Ghost Book Two: The Death Machines

– Chapter Five –

BOOM!

In we ran with the smoke still billowing towards us and bits of masonry and brick still raining from the sky. For a few steps the cloud enveloped us completely and we could see nothing, but then a triangle of darkness appeared before us — a hole at the bottom right corner of the big brass doors. It looked like the sort of hole a rat would chew in a baseboard, only big enough — just — for a man to crawl through.

And that’s what we are, isn’t it? I thought. Man–sized rats, scurrying around in the decaying houses of the giants that came before us. The Guardians were the packrats, hoarding everything they could get their greasy little paws on, and we were the desert rats, who…

Fortunately we reached the hole before I could think of an ending for that tortured metaphor. I squeezed in ahead of the others. The blast had sprayed a fan of debris into the entry hall and thrown the shattered remains of two guardians against the red–smeared walls. Three others were slowly sitting up and raising their guns, their gold–chased black cassocks torn and bloody from the rain of broken bricks.

I gunned them down with my AR and shouted back through the hole. “Clear!”

That, however, was a lie about two seconds later, as more Guardians streamed into the entryway, disbelief on their faces and a bizarre collection of antique weapons in their hands.

“They’ve breached the unbreachable doors!” shouted one. “Stop them!”

I flicked over to full auto and unloaded on them. Angie, who had just rolled in, joined me. Smoking brass shells cascaded from our guns and went dancing and tinkling across the cold stone floor while the sound of our gunfire drowned out the Guardians’ screams and echoed back to us from the shadowed ceiling.

“Fall back! Fall back!”

The survivors scattered back the way they’d come, leaving the dead and dying where they’d fallen. By the time the echoes faded, the rest of our squad was through the hole and lined up.

“Let’s hope it’s all this easy,” said Vargas.

Hell Razor grunted. “Tsk. Now you’ve jinxed it.”

Angie laughed. “I thought you didn’t believe in superstition.”

Hell Razor crossed his fingers. “I don’t. But there’s no sense pushin’ it.”

“What the hell is all this stuff?” asked Ace.

We looked around as the dust and the gun smoke cleared. The hall was high, wide and so deep that the far end was swallowed in darkness. Between us and that darkness, a heavy–duty freight elevator rose from a big square shaft in the center of the floor, and surrounding the shaft was a bizarre and bullet–chipped collection of bronze and plaster busts, statues, paintings, murals and portraits. I didn’t recognize even a tenth of the stuff. Most of the busts were serious–looking guys in suits and ties, hair neatly–groomed, and a lot of the statues were nude women holding torches or swords or scales, but some of them were stranger. Much stranger. There was a wax effigy of a dark–haired guy in a white jumpsuit covered in rhinestones. He was holding hands with a voluptuous blonde woman, also in white, who seemed to be trying to hold her dress down even through there was no wind. And in front of them, holding out a hamburger to them like it was some kind of sacred offering, was a pudgy little dwarf in red checkered overalls. It had the shiniest hair I’d ever seen.

The paintings were even more bizarre — landscapes of highways that soared and looped through the sky in impossible ways, a portrait, painted on black velvet, of Jesus holding a little white lamb and smoking a joint, a man with a chin–beard and a stovepipe hat leading an army of naked black men against a man wearing a goatee, glasses, and an old–fashioned white suit, whose army was a horde of white cowboys riding chickens; a big painting of a man whose hair looked a lot like the shiny hair on the dwarf in the checkered overalls tearing down a barbed–wire topped concrete wall with his bare hands while a bear tried to kill him with a hammer and sickle, a postcard from Roswell, New Mexico with a picture of a little green man next to a crashed flying saucer sticking his thumb out and saying, “Going my way?”

The craziest of all, however, was a long mural along one wall, which seemed to be an attempt to show all of human history in one picture. I don’t know how well they did. It certainly didn’t look like the past I’d seen in the helicopter simulator, but maybe Arizona was different from the rest of the world back then.

