Carrying the iron bar of his prison, the creature called Tool limped down the cellblock to the stairs, and climbed into the light.
2
TOOL COVERED MILES. He was built to do so, and even wounded, he moved with a speed that would have exhausted a human being within minutes. He forded algae-thick canals and limped through bean fields and soaked rice paddies. He passed farmers with wide broad hats who stared up from their sweating work and fled in fear. He circled and doubled back through bomb-shattered buildings, confusing trail and scent. Always, he moved farther from the Drowned Cities, and always the soldiers pursued.
At first, he had hoped his pursuers would give up. Colonel Glenn Stern and his patriotic army had more than enough enemies to keep them occupied; the Drowned Cities were full of fighting factions, perpetually tearing at one another’s throats. A single escaped augment might not be worth the Colonel’s attention. But then the panthers had caught up with Tool, and he’d known that the Colonel would not let his prized fighting monster slip free so easily.
Pain lanced through Tool’s body as he limped onward, but he ignored it. So what if he’d torn his shoulder from its socket in his mad attack on the bars? So what if the hunting panthers had laid long, deep gashes down his back? So what if his one eye was blind? He was moving and free, and he was trained to ignore pain.
Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, how far he could still run, and what his chances were in the next battle.
Behind him, the hounds began to bay, picking up his scent.
Tool growled in irritation, unconsciously baring teeth as cousin creatures called for his blood.
The hounds were perfect killers, just as he. They would throw themselves mindlessly into the fight again and again until they were torn to pieces, and they would die content, knowing that they had done their duty for their masters. Tool’s dog nature—spliced into his genes by scientific design—knew their mastiff urges. They would never stop until they were dead, or he was.
Tool didn’t blame them. He, too, had been loyal and obedient once.
Tool reached a new thicket of jungle and plunged into its shadows, tearing through tangling vines. He moved like an elephant through the vegetation, crashing and crackling. He knew he was leaving a trail that even a stupid human being could follow, but it was all he could do to keep moving.
Well-fed, with all his limbs working, he could have run these sad dogs and soldiers for days, doubling back and destroying them one by one in the jungle, whittling dogs and humans down to a huddled fearful tribe around a solitary campfire. Now he doubted he could kill more than a few. Worse, after the last ambush he had set, they had become clever to his ways. They understood—now—how easily their bones snapped.
Tool stopped, panting, his tongue lolling from his mouth, chest heaving. He sniffed the humid air.
Salt breezes.
The sea.
Somewhere north there was an inlet. If he could make the sea, he might escape them still, might dive into the ocean and become one with the marine world. He could swim. It would hurt, but he could do it.
He turned north and east, pushing on by force of will. Behind him, the dogs followed.
Tool almost wanted to laugh. They were such good dogs, and because of it, many of them would die. Tool, on the other hand, was a very bad dog. His masters had told him so many times as they beat him and trained him and molded his will to match their own. They had forged him into a killer and then fit him into the killing machine that had been his pack. A platoon of slaughter. For a little while, he had been a good dog, and obedient.
Platoon. Pack. Company. Battalion. Tool remembered the Red Standard of General Caroa, waving in the breezes above his encampment in the Kolkata Delta when the Tiger Guard came down on them.
Bad dog.
Tool had been such a bad dog that he still lived. He should have been dead on those muddy tidal flats outside of Kolkata, where the waters of the river Ganges met the warmth of the Indian Ocean, and where blood and bodies floated in salt waves as red as General Caroa’s flag. He should have been dead in wars on foreign shores. He should have been dead a thousand times over. And yet always he had survived to fight again.
Tool paused, chest heaving, and scanned the forest tangles. Iridescent butterflies flitted through beams of reddening evening sunlight. The forest canopy was turning dark, emerald leaves becoming muddy as night came on. The black tropics, some people called this place, for its winter darkness. A sweltering humid environment where pythons and panthers and coywolv stalked at will. Killers all. It galled Tool that he was now prey, and weakening.
The guards had been starving him for weeks, and his untreated wounds oozed pus. Only his massive immune system kept him on his feet at all. Any other creature would have succumbed weeks ago to the superbacteria that coursed through his veins and seethed in his wounds, but his time was running out.
When he had been a good dog, an owned dog, a loyal dog, his masters would have stitched and treated wounds like these. General Caroa would have worked hard to protect his battle investment, showering Tool with trauma care so that he could once again become the apotheosis of slaughter. Good dogs had masters, and masters kept good dogs close.
Behind him, the hounds bayed again. Closer.
Tool stumbled forward, counting the steps until he would fall, knowing that flight was hopeless. A final stand, then. One last battle. At least he could say that he had fought. When he met his brothers and sisters on the far side of death, he would tell them that he had not yielded. He might have betrayed everything that they had been bred for, but he had never yielded…
Salt swamps opened abruptly before him. Tool sloshed into the water. Huge snakes slithered away in ripples, pythons and cottonmouths recognizing that they wanted no traffic with a creature like him. He waded farther and suddenly found unexpected beckoning depths. The swamps here were deep, many meters deep. A welcome surprise. This landscape hid sinkholes of water.
With a sigh, Tool sank into the swamp, feeling bubbles forming around him.
Down.
The slits of his nostrils tightened, sealing in his breath. A translucent membrane slid across his remaining eye’s iris, protecting his vision as he sank into the depths of the swamp, down amongst crawdads and mangrove roots.
Let them hunt me now.
Above, soldiers came crashing close. The voices of men, and others, younger. Some of them small enough that Tool could easily eat one in a day. But all of them armed and all of them adrenalized by the hunt. They shouted and called, their voices twining with the barking and stampeding of their dogs, all of it filtering down through the waters to Tool’s listening ears.
Splashes in the shallows. Dogs swimming about, their legs windmilling above him, baying in confusion, trying to find Tool’s direction. He could see them up there, canine shanks cycling madly. He could swim up and yank them down, one by one…
Tool resisted the urge to hunt.
“Where the hell did it go?”
“Shhhhh! Hear anything?”
“Shut your dogs, Clay!”
Silence fell. At least as much silence as pathetic human beings and dogs could summon. Even through the waters, Tool could hear their attempts at stealthy breathing, but they were trying, in their childlike way, to hunt.
“No spoor,” one of them muttered as footsteps stalked through the grasses. “Tell the LT, we got no spoor.”
Tool could imagine them all on the edge of the swamps, staring out at black waters. Listening to the pulse and scratch of insects and the far cry of a wild panther.