‘Time for another blast,’ instructed Forrest to Nell and her assistant. The lad’s fingertips were nearly split with the real-time key-sequences he’d been tapping out.
‘Another hour and I’d have had it automated,’ he lamented.
‘Just get it done,’ barked Forrest.
He wasn’t their real boss, just her jumped-up bodyguard. He went back into the cab of the surveillance truck, where he closed the curtain and imagined that that gave him some kind of privacy. Instead, the pair at the keyboards heard every word he said on the phone; and like Beck at his end, were taking careful note.
Nell said quietly to her speedy colleague, ‘I almost wish we had “her” back,’ as she wrote out the dots and dashes for the next transmission.
This time the car didn’t veer towards the verge when the artifs went rigor. Victor was driving, all the doors had been locked; and maybe he was becoming a little more used to the spectacle after seeing it several times. He was beginning to lose the panic that accompanied the ghoulish show.
‘When it happens, keep driving,’ Chris had said. And that was what Victor did. And soon it became almost routine for them to spasm – then jump out of it – spasm – jump out.
‘They’re altering the pattern,’ noted Ellie, tiredly after the latest burst. For the whole affair was a terrible drain on their batteries. Yet each time, one of them noted the last message. After hours of interrupted driving there were several in the notepad:
roadblocks along county line go east or west
they are getting frustrated be careful
only regular police no army yet
Victor hadn’t liked the sound of that ‘yet’.
And then finally, the most specific and extraordinary message of all: firstly, some co-ordinates in the artif’s familiar format, followed by the words:
cannot get police there go quick go quick
‘Pull over,’ asked Chris after that latest message, himself hoping for a blessed break from the death-rattle.
‘You still think it’s a trap?’ asked Victor.
‘If it is, then it’s a very long game – hours long. And at a time when their department are under huge pressure.’
‘And it’s worse than that,’ said Ellie. ‘As long as we’re scurrying around the county dodging their roadblocks, then we’ll be in range of their signals.’
‘Like a submarine under depth charges, not able to get out,’ remembered Victor from an old war film he’d watched with his Dad. Where were his family now, he wondered. Had they been told he was a fugitive? Chris broke his thoughts with,
‘Victor, drive. I think we have to trust in kindness.’
And no one in the car dissented.
With an atlas on his lap, Chris called the shots,
‘The co-ordinates are for a town called Mayweather. There’s a local road runs through it, that joins an A-road three miles later. Get through the town, and we’re home-free.’
Streets, turns, road numbers. It was the early hours now, but Victor at the wheel was awake and high on adrenalin. Soon enough, though, that internal reserve would run out, and begin to drain through him like the poison it was.
Chris was in the back-seat, next to poor, inactive Danny, with Ellie at the other side. Anna had been allowed the front passenger place, to move her from her brother’s side. There she curled up like a ball, and was hardly any more communicative whether receiving a signal or not.
‘I’ve always liked the night,’ said Eris. ‘It’s my time. I can move so freely.’
‘That’s because the rest of the world’s in bed,’ answered Beck. ‘You’re not a part of society.’
She looked at him, but ignored his harsh words. For she had had a revelation, and was happy. Tapping on the glass partition, she told Charlie the name of a town,
‘Mayweather. Go there at once.’
And Charlie did.
‘Mayweather,’ mused Forrest, now sat in the back of the truck. ‘A dead and alive little place, it sounds like. I’m not sure I’ve been there.’
‘Oh, what about it?’ asked Nell, as innocently as possible. This was a town they’d overheard him mention to Eris, a town he had been having trouble getting any spare police to quickly enough... and so whose co-ordinates they had tipped the artifs off about.
Now though, Forrest explained something different, the result of his latest phone call,
‘Well, Eris has had an idea – rather than considering Mayweather a hole in the net, we’ll make it our focus. Leave it unprotected, and let the artifs find their own way there. And then we pounce.’
‘Perhaps another signal first?’ asked the key-weary assistant, his stomach suddenly sinking. But Forrest shook his head, saying,
‘No, no, give them a breather – otherwise they won’t risk driving again. And now we want them on the move!’
Chapter 117 – The Perfect Storm
Having chosen, they’d committed. Now the artifs and Victor, their human chauffeur for the evening, followed the co-ordinates for Mayweather. There even seemed to be a break in the signals, allowing them a chance to reflect.
‘But doesn’t it all feel a bit convenient?’ asked Ellie. In saying this, she was doing no more than voicing all of their fears.
Twice on their way, at long-distance, they had seen roadblocks lit up like beacons in the night – police cars were generally quite hard things to keep quiet and out of sight.