It started at the left edge of the mural with a guy in a top–hat and bushy beard walking arm in arm with an ape in a wedding dress. The painting didn’t record the ape’s name, but there was a fancy scroll over the head of the guy with the beard that said his name was Charles Darwin.

Next to the wedding party, a man all wrapped up in bandages wearing a gold mask and headdress with a snake coming out of the forehead danced on the stage of a place called — according to the neon lights behind him — the Radio City Museum of Unnatural History, while thousands cheered.

Beside Mr. Burn Victim and his audience, a masked man in a powder blue cowboy outfit brandished silver six–shooters on the back of a silver Tyrannosaurus, hot on the trail of a mustachioed man in brown wearing a swastika, while over their heads a fat man in a red uniform with white trim flew through the sky in a sleigh pulled by eight black bat–winged jets. He had bags full of guns, ammo and bombs in the back of the sleigh, which a bunch of children with pointy ears were dropping down to a guy in metal armor labeled “King Arthur” and his knights so they could battle a guy in bamboo armor labeled “Genghis Khan” and an army of men and woman in green uniforms with red stars on their caps and red books in their raised hands.

Further on there was a man in a green and gold uniform with the number 12 emblazoned on it and a ‘G’ on the helmet throwing a missile to a man vanishing in the white glow of an atomic mushroom cloud. And finally, at the far end of the wall, the ape returned, squatting in its tattered wedding dress and studying the fire–blackened helmet with the G on it.

Like I said, crazy. And as I looked around, all the junk and the way the guardians revered it flashed me back to something the original me had learned about back in ranger training — something called the Ranger Dilemma. One of my instructors had told us that at some point every Ranger had to decide how he or she wanted to do their job. Was she going to help others find their way into a better future, or was she going to help them somehow get back to the good old days of the past?

The Guardians were definitely on the “back to the past” side of things, that much was clear, and their example would make that philosophy seem like madness. But was it the “wanting to go back” part that was insane? Or was it the hoarding and worshipping part? Not everything in the past was bad. In fact, a lot of it would make life in the here and now a hell of a lot easier if we could get it up and running again. Maybe it was the inability of the Guardians to make any kind of value judgments about all the stuff from back in the day that was the problem. Electric toothbrush? Yes! The ancients made it so it had to be good! Atom bomb? Also yes! Crazed super computer that wanted to wipe out all humanity? Hell yes! The Guardians loved it all.

On the other hand, there were the folks that felt we should abandon the past completely and create an entirely original future. Also not a bad idea on its face, seeing as how the ancients in their wisdom had already destroyed the world once. It seemed to me that that must have been Finster’s original goal, but once again he’d taken it to a fanatical extreme. It had sent that idea spinning toward hell in a hand basket faster than you could say mutant abomination, and the crazy bastard had ended up turning himself into an android and poisoning everyone who worked for him in pursuit of his dream of a new beginning.

Maybe the problem was that leaders always seemed to start by picking a philosophy first and then trying to shape the world to fit it, instead of shaping their philosophy to fit the world they were living in. Or maybe the problem was that people followed the leaders who shouted their philosophies the loudest, and not the ones who were just trying to get along.

I popped out of my reverie to find that Hell Razor was answering Ace’s question.

“Some of this shit they find,” he was saying. “Some of it they make. Interpretations of their sacred texts.”

“Wow,” said Ace. “Those texts gotta be something else.”

“Save the “who are they?” stuff for later,” said Vargas. “Right now we gotta focus on “where are they?”“ He swept his hand around the big hall, indicating objectives. “Ace and Angie, watch that hallway to the left. Hell Razor, Thrasher, take the one to the right. Ghost and me and gonna make sure that elevator ain’t workin’. Move out.”

We all started forward together, but before we’d taken five steps we heard movement from the two side hallways .We faded into the ranks of strange statues that lined both walls — me with Angie and Ace on the left, Vargas with Thrasher and Hell Razor on the right.

