Chapter Forty-Nine

Marek

Marek wakes up on the floor in the complete darkness. His ears are ringing and the back of his head hurts like all hell. He starts fumbling around on all fours, trying to find his backpack. The last thing he remembers is being thrown into his bunk room by the others and that’s about it. The air is thick with some bad tasting dust, but it’s at least not smoke.

After bumping his head on the edge of the bunk frame, he pulls himself up onto his feet and turns himself around towards the door. Ever so slowly, he shuffles across the small room while reaching out in front of himself. When he finds his pack on the floor in the corner, he crouches down and grabs it.

With his bearing set straight, he steps backward and sits down on the bottom bunk to go through his things. He unclips the small flashlight from the front pocket webbing and turns it on. It doesn’t do all that much good in all the dust though. It is like trying to see through murky water. Having lived in the small quarters long enough, he could probably find his way around just as easily without it anyhow.

The first thing he figures he has to do is to check on the woman they brought in. He feels so terrible for what Brent did to her, and he has to make it right. From the looks of it, his time here is over anyway. His loyalty to these assholes is over and gone.

In the next room, he finds Valerie slumped forward in her chair, barely awake. The front of her shirt is torn open and there’s dried blood all the way down her chest. If it weren’t for her hands being tied together to the back of the chair, she’d be face down on the floor. He cuts the cable tie around her wrists with his pocket knife and sits her upright to look her in the face. After shaking her some, he gets her to wake up a little more. She doesn’t say anything to him, and only sniffles. “Valerie, it’s over, I’m getting you out of here, ok, now get up.”

Taking one of her arms, he drapes it over the back of his neck and stands her up. She can barely hold up her own weight, but he keeps her on her feet. It takes a minute before she’s aware enough to walk along with him out of the room. Together, they hobble down the hall towards the exit. When they come across fleshy chunks of bone on the floor, he has to kick them out of the way so she doesn’t carelessly step on them. They barely make it through the doorway without slipping on all the blood, and the smell of it is incredibly heavy in the air.

In the main room, Marek shines his light around to see if anyone else is still alive. He thought he heard voices a moment ago. He can hear someone moving around between him and the outside door, but he can’t see them with his light yet. Out front of him, silhouette gets up off the floor and holds a hand out to block their eyes from the beam of light. When he gets close enough, he sees that it’s not a human hand though. It’s black and looks almost like clear-coated carbon fiber. He staggers back in panic, tripping over Valerie. Before he goes down, the hand reaches for him and snatches the front of his heavy jacket.

While he’s off-balance and still trying to hold Valerie up, the tip of a huge knife slowly slips through the darkness towards him. As if it were a shark in the water, he helplessly watches it coming for him. Luckily, it stops just before sinking into his face.

All he can manage to get out is a meek “No, please don’t.”

Valerie is finally standing on her own and tries to shirk him off of her. She can hardly speak over a mumble with her busted lips, but she manages through it. “It’s me, Arma.” She reaches out and grabs onto the arm that’s holding the knife. She holds onto it as if it were a railing leading to the figure in the darkness. It hardly wavers under her weight. “Don’t kill this one, he doesn’t deserve it.”

With Valerie safe in her arms, Arma kicks at Aaron who’s still on the floor. “Get up already, it’s Valerie.”

Aaron scrambles to his feet and grabs hold of Valerie, shoving Marek to the side. When she starts to cough from the dust, blood begins to trickle from her mouth again. He swiftly picks her up in his arms, rushes her outside, and kneels on the sidewalk with her. Her face is beaten and bloody enough that he can hardly recognize her. Her upper lip is split almost up to her nose and most of one side of her face is purple and red.

The overwhelming flood of emotion taking him over this time is not of anger anymore. He holds her up closer to him, touching his head to hers, and tells her softly that he loves her. She reaches up, wraps her hand around the back of his neck, and does her best to smile. With her eyes closed, she turns her head to the side and rests the unbruised side of her face against his shoulder.

“You’re all warm again.”

Down in the main room, Arma reaches around on the ground and finds the woman that she was protecting. When she paws at her in the darkness, she can tell it’s her by the way she groans in pain. She picks her up off the ground and carries her outside to where Aaron and Valerie are. The man with the flashlight discovers what she’s doing and follows her up the stairs.

