Gravewalkers: Dying Time (27 page)

Critias checked his watch,
“You only have a few more hours, don’t fall asleep.”

“
You don’t have to tell
me,” Kenny guaranteed his long-lasting alertness. “Jim would have
my ass in a sling.”

Critias jogged on down
through the Tower basement. Another guard let him past the gate
there and then he ran on to Funland before he circled back to the
King’s Tower. After a hot shower in the lobby decontamination area,
Critias took the elevator up to Bob’s laboratory to find
Carmen.

Hatchet waited outside the
elevator door in his pajamas and he looked hackneyed, “Don’t you
two ever sleep?” His annoyance proved that Carmen had come that
way.

“
Sorry,” Critias offered
as apology. “I don’t know what made her come up here so I came to
find out.”

Hatchet waved for him to
follow then delivered him to Bob’s workroom where Carmen and Kevin
messed with his mechsuit on a table. They currently used airbrushes
to paint the exterior.

“
Come and tell me what you
think,” Carmen summoned him obviously pleased with herself over her
accomplishment. “Kevin gave it a complete maintenance check
too.”

They painted the suit with
a combination of flesh-tones and dirty browns in the patterns of
tattered clothing to appear as though he was some kind of brutish
hunter ghoul when he wore it. The helmet especially apart from the
visor had the appearance of a monstrously deformed face with
goggling eyes on the forehead and rows of teeth around the visor as
though from a shark.

Critias was aghast that
they had defiled his pristine and much beloved armor.

Carmen expected praise,
“What do you think?”

“
It’s positively hideous,”
he answered honestly. “The first guard I pass is going to shoot me
in the head. It was beautiful and now you made it look like a
filthy stink-wafting zombie.”

“
Perfect,” she nodded in
satisfaction of a job well done. “That’s exactly what I want the
infected to think. In combination with the kinetic response
upgrades Kevin installed, this is going to work like a
charm.”

“
You ruined my beautiful
suit,” he complained. “It was ceremonial, ideal in both regulation
and tradition. Now it looks ghastly.”

Carmen educated him, “It
has to look ghastly for walking among the infected without them
attacking you, silly. With the changes we’ve made, you will even
sort of move like one so long as you keep it slow. My costume is
not as nice as yours, but I’m a much better actress.”

He ruminated on what she
said to be sure it was as insane as he suspected, “You want to go
outside and walk around among the ghouls as though one of them and
you expect them to just ignore us like we’re part of the
family?”

“
Yep,” she answered with a
confident grin. Carmen reminded him, “Remember when we sat in the
truck by those sand hills and that one walked right up to the
window to sniff us? This is just the same thing, but we can move
around. What Bob said got me thinking, tactically I mean; if my
body and your mechsuit are biological cousins to ghouls, then we
just need to look like them too and they won’t know what hit them
until it’s too late.”

Critias had his doubts, “Or
on the other hand, they think we are ridiculous as this sounds and
tear us to shreds.”

Carmen quoted at him, “Why
are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” She added a flash of her
raised eyebrows, “When has Carmen ever led you astray, my
love?”

“
This disaster comes to
mind at the moment,” he indicated his armor. “Correct me if I am
wrong, but isn’t there some part of that story where the armor
painted in the lab today gets cast into the oven on the
morrow?”

She countered, “Houston
might very well be an oven since you mention it and we’re going
anyway.” Carmen made a presentational gesture toward the armor, “At
least like this, if we get caught in a tight pinch we will have
other options.”

He struggled to come up
with a good example of Carmen being wrong, but he couldn’t think of
anything worth mentioning, so he said, “You were wrong about your
hair sparking?”

“
Not for lack of trying,”
she laughed since it was true.

“
On the topic of your
neurotic malfunctions,” Kevin interrupted speaking to Carmen, “did
the new sleeping program function to your satisfaction?”

“
Perfectly,” she
congratulated him. “It’s every bit the intimate bonding experience
I was hoping for, so much better than playing possum. There are
moments when I almost forget I’m not human.”

“
What a tragic thing for
any android to say,” Kevin sighed.

She looked to Critias,
“Suit up so we can get some jumping practice in. It makes me feel
bad watching you hop around like an old granny.”

He swallowed his pride and
his retort to put on his mechsuit with her assistance. Once he was
ready, he checked his reflection in a mirror. As he approached, he
noticed his carriage was somewhat simian.

Kevin joined him with a
handheld instrument that he manipulated, “I have greatly improved
your mechsuit’s involuntary kinetic reflexes and gyroscopic
balance. You will also find that I have upgraded your visor’s
targeting display to calculate vault trajectories.”

Critias used eye movement
to control the visor interface displays. The upgrade Kevin had
installed informed him about how far or high he could successfully
leap and what his ideal flight-path should be. It prompted Critias
to ask, “This thing can really cross thirty meters?”

“
At your maximal sprinting
velocity that is approximately your uttermost dependable distance,”
Kevin confirmed. “The new reflex processor will require some time
to graduate, but I’m certain you will acknowledge a significant
melioration.”

“
You could jump thirty
meters if you had the balls to try,” Carmen translated. “You need
to practice a bit for the autopilot-thingy to get to know you
before it will blow your mind with how sweet it makes your
moves.”

He had newfound enthusiasm
for her designs, “Where can we test it out?”

“
Just follow me,” she
headed for the door.

Carmen led Critias to
Funland and then up the stairwells from there all the way to the
roof of the Customs House. Various guards who stood at gates or
walked patrols saw them on their way. All displayed the same silent
astonishment at the ghoulish character of his mechsuit.

