Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1) (14 page)

I was stunned. I didn’t even think warrior forms
could
die. They were the invincible heroes of legend with stories of everything from natural disasters to zombie incursions. I couldn’t believe that Adara was dead, or that she had given her life saving me. It just didn’t seem real.

Rebekah understood what had just happened. These machines, some of the very same who had killed her family in the Preserve, had just saved her life at great cost to themselves.

“Thank you,” she whispered to them.

There was a terrific boom as the dropship rocketed forward and broke the sound barrier.

One of the glossy-faced machines stared at me.

“Pax Faustus,” she said, using my full name, “I am Major Isis Walling of the Republic Vanguard. You are under arrest for suspicion of high crimes against the Republic. You are hereby ordered to offer a full account of the events leading up to this…tragedy. I left almost a dozen friends and comrades on the ground back there. You’d better have a compelling story.”

So I told her about everything. Semper. Old Vancouver. The Preserve. The Zionists. Magic Valley. Rebekah. Our capture by the Reverend. The bombs. His plan.

When we arrived back in the capital an hour later, Rebekah and I were quickly loaded into a special ambulance that wouldn’t allow plague germs to circulate to the outside air. We were immediately quarantined in different cells in the basement of Atrix Medical Center, the flagship hospital of the Republic. I don’t know if the quarantine cells had ever been used before, but regardless, she was across the hall from me. I would wave and smile at her, though we couldn’t talk.

I was offered a lawyer for my defense stemming from the charges against me, and I accepted. During the first night of quarantine, my parents arrived from Valhalla and spoke with me at length about my adventures through the intercom provided. I wish I could have hugged them. I wish I could have touched them. I would get the chance again later, I’m sure.

I put my hand on the glass and Dad put his hand up on the window with mine. We held it there for a minute, hoping our energies would connect through the inch of triple-pane glass between us. My dad looked over at Rebekah in the other room. He walked over to her glass and did the same. She couldn’t have known who he was, but she put her hand up on the window to meet his, and then smiled at me with tears in her eyes.

Before he left, Dad looked back at me and smiled at me with a look I’d never seen in all my years of knowing him. For some reason, I imagined that he was daydreaming of Freya Wynveldt, his lost love.

For two days, Rebekah and I stayed in the rooms undergoing a battery of tests. The glass that separated us was because whatever plague or disease may have found its way into my blood during my journey was a threat to every human outside these walls. Even a simple flu-strain could have wiped out half a generation of children if unvaccinated and unprepared. I accepted that my sequestration was my responsibility.

Rebekah, however, seemed frightened and alone. She barely understood the basics of diseases and transmission, and slightly understood that a quarantine was necessary to protect the world outside from the bugs in her veins that she had known her whole life. Modern medicine was a different concept entirely. In contrast to prayers and herbal remedies that she had been taught, she was being given pills, injections, and transfusions. She hated it, but I tried to reassure her from across the hallway, through the sealed glass walls.

I longed to hold her hand again. To sleep next to her. To touch the smooth skin of her face.

By day three, one of the doctors had come in to share some surprising results. Both of our blood was now clean of foreign parasites and other pathogens, including plague. Rebekah and I were allowed to visit each other, but still not allowed to leave the hospital.

We sat together, holding hands, as the doctor shared the rest of the news with us.

Her bloodwork had come back with a series of interesting genetic information. She had the same plague resistance that I had, which is why she and most of her family had been spared the horrors of the disease and its side effects. She also had some specific DNA markers that indicated that someone in her ancestry had been a genetically engineered citizen of the Republic. Her forerunner had been a man named Argus Tew, who had left the Republic almost three hundred years ago in lieu of undertaking the surgical transformations. Because he left of his own accord, and his citizenship was never revoked or renounced, that citizenship extended to Rebekah. She would be allowed to stay in the Republic if she chose to do so, and having committed no crimes, she would be released. Being legally an adult, based on telomere counts, she could go wherever she wanted. This was all very good news for her.

