Love, Death, Robots, and Zombies Read online

  Chapter 4.

  Her words don’t register. Kill the others?

  Oh, right. Fin and Cabal. They’ll be back, and they aren’t going to take this lightly. Take this lightly? A compartment of my brain wants to laugh hysterically. Yeah, they’ll shrug it off. It’ll be fine. No big deal. Echo is right, of course. My own thoughts haven’t taken one step beyond the shooting. I try to kick-start my brain.

  “You’re right. They’ll hear the shots. They’ll come run–”

  “It wasn’t loud enough,” Echo interrupts, pulling on her pants and lacing up her boots.

  Again, she’s right. The gun has a suppressor. Fin’s did too. After all, if Foundry’s scouts have to kill someone, they may want to do it without alerting half the countryside. Still, the others will be back as soon as they’ve dealt with the roamer.

  “How are you here? I thought you were dead,” I say.

  “Me? I thought you–no. There’s no time for this. We’ll talk later.”

  “Fine. Right. We need to leave,” I say. The Library is my home, but I can’t think about that now. Echo shakes her head sadly.

  “We can’t. Not yet. Cabal and Fin will be back soon. If we leave, they’ll come after us. They’ll hunt us down. And the fact is they’re better than us. They’ll kill us. Tristan. We can’t leave them alive.”

  Her lip trembles, her voice threatens to break, but her eyes are deadly serious.

  Aren’t they your friends? I want to ask, but now isn’t the time. I nod.

  Echo looks at Ballard’s body. She closes her eyes and blocks something out, some memory perhaps, or a whole string of them. She takes a deep breath.

  “I need you to move his body. We don’t want them to see it through the window,” she says. Ballard’s body possesses hidden weight. I drag him heavily off the bed, across the room and through a doorway, leaving him out of sight. Volume Seven is still on the floor. I stuff it into my pack and strap the pack back on. I can’t stop shaking.

  Echo is crouched by the window with my crossbow, peering out. The sight gives me pause. I’ve been living alone in a lawless wasteland for three years. It’s not easy for me to trust someone with a weapon, even if that someone is Annabel Lee, the girl who waits in the desert. She’s found the bolts with the supply pack and is figuring out how to load them.

  “We’d better trade. I’ve never used one of these,” she says.

  We trade. My crossbow’s familiar grip gives me comfort. Echo presses a button on the side of the gun.

  “This is a machine-pistol, you know. Fully automatic. You had it in semi.”

  “Oh.”

  I don’t know much about guns. Echo has apparently learned some things in her travels. I’m still not thinking clearly. The past few minutes are stuck in a loop in my head, subjected to ceaseless analysis for internal absorption. The brain is reprogramming itself, trying to make things right with the world.

  Echo says we should ambush them as they walk through the door. They won’t be expecting it. She keeps watch through a corner of the window while I kneel ten feet from the door. Now and then there’s a sound outside. Lectric shifts nervously. I forgot he was even here. I keep telling myself not to pull the trigger until I see them. And don’t miss. Aim, shoot, don’t miss. Forget about Ballard’s face, the way his left eye came out of the socket as the bullet passed through.

  “I see them. They’re coming. They’re together,” Echo whispers. A long minute passes. She backs slowly away from the window, settling on my right. From this position I still have enough room to shoot, and Echo is virtually guaranteed to hit. The odds are stacked in our favor, yet we’re nervous as hell. What if they sense something’s wrong? I can’t hold my hands steady.

  Why is this happening?

  Stop thinking. Aim, shoot. Don’t run. Kill. Conan would do it without a second thought. I just wish I was elsewhere. Lectric hides beneath the desk. It was like something from a comic book, Ballard’s eye popping out.

