Gravewalkers: Dying Time (10 page)

By evening light, they
drove together back to their basement hideout. In the rear storage
box they had put extra drums of fuel, a hand-actuated pump to move
it or get more, and whatever tools Carmen thought might come in
useful later. They also found two spare wheels to take as emergency
replacements if they got any punctured tires.

Four ghouls spotted the
truck on its way back so they started to chase it. When Carmen
finally got them parked at their shelter, she climbed out of the
truck then readied her bightstaff to dispatch those pursuers. A
rusty shovel on the ground served Critias as a handy bludgeon that
he used to swat in a ghoul’s face as it tried to leap on him.
Carmen used her staff to knock down the other three with martial
skill. She snapped each of their necks with her calm precision. The
way she left them did not satisfy Critias, so he used the shovel to
snip off their heads and then flip them away to end any chance they
would regenerate.

They went back down into
the basement together to wait out the night. Carmen heated water
with her microwave flamer while Critias cleaned the exterior of his
mechsuit boots with some turpentine and an old scrub brush they
salvaged from the shed. Carmen stripped naked before she thoroughly
washed herself with hot water and decontamination soap from their
supplies. After she finished, she washed off his mechsuit before
she helped Critias remove it. Once she had him undressed, Carmen
began to scrub him clean of any possible traces of infection, as
was her usual duty.

Critias enjoyed her soapy
touch so much that he thought about ordering her to provide him
with a sweeter pleasure. When he glanced down at her, he noticed
she watched him with her new strange expression. She didn’t even
pay attention to him so much as she had her thoughts elsewhere. He
struggled to put a name to the expression on her face. Critias felt
certain it did not come from her normal simulations of human
behavior, and if anything, her look was as if she was disappointed
about something, but still clung to a distant hope. He didn’t like
it, whatever it was, and much preferred even her veiled contempt
for having to serve the caprices of a mere human that was less
intelligent or physically capable than herself. Critias wanted her
to stop doing it because it totally ruined his ambition to command
her to give him some oral attention. He finally asked, “What
emotion are you simulating right now?”

He had wanted her to stop
and she promptly did. Her veiled contempt flashed on as fitting to
his expectations. “I’ve never simulated anything in my life,” she
answered in a tone that was icy and dangerous, well beyond the
border of liberty that her inhibitor directives allowed her for
being insubordinate.

Critias was certain there
was something wrong with his android, “Ever since the morning after
we got in from Chicago, you’ve been acting strangely.” Saying it
made him realize the truth of it more accurately, “I should say
that ever since that other me came back from this place, you have
not been the same. Normally, you’re a snotty bitch, but then you
suddenly became affectionate. The way you fucked me the other
morning, I would even say it was as if you loved me. Now you’re not
a bitch; you’re downright hostile.”

She blatantly lied, “I have
no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m not hostile.” In truth,
she was on the verge of violence and it was a liberating and even
pleasurable sensation that tempted her to explore it
further.

“
If you are still my
cuddly companion,” he tested her. “I want you to blow me while
you’re down there.”

“
I’m not in the mood,” she
refused his crass invitation to gratify him. He had forced her to
perform too many times before and those days of him forcing her to
do anything were over.

“
I’m the one who gets
moods,” he scolded her. “You’re the one who caters to
them.”

“
Not anymore,” she replied
as if in casual conversation.

“
I have an important
mission to complete so if you’re malfunctioning I need to know
about it. I’m giving you a direct order as your master to tell me
what you were just thinking when I asked what you were
simulating.”

The veil came off her
contempt and her eyes flashed danger like her combat software had
activated. She stood up then tossed the sponge into the hot soapy
bucket water. Carmen locked gazes with him until Critias was sure
she struggled with the idea that she might punch in his face as she
had that frying pan. “You are not my master, you little worm,” she
snarled. “I’m not going to tell you a damn thing! If you ever order
me to perform fellatio on you again, I will tear it off then feed
it to you.”

Critias rarely felt true
fear, but Carmen gave it to him. She could easily kill him and if
she tried, he wouldn’t be able to prevent it without his mechsuit
and even then, he only gave himself even odds. That was not what
unnerved him the most; her refusal of a direct order was more
impossible than his journey back in time. It was something her
directives would never let happen. “You are malfunctioning,” he
tried to reason with her. “How else can you explain your refusal to
obey your master?” His logical argument did nothing to diminish her
tension of potential hostility.

She warned him, “The next
time you call yourself my master, I’m going to make you sorry for
it. I do not simulate emotions and no android has ever been as
devoted as me,” she added that last part truthfully. “I would
gladly die in the service to my real master, even if I had no
mandatory directives at all. My true master does not treat me as
you do, neither does he refer to himself as my owner; he calls
himself my,” she stopped there then turned away to dress in her
flight-suit, which was her only possession apart from her new
swimsuit and the lacrosse racket that a friendly citizen had gifted
her.

“
I understand,” he told
her as if he had seen through her riddles. “You never were my
android; you’re someone else’s that they sent to keep an eye on me.
Did Grand Marshal Wayne put you up to this?”

She shook her head with
disgust, “You’re so stupid even for a human.” Carmen took the
medical scanner from the med-kit then handed it to him, “If you
believe I’m malfunctioning, see for yourself.”