I, however, had implicated myself in a number of crimes: “transferring stolen property” when I gave the taser to Henry in Old Vancouver; “interfering with an investigation” by not revealing Semper’s location to the authorities; and even “illegal passage” by riding the train without obtaining authorization. The most serious charge, however, was “high treason”, for allowing the Reverend, an enemy of the Republic, to access the Central Library, and for which the punishment was immediate termination. The wording of the punishment was designed for adults, whose robotic form would be forever deactivated. I don’t suppose they ever assumed a non-robot citizen could have the power to commit such a crime, but regardless, they could terminate me in other ways.

Rebekah was ordered to leave the hospital, but clearly had nowhere to go. The Republic had no welfare or social services system, so she would have been completely on her own—an outsider with no education or standing. My parents, however, offered to take this strange, beautiful girl into their home. Dad knew what she meant to me, and I am so fortunate they were willing to help her.

She kissed me good-bye with tears in her eyes, and they led me off to a cell at the police station to await my trial. I told her I would always be with her. My parents held her close, and they all waved as I was driven away.

The cell was not nearly as nice as the hospital room. It was barren except for a very hard sleeping platform—not even a mattress. I had to ask permission to go to the one restroom at the end of the hall. The food was in tablet form: it would keep me alive, but I’d have preferred even some raw fish to keep my stomach from feeling so empty. Hunger was apparently part of the punishment for those without their enhanced forms. Two Vanguard warrior forms kept watch over the facility, and I’m sure they had disdain for me due to my responsibility in the loss of their comrades.

I was in jail for just one day when I had a surprise visit from President Sandstrom.

“It sounds like you’ve been quite busy,” he said, holding a digibook and scrolling through reports and photos.

I nodded, “I’m sorry, sir.”

“We all make mistakes,” he said, “but we all have to pay for them. That’s how our society works.”

“The Reverend,” I said to him, “you have to stop him.”

“We’re trying,” Sandstrom replied, “but he’s got numbers on his side. We’ve been throwing the Vanguard against him but we’re running out of soldiers. He loses five hundred for every one or two of ours, but he had a half million to start and we only had a few hundred. We can’t train ours quickly enough and he can simply spread the Plague to convert the primitives—the ones they don’t eat—into more zombies. We are ill-prepared for such an assault. We never anticipated something like this could happen.”

He scrolled through some photos and showed me one. “This is Omaha after we brought a capital ship into orbit and fired the MAC gun at the city.”

The city was utterly leveled…a giant crater filled with rubble compared to the ruins we had been paraded through.

“Unfortunately we can’t hit them all, everywhere,” the president continued, “and it seems they’ve split up into smaller and smaller groups to avoid the orbital weapons. It may be a few weeks before we can recall enough of the Vanguard to Earth from their other assignments. We simply don’t have the resources to fight them and we’re concerned that all it will take is one infiltrator with a nuclear device to wipe out so much of what we’ve accomplished. It will be weeks or months before they move across the mountains, and with winter coming, we may get a slight break. I think you still might be able to help.”

“How can I help?” I asked. “I’ve already told you everything.”

“I feel like you may be unintentionally skipping some critical details,” he said, “things that are important to stopping this Reverend and the zombie threat. Until we get every last detail out of you,” he continued, “we can’t clear you of your involvement. I can promise you clemency for your crimes under two conditions. The first is documentation.”

The president handed me a new digibook.

“I need you to write everything down. Include maps and photos, where you can. This has access to the archives at the Central Library. You may also use it to video chat with your,” he checked his notes, “’Rebekah’ and your family as you see fit. You are not, under any circumstances, released from captivity or cleared on
any
charges until you comply with two conditions: The first is that you must provide
in detail
the circumstances surrounding your alleged crimes. Should you provide enough critical information, and enough evidence surrounding your motives and actions, you will be cleared of the most serious charge of treason.”

Which is precisely why I’ve written this story down, now, and in as much detail as I can remember.

“And the second condition?” I asked.

“To clear the lesser charges, we’re going to need your cooperation. As I mentioned,” he replied, “we’re short on soldiers. I’m going to need to you join the fight.”

The president had taken an interesting and very personal role in my life: his invitation to tea, his plea to turn in Semper, and now his visit in jail to ask for my help in fighting the zombies.