  Cabal’s girlish laughter pierces the air. Something flutters in the cauldron of my guts. Echo gives me a terrified glance. Fin and Cabal are talking as they approach. Some joke has been made–their last. The door opens and Fin is a few steps ahead, a smile departing, a trace of humor fading from his face. He has a split second to register surprise as my bolt penetrates his chest. A burst of gunfire peppers the doorway. Little puffs of smoke and debris pop from the wall. A red flower blooms in Fin’s neck even as he’s knocked off his feet by the sheer force of the bolt. Cabal is already diving out of sight behind him.

  Echo runs forward, shooting. I load another bolt. She takes a step outside, firing, but gasps and reverses directions in a hurry. A shotgun blast eats a chunk out of the doorway, almost taking her head off. Splinters lodge in her hair. She screams a curse, blue eyes shut tight.

  I flatten myself against the wall to the left of the door, glimpsing Cabal behind a boulder outside. Fin is convulsing on the ground, holding his neck, one boot-heel rhythmically scraping the doorway. Echo slinks to the window on her right, near the bed. Outside, Cabal is moving, scrambling. Echo’s machine-pistol sends a quick burst through the window.

  “Got him!” she exults, but when I leave the wall she waves me back. “Stay inside. I don’t know if it went through.”

  If what went through?

  Oh yeah–Cabal is wearing some kind of armored jacket. Echo peers out and flinches back. The shotgun bites the window-frame. Fin’s twitches slow like the hands of a dying clock. He’s like a fish flopping on dry land. His air runs out.

  Cabal screams, says he’s going to kill us. The possibility is hard to ignore. What if he’s right? Am I ready to die? No. But I have to be, just in case. It seems important.

  “Where is he?” I ask.

  “Behind that wall,” Echo says. She’s biting her lip, thinking, worrying–how can we get him? He has better cover now, a crumbling three-foot wall fifteen feet from the building. I peer out through the door. He pops up for a look but I don’t have a shot. Maybe Echo can keep him pinned while I go out back and circle around.

  “Echo…”

  A metal cylinder bounces through the door, red light blinking. Gluefire.

  I’m running at Echo. A shotgun blast comes through the open door in my wake. I tackle Echo low, and we roll beneath the window as a second shot passes overhead. We hit the side of the mattress. I reach over and flip it on top of us, angled to shield us from the cylinder. The gluefire detonates, washing the room in a sticky mass of burning tar. Everything is instantly on fire. It’s Cabal’s best chance to finish us.

  I push the burning mattress up and shove it against the open window, grab Echo’s wrist and pull her toward the back hallway, avoiding the molten tar. A shotgun blast hits the mattress. Cabal’s probably a foot outside the building now, taking advantage of the distraction, knowing he’s got the advantage. As soon as that mattress tips, he’ll have us. As it does, Echo sends a scattered burst at the window. It gives him pause–there’s no shotgun poking in, but another gluefire grenade bounces into the room just as we reach the hallway.

  Something’s missing.

  “Lectric!” I shout, horrified–is he dead? But he comes scrambling after us, somehow unharmed. Cowering beneath the desk was apparently the right move for him.

  “Good boy.”

  We pass the ladder leading up to my room and head down the hall to the place where the floor collapsed. The second grenade goes off behind us. Cabal’s probably running to cover the rear exit. Yet there’s something he doesn’t know.

  I pause at the edge of the sewer.

  “Reach into my pack. Get the flashlight.”

  She finds it. We descend. The beam bobs as we jog through the wet, cramped, rat-infested sewers, heavy breath echoing in the darkness. Monsters, here we come. The air is thick with moisture and rancid odors. I pull Echo left at the first inte
rsection, leading her through a maze of tunnels. Half a mile maybe, mostly west. Then we hit a dead-end with a ladder leading up to a half-covered hole.

  I’ve been here before. In my paranoia and boredom of days past, I’ve explored these sewers for miles around, noting possible escape routes should I meet with another Complete Disaster. Which is what this is.

  Three years in the Library–gone. But now isn’t the time for self-pity. I need to avoid thinking and feeling and remembering. I climb up, carrying Lectric under one arm. Echo follows. We’re in the middle of a broken street, hemmed in by collapsed buildings. Cabal is nowhere in sight.

