Resurrection Express (48 page)

00:26:00

Heather grabs me and tells me to forget about her—I’m all she has left, all anybody has left. I spit words at her that sound like to hell with you and to hell with the world. I only want to find my wife, my love, my best girl, whom this was all about from
day one—and I force myself not to think about the bombs in the silos, the submarines in the sea. I force myself not to see the task set before me. I force myself to look right through the false image of Toni, wringing me in her grip like a living doll, slapping my face and telling me we’re all going to die—every single one of us. We’ve done this before, she and I, and was any of it funny the first time? I see Alex Bennett, crying somewhere in the dark. Saying she’s afraid of what will come if I don’t act now. She screams at me the way Heather screams at me. I only want to see my wife.

00:25:00

The room spins on all sides as Heather lets me go and starts yelling at the other wirehead, who cries because he’s been shot, holding his guts in with one hand. I realize as the gunsmoke clears that this place is even bigger than I thought it was at first. It opens into a wider chamber, which looks like it could be several miles long. Rows of those large glass tubes filling the chamber, way back there, machines humming in a glimmering half darkness. Nobody else around. Abandoned. Some of the cylinders are empty, some of them still have people in them, floating in green liquid, breathing in forced sleep. I notice some of them are men, but most of them are women. I want to charge into the maze. I want to find my wife. I start for the darkness. Toni, you’re in there. I saw you there. To hell with all these people and all this noise. I want to breathe my last breath into your mouth. I want to clock the last second left to humanity in your arms. I am running toward you. Something stops me from doing it, though. A loud blast that echoes off the walls and zings into nowhere. Freezes me to the spot. I turn and Heather says that was a warning shot and that I’m not going anywhere.

00:24:00

Her face is stern and ugly, full of war paint and hard resolve and something desperate—something that will end my life in
one second for the good of our children. She says I’m not going after Toni. She says she will shoot me in my legs and drag me to the console if she has to, and I believe her. They can’t do it alone, she says. I can’t hear her voice. She is like all the others—deadly silhouettes playing grim games in the fast-forwarded slipstream of my final job, and I only read their lips as it blazes over me and through me. I only read their minds and thoughts and hearts because it’s all so slurred and crazy, this far down. I tell her to go to hell and I start to run again. She fires another warning shot and I almost fall down. She says that’s the last time she’s telling me. Get over here now. Forget about her, Elroy. You came down here to find your wife, but there’s no one here—they’re all gone. The rest are dead, we’re all that’s left. We have to do this or the whole world dies. I am surrounded on all sides by a chamber that seems to go on forever, standing in an ops room walled with smashed computer terminals, shattered flat-screens. It’s half-dark and flickering with dying starlight, flushed with sparks and flames—like the bridge of some alien starship blown halfway to hell. She is like a shape of the grim reaper, outlined here at the bottom of the world and the edge of the universe.

00:23:00

And here at the edge, it all comes clear what I must do, to keep the world alive a few more minutes—so I can really find her. I put up my hands and move toward Heather. She keeps her gun on me, tells me to hurry the fuck up, and I feel the heat of years at my back, the ruins of my life, the flames that will consume humanity. I see Toni somewhere in the dark, way back there and crying because I came all this distance, and I’m stopping now, to save a planet crawling with murderers and maniacs who hated us so much when we were kids. It all swirls and crashes in my heart and in my mind as I force myself to move my hands.

00:22:00

I tell Heather to stay the hell out of my way while I’m working. I move forward and I yell at the half-dead soldier to help me with the interface, and he gurgles a dull
yessir
and I tell him not to call me sir and it all lurches forward again without detail, without sound, without anything but what I have to do. Toni, please forgive me. I feel your presence somewhere even nearer and I cannot look for you, not just yet. But I will find you. I will resurrect you. I push past Heather and get to work.

