“Stop! Stop!” Jackson screamed. “Just STOP!”
And suddenly, they did. For a heartbeat, Jackson thought they were listening to him.
But then he heard it, too.
Out there. A distant, ethereal shriek, electric and cold, at once human and electronic, like the squall of digital noise translated through atrophied vocal cords. Then another. Answered by yet another, not so distant.
Whit curled himself fetal in the corner of the entryway, hands covering his ears like a child in a thunderstorm.
“Late,” he choked out. “Too late.”
Then the chaos resumed, as the tenants of the Vault abandoned all thoughts of sealing the doors and turned instead to blind panic. The screaming throng pressed and writhed its way back, deeper into the Vault interior, forcing Jackson away from the entrance. Why they ran, he didn’t know. The gates were the only real protection they had.
He tried to fight his way free of the mass, working back towards the gateway, where Gev alone had re-doubled his efforts to free the lodged door. Jackson broke from the crowd, but as the last of the fleeing tenants passed, he froze to the core. Out beyond Gev, pairs of pale blue pin-prick stars hovered in the darkness, appearing from every alley, growing. Slowly, like shadows stretching, consuming the landscape in the day’s final hours, they approached. The soulless electric shrieking increased in volume and intensity, until beyond the gate all was a cacophony of sinister white noise that seemed to seize Jackson’s spine and shatter all reason.
The last that Jackson remembered was Gev turning to pick up his heavy iron pipe, with a look that was resigned yet quietly determined.
“Go on, boy,” Gev called, gripping the pipe with both hands like it was some great rusted warhammer. “If you’ve got a place to upload your soul, now’s the time.”
Gev strode out into the night, and the Weir were upon him.
One
Golden beams of sunlight spilled through the skeletal high rises, and through the concrete and steel network of interlaced highways, bypasses, and rails that once flowed with harried humanity, now devoid of all but the meanest signs of life. Overpasses stacked ten high lay inert, arteries of a city embalmed. The wind was light but weighty with the failing autumn, like the hand of a blacksmith gently laid.
Beneath the lowest overpass, a lone figure plodded weary steps, bowed and hooded, burden dragging behind leaving long tracks in the concrete dust. He paused, raised his head, laid back his hood, and felt the cooling breeze on his sweat-beaded face. His sun-squinted eyes roved over the urban desert before him as he adjusted the straps of his makeshift harness to ease his protesting shoulders.
“I see why you left,” the man muttered. He spat, wiped his nose on the sleeve of his knee-length faded olive-brown-mottled coat, and started on his way again.
The man stepped up onto the road, felt his senseThetic boots soften slightly to better absorb the hard shock of the asphalt, cringed at the hollow echo of his cargo scraping across the scarred and pockmarked ground. As he walked, he imagined the city as it might’ve once been. The endless dissonance of a half-million people packed into five square miles, swimming in an almost tangible soup of electromagnetic traffic. He wondered what traces of personality might still be left, rippling through those invisible fields around him even now.
Progress was slow, but he was close. Another few minutes and at last the man stood before the gates of his destination: a small enclave of survivors set within the dead cityscape. From atop a twenty-foot wall of haphazardly-welded urban debris, a watchman called down.
“What’s your business, stranger?”
The man jerked his thumb behind him, indicating the cargo he was dragging. The watchman grunted.
“Yeah, alright,” he answered. “Reckon the agent’s gonna wanna take a look before you go far.”
The man waited in silence as the enormous gates ground open, just wide enough to admit him and his payload. They started to close again before he was all the way through.
“Second street on your right, agent’s the first on the left. First floor.”
The man nodded curt thanks, and headed to see the enclave’s agent. Within the walls, the architecture was unchanged from that outside: tall gunmetal skyscrapers with windows darkened like gaping sockets of a skull, dead flat panel signs forty-feet wide that might once have hawked the day’s latest technological fashion. In here, however, there were men, women, and even wide-eyed children, who stared in wonder at this new evidence of life from beyond the wall, walking amongst them. Most of the adults pretended not to notice him, though he felt their sidelong glances and heard the hushed whispers after he passed. Even in days as strange as these, it was unusual to see a man harnessed as he was, hauling such a load: scrap aluminum, worn and scratched, bent into the makeshift but unmistakable shape of a coffin.
The man reached the agent’s office, and he paused, steeling himself with a final deep breath of outside air. He’d dealt with agents before, nearly thirty he could recall, and they’d all been the same. Muscle-bound gun-toters with a lot of bark, always itching for a reason to bite. Mostly ex-military or law enforcement, agents were tough guys who liked the power, and still clung to the outdated notion that order could be maintained even in a desolate society. They had their uses. But the man had little use for them.
He stepped forward, automatic doors sliding smoothly open to admit him, and dragged in from concrete to polished granite. In an earlier time, the office might’ve been a bank, with all its oak and stone. Or a tomb. Now, it was just a long corridor, leading to an imposing flexiglass cube. The glass was darkly smoked, but the man correctly presumed whoever was inside could see his approach. Still, he strode nearly the length of the corridor, before a sudden booming voice stopped him five paces from the cube’s door.
“State your business,” thundered the voice, rolling emphatically down the stone hall.
“Bounty,” replied the man.
“State your name.”
“Three.”
There was a pause.
“You got three of ’em in there?”
“You asked my name.”
The voice puzzled for a moment. Then—
“Who you got in the box?”
“One of yours.”
“Open it.”
“I’d rather not.”
The voice resumed a more professional tone.
“All collections must be verified and processed before payment will be distributed.”
“So open the cube.”
A slot opened in the cube, and a sleek metal case slid out, popping open to reveal a cracking rubberized interior.
“Deposit your weapons in the provided secure receptacle.”
“I’d rather not.”
Another pause. Though it still boomed, the voice sounded flustered.
“You cain’t come in here so armed, mister. I don’t care who you are.”
The man named Three let the straps of his harness slide off his shoulders. They clattered to the floor next to the coffin.
“Then you come out. I’m done dragging.”
Three turned around and started back down the corridor.
“Hey!” the voice thundered, “Hey, you cain’t just leave that settin’ there!”
Three walked on.
“I’ll have you arrested if you don’t come back!”
He was almost to the exit. There was a whir and a click behind him, and a thin, crackly voice called out from the cube.
“What about your bounty? Don’t you want it?”