“I schemed,” says Lurker. “I plotted. I found a way, brother. What happened to you? Where have your balls gone?”
Arrtrad speaks to the pavement. “I’ve seen it out scavenging, Lurker. All this time, the cars still sit on the streets. Start their engines once a month and idle for ten minutes. They’re all ready for us, mate. Just waiting.”
“Arrtrad, come over here,” says Lurker. “Have a look at yourself.”
The security camera pans over as Lurker motions at Arrtrad to step next to a panel of sun-baked glass attached to a mostly intact building. The tint is peeling off, but the glass wall still holds a bluish reflection. Arrtrad steps over and the two look at themselves.
A data readout informs me that they first activated the exoskeletons a month ago. Military hardware. Full body. Without a person inside, the machines look like a messy pile of wiry black arms and legs connected to a backpack. Strapped into the powered machines, the two men each stand seven feet tall, strong as bears. The thin black tubes running along their arms and legs are made of titanium. The motorized joints are powered by purring diesel engines. I notice that the feet are curved, flexible spikes that add a solid foot to their height.
Grinning, Lurker flexes for the mirror. Each of his forearms has a wicked notched spike curving out, used to pick up heavy objects without crushing human fingers. Each exoskeleton has a roll cage that arcs gracefully over its occupant’s head, with a bluish-white LED burning in the middle of the frame.
Together in the mirror, Arrtrad and Lurker look like a couple of supersoldiers. Well, more like a couple of pale Englishmen who’ve been living on sardines and who happen to have scavenged some abandoned military technology.
Either way, they are most definitely badass.
“See yourself, Arrtrad?” Lurker asks. “You’re a beast, mate. You’re a killer. We can do this.”
Lurker tries to clap Arrtrad on the shoulder, and the other man flinches away girlishly. “Careful!” shouts Arrtrad. “There’s no armor on these things. Keep your hooks away from me.”
“Right, brother.” Lurker chuckles. “Look, the British Telecom Tower is one mile away. And it’s jamming our satellites. If people could communicate, even for a little while, we’d have a fighting chance.”
Arrtrad looks at Lurker, skeptical. “Why are you really doing this?” he asks. “Why are you putting your life—our lives—on the line?”
For a long moment, there is only the chup-chup of the two diesel engines idling. “Remember when we used the phones to torment people?” Lurker asks.
“Yeah,” responds Arrtrad slowly.
“We thought we were different than everyone else. Better. Thought we were taking advantage of a bunch of fools. But we were wrong. Turns out we’re all in the same boat. Metaphorically speaking.”
Arrtrad cracks a small smile. “But we don’t owe nobody nothing. You said so yourself.”
“Oh, but we do,” Lurker says. “We didn’t know it, but we were running up a tab. We owe a debt, mate. And now it’s time to pay up. Only phreaks like us would know about this tower. How important it is. If we can destroy it, we’ll help thousands of people. Maybe millions.”
“And you owe them?”
“I owe you,” says Lurker. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn London. Maybe they wouldn’t have believed. But that’s never stopped me. Christ, I could have co-opted the bloody emergency alert system all on my own. Shouted a warning from the rooftops. Doesn’t matter now. Most of all—I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry for… your girls, mate. All of it.”
On mention of his children, Arrtrad turns away from Lurker, blinking back tears. Eyeing his own sinuous reflection, he shrugs one arm out of his exo-suit and smoothes back the puff of blond hair on his balding head. The exoskeleton arm automatically settles down to his side. Arrtrad’s cheeks puff out as he exhales loudly, slipping his hand back into the metal arm straps.
“You make a fine point,” he says.
“Yeah,” says Lurker. Then he taps Arrtrad on his metal shoulder with one wicked blade. “Besides,” he asks, “you don’t really want to live to old age with me? On a bloody houseboat?”
A slow smile spreads across Arrtrad’s birdlike face. “You do make a fine fucking point.”
The streets of central London are mostly empty. Attacks came too fast and too organized for most citizens to react. By law, all the autos had full-drive capability. Also by law, hardly anybody had guns. And the closed-circuit television network was compromised from the start, giving the machines an intimate view of every public space in the city.
In London, the citizens were too safe to survive.
Visual records indicate that automated trash trucks filled dumps outside the city with corpses for months after Zero Hour. Now there’s nobody left to destroy the place. No survivors brave the streets. And nobody is around to see two pale men—one young and one old—encased in military exoskeletons as they leap in ten-foot strides over the weedy pavement.
The first attack comes only a few minutes in, as they sprint through Trafalgar Square. The fountains are drained and filled with dead leaves and blown trash. A couple of broken bicycles lie out but that’s it. Covered in roosting birds, the granite statue of Lord Nelson in his admiral’s hat looks down from a hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall column as the two men bound across the plaza on elastic foot blades.
They should have known there was too much wide-open space.
Lurker notices the smart car a couple of seconds before it can ram into Arrtrad from behind. With one leap, he closes the twenty feet between them and lands on the run beside the speeding car. A blossom of mold has spread across the top of it. Without a regular car wash, nature is eating up the old stuff.
Too bad there are plenty of replacements.
On landing, Lurker hunches down and drives his foot-long forearm blades into the driver’s side door of the car and lifts. Steam jets from the hip and knee joints of his exoskeleton, and the diesel engine surges as he wrenches the whole side of the car upward. While on its two right wheels, the car veers but still manages to clip Arrtrad’s right rear leg midstride. The car flips over and rolls away, but Arrtrad is off balance; he trips.
Falling down at a twenty-mile-an-hour jog is serious business. Luckily, the exoskeleton can tell that it’s falling. Leaving Arrtrad no choice in the matter, the machine jerks his arms close to his body and his legs curl into fetal position. The roll cage becomes pertinent. In this crash pose, the exoskeleton rolls over a few times, then plows over a fire hydrant and comes to a stop.
No water comes out of the decapitated hydrant.
By the time Lurker lands next to him, Arrtrad is already climbing to his feet. The pudgy blond man stands up and I can see he is grinning, chest heaving.
“Thanks,” he says to Lurker.
There’s blood on his teeth but Arrtrad doesn’t seem to care. He pops up and sprints away. Lurker follows, on the lookout for more cars. New ones appear, but they’re slow, not ready. They can’t track the speeding men as they leap through alleys and tear across parks.
Lurker put it best: It’s only a single fucking mile.
From a new camera angle, I see the cylindrical British Telecom tower looming in the blue sky like a Tinkertoy. Antennae bristle from the top and a ring of microwave transmitter dishes wrap just below, pointing away in every direction. It’s the biggest TV switch station in London and it’s got whole highways of fiber-optic cable buried underneath. When it comes to communications, all roads lead to the BTT.
The wiry exoskeletons appear and dart around the side of the building, stopping in front of a steel door. Arrtrad leans the scratched-up frame of his exo against the wall, huffing and puffing. “Why not just destroy it from here?” he asks.