Defenders (36 page)

“Selfish prickless bastard.” In the shadows alongside the Timesaver, Kai noticed the Dumpster was so full the lid was jammed open.

“Grandiose pinhead,” Lila said.

Kai squeezed her hand. The green Dumpster tucked alongside the Timesaver was filled with bodies. Others were stacked in front of it, leaned up against both sides. In the tepid light of streetlamps and store signs, blood-soaked skin appeared black instead of red; deeply shadowed eyes were nothing but black sockets. A single Luyten corpse lay wedged between the Dumpster and the wall.

They kept walking, around to the front of the store and inside. They picked out their sodas and headed to the checkout counter.

“So what happened out there?” Kai asked the clerk, a teenage girl in tight jeans. He tried to sound casual.

“There was a traffic accident,” she said, shrugging, like she was just making conversation.

“A bad one?”

The clerk shook her head. “Not too bad. A woman backed into the front of a defender’s SUV. Evidently. He got angry.”

Kai nodded, glanced at the TV mounted over the woman’s shoulder. She was being careful with her words, in case someone was listening. What she probably meant was, the defender rear-ended the woman’s car, then went berserk, even though it was his fault.

They thanked her and headed home, both of them looking away as they passed the Dumpster. It was possible there had been more casualties. Sometimes people still risked retrieving murdered loved ones and burying them, even though bodies were supposed to be left out for the sanitation trucks to cart away. Kai felt sorry for people who worked as trash collectors. That would be one grim job.

“We have to do something. We can’t live like this,” Kai said.

“I agree. The only thing we disagree on is tactics.”

Kai limped along, his bad leg starting to give him trouble. There was no point in arguing; both of them were too stubborn to be shifted from their opinions.

There was a letter in Oliver’s mailbox. It was handwritten, with no return address. Oliver tore it open, withdrew an index card with a single thing written on it: Earth2.

Even if he hadn’t recognized Kai’s handwriting, he would have known the message was from Kai. No one but Kai and Lila knew he lived there. He headed back inside his little basement apartment, decorated primarily with Marvel comic book memorabilia, and sat at his computer.

He’d never been much of a gamer, even back in high school when dorky kids like him were supposed to hide there until they could escape into adulthood. Now he called up Earth2 and set up an account.

He was surprised to find the place roiling with activity. Avatars hurried here and there on foot, in cars, via flight. It seemed bizarre that so many people would be playing an old-fashioned online game. And actually, most people weren’t playing, exactly—they were meeting. Performing a three-sixty, he saw three separate groups of avatars congregated together, deep in conversation.

He directed his avatar toward the nearest group, about two dozen people sitting in a circle on a beach. As he approached, they stopped talking.

“Private meeting,” someone called in a metallic voice, or maybe his audio settings made it sound metallic.

Oliver turned his avatar around, headed for the second group. It probably would have been more efficient to check the instructions and find out how to fly, but he was in no hurry.

He was still surprised by how easy it had been to slip off the defenders’ radar. He’d been a major political player, heavily involved in the Luyten War, the defenders program, yet the defenders had simply lost track of him, and didn’t seem to be actively trying to locate him. If they had a weakness, it was this lack of attention to detail.

As he swung open the door of the old-fashioned diner where the second group was meeting, a few avatars looked his way, but no one said anything. Oliver took a seat toward the back.

“If you try that, they’ll catch you, and they’ll kill you,” a blond, square-jawed avatar said to what appeared to be a golden retriever standing on its hind legs.

“They won’t catch me. And they won’t catch you, either, if you follow my instructions. They can’t trace you if you’re using my baffle software.”

“Can we get back on subject?” a Valkyrie-looking woman dressed in purple furs said.

“We
are
on the subject,” the retriever said. “Our charge is to develop techniques to disrupt their electronic communications. How are we off subject?”

His heart pounding, Oliver directed his avatar back outside. If this was what it appeared to be …

He joined another meeting. They were discussing how to locate US Army weapons caches hidden during the previous century.