They walked out onto the
roof in the thin light of the approaching dawn. Agriculture
enshrouded the flat surfaces of the roof, which included the tops
of elevated outbuildings and the narrow ledges that projected from
some of the upper floors visible down from the roof edge. With the
food crops occupying so much of the area, the roof was not suitable
for any sort of training practice. It was difficult just to walk
the narrow paths without them disturbing any of the
plants.

“
You picked a bad place to
play,” he told Carmen with some satisfaction that she had made at
least a small miscalculation. “I guess you weren’t expecting to
find a farm.”

She gave him an annoyed
glance, “I wanted to come to this roof. I never said I planned on
staying here.”

He went over to glance off
the edge, “We’re much too high for getting down from up
here.”

She pointed east at an
office building at least a third taller than the structure they
stood on, “Is that so?”

The nearby building that
she indicated may have once been valuable realestate, but its
current condition appeared as though it had been the scene of an
Outbreak survivor gun battle. Most of the exterior had been panes
of dark safety glass and at least half of those were missing or
shattered. Birds flew in and out of the openings, which promised
that the interior would be in equally tragic condition. The
building was also on the far side of a city street at least thirty
meters away.

“
You can’t be serious,” he
challenged even though he already knew that she meant
it.

Carmen lectured, “Lao Tzu
said that being deeply loved by someone gives you strength. He also
said that loving someone deeply gives you courage and I’m betting
he was right about that too.” Carmen did not wait to hear what he
thought; she just ran for the edge of the building as fast as she
could then leaped off.

Critias didn’t hesitate to
sprint after her. There was no way he could let her go off outside
the barrier alone with nothing but her pistol for protection. He
reached the edge in time to see her tuck into a ball then disappear
through a windowless opening in the office building a floor lower
than she started from. His visor display locked her entry point as
a target and told Critias he could make the jump too even while his
own brain screamed for him not to try. Critias didn’t pause to
reconsider. He just leaped off the edge of the roof to fly in
pursuit of Carmen over the street far below. The processor that
translated signals from his nervous system into commands for his
mechsuit went a step further as it gyroscopically controlled his
orientation. He went off the building in a spread-armed dive that
carried him across between the buildings and then through the same
window to land in a hands-first tumble that he rolled out of onto
his feet. The thrilling act totally transformed his confidence in
himself and his mechsuit.

Carmen stood in the room
with an outstretched one-arm stranglehold on an infected. What had
once been a nine-year-old girl dangled and kicked from her hand
like a snatched stray cat. As small as it was, the creature had no
chance to escape her. The thing could casually persist without
fresh oxygen, but Carmen’s grip that crushed its windpipe did
prevent it from uttering any feeding call to attract more of its
kind. Carmen gazed on Critias with pride over his accomplishment,
“I knew you had it in you,” then she whipped her arm to snap the
ghoul’s neck. Carmen put the limp body quietly to the
ground.

Critias checked his thermal
imager to give him some wall penetration and perhaps see other
ghouls before they detected him first. His quick glance about the
area revealed nothing but birds and rats. The room had once been
the office of some sort of paper-pusher. Rain and bird droppings
had laid the interior to waste.

She drew her teslaflux
pistol so that she could dial the projectile velocity down.
“Three-hundred-thirty meters-per-second should be silent,” she
said. “You go first and act as if you’re a zombie and I’ll follow
you to see if you can fool them at least from a
distance.”

Critias reset his pistol to
the same velocity so the rounds would not sonic boom. That sharp
crack would give them away if they shot any infected, which would
call in even more ghouls. He holstered his tuned sidearm, “Explain
to me what act like a zombie entails.”

She offered him her logic,
“According to Bob, the ghouls are using their human brains and
senses to find food. Just like every other creature, ghouls find
infected meat to be inedible. My whole body and your mechsuit are
not tasty to them, so the only thing that sets them off into
violence must be that they see that we’re not ghouls. The infected
never show fear and don’t have any interest in one another. If you
don’t talk, show fear, or move like a human, I think they’ll
believe you’re just another ghoul, at least until they get close
enough to see otherwise. If they don’t howl, no more ghouls will
come to investigate. It’s simple as that.”

He was skeptical but
willing to indulge her, “Where are we going?”

She grinned having fun, “We
can go down and search for something to take, or we can go up a
couple floors so we will be high enough to jump back.”

He asked non-rhetorically,
“You have any idea how many infected are prowling around in this
building?”

Carmen estimated, “Some are
creeping around here and there, chasing rats and birds, stealing
eggs from nests, things like that, not enough food for many of
them. On the other hand, if we go to the basement, we might get
lucky and find a nest with a watcher.”

He rolled his eyes at that,
“We’re not going to the basement with two pistols.” Critias did his
best shamble as he left the office to explore a bit. The kinetic
processor translated a ghoulish movement to his suit; such that
combined with the paintjob, he felt confident enough to test her
conjecture on passing himself off as one of them.

The reception area beyond
that room had open doors that led to similar offices. Carmen went
to a punctured fire extinguisher that still hung on the wall.
“Helicopter gunship,” she whispered after she examined the
bullet-hole that went clean through the pressure tank and then the
wall behind it.

The not too distant sound
of what seemed like a door that banged into a wall alerted them to
danger. Having guessed the source, Carmen pointed out to the main
hallway and then to the right. Critias lumbered out into the hall
then looked that way. At the far end of the hall, he saw a runner
ghoul on all fours that was just outside an open metal fire door
that probably led into a stairwell.

The creature ignored him as
it sniffed at the ground even after having glanced in his
direction. The first rays of dawn were on the rise outside, which
produced just enough ambient light in the dim hallway for them to
be able to see one another. Carmen and Critias had thumped hard on
the floor when they landed from their jumps. That noise had lured
the predator to come up to identify the source of the noise; no
doubt, it had hoped to find something edible.