A man rushed out of an unmarked building. Firing. Firing. Firing. Fast. Accurate. At me. Handgun. Big caliber. My damaged, bullet-riddled cage shattered and fell inward on me. I raised the scraper-pusher to protect myself. But not before I recognized the man. He had been in the roadhouse, eating a meal with his wannabee biker buddy and two chicks. I had thought they were just lookie-loos. They had been looking all right. And they had seen me. And Alex.
I lowered the blade and gunned the dozer. Spy leapt to the man’s back. Pounce wrapped the shooter’s leg in its four legs and bit down behind his knee. An unnamed cat grabbed his shoe on the other foot and the man went down.
I dropped the blade. I ran over him. Slowly.
Nobody comes into my roadhouse and plans to do evil to one of mine. There were Rules.
Pounce, the unnamed cat, and Spy leaped into my busted cage. “Thanks,” I yelled over the roar.
I was out of fuel and the big Caterpillar was sputtering when I rested the pusher blade on the ground and turned it off. There was blood on the blade and on the track treads.Good.
Laughing in that giddy, not-quite-sane way I had begun to adopt in battle, I looked around at the destruction I had wrought. The cage was bullet riddled, and my suit had taken a few rounds here and there, but I was uninjured. I unlocked my helmet and it settled into my collar groove. I patted the dozer. “You are my new best friend,” I said to it. “If I can find the fuel, you’re coming home with me.”
I checked my chrono. Twenty minutes was a really long time in terms of human-on-human battles. Short bursts of violence were nothing like the wartime battles against mama-bots, Perker Crawler Slow-bots, and other PRC Warbots. Each of those machines had their own power plants and those battles had gone on for hours, sometimes for days, as the bots destroyed entire cities and killed tens of thousands of civilians who were trying to escape. Fortunately for the Dark Rider traitors, I wasn’t a bot made by the Peoples Republic, and didn’t have unlimited power. I was just a happy dozer operator set free to destroy. And now out of fuel.
* * *
No one came to help the Dark Riders—who turned out to be called Dragon Fist—which sounded stupid, like something out of a prewar Kung fu film—because the comms were still mysteriously out. My people had all the time in the world.
Jagger set up our HQ in the big dozer building and began to question the riders. He started with having them disrobe, taking pics of them naked for later identification with close up pics of the red dragon tattoos all of them wore. Then he put onhis brass knuckles and began beating the truth out of people. I didn’t stay to watch.
Instead, I rounded up all the people who were infected with Clarice Warhammer’s nanos and did my own interrogation. I touched all the thralls I found with my bare hands, to begin a second transition and make them mine. Part mine. Because I didn’t complete the process. I just made them sick and unable to think, the way Warhammer had done to Evelyn and the people the queen didn’t like but wanted to use. When I had rescued her, Evelyn, half transitioned, hadn’t been able to heal properly, couldn’t think, couldn’t do much of anything but sit and stare. That’s what I wanted for the Dark Riders.
Using the same minimal technique Warhammer had used on Evelyn would leave them disinterested, unmotivated, lethargic, and possibly half-braindead. Maybe I should have had compassion or something. But it was impossible to feel compassion for people who wanted to run the world. People who knew about Alex. And me. And Cupcake. And . . .
Yeah. No mercy.
Before I was done infecting them, I got all the names of their nest in every branch of Gov. and the military. There were twenty-four more traitors, all of them big names and big brass. If they survived this vid going public, I’d hunt them down later. For now, I had done enough of my own version of evil.
It wasn’t a fair or good fate for them. It was prettybloody damnhorrible. But someone somewhere was using thralls as warriors, and that couldn’t happen. If I ever found these men again and thought I could fix them, I would, but for now, they had to be useless. So, I made them useless. It made me sick to my stomach. I was breaking all my rules. But they couldn’t go free and help build a new nest and take over the world. And that would happen if they weren’t killed or disabled.
When they were all sick, I went and found the women the men had abused. Physically, most were in good shape. Mentally, they were pretty traumatized. I got them into medbays and hooked up with Berger chip counselors until something better could be offered. If it was offered. These days women mostly suffered in silence or formed gangs and hunted down their abusers for the fun of it. I had no idea which way these would go.
Then I got out of the armor and the bloody—literally—catheter wand that had rubbed my privates raw. I put on my own clothes and ate a meal and drank a couple of halfway decent beers before falling dead asleep in an abandoned bed in the commander’s quarters. When I woke, I had an entire clowder of cats in bed with me. The combined purrs were like the vibration of driving the dozer. Nice. Real nice.
* * *
Twelve hours after we stormed the HQ, the Sikorsky lifted off, piloted by Evelyn while Bengal and Jagger played five card stud in back, to see who would own the helo now that we were done with it. I didn’t want it. Too much maintenance.
Instead, I pulled onto the road, driving a new tractor trailer loaded with 48,361 kilograms worth of my new Caterpillar bulldozer and its mighty pusher blade, hidden under every auto-camo ghillie-tech tarp in the compound. Behind me traveled a tanker truck halfway full of diesel. A warbot suit sat on top of the tanker extending its camo across it to look as if the truck was hauling a pile of dirt. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, but it would do for drones or satellites.
The road from the waterpark led to the nearest ford, a low-water crossing over the Catawba river. This one was reinforced with broken asphalt and chunks of concrete and, a few times, I thought I might puncture a tire, but I made it.
As we climbed out of the Catawba River gulch onto what had once been interstate highway, I took the shard from Spy’s harness and hid it again in the tin. Comms came on strong, people talking to and over each like maniacs. After so long with silence, the cacophony was painful and I turned my comms off, tuning into a news channel. Waiting.
Two hours later, the Sisters hit the airwaves with everything: video, pics, uniforms, conversations I hadn’t heard because of the shards, an information overload that shattered what was left of the nets. The Sisters of the Cross named names, becoming viral video stars within minutes.
The Dark Riders—or Dragon Fist—were allied with the CRP and the vice president of the US. They were planning a major coup to disrupt and take over what was left of the Gov. and military. They had people everywhere, in every branch of the government and the military.
As the vids went viral, there were riots, fires, hangings in public streets. The people I had thought I would need to take down were, instead, hunted by the citizenry.
I watched as long I could stomach it and then stopped.
I was going home to the roadhouse, to my people. That was all that mattered. That and the rep I had added to. I’d need a new badge for my kutte. Cupcake had designed one for the Battle of Warhammer’s Nest, and it was due in the mail any day now. I was sure she’d come up with something for the Battle of the Waterpark, or the Battle of the Dragon Fist, or whatever people would end up calling it.
* * *
The roadhouse never looked so good, as my new tractor trailer and dozer rolled into it. Cupcake, Amos, and Jolene were out front, the humans wearing roadhouse T-shirts in the seventydegree heat, Jolene wearing some kind of sparkly sequined dress and a black wig. They took over the deliveries and got the payloads into the back of the junkyard, sprayed down with camo paint to look like the bedrock under them, the trucks parked.