“I don’t know the first thing about fighting zombies,” I laughed. “Don’t you have military commanders who train for this?”

“I do,” he said without smiling, “but they’re in short supply. Frankly, the conflict thus far has shown me the one critical flaw in our strategy.”

“And that is?” I asked, in a slightly disrespectful tone.

“That is that we’re not human enough. We always thought that when war came to us, logic would be a blessing. Necessary sacrifices would be made. All efforts would be expended. No expense would be spared. Instead, we find ourselves unwilling to run away from a fight. We never trained to retreat. And now we’re unable to feel the fear that would keep us alive. Our logic is dooming us.”

“So how do I help?”

“At almost nineteen years old, you’re the oldest biological human in the mainstream of the Republic. The older ones are outside of our sphere of influence anymore, living under the shelter of our protection, but outside of our accepted norms. The villages on the East Slopes. The pirates in the Vancouver harbor. We need to call on them to serve, as we do every eighteen-, or close-to-eighteen, year-old adult in the nation. We’re starting a draft and building an army. Our factories are retooling machines for war. We’re churning out weapons. But we need people to fight.”

I still didn’t understand. “Why not more enhanced-form adults? Why not have people fight who are older and stronger, and more impervious to the Hordes?”

Sandstrom shook his head. “Our robotic forms are not as suited for full-scale combat as we had hoped or imagined. We’ve seen it in every battle since Omaha. Their numbers beat our brilliance in every contest and in every simulation. No, my commanders are suggesting we need a human element to this and that we need to start with someone who followed his gut and took a risk that we would have never taken. You have a loyalty to your lady-friend, and to your late friend Semper, that we haven’t seen in scores of decades. We want to try to harness that power and emotion…and creativity.”

“We’re going to create a biologic division,” he continued, “to face this threat from a different angle. We’re working on a few divisions of enhanced forms as well, but we need to bring all options to the table at this point.”

Sandstrom paused and looked at me. “Can you believe I have senators and administrators asking for a full retreat of the planet? They want to put the kids all in stasis and take them to Mars or something. Maybe even farther away than that. I’m refusing because we’ve fought so hard to rebuild the Earth, that giving in to the Horde—even temporarily—is an abhorrent thought. I won’t do it. People can do what they please, but I will not order an evacuation.”

“Well that’s…uh,” I searched for the word in my mind, “admirable?”

I was, admittedly, being rude to the man who held my salvation in his hands, but I didn’t trust him at all, and I didn’t think this ridiculous idea would be successful.

“If you don’t help defend our Republic,” he said coldly, “you’re going to die. Whether it’s at our hands, or theirs, or through the slow wasting away of your life, you will die. You can choose how, and you can make a difference before you go, and just maybe find the path to your enhanced form and your future among the stars.”

I paused for a moment to consider all of that. I had fully anticipated undergoing the surgery when I returned to the capital, but now that Rebekah was a part of my world, I couldn’t say good-bye to her, and I definitely couldn’t let anything bad happen to her.

“Okay,” I mumbled. “I’ll join your ‘biologic’ division.”

“No,” he retorted quickly, “I need you to lead it. You’re organic, and a lot of the organics outside of the Republic don’t trust any of the enhanced forms like us. You have a personality that people will follow, and you have ingenuity. We need you to lead the division, and we need at least two thousand soldiers. We’ll provide you an officer cadre and all the training and gear you need, but you need to fill it with bodies. The zombies are camped on the eastern slope of the Rockies for the winter, but they’ll be on the move when the snow clears in the spring and we need you ready by then.”

“This,” he finished, “is the condition for your clemency.”

He looked at me intently, until I nodded in agreement, bowing my head.

President Sandstrom left the room and he was immediately replaced by a man in a military uniform. The only military people I’d ever seen were starship captains. This man wore the five-stars on his collar that I knew meant he was the Grand Marshal of the Fleet, the leader of our entire defense forces and fleet of exploratory starships.

