Chapter 24 #2
I understood now what Miri meant when she had told me I had “Old Tech.” I’d thought she’d meant the guns, that I could bring down a tank or two, and that the skinsuit would protect me. But she’d really meant the exoskeleton. Specifically: raw brute strength.
“All right.” I bent and felt along the cracked edges of the ceiling slab. I gripped a protruding piece of rebar with my right hand and slotted my left hand into a small pocket in the concrete. Then I heaved.
Nothing happened at first. I pushed my feet against the other half of the concrete slab and felt the exoskeleton whir and adjust, pushing with me, the entire metal apparatus aligning itself to give me added leverage, additional strength.
I strained against the weight, and for a long moment it didn’t move.
“Enhancing power output,” Iron Maiden said. “Power levels will fully drain in four minutes, eight seconds.”
Something moved along my back, and I felt the exoskeleton growing hot.
I took a quick look over my shoulder, turning the helmet as far as I could.
Bladed wings spread outward along my back, radiating reddish-orange heat into the night air.
I faced forward, heaved again, and this time the slab shifted, groaning and cracking.
I gritted my teeth. A line of sweat broke out on my forehead.
The temperature inside the suit spiked despite the fins on my back.
My left hand tore free with a wrenching crack, ripping a chunk straight out of the slab.
I stood there, the weight on my right hand, and saw another piece of crisscrossed rebar exposed in the ripped-out section.
I grabbed it—the fingers of the exoskeleton punching into and through the concrete around the bar—and heaved again, yelling, my arms and legs shaking.
The slab edged up. It was eighteen inches thick, and I was moving it.
My feet compacted into the section I was standing on.
Concrete cracked and split under my boots.
But I moved the slab in my hands, raising it upward, a foot, then two feet, then three.
It was dark underneath. I held the chunk of concrete up as my legs shook against the now white-hot sections of the exoskeleton.
Next to me, Cerberus lowered its big head and ducked under the edge, sidling underneath and into the darkness beyond.
“Christ, come back quick,” I gasped.
It felt like forever, my feet digging craters into the concrete as I held up three or four tons of weight, every muscle in my body shaking as sweat poured down my face.
Then Cerberus scrambled backward out of the hole, hauling two dust-covered human figures dressed in leather wrappings.
The robot yanked them out of the hole like a dog playing tug-of-war with a rope.
As soon as both were clear of the hole, I let go of the slab.
It slammed down with a resounding, thunderous impact, dust billowing out in a wave.
I stumbled backward and fell on my butt in the dirt and broken concrete.
“Power levels at thirty-two percent,” Iron Maiden said. “Recommend recharge before engaging in combat operations.”
My chest heaved. I wanted to wipe the sweat out of my eyes, but I had a feeling the helmet was keeping me at a reasonable, sauna-like temperature as the wings on my back radiated away the rest of the heat.
So, I left the helmet on and sat there, gasping.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Somehow, I doubted we’d find a convenient working power outlet in this apocalyptic version of Fresno.
“The hydraulic musculature of the exoskeleton has sustained moderate damage,” the suit said.
Two new pairs of eyes watched me from the corner of the destroyed warehouse.
The larger one looked like an older version of Miri, with sharper cheekbones.
Her nose and mouth were hidden behind a cloth wrap, like Miri’s.
Her green eyes were intense. The smaller figure was a boy, maybe ten or eleven.
The woman’s arms wrapped around him, pulling him against her.
“Lily?” I asked, conscious I still wore the helmet and had glowing wings coming out of my back. “Lily, ah … daughter of Mark, son of Jennifer, daughter of Xavier, son of Lyle, son of—well, son of Scott? Mother of Miri?”
The woman’s eyes widened. She kept her arms around the boy but edged forward.
Cerberus, its chameleon mode back on, stood somewhere behind me, watching the battle beyond the collapsed wall.
“Who?” Lily asked, her voice coming out raw and choked.
I wondered how long it had been since she’d had water or anything to eat.
“I’m Scott. Um. Scott Treder.”
“Traveler,” Lily said. Next to her, the boy shifted, gazing at me with wide eyes.
“Miri sent me. With your … dog.”
“Traveler.”
“We need to get you out of the city. Back to Miri. Can you both walk? Run?” The battle still raged in the distance.
I had the uncomfortable feeling the rolling explosions and flashes of stark light were drawing closer.
I looked back at them. “We don’t have much time.
” As if to emphasize my words, Cerberus pawed at the concrete again—an odd sight, given it was a shimmering patch of black amid the darkness. “Can you run?”
Lily straightened. She pulled the boy to his feet. Her eyes were bloodshot and haggard. But she nodded. “We run with you, Traveler.”
Cerberus led the way. I had Lily and the boy—Case—follow the dog, and I trailed behind them. It seemed a good idea. The two weakest in the middle. I didn’t know if that was right or wrong, or where I’d gotten the idea. Maybe a documentary about elephant herds protecting their young.
In any event: we ran.
The muscles in my arms, back, and legs were already knotting up after lifting the concrete.
The exoskeleton had done almost all the work, but even my small contribution had wiped me out.
I hadn’t exactly been winning triathlons before all this.
Now, I had to get my legs moving, had to keep up with Cerberus and with Lily and Case who, despite having been trapped in a hole for who knew how long, kept pace with the mechanical dog.