Yet Mayweather, as they arrived there, was as inviting as the grave – a series of sleepy houses and leafy lanes – no house light was shining that shouldn’t have been.
In the lulling silence, dreams of Silicon Sands began to have a chance to nestle. And with several of the family back together at last, then even with the loss of Danny, there was a strong sense that a mission had been accomplished, that a phase had been completed. Almost despite themselves, they were beginning to relax.
They had been genuinely directed to try their luck in Mayweather. And it was all too easy not to fight this. And so, tired and shaken, low on power, and with a real sense of the net that was drawing in and closing-off so many other options of escape, they went for it.
‘Whatever happens, keep driving,’ said Chris.
They had barely made the centre. The sound was of a thud and a bang beneath the car, and then the awful wrenching and clunking of a tyre being torn, times four.
Victor lost control of the large estate. It slithered over the smooth cobbles of the town square, before giving a real tank-slapper to the town’s First World War memorial obelisk.
Before the dust had settled, there were voices, and spotlights shining from the barrel of rifles. The car, however, had travelled much further on its skidding rims than the men with guns had been expecting in that pitch-black night, and this gave the occupants an advantage.
‘Out,’ called Chris, ‘passenger side.’
Ellie, who was at that side, threw her rear door open. She quickly lifted Danny and carried him the few yards to the entrance of a side-street. Chris slid out after them, though straight away heard Anna screaming. Her door was pinned by the memorial and she couldn’t get out. Victor wasn’t with them either.
Once on the pavement, Chris pushed the car away from the memorial, then tore at Anna’s door from the outside. Even together they couldn’t shift the meshed metal. But they did pull the frame out of shape enough to smash the window into tiny cubed pieces, which let Anna clamber through.
Meanwhile, Ellie had dashed back also and raced around to the driver’s side of the car, expecting Victor’s door to be similarly wedged. However, when she got there it was hanging open, he simply hadn’t moved from his seat.
And a simple thought occurred to her – that humans didn’t walk away from car crashes as easily as artifs. He still had his seatbelt on, which she quickly unlocked for him. His knee and elbow looked cut, but not enough to cause the trouble he was clearly experiencing.
He seemed to be in a haze of indecision, as if asleep and lost to the ni
ght-time dreams she’d only heard about. She had never seen an injured human. What did they do? How did they work?
Regardless, with her arms under his, she soon had him clear, and was pulling him away when the light caught her, blinding her perfect eyes.
‘Here!’ shouted Chris to the gunman, jumping out of the shadows to throw him off. So near, Chris could see he was a regular soldier in dark green uniform. And so young, he was perhaps a cadet.
The gun’s barrel light jumped to Chris, then back to Ellie, then Chris again.
‘Give me an order!’ called the cadet. ‘What do I do?’
In that second of indecision, Ellie moved to drag Victor toward the darkness behind the car and memorial.
And then, from somewhere outside the gun’s pool of light, a woman’s voice called, ‘Fire!’
Victor came to his senses then, and lurched forward to shield Ellie. She shouted ‘No!’ just as the trigger was pulled and could not be unpulled.
It sprayed them both; although it was he, in front of her, who caught it the worst. In the silence after, the young gunman stood aghast, leaning over his weapon and unable to move.
‘Step back, lad,’ counselled his Sergeant who was running up behind him. The gunfire had stopped all in their tracks. No one fled, and no one came closer. Neither the soldiers now in view, nor the others behind them, or the civilians on either side of the stand-off dared move.
Ellie moved though. She was still fully conscious and in a state of waking horror. Shrieking and crying, she pulled herself across the steps of the war memorial to her dead lover, with her useless shattered legs dragging behind her beneath her patterned skirt.
Chapter 118 – The Murderous Murderess
‘You told me they were robots!’ shouted the cadet.
‘It’s okay, lad. Step back,’ called his Sergeant.
‘He dashed across me. I couldn’t...’
‘Step back!’
The cadet did so, as the Sergeant moved forward and took his gun. Doctor Beck came forward then also, to attend to Victor. Beck had arrived earlier with Eris, and had had a guard at his side for the time since. Though no one was going to hold him back now.
As Beck knelt by the body, warm blood soaked into the knees of his trousers, and he shivered as he felt it on his skin. There was no doubt, and it was hardly worth the moment spent checking for a pulse. But he was a doctor, even if not a medical one, and the patient was owed that much. Beck turned his head back to the gallery, and shook it. There were perhaps fifteen people there now, lit by new lights all around them.
The absolute confirmation of the death seemed to end the dramatic segment. Suddenly people caught themselves: artifs on the run were standing still, their pursuers likewise.
