Future Unleashed Read online

  I shouldered my weapon smoothly and put a round through the creature’s eye, destroying the brain in a flash. The huge animal shuddered and began to topple, the light going out of the other eye as a wave of disgust swept through me at the utter waste before me. With a thunderous tumult, the beast landed, the lower half of its leg snapping clean off in the hole.

  “What happened?” Valor shouted from the crest of the hill. Her chest was heaving as she took in the scene, and I thought I saw tears spring to her eyes, even from my vantage point.

  “Shattered leg in that hole. I put it down, it was—it was suffering,” I said, unsure why I felt so shitty. Then it clicked. I hunted for food, but this was an act of waste, brought on by a stupid hole that never should have—

  “Doesn’t that look like the other places?” Valor asked, interrupting my moment of anger.

  “What other places?”

  “The dirt. It’s all inside out. See those white things?” She pointed near the giant corpse. There were light colored items in the debris, and they looked out of place, even to my eye.

  “Okay. What are they?” I asked. Valor came to my side and we began descending the slope, wolves at our sides.

  We reached the closest edge of the dirt, and I picked up one of the white objects.

  “I’ll be damned. Fossils.” It was a shell of some kind, but bone white and clearly fossilized. There were dozens of them, along with all manner of other bits from the deep past. “Something brought these to the surface, and it wasn’t a groundhog. Also, groundhogs don’t dig holes big enough to harm—well, whatever that poor thing was.” I waved to the giant beast, on which both wolves now stood, sniffing and whining softly at the presence of so much food.

  “Go ahead,” Valor said.

  Both wolves waited a mannerly second and then began to use their jaws at the junction of one of the animal’s huge ears. They tore the doormat sized ear off and stalked off with it like a carnival prize.

  “Not very greedy, are they?” I asked.

  “They’re not, but it’s only because their instincts keep them lean. Less is more in their world, where speed and endurance can be the difference between life and death.” She gave my muscles an appraising look, then grinned. “Seems you’re part wolf as well.”

  “I’ve been known to howl, given the right woman to inspire it.”

  “I can’t wait to hear your next song.” Her grin was wicked. “As to this . . . place, what of it?” she asked.

  “The hole is recent, for two reasons. The dirt hasn’t been rained on, which means this happened in the past week or so. The second reason, and one I find even more compelling, is that this poor creature has been walking this path for some time,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because of those,” I said, waving down an obvious trail to a massive sprawl of blackberries. “And what’s just beyond those bushes, too, though you can’t see it from here. Can you smell it? I know the wolves can, but they’re occupied.”

  In answer, the wolves looked up from chewing on their prize to lift their noses. After a second, they both bared their teeth, then looked to Valor.

  “Death?” she asked.

  “Ruins, and I already know what we’ll find. A farm, corpses, maybe a few missing people, and utter depravity, but I want to see it for myself,” I said.

  “Okay.” Valor schooled her features, clearly getting tired of death and loss. “Let’s go.”

  We walked along with her wolves, and the scene was exactly as I expected, if on a larger scale. There had been three families, and all were dead, mutilated, and dismembered in new and horrible ways, with no less than three people being opened up from neck to navel for a purpose I couldn’t begin to imagine. Two of the men were cut from the back, as if by a weapon, and their spines were—well, if not gone, then pulverized by some unseen force. It was all Valor could do not to vomit, and the wolves paced back and forth, whining and uncertain.

  “I’ve seen enough.” I led them away from the site, back to the four-wheeler. Without a backward glance, we traveled on, silent for a moment as we both stewed in our thoughts.

  “Will you tell me something about yourself?” Valor asked.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Something domestic. Do you like to cook? Do you like to hunt, or read, or be still and do nothing, if you ever get the chance?” she asked.

  It was a thought so alien it struck me silent for a moment, then I smiled. “I like to grill. Back when—back in my time, it was understood that if you were a man during the summer, you grilled. And drank beer and hung out with your friends, but the grill was the heart of it all. It was how we came together, like an unofficial official social club.”

  “Did women grill things?”

  “Sure. They drank beer, too,” I said.

  “I find that I prefer stronger spirits, but I like the idea of cooking with friends. So little of what I do is for pleasure,” she said, and there was a distinctly wistful note in her words.

  “Everything is because we have to. It’s a harder world now,” I said, adjusting the steering wheel to avoid a rock the size of a mailbox.

  “Was it easy during your time?” Valor asked.

  “No, but it was nothing like this. I didn’t worry about being eaten on the way to my car or invaded by people who seem to think that my body parts are theirs for the taking. There were no ogres—at least, not real ones, though we had some people in the government who would have qualified—and I never worried about dinobirds dropping on me from a hundred meters up. A different place, and now that I look back on it, soft. There was war, and problems, but nothing like this,” I said.

  “I think I might like to have a grill,” Valor said. “If I cooked, would you come eat?”

  “Of course.”

  “Promise?” she asked, smiling sideways at me.