“I didn’t hurt her, I swear. The other guys did that. I tried to stop them.”

“That’s fine, rat, and I’m not gonna kill you for it, but that’s about it.” She looks back at him in annoyance when he continues to hover.

“She’s my friend, please don’t kill her. She didn’t have anything to do with this. C’mon, she’s hurt!”

“If you don’t leave me alone rat, I will hit you over the head!” She pauses outside and slightly turns towards him with a scowl, but it only gets him to back off out of arms reach.

He shines his light at her again and then down to the blood dripping down off the tip of her elbow. “She’s bleeding!”

When the man reaches out for the woman again, Arma raises her long leg up high high and throws him to the ground with her foot. “You keep your grubby hands off her!”

On his hands and knees, Marek continues pleading with her. “Please, she’s my friend! She’s hurt!”

She gently lays the woman on the ground alongside Valerie and starts looking her over. When the man crawls over to her again, she decides to let the persistent little jerk check her out. He doesn’t seem all that dangerous. She has no idea how to help an injured person herself and he’s got her all worried now.

Marek rolls Alexis over onto her side and pulls up the back of her shirt. There are numerous small dark wounds on her back that are slowly weeping blood. Her grey shirt is completely saturated red and it looks like she’s been hit by some little bits of concrete and lead pellets. It doesn’t look very serious, but it doesn’t look great either. It’s not his only worry though, she’s in bad shape from the fight and explosion too. She must’ve been behind something when the bomb went off, or she wouldn’t have made it at all.

When the robot woman lays Alexis back down, she weakly rolls her head towards him and peers up at his face for a moment. She weakly blinks her eyes a couple of times and then makes a small tired smile. She can’t see his face very well in the dark, but she can recognize his voice.

“Marek, you’re not dead?”

The entire industrial complex is dark now, inside and out. With the flux generator having gone off so close to the central power system of the plant, the whole place has been taken down by the microwave surge. Neither Aaron nor Arma’s bodies have any old semiconductor technology in them, so they were mostly unaffected.

In the distance, they hear sirens approaching and then the rumble of Mikel’s truck. His tires are howling around every turn. Suddenly, everything around them is flooded in his bright off-road lights after he jumps the curb and barrels in between the buildings towards them. He screeches to a stop, barely missing them.

“They’re hot on our asses! Load up, now! We gotta go!” He’s banging on the outside of his door, rousing them up.

When Aaron picks Valerie up, Arma does the same with Alexis. She doesn’t quite know what to do with her though. The woman is not one of them. “What do I do with her? Are we still protecting her?”

As Aaron sets Valerie in the back seat of the truck, she grabs hold of his arm. “Don’t leave her here, not with them. She wouldn’t be safe.”

When he looks out and around himself, he can see that it’s not just the police that are coming, but dozens of people are pouring in from the darkness. The rats have found them and they’re amassing in huge numbers this time.

“Put her in here, Arma, We’re taking her with us. Go!” As soon as everyone is loaded up, he slams the cab door shut.

Mikel is in full freak-out mode and rats are now charging at them. Bottles and small things are already bouncing off his truck, and Aaron is still outside. “What the fuck are you doing man! We gotta go!”

“Runner is still out there. I’ve gotta go get ‘im!”

Marek isn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Everything he had going for himself just went up in smoke and the only person he cares about is being hauled off by the robots that just killed everyone. The last thing he wants is to answer for everything that’s happened. He knows Tey was still laid up in one of the back rooms and would’ve heard everything. All that he can think to do is stay by Alexis’s side. When he leaps into the back of the truck, the biggest robot, Aaron, grabs him by the back of his jacket and throws him to the ground with more than enough force to rattle him.

“I don’t fucking think so!”

Marek rolls onto his side in pain, trying to rake in a breath. “Don’t leave me here, man!”

“This is your home, dumbshit! You’re not coming with us! Are you fuckin’ kidding me!” While keeping his eyes on Marek, Aaron hits his hand on the back quarter panel of the truck signaling for Mikel to floor it. “You’ve got Valerie, now get outta here!”

The truck leaves tire tracks and a cloud of smoke behind while Aaron takes off in a dead run for where he left runner. With the bomb having gone off indoors, he can only pray that Runner might be ok. When he finds it on the far end of the block, where he left it under the metal grate stairwell, its controller lights are still on.

