“They can’t leave you alone. They need you-” He stopped. “Did you hear that? Turn down the music!”
It sounded like thunder.
It was dark in the back of the garbage truck. Soothing miasma of rot inside, pushing out bad thoughts. In the dark, in the stench, #24 couldn’t see the new recruits, couldn’t smell their freshly welded metal and plastic new-corpse stink.
The Commander’s voice recited a litany in his ear, over and over. The pre-engagement medpak spikes made him restless. When that happened, #24 got bored, and he started to picture something else happening, and remembering it, or imagining it. Wishing…
“Hold and contain. Wait for the gas to clear. Target center-of-mass. No headshots. Don’t screw your Dungeon Master, kids…”
On and on. Over and over, like teaching a parrot to talk. If something else happened, anything, it would be better.
One of the Raiders moaned, a low, hungry sound in the dark. The others took it up. They did it every time. The drugs and the voice in their ears wound them up, so they must be getting close.
A flat, deafening boom lifted the truck and stood it up on its back wheels, then dropped it on its side. The Raiders were thrown into a pile. #24 was on top, but he couldn’t move. Static chewed his ears.
The rear hatch hissed. Jerry the handler pried it open with a crowbar.
“Motherfuckers,” he kept saying, like a parrot. Blood streamed from his ears and hundreds of cuts all over his face and chest that shone like rubies-half-melted glass embedded in his skin. “Used our own fuckin’ mines on us, Tooz…” Woozily, he punched #24 in the shoulder. “Fuck ’em up, O-Town!”
“What is the fucking situation out there, over?” The Dungeon Master screamed in their ears. “Gordo, Jerry… where are my dogs, goddamit?”
Jerry sat down in the street and lit a cigarette, started coughing. Blood squirted out of the holes in his neck. The Raiders spilled out of the trash truck. Three of them rushed Jerry and tore him apart. They looked funny to #24, trying to stuff gobbets of steaming meat into their toothless mouths and into their rubber food-tubes.
“Raiders! Sound off, you cocksuckers!”
#24 growled at the PDA duct-taped to his forearm and tapped the touchscreen. Green dots on the map were friends. The red spot on the edge of the map was hot. Move closer, get warmer. Feels good. When you were hot, you got to fight.
“#24, you’re my quarterback, baby! Are you the only one left? Fuck… The transmitter in the truck is toast, I’m rerouting through here. I can’t see shit on the satellites, and my air support is a fuckin’ noob. And I’m pretty much talking to myself right now, huh?”
#24 counted his comrades, tapping the touchscreen six times… Two Raiders still lay in the back of the truck. One flopped from the waist down. The other one’s head was twisted around backwards, and could only bite his own back.
“OK, helmet-cams are live… Fall in, bitches, it’s medication time!”
As one, the Raiders jerked to attention. Their medpaks whined under their helmets, pumping drugs and barrages of electroshock to jump-start sluggish, decaying synapses. Shreds of Jerry’s septic gut dangled from the facemasks of the three backsliders, but they shambled into the huddle.
The new guys were stripped. Slim green metal tanks jutting out of their chests, stuffed with C4 bricks.
They marched in staggered formation along both sidewalks, hugging the scorched brownstone townhouses and concrete lofts that lined Haight Street.
On their screens, the meaningless map glowed red in the direction of west. #24 took point with a sixty-caliber SAW in his hands.
The Dungeon Master spoke in his ear, coaxing them around piles of wrecked cars and booby traps. “Okay, you’re coming up on the park, go left, you’re getting warmer…”
#24 didn’t need directions. His brain glowed, pulsing in time with the Red Zone on the map. The light from the intense shocks sparked behind his dull gray eyes and through the bulletholes in his black and silver helmet, making him look like a wrathful, dick-swinging god of the underworld.
The mix downstairs rudely cut out, and Bob Marley’s “Iron Lion Zion” shook rat turds out of the record store’s rafters. It was their burglar alarm.
The pizza feast disbanded with fire drill discipline. Even the kids grabbed guns. Tweak pulled a metal chain to drop the steel curtains in front of the store, but something roared out in the street and burst through the plywood and plastic windows. It burst in midair before crashing at their feet. A canister flooded the loft with yellow smoke.
Eagle pulled on his mask and pushed Lester’s chair away from the gas. Gracie herded the kids and the pedal-pushers towards the rooftop stairs, but she dropped dead before she could say the words.
Eagle shouted, “Masks! Get your masks-” Most of them had masks or filters around their necks, but the gas rolled over them before they could spit out their pizza. Half a dozen of them died in a sprawling pile at the foot of the stairs. A kid rolled on the floor clawing at her mask, drowning in her own vomit.
Lester slid out of his chair and tumbled to the floor.
Eagle took his gun out and looked for something to shoot. His goggles were fogged up. All he could see was smoke. The white stuff that killed everyone thinned out into cotton candy streamers oozing down the stairs. Black smoke came from the roof. Shooting from outside, but almost all of it was hitting the building.
Eagle charged down the drawbridge stairs just as a car crashed through the portcullis and plowed into the electronica section. Nobody was driving the burned-out Subaru wagon, but four Oakland Raiders were pushing it.
The second the Subaru crashed through the wrought-iron gate, a ring of claymore mines on the cashier’s counters popped up like sprinklers to shoulder height before exploding. Thousands of steel ball bearings flew out like a multiball monsoon in a tight, utterly devastating radius.
Two Raiders stumbled into each other as their perforated heads drained like dribble glasses. Tweak capped a third with a shotgun, but the headless Raider self-destructed and doused the DJ with flaming jelly.
The fourth Raider had dozens of steel pinballs embedded in its armor, but it gamely came over and climbed the stairs. Dragging a huge machinegun on one arm like John fucking Wayne, #24 clomped up the steps as Eagle tried in vain to figure out how to raise the drawbridge.
He looked at the pile of people behind him. Dead kids with guns and pizza in their hands. The roof stairs were on fire. He put away his gun and picked up the last pizza box. Olives, artichoke hearts, and anchovies, less than half-eaten. Why did nobody appreciate anchovies?
“Hey, Sherman, hold up, man! It’s me, Eagle. The pizza guy.” He waved his chipped wrist at the approaching zombie Raider. Like he deserved to live, while these chipless nobodies deserved to get gassed in their own home.
As if the Dungeon Master, looking at him from behind his game console, would see a human being at all.
#24 lifted the gun to Eagle’s head, then froze, looking down. Eagle felt shit pushing at his sphincter. Sweat popped out of his forehead.
“I’m not fighting you,” he told #24. “Nobody here wanted to fight you. They just wanted something to eat.”
#24 scanned the loft, from the neat pile of bodies by the stairs to the harmless, hopeless pizza guy standing in its way. Looking back at the dead bodies for a long moment, it finally turned to Eagle and raised its gun.
“Hey, big guy, you want a slice?” Eagle held out and opened the box.
And he wanted to say, Please, in the head, if you have to. Which was to say, Please, I don’t wanna come back.
Looking past the camera goggles, stared straight into #24’s runny gray eyes. Just pouring his soul out. Being human. The only thing he’d ever been.