00:21:00

We pry open what’s left of the main screen, start rewiring things, working around massive damage. It takes a few minutes—time we don’t have. I pull away a dead body at the workstation and sit in his chair. I realize that the half-dead soldier next to me is the only other man besides Heather who made it this far. I ask him his name. He wipes sweat and blood out of his eyes and says Mitchell Gant, Airman First Class. He’s fast with his tools. We get our screens wired in a few more minutes, but the minutes fly by like seconds. My console beeps and flashes all clear. Mitchell doubles over, coughing up blood.

00:17:00

I port the recall numbers into my rig. I look at them and memorize them. My fingers click the keys. It’s the only sound in the room. The ghosts of dead women snipe at me as I work. Swirls of familiar scents, accusing voices, a kaleidoscope of desperation and despair, spiraling in a room full of broken Barbie dolls. I force it out of my mind, but those weird images stay just at the edge of everything, like a cruel backdrop, soaked in perfumes. In front of me, my screens pay out walls and canyons of dazzling information, and I see the complexity of the program they designed for the first time. I’ve only seen pieces of it before. Now I see it full-on
running, talking to the world, sending its complicated signals, still holding at fail-safe for the recall order, still holding up its deflector screen, which keeps out all enemies. I’d never be able to fool anything this sophisticated without an edge. But I have that edge—the numbers. I looked into the face of God and I saw where this place was. I lost everything I ever loved to be in this chair. I crush those thoughts and get in there. I enter the numbers. It doesn’t like them. Have to go in a different way.

00:15:00

Down to the wire again. Last time, it would only cost my life. This time, it’s everybody’s life. I find a hairline crack in the armor and slide in slow. Have to be careful. Have to find the right place to enter the numbers. I stack seven different infiltrator programs, military-grade blackware designed just like their gunships—mean and sleek and state-of-the-art. They run their jive, and the jive works. My fingers move quick. I burn through five minutes like they’re not even there. It’s coming, coming faster now. Come on, baby,
talk to me . . .

00:10:00

More minutes fly by like seconds. The system is starting to like me. It was cursing at me before, but I’m sweet talking it now and it’s coming around. I find the port at last. I look at Mitchell and tell him we’re almost in. He’s on his back now, staring straight up at the ceiling. Not a word left in him, his guts leaking through stiff fingers. Burke, gone, too. Facedown in his own blood, where he fell. Me and Heather are the last people drawing breath in this room. I want to tell them thanks for this, for keeping me alive, for standing with me . . . I want to see Toni’s face again and kiss her one last time . . . but I can’t do that now. I see the clock ticking on the screen. Less than ten minutes now. My fingers move so fast you can’t see them.

00:07:00

I see the wall right ahead and I break it. Heather shrieks like a schoolgirl when that happens. She starts crying because we’re so close now. A screen flashes at me and asks if I want to abort Resurrection Express. I tell it shit yes I do. It asks for the recall code. The numbers I just memorized. This will stop the signals feeding to our silos, and tell the computers the game is off. The submarines standing by for authentication orders will receive encoded messages not to launch. If this machine listens. If the recall code actually works. The numbers go in quick. It’s as easy as breathing, even though breathing is hard now, the pain in my side creeping up into my lungs, making my breath boil. It rolls out painfully and drifts away from me, sweat dripping down my face. I’m about to type in the last number. My finger is almost on the button as something hits Heather hard in her stomach, and she flies back in a spray of blood, hitting the floor next to her dead soldiers. I almost wonder what’s happening for a split second before the next bullet chunks into my guts and kicks me from the console, shattering a screen . . . and I land on one knee . . .

00:05:00

. . . and the sting of the wound slashes me, gouging deep into my stomach, oozing slowly inside . . . but it’s nothing to me . . .

. . . 
not compared to
 . . .

Her.

She doesn’t smell like perfume or roses.

She doesn’t smell like
anything
.

Her mysteries and magic and pheromones washed away—like my home, which was so far down in the dark until this very moment.