“Oh thank god. Come here, Runner. Hurry now!”

He jumps onto Runner and grabs the controls just back of its shoulders. With a mob flooding onto the steel mill campus and an entire line of emergency vehicles parading in from the other side, he picks a line down the road and launches Runner into a dead run. Sparks fly off Runner's claws as it careens down the pavement, dodging people in the dim moonlight.

When a pair of police cruisers spot him, he takes turns down numerous alleys and climbs over impassable obstacles everywhere he can. They lose track of him so badly that their infrared drones get sent in the completely wrong direction.

With his new body and faster mind, he’s able to push Runner faster than he would’ve ever been able to before. Even when taking such crazy routes back home, he’s able to get there in a matter of minutes. When he reaches the apartment, he doesn’t stop to key in, but leaps over the entire parking barricade. Mikel’s truck is still parked in front of the elevators and everyone is climbing out. Mikel stays with the truck while the others rush inside. No one has plans on staying, but there are things they have to get while they can.

There’s no point in them trying to be discreet anymore. Valerie and Marco’s DNA is going to be found all over the rat’s hideout and a blind person would probably be able to find their way to the apartment by all the claw marks Runner left in the pavement. Within hours, there’ll be a swat team at their doors, and everyone will be looking for them.

They all take the elevator up to the apartment and quickly gather what they need. Valerie wakes Clarice up off of the couch and has her pack clothes while she gathers Five and Arma’s equipment. They won’t have many options for running or hiding anymore. They can’t completely disappear though. Three of them are robots, and for now, their lives are still tethered to Werker.

Arma doesn’t grab anything for herself other than the leather sheath for her knife and a big spare battery that Valerie handed her. The two things are all she has to her name. She stands guard at the front door while everyone else packs.

Five is in the same situation as Arma and has no possessions of her own. The only thing she finds herself caring about is Aaron’s painting. By the sound of it, she figures they’ll never be able to come back home again. It’s the one thing she won’t leave behind. In the same sentiment, Aaron grabs only his backpack and stands around, wondering if there’s really anything left of his old life to even take. He can’t even pack any of his clothes because they’re too small now.

When anger starts to trickle back in, he notices his old computer on the desk by the window. It’s all he has that represents his old self, what he was afraid of, what he wished he had, and what he’d loved. He rips the shroud off of the tower, unplugs the hard drive, and peels it right out of the frame. He stuffs it in his bag and marches into his bedroom.

There is one other thing he remembers. It’s silly, but it’s still his, and he‘ll be damned if the cops get it. The others look at him a little warily as he shoves his alarm clock into the pack like a nutjob. With the look he has on his face, none of them are about to say anything about it either.

The sun is just beginning to rise when they all leave the apartment. They take all three of the vehicles, as well as Runner. Mikel takes Arma and Alexis in his truck, along with Runner in the back. Five drives Valerie’s truck with Aaron in the passenger seat, and Clarice takes Valerie in her car.

Though she’s pretty beat up, she has the determination to make sure they’ll be set as best as they can be for the immediate term. No matter what happens, she absolutely can’t have Five, Arma, nor Aaron ever being discovered by the public. That kind of attention would ruin things even more than they already are for sure. She still plans to be on good terms with Werker and continuing the project. They can’t grieve her for what happened, it was going to one way or another, sooner or later. They were never meant to live in the dark like the rats.

On their way to Mikel’s home, she insists that they stop by the Werker plant and gather as many supplies as they can. They can’t hide there, so they’ll just have to get by on what they can. Mikel swipes his card in and takes Aaron to the scanning lab where Marco and Valerie would normally spend most of their time.

He has Aaron follow him with a flat-cart while he piles whatever he can grab onto it. They grab three more spare batteries, two large external battery backpacks, and charging cords. Gabriel will know to hide all of the memory drives. They can’t fully trust him, but they absolutely can’t afford to be caught with them while on the run.

It’s all they have time to gather before wearing out their welcome. The guard staff has noticed them. Though they are harmless, they can still cause problems. They have the prudence to not call the authorities on Valerie, but they do warn her that her access will be discontinued until she is cleared by management.

When they get on the road again, Mikel tries to make small talk with Arma, to keep calm.