  Echo curses. Her eyes are wild. She starts rambling about how we should have finished him and he’s going to come after us, and he may get help from Foundry because we killed two of their people. Cabal terrifies her. I think that was true even before today.

  “Annabel!” I exclaim, seizing her arms.

  The name jolts her. She flinches as if she’s been hit.

  “Annabel Lee,” I say more quietly. She looks up at me as though I’ve said something terrible, and maybe I have. The name is a light piercing the darkness where she hides the things that hurt her. It’s a boulder that starts an avalanche. Tears come, and they don’t stop. She stands there shaking, crying, neither moving away nor drawing closer. Lectric stands on two legs, whining.

  “Oh God,” she whispers, and cries more, her muscles rigid with feelings I don’t fully understand. I don’t know whether to hug her or let her go. I mean, I’ve just lost my home, but the change seems bigger for her. She did just help kill what appeared to be her boyfriend. I’m not sure if she did it for me or herself or both, and I can’t say why she did it at all. I have no idea what’s happened to her in the past three years, let alone the past hour. Whatever it was, it’s over now, and a new path has been chosen. Some changes take a lot of tears.

  Slowly, her head tilts forward until it touches my chest. I’m afraid to move. She sobs in relative silence until the sobbing becomes breathing and dissolves further into almost complete stillness. Finally she lifts her head, wipes her cheeks, and licks her lips.

  “We can’t stay here. Fin’s a better tracker than Cabal, but the army will be here tomorrow, and he’ll have help. We need to go, or we need to hide,” Echo says.

  “How many are coming?”

  “It’s an army, Tristan. The Black Baron wants Cove.”

  “The Black Baron?”

  “Tristan! We can’t waste any time here.”

  “Okay, okay, just let me think. Foundry is to the south, right? Cove is west. Why are they even passing through these ruins?”

  “West of Foundry is a barren desert. They’re following New Sea north to stay close to water, but Cove is almost straight west from here, so here is where they’ll turn.”

  “And if we go north?”

  Echo closes her eyes and pinches the place between them, shaking her head. She doesn’t want to think or talk any more. She wants to be somewhere else, or someone else. She heaves a deep breath and looks at me.

  “Unless you know somewhere to hide for a few days, north is our only option,” she says. “Cabal will know that too. He’ll come after us. But what else can we do? The army will head west. They’re not going to delay for a few–a few dead scouts. We weren’t even officially part of the army, more of a mercenary group. But Studebaker–that’s who Ballard will report to–Studebaker will see this as an attack on Foundry. He’ll give Cabal whatever he needs to catch us.”

  So we run or we hide. There are places to hide. Plenty of little cubbies and niches in the sprawling ruins. But how long will we have to stay in one? We’ll need water for at least a few days, and with so many soldiers spreading through the ruins, we’ll have no chance to gather more if the army lingers. There’s a fair chance we’ll be found too, especially if they have some variation of those spider-like recon bots Cove uses.

  If we’re not found, I could eventually return home–but how long until the army comes back from Cove, or Cove’s army comes for Foundry, or Cabal returns to check the Library? Will I ever feel safe there again? No. I want to go back but I can’t. The Library will never be the same. I don’t want to admit it, but that part of my life is over.

  “We’ll go north,” I say. Echo’s face says many things. Her voice says nothing. We circle west-northwest, giving the Library a wide berth. Lectric trots along behind us. I’ve never been very far north, but I know what lies that way as surely as Echo does. From New Sea to the Rockies, maybe even beyond: the z-line. Toyota never did tell me how he made it through. Maybe we won’t need to–but where else can we go?

  It’s not a question for the present. Our world has narrowed to the next moment, the next mile. We watch the east for signs of Cabal and hold our weapons ready, stumbling over the fallen homes and scattered bones of the resting dead.