Chapter 19: Behind Those Eyes

John clamped his hand over Sylvester’s mouth. The screams still came out muffled. He kept his fingers on Sylvester’s face while the wounded man thrashed his head from side to side, almost as if he wanted to announce their location.

“It’s okay, man.” Justice put a hand on Sylvester’s chest. He lifted his knee out of the pool of blood. “Uh, it’ll be okay.”

No bots showed themselves down the hall to the blast doors. As far as John could tell, came from behind, but that could change at any second.

“Heads up.” John nodded to Justice. “We’re exposed out here.”

Elroy undid Sylvester’s laces and pulled the boot off. The pressure made Sylvester whip his head around more. John gripped his teammate’s skull and held it firm. Though bloodied, the foot looked intact. Fresh gore flowed from the wound.

“Can you fix him up?” John asked Elroy.

“We’ll see.” Elroy pulled off his pack, reached in, and pulled out the medkit.

“Use your corpsman try.” Justice scanned the hallway in both directions. “He’ll recover twenty-five percent more hit points.”

After Elroy opened his eyes, he sprayed the wound and wrapped it. He closed them again. “Seems hit points and injuries are two different things. If you don’t stabilize injuries, you keep losing hit points.” Elroy opened them again. “Just like life. Anyway, it’s stable.”

“Good to know, I suppose.” John kept his hand on Sylvester’s mouth. The guy had stopped screaming, but John wasn’t about to take the chance.

“What do we do?” Elroy looked John in the eye.

Justice spoke into Elroy’s ear. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, he’ll pass the exercise as long as we down another bot.”

“Leave him?” Justice pulled away.

Sylvester whimpered. He reached up and pulled John’s hand away. “When they get me, I… uh… won’t even be able to,” Sylvester sucked in a breath, “hold my leg.”

“Some doctor you are.” Justice’s words had bite.

“He comes with us.” John put Sylvester’s arm over his shoulders and used his rifle to pull them both upright. “We got to get out of this hall.”

Sylvester sucked in ragged breaths through grit teeth. Justice, with his rifle still in his good hand, put his arm around Sylvester’s back. Elroy slipped the boot back on, and Sylvester let out a slew of what sounded like swear words.

John hit the open door button and pulled the other two through it. Sylvester tried his damnedest to stifle the grunts he let out with every hop. Elroy closed the door behind them.

The room had an open door on the far wall. Through the doorway, a faint band of horizontal light revealed a third, closed one. Elroy slipped by the others and took point.

“Shit!” Elroy fired at something behind the wall. “Two right here!”

The gunshot left a ringing in John’s ears. They leaned Sylvester against the wall with the open door. If any the bots came to the door, they’d have to turn to get him.

“Did you get one?” John slid Sylvester’s arm off his shoulders.

“Nah. They’re both operational.”

John slid up against the wall beside Elroy. “What are they doing?”

Elroy ducked his head out. “I think they’ve retreated behind the far wall.”

“I’ll take a page from their playbook and get around them.” With his rifle trained on the open door, John shuffled backward to the third door.

“There’s one more out there.” Justice kept his back to the wall.

Elroy kept his eyes on the open doorway. “At least one more.”

“Sylvester, you keep your gun on where we came in. Justice, you keep yours on this door. If anything comes through either of them, shoot.” John hunched his back and shrugged. “Friendly fire isn’t a thing, right?”

John hit the open door button. The Pithite, its weapon lowered, took a step back. It shook and almost dropped its weapon. It must not have expected the door to open. John turned on his heel and brought his rifle to bear. His finger twitched. The rifle slammed into his shoulder, and the bullet blew the bot’s knee apart. Its leg bent the wrong way.

Justice fired, and the thing’s weapon exploded in a mess of parts. Elroy shot, too. It seemed the other two bots used the distraction to push forward. John couldn’t worry about them. The bot raised up on one elbow. John put the barrel between its eyes. The Pithite glanced up and made eye contact with its pink irises. He pulled the trigger, and his head whipped back. The shattered innards of its skull pelted the wall behind.

My first kill.

He didn’t know how he would feel. That thing had a… a something behind those eyes. Whatever people had that robots didn’t, that Pithite almost looked like it possessed it. Lucky for John, a bot took the bullet, not a person.

“You—” John’s heart raced. The adrenaline in his bloodstream made his words come out jittery. “You keep them busy there.”

Elroy barked an “okay.”

John closed the door behind him. He moved to the far doorway and peeked out. The next room had four doors, one in each wall. The layout of the entire place looked random. None of the rooms like looked like they had any other purpose other than a place for their combat exercise to play out.

Sweat ran down John’s eyebrow and into his eye. He squeezed the eye shut, and info bubble popped up from his gun in the WarFace.

28.01/30

FA-05

◆ Type: semi-automatic rifle

◆ Ammo: standard

The second decimal place of the ammo count at the top of the bubble crawled up to “28.02.” The nanobots would take hours to refill an empty magazine. Before John forgot again, he went into the carousel, found the invader try, and selected it.

The sound of another gunshot penetrated the closed door behind.

Quieter now, he entered the room and slipped along the wall. He peaked into the next room where Elroy had the bots pinned down. A light on the wall shined into the next room, but no bots. A surge of metallic birdsong came from the next room.

Is that their language?

John crept along the wall. A second burst of tinny chirps, higher in tone, came out of the room. Maybe the bots had different voices, like actual people. The faint sound of machinery in motion met John’s ears. The bots made their move.

John stepped into the light. Both of the bots faced away, toward Elroy and the others in the room. The farthest one, the one closest to the door, had its knees bent and weapon ready. The second one sidestepped into the middle of the room. Still crouched, it stood taller than the other, ready to fire over its partner’s head. John’s shadow moved along the wall. The far one spun.

John shot the back of the head of the closest one. The top leaped off in a shower of sparks. It fell to the side, while the farthest one collapsed against the wall. Its limbs trembled, and its weapon fell from its limp hand. A hole had appeared where its eye used to be. He got them both with one shot. Couldn’t have gone better if he planned it.

“That you?” Elroy called from the other room.

“Yeah.” John slinked past the corpses with an eye on them lest they proved to be less dead than they appeared. He entered the room.

Elroy pointed his rifle at the ceiling and sighed. “I half expected you to be one of those things like it was some trick with your voice.”

“We should get out of here.” An acid taste invaded John’s mouth. His legs shook, and his fingers twitched on the rifle’s grip.

“Two more kills, and we get a Pass B.” Elroy glanced past John into the room behind. “I still haven’t gotten one yet.”

Justice still had his rifle balanced on his knee and trained on his closed door. Sylvester’s skin looked gray in the dim light. He ground his teeth in pain.

John shook his head. “No way. We camp out in this room back here. It’s well lit and has only—”

The door to the hallway opened. The Pithite had its weapon ready. It emitted a sine wave.

All at once, John’s muscles gave out, and he hit the ground.