“It? I killed you.”
“Yes… me as well, but also… it. Now we can talk… privately.”
“Huh? What do you mean? What it are we talking about?”
“Co… chise…” It was having a hard time talking now. “It is… eliminating all… threats. Sent its assassin to… kill me. Now I’m… dead.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “We killed you. The Desert Rangers. And we’re nobody’s assassins.”
Its huge hand lifted up and opened, revealing a plastic card with a black stripe in its palm — the sec pass. “It… knows you are… coming. Without… armor, it will destroy you. Use it… well. Prepare… your… selffff….”
The head slumped back and the hand dropped. The mega–Finster was dead.
I scooped up the sec pass and kissed it. “Fucking finally!”
There was a door behind the leviathan’s body. I stepped through it…
…and was suddenly falling down a bottomless pit.
“Godddddammmmmm ittttttttt….!”
– Chapter Eleven –
“Fuck!”
“What’s happening to him?”
“Pull him outta that thing!”
“Hurry up!”
“Grab his arms before he hurts himself!”
“It’s killing him!”
“I think he’s coming out by himself. Hang on, hang on.”
My eyes opened to blurry figures moving between me and the light. A weight lifted from my head. My heart was racing like I’d just run up a mountain in cement shoes, and my brain and nerves were all shouting, “Danger! Danger! Danger!” in my ears.
“Ghost,” said a voice. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
For a second I didn’t know who Ghost was, but then it all came back, and my brain started to calm down as everything dialed into focus. Athalia was holding the headphone/helmet thingy and everyone else was staring at me with looks of worry, uneasiness, and anticipation.
“You alright, brother?” asked Vargas.
It was a little too early to answer that, but I didn’t want to disappoint anybody, so I gave it a shot. “I… I think so.”
“And…?” asked Angie.
I frowned. “And what?”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t you remember what this all about? You went in there to figure out where Finster hid the sec pass. Did you find out?”
“I…” My mind flashed back to what I had been through. The puzzles, the night screamer, the spider, the fighting multiple Finsters, the baseball game for Christ’s sake. Then, at the end… Yes! “Yeah yeah, it’s fine. He handed it to me.” I opened the hand that had been holding the sec–pass. “It’s right—”
Of course there was nothing in my hand. If I hadn’t been so disoriented I would have known it before I spoke. Everything in the maze had been an illusion. Why should the card have been any different?
Angie groaned. “Oh for fuck’s sake.”
“I—”
A strange clicking noise interrupted me. Everybody turned around. The sound was coming from Finster’s head, which was still connected to the console. It was vibrating slightly and the eyes were flashing on and off.
“What the hell?” said Vargas.
“Ain’t gonna blow up, is it?” asked Hell Razor.
Finally, with a ping and whirr, the metal dome of Finster’s head split open and folded back on itself, revealing the innards of his electronic brain — basically just a bunch of wires and transistors and other stuff I didn’t understand.
Athalia did, however, and noticed right away that something didn’t belong. She frowned and reached her long fingers toward the open head. “What is…?”
She plucked something out from between two thick black plastic cards that slotted into some kind of circuit board. It was the sec pass. She laughed. “He was telling the truth. The pass was in his memory! Right in the middle of it!”
I didn’t get the joke, and I don’t think the others did either. We did get, though, that we’d finally found the thing we’d come here to get in the first place.
Angie snatched it out of Athalia’s fingers. “All right! Finally!”
Hell Razor spat on the floor again. “Now we can get out of this mad house.”
“But what the hell was it doing in there in the first place?” asked Vargas.
“He probably put it there once he overheard us saying we were looking for it,” said Ace. “He wanted to use it as a bargaining chip, remember? And he wouldn’t have wanted us to find it before we’d made a deal with him.”
“Why ask why?” said Angie. “I’m just glad we’ve got it.”
Vargas stood and stretched. The others did too. “Alright, let’s get out of here. We gotta get ourselves dosed with Prussian Blue before we—”
“Wait,” I said. “One thing.”
They looked back at me.
“While I was in there, in Finster’s head, he told me that Base Cochise was after him, and us too. It was eliminating all threats, he said.”
Angie frowned. “So he’s saying the killer robots aren’t just some weird glitch? The base is actively sending them out to kill people?”
I shrugged. “Finster seemed to think so. He said Cochise knew we were coming, and that it would destroy us, then he gave me the sec pass and told us to use the armor to protect ourselves.”
“Sounds like more of Finster’s paranoia,” said Athalia.
“Could be,” said Vargas. “Guess we’ll find out when we get there.”
Metal Maniac poked his head in the door and gave us a salute. “Uh, hate to interrupt, but we’re puttin’ the bodies of Finster’s victims in the ground, and some of ’em are your people. Thought you might want to come send ’em off.”
Everybody was quiet at that, but at last Vargas nodded. “We do indeed, friend. We do indeed. Lead on.”
You know that old gag about wanting to live long enough to go to your own funeral?
Well, you don’t.
Really.
A guy never feels quite so much like a fifth wheel than when his friends are standing around the grave of his former self, passing around a bottle and talking about what a great guy he was and how much they’re going to miss him.
Hell Razor’s eulogy was short and sweet. “He was a good drinkin’ buddy, and he had your back in a fight.” He took a slug for himself, then poured some down into the open grave. “Kick ass in Hell, brother.”
Thrasher’s was even shorter. “Good friend. Great ranger.”
He poured some out too, drank, and passed the bottle to Vargas.
Vargas took a swig, then cleared his throat. “I didn’t know him as well as the rest of you, but that he died twice in the pursuit of his duties and never gave up trying to stop the enemies of man speaks volumes about his loyalty to the Desert Rangers and his commitment to building a better world. Here’s to him.” He splashed some booze into the grave then passed the bottle to Angie.
She wiped her eyes and nose, knocked back a swallow, and then spat it down at my old self’s burlap–wrapped corpse.
“I’m mad at you, you bastard,” she hissed. “You shouldn’t have died. You shouldn’t have left me! You should have said goodbye! But…” She hiccupped. “But I guess being’ mad ain’t gonna bring you back, so…” She snorfed on the sleeve of her leather jacket. “Well, wherever you went, I hope there’s a big nasty redhead there waiting for you, and a world without walls where you can ride forever and ever and never find the edge of the map.”
She blew a kiss down into the hole. “Happy trails, you glorious son–of–a–bitch.”
Her eyes were blurry as she swung around, holding out the bottle for the next person, but they focused when she realized the next person was me. At least she had the decency to look embarrassed as she turned away.