The Guardians were back, and more organized this time. They stayed in the cover of the corridors and sprayed lead our way in a thundering crossfire. We hugged pavement as statues and busts exploded in showers of marble and plaster above us. Bronze shrapnel flew everywhere. Right over my head a statue of a man with one glove and the world’s tiniest nose flew to pieces and covered me in a fine white powder. Across the room a bust of a uniformed man with a narrow mustache and a droopy hairstyle toppled off its stand and shattered across Thrasher’s back.

We fired back from within the thicket of legs and pillars, trying to find targets in the darkness of the corridors. It was no good. The Guardians were dug in good and cutting down our cover one statue at a time.

“Be ready,” said Ace. “Got an idea.”

He picked up a fist sized piece of rubble and mimed pulling a ring from it, then hurled it like a hand grenade.

“Fire in the hole!” he shouted.

The rock bounced into the hallway to the left and terrified Guardians came running out and diving for the floor. We filled most of them full of lead before they landed, but one rolled and took refuge behind a life–sized bronze of a man in a coonskin cap. Angie put a bullet through the statue’s boots and blew a hole in the man’s face.

“Nice,” I said. “Any ideas for the other side?”

Hell Razor was way ahead of me. He fired the last LAW rocket from behind a statue of clown in an orange and red jumpsuit. Guardians came running out of that hallway as it screamed toward them, but they didn’t get a chance to dive. The blast caught them way before that, scattering their body parts all over the hall.

“Come on!” said Angie, surging up. “While they’re reeling!”

We pushed up after her and dodged through the statues toward the left–hand hallway as Hell Razor, Thrasher, and Vargas were doing the same on the right. Angie reached our hallway first and sprayed her AR around the corner without looking. We heard a scream and charged in. A handful of wounded Guardians were retreating around a corner ahead of us. We fired after them, then pulled up and looked back. Thrasher, Hell Razor and Vargas were covering the other hall just like we were.

“Alright, hold up,” called Vargas, then started toward the elevator. “Ghost. Cover me.”

I jogged to meet him and kept my eyes scanning in all directions while he looked over the railing into the hole from which the elevator rose.

“What’s down there?” I asked.

“All I can see is the shaft and the support beams goin’ down into the dark,” he said. “No lights. No nothin’.”

He moved to the elevator doors and stabbed the buttons beside them. Nothing happened — no far–off generator spinning up, no electrical fritzing; no pneumatic hiss.

“Maybe it’s busted,” I said.

Vargas smashed in the face plate of the buttons with the butt of his rifle, then reached in and tore wiring out through the hole with his gloved hand.

“It is now,” he said. “Alright, back with Ace and Angie. Let’s clear these sides.”

“Got it,” I said, and I started trotting back toward the left corridor.

He called after me. “And keep an eye out for the rest of those keys.”

The three of us entered the corridor and worked to the first corner. There were two doors along the way, both on the left wall. I kicked through the first with Ace and Angie covering me, then Ace did the kicking at the next door when there was nothing behind the first. The second was also empty.

We moved to the corner.

Angie popped her head around.

“Clear,” she said.

We stepped into the corridor and started toward a room with a double–wide doorway at the far end, checking side doors as we went. Halfway there and the double doors cracked open. I stitched them with fire, but not before a canvas satchel slipped out and slid toward us across the polished floor.

“Oh shi—”

Angie and Ace yanked me sideways into an office, and we all landed in a heap as the satchel charge exploded, blowing shrapnel past our door and filling the corridor with fire, dust, and the loudest noise I’d ever heard in my life. My ears were ringing like fire alarms. Shit, my whole body was ringing. I felt like a gong hit with a sledgehammer.

I was in a cocoon of shock and thought it would be really nice to just lie there and stop moving for a while, maybe think about life a little, but after a few seconds — minutes? hours? — I heard faint whispers behind the roaring.

“Yeah, yeah, we’re fine! Stay where you are.”

I opened my eyes to see Angie shouting into her walkie. She sounded a hundred miles away.

“I said it’s fine, Vargas! They missed us!”