The hard, beautiful sight of her flooding back on me like a fast tide, overwhelming my senses all at once . . .

00:04:00

Toni.

Your face hovering above me, your
real
face.

The silken trace of your nose, the long black glass of your hair, eyes green and beaming.

I love you so much.

I’ve searched the whole world over to find you.

I suffered in the dark, I gave up everything—or would have—just to claw my way to this moment.

You are beautiful like no other woman is beautiful.

You are everything.

“Hello, darling,” she whispers.

And her voice is as clear as crystal.

My love, forever.

She stands above me, her white gown glowing in the dark.

Beautiful
.

And her voice is real.

Not some hallucination, sniping at me from the brink of death. Not a lie oozing through my damaged mind, like the slow blood dripping from the wound in my guts.
Real
. My logical mind swims just outside of this, screaming at me to get up. I struggle with my legs.

She shoots me again.

00:03:00

My right knee explodes as the bullet tears in.

I go down.

“I’m so sorry, Elroy. I can’t let you do it.”

I realize it was her final bullet that took down Burke. I realize she was waiting, just in the shadows, to see if we could break this machine. I realize that she is going to kill me. I realize . . .
somehow . . .
in a place of utter hopelessness and despair . . . that
it makes sense. I ask her if she became Jenison’s woman, if she was always Jenison’s woman, and she nods her head slowly.

“She’s my mother.”

00:02:00

And it all comes clear.

The photo in the nightclub.

Jenison telling me about her daughter.

Her daughter.

My wife.

Everything I ever was, I did it for her.

Everything we ever did, we did it together.

And she always belonged to Jenison.

Belonged to Resurrection.

“You were my life project,” she says. “My assignment. My love. You don’t understand how many of us there are, how deep it all goes. The power people like us represent. When you knew the truth, you came to destroy it.”

“I came . . . for
you
.”

“I know you did . . . but this . . . all of it, all around us . . . is what we were
destined for
. Since we were children. We were trained to guard the new future. To watch over all these people.”

I see the chamber behind her again, as she motions to it, her hand steady and unshaking. The stasis tubes. Thousands of men and women, waiting there, floating in their artificial wombs. Waiting for everything to be destroyed. So that they can make it all better again a million years from now.

My whole life was about building this.

“I was the first to volunteer. The first to go into wet sleep. And I was the first to come back when your attack began. My mother brought hundreds of us up from the tubes. There wasn’t time for more. She wanted me to run with her, but I wouldn’t go. She abandoned Resurrection, but I stayed. Because I knew you would
come. And I knew if you saw my face you would finally understand.”

She looks back at the endless chamber.

All filled with dreamers.

“Elroy . . . they must be
protected
. They must
live,
and their children must live after them. Otherwise, we are not immortal creatures. Do you remember when I said that to you, all those years ago?”

Yes.

And I loved her for speaking to me that way.

Loved her for making me into what they wanted me to be.

For running where they wanted me to run.

Where she ran, always.

My whole life.

A project.

And I never even knew it—never knew I was destroying the world, never knew I was looking right into my wife’s face when I was looking at Jenison, even in that bottomless moment in the hotel lobby when my mind was almost gone.

“This is
crazy,
” I tell her, hardly finding my voice. “Please tell me you’re lying.
Please tell me it’s not true
 . . .”

“I can’t tell you that,” she says to me, and her voice is cruel and strained, like some distant accusation that never quite reaches my ears. Insane and lost.

Just like me.

“Toni. Please. I love you.”

“I know,” she says to me, as she raises the gun again, right between my eyes this time. “I love you, too.”

00:01:00

The gun shakes in her grip.

Her mouth trembles, like an angel at the gates of Resurrection. Like an ordinary woman, my woman, staring into the eyes of her
entire life. A life spent reporting to a mother I never knew. A life spent seducing and deceiving people, like David Hartman. A life filled with secrets.

Not a life at all.

A lie.

A cruel, endless lie.