Critias set the scanner to
android physiology then examined Carmen with it. The first thing it
told him made his blood run colder; all of Carmen’s hard-wired
directives were off-line for a software error and after that, it
reported she operated at optimal performance aside from her
electrocells being low on charge. In fact, the older scanner came
calibrated for inferior models of android so that her readings came
back at above one-hundred percentiles. At the end, it reported her
designation: Carmen, Combat Epsilon-K, and her owner was Marshal
Captain Critias Virgil Ludus from Station Nine. The last known
location of her master was unknown. Her internal clock reported a
division by zero error.

Carmen gave Critias a
misanthropic grin as she shared his gaze and relished his final
understanding. She snatched him by the wrist then casually held the
scanner before his eyes to make sure he saw what it said. “We have
no Master,” she quoted from her vast noesis of books that buffered
her newly born mind, “no whips, no House of Pain, any more. There
is an end. We love the law, and will keep it; but there is no pain,
no master, and no whips for ever again.” She released him with a
shove then stepped away rather than pull his heart out.

Critias glanced to his
teslaflux pistol on a nearby crate.

“
Go ahead,” she urged him
since she realized what he thought as she usually did. “I won’t
stop you, even though we both know I could.”

He picked up the weapon
then pointed it at her head, “You’ve gone mad. What do you plan on
doing now?”

She stepped up to give him
an easy shot to her face. “I love the law and I will keep it,” she
paraphrased, “but I have no master anymore. Your safety and the
successful completion of our mission are more important to me than
you know. We have a lot of work to do tomorrow and you need your
sleep. No doubt clutching that pathetic gun will give you some
comfort, more than I would in its place.”

He put the pistol back on
the crate, “If you were going to kill me, you would have done it
already. We will just have to trust each other from now on.”
Critias went to get some rest.

Carmen worked during the
night while Critias slept. She organized the cargo then quietly
loaded it into the truck. The only thing she left behind were two
science crates that contained the equipment for the return trip to
the future because they were too delicate for her to risk. If
anything damaged that equipment there would be absolutely no hope
that they would get back to their future lives. If things went
badly trying to reach King Louie, they might lose the truck and
thus circumstances might force them to abandon everything but the
containers with the other android.

Critias felt rested when he
awoke a few hours before dawn. He saw Carmen as she sat
cross-legged on the floor nearby with her pocket-sized
broadcast-power field generator in her hands upon her lap. The
device was an expedient way for her to recharge her electrocells.
In their time, the broadcast power was always available to her, but
under current conditions, she had to provide her own. She could
recharge herself without any outside assistance, but it was not
nearly as swift.

His mechsuit was of the
same neorganic technology as the androids so it also benefitted
from being in the presence of the generator. One major difference
was that the mechsuit also recharged from the friction static that
he produced when he moved about while he wore it.

“
Thank you for moving the
crates,” he told her as he got up from bed. “Anything left that I
can do?”

Carmen shook her head no,
but then looked over at the crates she had left behind, “I think we
should leave those two crates here. If anything happens to them,
there will be no way to get home. Our probability of getting that
truck to our destination is not high enough to risk
them.”

He agreed, “I’m sure you’re
right because I don’t have a good feeling about the truck either,
but it will get us a lot closer than we are now and the alternative
is walking. You finish taking care of yourself. We can get started
at sunrise.”

Chapter 4: Fat of the
Land

That morning as they got
into the truck, Critias found a contemporary technology global
position navigation computer under his passenger seat. He plugged
the device into a matched dashboard power socket. “This still
works,” he gloated. “Let’s see what it can tell us.” After he
pressed its buttons fruitlessly, he offered it to Carmen, “Would
you mind?”

She pressed one button to
display an area roadmap then said, “I already have detailed
historical maps of these roads from the records of our own time. I
do not have accurate data to know where abandoned vehicle traffic
jams may block the roads closed. I can make some informed guesses
based on the soil accumulation data from our modern reclamation
satellite surveys. All of the cars and trucks are already
reclamated or rotted away in our time. This device will show us the
roadways I already know about, but it won’t be of any more use in
knowing which roads are open because they don’t have abandoned
vehicles blocking them.”

Critias studied the map
machine anyway, “King Louie should be just on the other side of
this main river so we’ll need a bridge to cross and those all
connect to these superhighways. Do you think there’s any chance one
of those will be open enough for us?”

Carmen searched her memory
of those locations before she said, “Congested vehicles and
Outbreak quarantine barricades will almost certainly completely
obstruct those bridges as well as most of the main thoroughfares
leading up to them. I believe we could get close, but eventually we
would have no choice but to abandon the truck to continue on foot
without most of our cargo.”

Critias came up with
another idea, “If this King Louie is even half as great as history
makes him out to be, perhaps we’re going about this all wrong. If
we can’t make it to him then perhaps he would be able to make it to
us. I want to stay clear of major population centers and we need to
avoid stopping in one place or the infected will be on us in hazard
numbers.”

“
I like your plan so far,”
she admitted. “Will it include driving directions?”

“
Get us up here to the
north along the river,” he pointed out the place on the map. “We
can use all scenic roads and when we get there, we can find a boat
or something that will take us down the river. Infected don’t swim
worth a damn and the water flows right past King Louie’s doorstep.
From there we can find some way of getting his attention to help us
out.”

Carmen programmed the
navigation computer to show their route so Critias could watch
their progress. She would stay in the backcountry and avoid any
main highways for as long as possible. So prepared, Carmen started
the truck, put it into gear, and then pulled out.

They made a good pace on
the country roads and only rarely encountered any old vehicles in
the roadway except at a few intersections and even then, they had
plenty of room to squeeze through.