  “Deal. You cook, I eat, or I cook, and you eat, or both. But still, deal,” I said, then reached over and shook her hand, which was oddly formal given how many times we been writhing against each other in a state of complete passion. And nudity. It really changes the way you relate to someone once they’ve come to know every sexual position you can dream up and a few that seemed impossible.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” she said.

  “I’m a man of my word. One condition, though.”

  “Which is?” she asked, lifting a brow.

  “No giant ears from dead animals. Only steaks.”

  I found a game trail that might have been from the giant rhinoceros creature, and after a few klicks it merged with the remains of a road. How long the road had been unused was anyone’s guess, but it was clear enough that I opened the throttle to maximum and the ground flew beside us. The wolves rode on the back, peering around with their tongues out in what looked like a canine smile.

  When I laughed, Valor asked me why, seeing that I was looking at her wolves.

  “No matter how big the dog, or what year, they all love riding in a truck,” I said, chuckling at the wolves and their complete joy at the situation.

  In an hour, Valor thought she recognized landmarks, and in two hours, she knew we were close.

  “There,” she said with complete certainty, indicating two stands of trees that framed the road. “That’s it.

  I slowed, and then stopped about a klick out from what appeared to be a worn office building in the middle of a scrub forest. It may have been white at one point, but the structure was a dull gray, with missing windows lending the appearance of a gap-toothed smile. I counted four and a half floors, with the ground covering the building at an angle that went lower toward the backside of the exposed structure.

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  Valor gave a terse nod. Her eyes were bright, and I knew she was dealing with a flood of memories. I drove forward slowly, then stopped two hundred meters away, parking behind a thick bramble of thorny bushes covered in tiny white flowers.

  “Foot from here. You okay?”
I asked, trying to make my voice as gentle as possible.

  All she could do was nod, but her steps were certain, and her rifle grip was firm. The wolves fanned out, ears up and eyes forward. There was no sound from the building, and the sun was just low enough that some of it spilled inside the open windows, casting the interior in a warm golden light.

  We covered the ground in silence, but I felt nothing and heard less as the building loomed before us. I knew some of it was buried, but the open windows were an easy access point, so I pointed to one, hoping for some information from Valor.

  “Top floor, I think. That’s all I know,” she said.

  “Top floor it is. I’m going in first, then the wolves, and then you. I want you on my right, gun ready, and eyes open. I know this is a tomb for you and your life, but I need you alert. Don’t mean to sound like a hardass, but there it is. If these Procs are half as dangerous as I think they are, then I don’t even trust their corpses,” I said.

  “I know I don’t,” she said. “I’m good. Let’s go.”

  I swept ahead into the building, seeing nothing larger than a beetle that left with an indignant chirp of its bizarre back legs, and then we were inside, surrounded by something familiar.

  “Memrock,” I said, noting the soft, bent appearance of the building.

  “Still fighting to correct itself after all these years,” Valor said. She was right. There was a surrealist element to the place, since each wall was off, and the angles weren’t right—but they were close enough to be familiar. The interior floor was open, with minimal walls, two staircases, and a central shaft that had been thick glass. Whoever looted the place had done so with surgical precision, because there was nothing left. Not even a stray pen or piece of paper left behind, and even the dirt was undisturbed.

  We entered the left staircase with the patience of thieves, and Valor sent the wolves up the other. They padded silently up into the gloom, never looking back, and we tried to match their confident pace by walking steadily up the broad stairs, lit from outside by long, open windows on each floor. There was a smell of age, and dust, and something faintly yeasty as we ascended.

  Something organic.

  My heart went into the next gear as I emerged at the top of the stairs, looking out over the top floor which lay open before us. I saw the wolves waiting in the other opening, their ears turning toward me like radar antennae.

  Unlike the other floors, this one had an occupant.

  He was on a table in the middle of the room, elevated above the other remains of what had once been a command center. There were shattered screens, chairs, a broken tank of unknown origin and complex tubing running between what could have passed for an angled throne, the metal rusted but still holding its shape after centuries of exposure.

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” I whispered, and my voice echoed through the space like a spoken curse.

  The Proc was horizontal, but even so I could tell he was nearly seven feet tall, ropy with muscle, and wearing combat armor that covered his chest, thighs, and abdomen with interlocking plates of dark gray material. There was a green sash around his head, meant to pull back hair from a cruel face with high cheekbones and a blade of a nose, the forehead long and proud. It was a face without mercy, and the long fingers of his right hand clutched a massive needle attached to a rotting tube that may have been surgical rubber at some point in the past decade.

  “Why didn’t they take his body?” I asked, frozen in place by the surreal scene.

  “Maybe they don’t know?” Valor asked.

  I shrugged, walking over the debris to get to him. I had to step up to the table, and my feet crunched over an array of items scattered in haste—fragments of things that might have made sense to a being from a thousand years in the future, but not to me. He looked like a man, but he was no longer human. That much I could tell from his surroundings, his structure, and the devices that had been attached to his body years earlier.

  I pulled my light out, dialed the beam to its smallest setting, and reached out, lifting his eyelid with an uncertainty I hadn’t felt since waking up in the Empty. Shining the light in his eye, I noticed something was very wrong.

