The sounds rang through the chamber, followed by a lesser electromechanical din that sounded like monstrous drivers slowly tightening huge machine screws. O’Keefe sensed movement, a lifting and swaying of the whole compartment, then more dissonant scrapes and booms as it came to rest on whatever it had been placed.
There were more hydraulic sounds of fasteners tightening, and more loud clanks and metallic thuds. For a few seconds there was silence, but then the reverberations repeated themselves. Only this time not nearly as loudly, and they seemed to come from above. The sounds continued to repeat over and over, each time at lesser volumes and seemingly farther away.
O’Keefe abruptly came to the realization that he was imprisoned in a cargo carrier, one of many being stowed aboard a transport of some kind. The Vazileks were loading them aboard a freighter, preparing to haul them off, almost certainly to another world altogether. O’Keefe’s fear ratcheted up a notch, as he wondered how far he and the men around him would be traveling and how long it would take them to get there.
It occurred to him that men could easily die in conditions like these, that when they arrived at wherever they were bound there might not be many of them left. His mind delivered up long buried and unwelcome images of box cars filled to bursting with humanity and rolling toward the gas chambers of the SS. As that horror scrolled across his consciousness, it was impossible not to contemplate the fate of the survivors upon reaching their ultimate destination.
His mind raced, imagining one Vazilek torture after another, each more dreadful than the last, that the murderous cutthroats might inflict upon their helpless prisoners. After all, cultures that preferred suicide to submission were notoriously brutal to enemies who meekly surrendered, almost universally deeming captives beneath contempt. More unbidden images floated before his mind’s eye. Images of beaten, starving stick figures; bamboo cages; and grainy video of grisly decapitations. Only the litany of his prayers in any way stanched the torrent of fear flowing into his awareness.