I flipped my knife around so the blade lay back against my left forearm, where he couldn’t see it or grab for it. He roared in swinging. There was no blocking a punch like that, and if I’d ducked it, the rest of him was right behind it, all four hundred pounds of him. I would have been road kill. Instead I spun to my right, outside his roundhouse, and stuck my knife out as he went past. Opened up his leathers like paper and left the rags underneath dripping red.
I stopped and turned, thinking I had all the time in the world, but he was faster than I expected. Before I was halfway around, he had me up off the ground with his arms pinning my elbows to my sides and his biceps tightening for a bear hug. I could hear my bones creaking, and suddenly breathing was no longer and in–out–in–out process. There was no in. There was only out.
I twisted my knife around and felt it cutting through more leather, but without leverage I was never going to reach anything vital.
“You fucking musk–ox!” I growled. “I didn’t come back from the dead to die like this!”
He just laughed.
And then he stopped laughing and started toppling forward.
I rolled free as his arms went loose, and just managed to get clear as he crashed to the ground, stone dead.
That was a murder mystery I didn’t have time to ponder at that moment. I rolled up, knife out, back to the wall, knowing there was one more I had to deal with.
But there wasn’t.
The last guy lay on his back, his neck bent at an angle that made me queasy to look at. I glanced back at the musk–ox. Strangely, he had died in exactly the same way.
I raised my eyes. The woman who had screamed stood in a picture–perfect fighting stance, fists cocked, and fire in her monitor–blue eyes. I couldn’t see much of her beneath the grey robe she wore, but her face was lean and her expression defiant. There were two more dead mutants behind her.
I lowered the knife a little and raised the other hand, showing her it was empty. “Did you really punch those guys hard enough to break their—?”
“Kick.” She said. “I kicked them. Steel–toed boots.”
I shook my head. “And here I thought you were in trouble.”
“They surprised me.”
“I bet you surprised them too. Damn.” I edged back. She hadn’t relaxed her stance. “Uh, are we cool?”
She gave me a quick once over — checking for extra fingers maybe? — then dropped her fists and stood, nodding. “We’re cool. Sorry. Can’t be too careful.”
I dropped to a knee and began to strip weapons and satchels off the mutants, but I still kept an eye on her. Cool or not, she was obviously lethal, and I didn’t know what she was doing in a place most people didn’t even know existed. Time to use some subtlety and find out.
“So,” I said, upending a dusty courier bag and pawing through the contents. “Why are you here?”
She shrugged and joined me in looting the dead. “Same reason as you, probably. Hunting for relics to help combat the robot menace. My order learned of this location and sent me to scout it out.”
A plug fit into a socket in my brain. A light came on. Flickering, but there. Was that my mission? “Robot… Menace… Yeah. Death machines, coming out of the desert. A never–ending army.”
“That’s the one.”
I glanced up at her, took another look at her duds. “You’re a novice with the Servants of the Mushroom Cloud, right?”
“Right. From Vegas.” She pried the bayonet–shotgun from the little guy’s hands and cracked it. No shells. No wonder he hadn’t fired. “Things are pretty bad there. Robots in the sewers. More surrounding the walls. The Church is doing what we can to help out.”
“And so you just happened to find this place the same time I did.”
“Actually, I probably wouldn’t have found it at all except I came across a trail of blood and limping boot prints. I tracked it back to here, hoping to help.”
I nodded toward the dead mutants. “Guess they tracked it too.”
“Guess so,” she said. “But what about you? I only saw one set of recent boot prints going into this place, and you’re not limping or bleeding.”
“I, uh…” I looked away. I hardly wanted to admit to myself that I was a clone, let alone tell anyone else. “I heal fast.”
She gave me a long look at that, then extended a hand. “Remarkably so, it seems. Athalia. Sister Athalia.”
I shook, but when I opened my mouth, nothing came out.
“You aren’t afraid of telling me your name, are you, Mr. “I didn’t come back from the dead to die like this?”“
So she’d heard that. Great.
She smiled. “I could always call you Ghost, I guess.”
“I prefer Revenant. It’s a better fit.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
I looked at what I had pulled off the corpses. A few shells for the shotgun, a nine millimeter pistol with a couple of clips, three dull knives and, surprisingly, a half–dozen red sticks of TNT. That last discovery caused me to take another look at the room. Three of the walls were made of a translucent crystal, and beyond the southern panel lurked a handful of silhouettes that appeared to be full suits of some kind of high–tech armor. Whatever it was, it was sure to beat the shit out of the flea–infested leathers the mutants had been wearing.
“I don’t know if that will work,” said Athalia as I hefted the dynamite. “The Church told me that according to their scouts the only way to get through that glass is with a security card. Maybe we should see if we can find one.”
Another plug and socket. I started slapping the pockets of the jacket and pants I had taken off the previous me. “I… I have one, I think. Here it… no, that’s a map. Wait. Here!”
I dug out the card and we spent a minute searching the room for the slot we were supposed to stick it in. Athalia found it in the molding that framed the glass panel. Not a slot — just a black plastic box with the icon of a card on it. I placed the card on the box. A red light came on. Nothing happened.
Well, almost nothing. Another light came on in my head too.
“Wait. I’ve done this before. It didn’t work that time either. In the end we found a note in a desk — it said the key cards that opened this door were actually in some place called Project Darwin.”
Athalia frowned. “Why would the key for a door in this facility be in a different facility?”
“That was in the note too,” I said. “The guy with the key went to Darwin for some emergency and didn’t make it back before the bombs fell.”
She sighed and turned towards the door. “Well, that’s that then. I guess we’re going to Project Darwin — wherever that is.”
“It’s right here on this map, but not yet. We haven’t tried Plan A yet.”
She raised an eyebrow. “And what’s Plan A?”
I waggled the dynamite at her and grinned.
Plan A went over like a wet fart. Athalia had been right. Blowing the dynamite didn’t do anything to that glass wall except change its description from frosted to smoked. But the plan did reveal something else. A couple things, actually.
At my insistence we had dragged the mutants out of the room, not because I was worried about damaging their already damaged corpses, but because cleaning a thin, red paste off all that lovely armor wasn’t my idea of a good time. And while we were looking for a place to dump them, Athalia went right when I told her to go left and ended up looking down at my body — my former body, that is.
She gave him the once over twice, then slid a look over at me. “Twin brother?”
“Something like that.”