The barely visible shadow of Cerberus tried to lead us away from the battle.
But additional fights had erupted around the rest of the city, or the battle we’d first witnessed had progressed in a semicircle around the building where Lily and Case had been trapped.
Either way, the mechanical dog cut a slanting line through the alleys and cratered streets, trying to thread between the two halves of the conflict.
We ran. My legs pumped and my booted feet thumped down on bits of broken concrete.
I stumbled every few dozen feet, nearly falling.
Lily and Case ran without hesitation, finding the perfect place to put their leather-wrapped feet with every step.
After a few ruined blocks, I concentrated only on running where they ran.
I stopped looking around and hoped Cerberus knew what it was doing.
The air was filled with endless thunder, rolling waves of it thrumming through the shattered buildings and sending sections of walls and ceilings cascading into the street.
Missiles darted back and forth in rapid sequence over our heads, leaving blurred trails of smoke.
Cannon rounds tore chunks out of masonry and brick.
A building to our left—once a church—detonated, coming apart in a blast of fire and debris.
The shock wave plowed through the smoke and dust and knocked all three of us down.
Cerberus skidded to a halt, waited for us to pick ourselves up, then darted ahead.
I saw the edge of the city, saw the barren landscape beyond, and started to think we were going to make it, when a tank the size of a city block burst through a wall in front of us, cutting us off in a cascade of flying debris.
It fired upward at the darting black shapes in the sky.
But then, as we stumbled to a surprised halt, the machine mind inside the immense thing saw us and decided we were a threat.
Multibarreled cannons swiveled on articulated turrets.
Time slowed.
I surprised myself by reacting first. I threw myself forward, pulling the machine pistol off my hip. The hazy patch that was Cerberus moved as well, the mechanical dog tearing straight toward the tank.
“Large-scale hostile threat,” Iron Maiden said in my ear.
I got in front of Lily and Case just as the three cannons on the front and side of the tank opened fire.
The spinning barrels spat white flower-petal flames, each several feet long and almost as wide.
Bursts of dust and dirt exploded up from the shattered street in front of me and along the wall to my left.
I aimed in the general direction of the tank and squeezed the trigger on the machine pistol.
Given the size of the tank it was impossible to miss.
The pistol juddered in my hand like a living thing.
Rounds stitched a line along the thick tank treads and into the side of the tank, leaving behind glowing holes that filled with fire as the rounds detonated inside.
The bullets from those cannons ripped their way down the street and slammed into me.
And Cerberus, abandoning chameleon mode, leaped thirty feet in a single jump onto the tank and latched on to one of the cannons with its jaws, wrenching the entire turret around.
The heavy bullets kicked me like blows from an immense hammer. There were hits to my right thigh, pelvis, stomach, chest, and shoulder, and a glancing blow to the helmet that snapped my head back and turned the visor into a spiderweb of cracks.
I fell backward onto a broken wall, an alarm shrilling in my ear.
From that angle I saw what happened next.
My dart pistol had wrecked something inside the tank. Old Tech at its finest. The tank’s engine or reactor, or whatever was inside, sputtered and the treads ground to a halt.
Then Cerberus went to work.
The mechanical dog put its legs against the metal platform and pulled the articulated turret down and around.
The turret was still firing as the dog heaved.
It fired straight into the other two turrets on our side of the tank, shredding them both.
Then Cerberus broke the turret with a twist of its neck; the gun continued spinning and firing, but the turret couldn’t move anymore, and the cannon shot into the side of the tank itself, scoring marks across the armor and throwing out curtains of white sparks.
Cerberus jumped off the tank. Hands scrambled across my back and under my arms, trying to lever me up.
I raised the pistol again and, aiming it at the tank, held the trigger down.
The pistol juddered in my hand. More little glowing holes stitched across the armor of the tank, blossoming into bursts of white and orange.
I held the trigger down until the bolt on the pistol snapped open.
Smoke rose from the barrel and the open breach.
The tank sagged. The turret Cerberus had damaged stopped firing, its barrels spinning to a halt.
The missiles along the top of the big tank stopped flying from their tubes.
One of the delta-winged shapes screamed out of the night sky over us; there was a lancing line of fire and the tank exploded, its armor peeling apart in a wave of fire like an unfurling fist. The shock wave, coherent in the dust, blew over us, rocking me backward.
“Sev—dama—” Iron Maiden said, the voice crackling and fuzzy, in my ear. “Crit—evel.”
Lily and Case pulled me upright. I sagged against them, and they almost collapsed under my weight.
The dart pistol fell from my nerveless fingers.
I didn’t feel any pain, didn’t feel any hot blood against my skin.
I had to be in shock. The cannon rounds must have gone right through me, pulverizing tissue and bone and organs.
I was so badly hurt I couldn’t even feel it.
Then Lily snapped her fingers in front of me, beyond the cracked visor. “Traveler! You are unharmed! We run!”
I looked down. She was right. The skinsuit and the exoskeleton had protected me from the tank’s cannon rounds. The exterior layer of the suit had ablated off under the bullets, but none had penetrated. I’d have some hellacious bruises, but I wasn’t going to die.
Not yet.
I forced myself to breathe. “We run.”
Lily nodded. I stood under my own power. Cerberus was there, eyes glowing red in the dust and smoke, its metal sides wavering orange in the reflected light from the flaming tank. It turned and darted away.
We followed it out of the city.