Oliver raised his fist in the air and whooped. A resistance movement. This was what he’d been waiting for. He navigated his avatar out of the second meeting, wandered around until he found a pedestrian—an Asian woman wearing a blue sweater and a pair of khakis.

“Excuse me, is there someone in charge of operations here?”

“You mean, here in Fiddler’s Green?” she asked.

“No, for the whole thing. All of this.” He gestured to encompass all they could see.

The woman put her hands on her hips. “You’re looking for Island Rain.”

Oliver’s heart hit another gear. Island Rain? Why did that moniker sound familiar?

Then he remembered. Dominique Wiewall. She’d been from the Caribbean. There’d been only one thing on her office wall—a poster of her home, with
Island Rain
printed across the bottom. Could it possibly be Dominique? But how could she have survived? He’d assumed she’d been with the US leadership in Colorado Springs when the country fell.

“Where can I find her?”

The woman laughed. “You can’t just wander in and see Island Rain. You have to earn your place, work your way up. Are you new? You look new.” She looked Oliver’s avatar up and down.

“Let’s assume I’m new, but I’m someone with expertise Island Rain would want to know about. How would I go about getting a message to her?”

“Hmm.” The woman folded her arms. She was quite good at realistic mannerisms. Oliver’s avatar was just standing there, arms dangling at his sides. Of course, that pretty well captured his mannerisms in real life. “I could message JJ, the captain of Fiddler’s Green.”

“Would you? I’d appreciate it.” If it was Dominique, how could he signal her? It would be a bad idea to speak her name, probably not smart even to mention Easter Island. Something subtle. “Ask him to tell her a fellow admirer of Moai needs to speak to her.” Oliver was elated to have something constructive to do. Something he was good at.

The morning rush hour pedestrians moved into the street, or pressed against the buildings, to let a defender pass on the sidewalk. It reminded Lila of vehicles clearing out to let an ambulance pass, only people moved more quickly to get out of the way of a defender.

Lila stood in the gutter an extra moment to allow the throngs to unclog, then stepped back into the flow of people on their way to work. She waited for the light and crossed Victory Avenue, which was a hundred feet wide at least, one of the new defender streets. The city was transforming into an enormous visual illusion. On one block everything looked normal; on the next everything was triple in size.

There was a new indoor rifle range on Ichiro Street, bearing the familiar
NO HUMANS
sign. She’d never seen a
NO LUYTEN
sign; evidently even while target shooting the defenders needed someone to fetch their iced tea.

She was so tired. Typically her insomnia would get a little worse each night, building to a crescendo where she was too exhausted to think, and that would break the cycle and she would sleep fifteen hours straight. This time it just kept getting worse. She was beyond exhausted, but her thoughts kept spinning, as if they’d discovered their own power source independent of her sleep-deprived brain.

She was so afraid of what might happen if this resistance turned out to be more than a bunch of posturing blowhards. What was it about humanity that always led it right back to killing as the solution to its problems? If someone would just listen, she was sure she could get them out of this mess without firing a shot. The defenders had weaknesses; their ability to respond to a physical attack wasn’t one of them. Why couldn’t other people see that?

If only there was some way to jump-start the process, to get the defenders to see that they’d be better off if humans were in charge, or at least sharing power. That would mean getting them to be less paranoid. Saner. Happier.

Lila laughed out loud. Couldn’t they all use that? She certainly could. The problem with the defenders was that they were engineered to be paranoid and unhappy. The only way to change it was to alter their genetic code.

She slowed her pace. What if she did it now, subtly? There was no one checking the new defenders’ genetic coding at this point. Would the existing defenders notice if the new ones were less disordered? If she could somehow reintroduce serotonin into the design, the new ones would still be violent and have negligible social skills, but they’d be less empty inside.

It would be incredibly risky. Her defender superiors had expressly instructed her to make the new defenders exactly the same as the existing ones. If they caught her messing with the formula, they’d pull her legs off, then stomp her to jelly. But if she made the alterations at the source codes, and no one checked her work, she’d be the only person on Earth who’d know.