With no hope for Victor, Beck turned his attention to Ellie. Her form beneath the thorax was so mangled that it hurt him to look at her. Her lower half was reduced to shards of carbon and plastic and metal. Around this mess of technology, the threads of her dress hung together remarkably, as if the seamstress had made it stronger than Beck had made the wearer. He suddenly felt ashamed.
He looked up, and found Chris looking right back at him. Chris then turned his gaze to Ellie’s broken form, and asked simply, with every ounce of self-control,
‘Can you fix her?’
Beck thought that Chris would cry, that he would cry. Instead Beck only nodded. For him what passed between them was a total understanding of the scene as it would play out over years ahead.
The Doctor placed his hands on Ellie’s shoulders, and tried to pull her from the body of Victor, to whom she was now clinging and weeping over.
Beck turned to Eris, ‘You have a lab?’
‘Yes, being built as we speak.’
‘Then I need to get her there right now. Who’ll help me?’
Two soldiers came forward to gather her up, which they did with remarkable tenderness in the face of the patient’s screamed protests.
‘Gentle, gentle,’ said Beck. ‘We need the fastest vehicle you have.’
‘Oh, we’ll go bloody light-speed,’ they stated, without a shadow of a doubt.
As she was lifted, Ellie moved her arms, soaked in Victor’s blood, towards Beck, imploring,
‘You can rebuild him too? That’s what you do, you build people.’
‘Not humans, love. Not humans.’
And there was something else. Ever the sharpest, Chris noticed it first, looking from Ellie to Beck,
‘We’re not tapping.’
‘Maybe even her transmitter’s been destroyed,’ answered Beck, not able to contemplate the damage she’d suffered.
Amid all this, others had been forgotten. Nearby, Anna was caught between emotion and horror. She was edging closer to the human body, her mouth agape. Her face was a snapshot of atrocity.
The consensus was breaking, they had moments – Chris realised this. In a single swoop he lifted Anna beneath her arms – she only came up to his shoulders – and down an unlit passageway between two buildings, he backed into the night.
‘No!’ called Eris after them, and went to grab the Sergeant’s gun. Though he held firm, as did his men, and the pair were gone.
The soldier said, ‘There’ll be no more shooting tonight.’
His men were having no more luck with Ellie, who had returned her savage attentions to Victor – her arms struck-out toward him as she was being carried. It was as though, if only she could be permitted a moment longer to hold on to him, then she could infuse him with her life force, and bring him back to her. But eventually her vehicle reversed into view and she was taken away.
Beck was still kneeling beside Victor, asking no one,
‘Why can’t I cry? Why aren’t I crying?’
‘You can’t switch it on and off,’ counselled the Sergeant. Beck was beginning to see the British Army in a whole new light. The officer asked, ‘And you are, sir?’
‘Of course.’ And for the first time in years, he gave an honest C.V. ‘Doctor Gawain Beck. Latterly of the London Arboretum, formerly of The University of Southern England, Biology Department.’ He held his hand out to shake, but drew it back when he saw it was covered in blood. ‘I’m one of those who built the Robots... her.’ He looked to Ellie being removed to the vehicle.
The Sergeant asked, ‘So it’s all true then?’ It was still unreal to him. Even amid the horror, he bore the excited expression of a nation reading recent newspaper headlines. He turned to Eris,
‘And you?’
She held out an identification badge that the Sergeant clearly recognised.
Among Eris’s people came a whisper that civilian police were on their way. This was soon borne out by distant sirens. But for Ellie’s low sob, then that was all that anyone heard.
‘They’ll want to know who ordered this,’ said the Sergeant to Eris. ‘I won’t let our lad take the blame.’ The lad himself stared at Eris with daggers.
Beck looked at the empty alleyway, the black space left by Chris and Anna as they had vanished into darkness. But he was going to offer no more information. If the authorities wanted his creations, then they could find them.
Nearby, a young soldier turned to the Sergeant for instructions; who only answered, ‘Hold your ground, son. Hold your ground.’
Eris, the wind gone out of her, said nothing. Beck prompted her,
‘So, how’s this going to work?’
‘Sorry?’ she answered, as if interrupted from a trance.
‘The lab. I’ll have assistants, materials?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she snapped, as if that answered all.
He heard again the muffled moan of Ellie from the Land Rover, lost in tears. And he mused,
‘Who knows how painful it is for her having all those damage indicators going off in her head.’
Eris only looked at him, blankly, unemotional, saying,
‘But they aren’t in her head, are they. They’re in her chest. You told me that yourself.’
Beck heard and saw n
o more though, as he was invited over to board the waiting vehicle. The last thing he remembered was all eyes being on Eris, and Eris saying nothing as the sound of sirens rose.
The End
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