“You know, the irony in all of this is just great. I used to side with the rats, and hate you damn robots, but now it’s all backward. I’m fighting the rats alongside the robots.”

Arma is still in a good mood after all the action. She smirks when he looks at her in the rearview mirror. “Yeah, and you know what’s funny? It’s probably not gonna stop there either. You’re probably gonna end up as a robot too, and we’ll all be living like the rats!”

That drops his mood right back down to zero, so he just puts both hands on the wheel and keeps his eyes on the road.

After Marek sneaks away, he figures he is going to have to face what’s happened one way or another, but his best chance is going to be alongside Migo. This whole thing was supposed to his responsibility, and when he gets to the campfire under the bridge, there’s a much larger crowd gathered around than usual. Someone is on the pedestal in the middle, but he can’t hear what is going on over everyone else. After he shoves his way through to get to the fire, he finds that Migo is the one speaking. He’s going on about something rather heatedly. He seems to have had a run-in with the same robots as well.

“Many of you saw them! They drug me away, tied me up, beat me senseless, and told me how they were going to kill all of us! Some of us have already died trying to stop them.”

He speaks up, making sure Migo can hear him over the crowd. “A whole lot more of us died when they came for us.” That gets his attention. “How did they find us? We were so well hidden. They knew right where we were!” It’s a rhetorical question between the two of them. He knows damn well how they found his hideout.

“Marek! You are alive! Did Alexis find you? Is she ok? Everyone, this is Marek, he and his team are the ones who are fighting these things.”

He doesn’t call Migo out, or tell everyone what happened to her, but he does pull him down off of the pedestal and takes his place. He means to tell everyone the truth.

“A great many of us have died tonight.” He gathers his thoughts on what he should and should not say. In a bit quieter of a voice than Migo’s ranting, he continues. “The same robots that attacked here earlier, moved on to my camp and slaughtered almost all of us. They left eleven men dead in their wake. My entire group is dead, and our camp has been destroyed.”

Someone in the crowd shouts out and raises a pipe he has into the air. “Murderers!”

“I don’t know what they are, but they only came for us because…”

Before he can get to the part where they had come to rescue their friends that he had abducted, the entire crowd erupts into screaming and yelling. He can’t get them to stop and listen again. He was going to try telling them they should never have resorted to kidnap, rape, and murder, but it is too late.

In the uproar, he’s knocked off the short pedestal and nearly trampled. He grabs hold of Migo and tries to tell him what he was trying to say to everyone else. Migo just shakes his head side to side, unable to hear him. He shouts even louder. “They have Alexis!” That gets his attention. The two of them claw their way out of the throng of people and stop out where he can describe the rest of the massacre to him in detail.

“All they wanted was to get their friends back, the ones we took. How did they find us? Did you tell them, huh, did you do that!”

“They already tore us apart, right here, and there was nothing we could do. They weren’t going to stop. The only thing I could do was send them to you guys, you had the bomb!”

“Yeah, well one of the dumb fuckers set the thing off inside! Everyone’s dead, and it didn’t do shit to the robots anyway!”

“No! What did they do to my girl! Oh no, Marek, no.”

“She’s fine. She’s hurt, but she’s gonna be ok. I don’t know why, but they took her with them, they were protecting her. They wouldn’t leave her with me. The big man, the one that was a robot, but looked really human, he told the black one to protect Alexis and to keep her safe! I heard it with my own two ears, and that’s what she did. She carried her away in her own two arms.”

“What the hell is going on here, Marek, you talked to them?”

“They aren’t just robots Migo, they’re something else. They act like people, they have compassion, care for one another, and they talk like us. They let me live when the woman we tortured vouched for me, even after what we did.” He looks down and then back up at Migo. “They tried to rape her, and I stopped them.”

“We need to find Alexis before all this shit gets even worse. Let’s get outta here before these crazies decide to hold us as witnesses or something.”

The two of them slink off into the darkness while the crowd starts circling and chanting “burn ‘em!” While they walk, Marek goes over all of the details of what happened with Migo. He tells him how the robots were immune to the EMP, where they came from, their names, and their obvious dedication to one another. By the way the one named Aaron was yelling for Valerie, she must have been very important to him. He tries to describe to him just how distraught he sounded. It was like he would have torn the entire place down with his bare hands looking for her.