Up ahead, the back of a parked semi rolled open, and a Luyten climbed out. Lila stopped walking and waited for it to cross the sidewalk and head down an alley between two shops. She would never get used to them; they would always make her skin crawl …

With a jolt, she realized that if she were to introduce serotonin into the brain chemistry of defenders, the Luyten would be able to read their thoughts. How could she have overlooked that fact, even for a minute? The thought gave her chills. Jesus, what if she’d gone ahead with it, not realizing what she was doing?

“Lila?”

Lila turned to find a beefy guy and a skinny blond woman keeping pace beside her. She didn’t answer, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to confirm her identity to these people. They were clean and relatively well dressed, not the sort of people she associated with the threats and hate messages she occasionally received.

“We need you to come with us, please,” the guy said. He had a heavy New York accent—Brooklyn, or the Bronx. In fact, he was wearing a New York Yankees Windbreaker.

“And why would I want to do that?” Lila shot back. Now Lila wasn’t sure; these people might be a threat after all. She looked around, saw two defenders within earshot. If she screamed for help, would they respond? They might if she made clear who she was.

“We’ve been authorized to speak to you in private, by the president of the United States.”

That got her attention. Usually when people lied, they tried to keep it plausible. “Oh, really? How did you contact him, through a Ouija board?”

“He’s alive. They’re both alive, actually. Anthony Wood is back in charge.” The man stepped in front of her; when she tried to walk around him he stuck out an arm to stop her, but stopped short of grabbing her. “Please, Dr. Easterlin. We need your help. We’re all on the same side here, aren’t we? You’re only helping them because they’re not giving you a choice. Right?”

She knew he was playing on her insecurities, but the words still stung. “What is this about?”

“It’s about exactly what you think it’s about.”

Lila looked at the woman, who had yet to utter a word. She looked to be about Lila’s age, late twenties. “Did you agree ahead of time that he would do all the talking?”

“My work comes later,” she replied. There was something about her, a nervousness, or maybe just too much caffeine.

Lila eyed them both for a moment longer, then shrugged. They’d sparked her curiosity. “Okay. Let’s go.”

The big guy stuck out his hand, introduced himself as Clete. The woman was Danika. As the three of them headed down Monticello Avenue, Lila tried to guess what they wanted. They must need her expertise for some sort of attack they were planning. Wouldn’t it be bizarre if they’d come upon the same idea as she, about altering the newly produced defenders in some way? But what sort of alteration would possibly help them? Whatever it was they wanted, she wasn’t sure she would help. If they were simply planning to blow shit up, kill a few defenders, then no way was she sticking her neck out even an inch.

They led her to the Renaissance Hotel. Lila had had lunch there once, back when it was a four-star gem; now it was in serious decline. The carpet in the lobby was stained and threadbare, the walls in need of a paint job. Few humans traveled for business, none for pleasure, and the place was too small for defenders.

There were no suitcases in Clete and Danika’s room, no indication that anyone was staying there save a briefcase lying closed on the bed. A slimy, unidentifiable lump sat on top of it. Danika went over to the lump, bowed her head as if in prayer. Clete hung back near Lila.

Danika picked up the lump with a quivering hand. She held it high, looked up at it, and stifled a sob. “I used to be a high school teacher. I taught algebra and trig.” Still holding the lump, she looked at Lila. “I don’t know why it’s important to me that you understand, but it is. Maybe it’s because I’m going to be you for a little while.”

“What do you mean, you’re going to be me? I haven’t agreed to go along with anything yet, and given how weird this is beginning to look, I doubt I’m going to.”

Clete took a step back, placing himself between Lila and the door. Suddenly Danika was the chatty one, and he was the introvert.

“I had a child, just like you. She and her father were killed when the defenders invaded Los Angeles. When I found out, I promised myself I’d join them in heaven as soon as I could. But I wanted my death to count for something first.”