  It was an eye, not a dried orb. And it dilated.

  The Proc was alive.

  “What the fuck is this about?” I hissed. There was no way he could be alive, but he was. In a flash, I thought of my own decanting from a tube that had been under desert sands for twenty centuries, and I knew that all I could was accept what was in front of me as fact and use it to my advantage.

  To our advantage.

  I tapped my comm unit, still in a state of shock. The fog lifted when Aristine answered. “Jack, you okay?” We’ve got eyes on the building, but no sign of trouble.

  “We’re better than okay. I need a team to meet me here triple time. Like yesterday. I need medical and armed escort with no less than fifty Daymares. Can you do it?” I asked.

  “No, but I can get you ten. We’re assembling everyone at the rally point, and I don’t have enough people hardened to pull them out into the sun. I’ve got teams ready in thirty-six hours, but not now. What is it?” Aristine asked, picking up on my excitement.

  “I found the Proc that Valor knew about. It’s not a legend. It’s real,” I said.

  “That’s incredible. We have no idea who they are, or if they’re even—” Aristine said, but I cut her off.

  “He’s alive.”

  “What?” Aristine’s voice dripped disbelief. I didn’t blame her.

  “Call it suspended animation or—whatever you want, I guess, but the bastard is alive, if in a state of near coma. I’m not moving him until your people are here and I can be certain we can restrain him. He’s not entirely human, and there’s a good chance of augmentation by nanobots or something else. As to what that might be, I don’t know, but he’s been up here for a decade, and he isn’t dead. That tells me we need him alive, and soon, because the Procs left him here for a reason. We need to know why,” I said.

  “Team inbound. It’ll be eleven hours at earliest, but they’ll get to you. Any chance of biological contagion?” Aristine asked.

  “I don’t think so. He’s been here this long without anything happening. We’ll stay outside, but I like our chances for him staying asleep until it’s too late. When the sonofabitch wakes up in chains, I want a camera recording it so I can see his face,” I said.

  “That’s easy. You can record him yourself. Come back with the team, and we can try to wake him up together. I’ll have a medical clean room ready for our guest,” Aristine said.

  “Good. This is your show. If he does wake up, all I ask is that I get to be the bad guy,” I said.

  “That’s my job,” Valor growled.

  “I heard that,” Aristine said with a laugh. “We’ll hold a place at the table for you, Jack. See you soon. If he twitches, blow his head off, will you?”

  “I won’t think twice,” I said.

  Behind me, Valor murmured, “If I let the fucker keep his head until then.”

  17

  Twelve hours later, we were part of a column of a truck, three four wheelers, and a new fusion-powered overland bus with comically large tires that Aristine’s engineers had been planning on unveiling a week later. Our discovery moved the reveal up, and I was thankful for it. With formed seats and climate control, the vehicle was closer to a tour bus than anything I’d seen since waking up in the Empty. With Condor air support and real-time synced tracking, we made triple-time across the scrub forest, desert, and creeks, arriving at the Chain in less than nine hours.

  “I had no idea things were so. . .” Valor said, waving a hand around her at the comparative luxury. Her wolves rested by her feet, their ears alert but eyes closed. They were tired after so much combat patrol, but with a quiet word, she had stilled them. In repose, they looked almost domesticated. Almost.

  “When you get to the Chain, I think you’ll understand why,” I said. “There were more than just pockets
of buried treasure. There were entire communities dedicated to advancing science and humanity in the face of the virus, and you’re about to see one up close. “

  Yulin leaned forward, her blonde hair in a thick braid. “My sister—and everyone else-- are thrilled to have you as a guest. The things that are happening right now are unlike anything we’ve known in centuries. This is our breakout, Valor. This is what we’ve worked for—two thousand years of quiet diligence, coming to a point here and now, and it’s all because of Jack, and then what you’ve done. Thank you,” the beautiful woman said, taking Valor’s hands in hers. The wolves didn’t twitch. They knew gratitude when they heard it.

  Valor looked uncomfortable, an expression that was completely alien on her features. “Um, thank you, but all I—that is, all we’ve really done is—”

  “Give us a link to three worlds, and you’ve done it because of who and what you are, Valor. You’re an empath, Jack tells me? You feel things, and can make people feel at ease around you?”

  Valor looked down, then smiled, regaining her composure. “Yes. I don’t know if it’s a gift, but—yes.” She cocked her head at me and licked her teeth, thinking. “Did Jack tell you things we said in bed? I was assured those were in confidence.”

  Yulin’s peal of laughter startled the wolves and everyone else in the vehicle. When she was done laughing, she wiped at her eyes, having reluctantly reclaimed her hands from Valor. “Jack, you are a man for this time. You go into the desert, find beautiful women, and convince them to join forces on a quest for the ages. Do you know what you’ve done?”

  I adopted my sternest expression. “I could give you a list, but I’ve done most of the same things with you, although I’m too much of a gentleman to list them. However, in the interest of science and world harmony, allow me to—”