I smiled up at her as she looked over at me, then closed my eyes again. She shook me, hard.

“Get up, Ghost! We gotta keep moving!”

I groaned, then staggered up and saw Ace leaning on the desk and tying a bandana around his forehead. I was going to make a smart–ass comment about his fashion sense, but then I saw he was doing it to keep a flap of torn flesh in place and decided to keep it to myself.

Angie squeezed his arm. “Okay, babe?”

He nodded. “Good thing it ain’t my face you fell in love with, huh?”

She gave a dirty chuckle and headed out into the hall. I grunted and followed, glad I was behind them and didn’t have to look either one of them in the eye. Too much information.

We leaped over the fire guttering in the corridor and plunged on into the room with the double doors. The blowback from the satchel charge had ripped the doors off their hinges and turned them into very pointy kindling. One of the Guardians who had been hiding behind writhed on the floor looking like an anguished porcupine. The other two were luckier. They only looked like pin–cushions. Angie killed porcupine with a shot to the head, and Ace and I put the other two out of their misery.

“Now,” said Angie, clambering over an upturned wooden desk. “What were they guarding?”

She tore the door off what looked like a walnut wardrobe built into the room’s back wall. Behind the wood was a titanium door with a combination lock. Her face fell.

“Crap.”

“I got it,” said Ace, and set his rifle aside as he squatted down next to the lock.

Angie looked back at me. “Ghost, go stand guard.”

Nothing like your girlfriend disappearing to make a man feel like a fifth wheel all over again. “Yeah, sure. Have fun.”

I stepped back into the corridor, slapping another clip into my assault rifle as I went, and crept past the office where we’d found shelter from the satchel charge, listening as best I could over the ringing in my ears. My nerves were still vibrating and I still felt like I was walking around with a couple of pillows wrapped around my head after that blast.

At the intersection I stopped and peered around the corner. Nobody in the corridor leading to the grand hall. I started down it, checking the doors as I went, making sure nobody had slipped in behind us. They were clear.

I crouched down just back from the end of the corridor and studied the darkness of the grand hall beyond, looking for movement. Aside from drifting eddies of dust, nothing. There were more Guardians somewhere, I was sure of it, but not here. Where were they? What were they waiting for? I keyed my walkie.

“Vargas. What are you seeing?”

A bit of static, then. “Found the mess hall. Cook tried to fry us. We settled his hash. Now we’re in some kind of museum. Lotta display cases, and—” There was a noise of shattering glass, then Vargas chuckled. “Hey. Whaddaya know. Another one of the keys.”

“Two down, two to go. Good work.”

“Tell it to Thrasher. He found it. Meet you back at the main hall when we’re done here.”

“Already there.”

I settled back against the wall of the corridor with my rifle at the ready, watching and trying not to let my imagination get the best of me. The Guardians would be coming again, but how would they be coming? Had they found more weapons and armor? More satchel charges? Shit, the way this place was crammed with junk they probably had an old tank in here somewhere.

There was a noise behind me — at least I thought there was. My hearing was still so messed up I was hearing random pings and pops from my brain cells dying. But this had seemed different. A sort of hissing, sliding–door kind of sound. Has Ace opened the safe? Were he and Angie coming back? It hadn’t quite sounded like that either.

I turned around and started back toward to corner. “Angie? Ace?”

No answer.

I checked the side rooms again as I went. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but—

But no, I wasn’t. There was a noise from the next room. A footstep. I padded to the door, rifle up, and listened. Nothing now, but there had been. I swung in, sweeping the room with eyes and gun. Desks, chairs, cabinets — no Guardians. But as I held still, a soft ticking noise came from the near corner, behind a desk. I sidestepped to it, keeping my gun on the rest of the room, then risked a glance over the desk. A crumpled piece of typing paper was slowly unwadding, like someone had just thrown it.

I whipped around. A slim silhouette was standing up in the far corner, holding a gun on me. It stepped out of the shadows.

Athalia.

There were tears in her eyes.

“Why didn’t you come away with me when I asked?”