“I’m Marshal Burnham,” he said, without a trace of emotion in his voice, but I already knew who he was. “The president and I feel that you can use your connections to draw in the Outcasts and get them to fight for us.”

I shrugged. “Some of them want nothing to do with you. Most of them, if I had to guess.”

“It’s a matter of survival,” he replied. “If they want to live, they’ll kick in.”

I wasn’t so sure about this, but I wasn’t going to abandon my chance to clear my name.

“A lot of them are old,” I countered. “They’re not going to be able to shoot a gun or fight. It’ll be a massacre.”

“What I’m about to tell you is classified,” he said quietly. “You know what that means and what the repercussions of releasing this information is, right?”

I nodded, assuming those repercussions were “worst case.”

He motioned to an adjutant, who brought over a digibook. The marshal showed me pictures of warehouses with rows and rows of warrior-form robots.

“We have a stockpile of thousands of these machines which we planned on deploying over time as we had suitable transplant candidates. We don’t have that time anymore, and they need to be deployed now. Regrettably, the secondary extraction of the central nervous system from the enhanced form to the warrior form is very difficult for most people. The training that goes into the development of a warrior takes many months. We don’t have time, or enough candidates.”

He paused, and then smirked as he showed me a new diagram.

I traced out the algorithm. Essentially, the Bionics Research Facility, where I’d gone as a child to calibrate my future robotic self, was being retooled as a place where biologics could enter the remote web and control fighting robotic forms wirelessly from anywhere across the planet. If one warrior-form robot was destroyed in combat, the operator could immediately operate a new one. It was like a video game with infinite lives.

“We won’t have to suffer another casualty,” the marshal beamed.

“Why do we need to recruit outcast adults?” I asked. “Why not use younger children who are already familiar with the process?”

The marshal shook his head. “No. Not only was that a politically unsupported decision, but we also need to be ready to fast-cryo all the children on-world and get them out of here if we need to. You’ll have everyone over the age of seventeen years with an organic body at your disposal.”

“Marshal,” I pleaded, “you need to lower that service age. I need teenagers. They’ve been using the systems, and the systems are calibrated for them. I’ll still go rally the adult outcasts, but it will take them a while to get used to the interface. It takes us years. And if the zombies reach the Columbia River, you’ll still have enough time to cryo and evac the kids.”

The marshal stared for a while with that blank stare that adult robots had while they were thinking.

“I’ll talk to the president. For the moment, you’re free to go. I’ve informed your parents you’ll be heading back to Valhalla on the train tonight, and they’ll meet you at the station. You have four days to prepare, and then I need you on the road. Continue documenting everything that’s already happened and everything that happens from now on.”

He stood up and saluted me in by crossing his right fist to his heart as he would to our military and expeditionary elites, and in the manner of the Roman legions so many centuries before. I stood and returned the salute as he left the room. The door remained open.

I walked to the door frame and peered into the hall. The warrior forms guarding the end of the hall had departed. I hadn’t been “free” in weeks, and the concept of being able to leave was unsettling. After ensuring that this meant I was really able to go, I grabbed my new digibook and walked quietly to the end of the hall to the booking desk. The lady working the desk stood up, and without saying a word, grabbed a discharge paper and slid it across the desk to me.

It felt strange to walk out onto the street. I stopped to smell the fresh air. It had been weeks since I’d been outside. The fresh clean scent of a recent rain was refreshing and invigorating. It meant I was home…but not for long. I didn’t have anything with me except my new digibook and the clothes on my back—my other belongings were under the pulverized ruins of Omaha.

The central train station was a few blocks away and it didn’t take long to get there—mostly because I sprinted. I was going to see my family, and see Rebekah.

The normally short train ride seemed to last for days. We whizzed north over the giant bridge across the Squamish Inlet. I was in the spacious passenger compartment surrounded by government officials and businessmen, all of whom were whispering about the coming onslaught of zombies. A man and woman behind me spoke of sending their child to stasis aboard a starship for a few months. A uniformed man at the front of the car talked about deploying enhanced forms to the front lines. I’d never heard fear in the voices of adults before, but I guess that at its very core, fear is rational and just amplified by hormones and physical bodies.