I Am Automaton: A Military Science Fiction Novel (26 page)

Carl and Mirabella strode off to make their sweeps for marauding ID. Peter addressed the other five men. “Okay. We’re in a pretty solid structure with no windows. The weakest point would be the inside doors.”

“They’re not bolted because they’re not exterior doors,” Barnes added.

“Right,” said Peter, “
so we need to focus on those doors. There are three sets of doors. If they make it into the building, they’ll be banging on those.”

“What if we just wait them out?” Private Hasbro asked. “When the authorities get here they can deal with them.”

Peter considered the option. “Too complicated. And complicated means messy.”

“Messy how?” Hasbro asked.

“Well, the Mexican authorities won’t know what the ID are. After several of them are eaten, they’ll fight back, but there’d be a learning curve. More would get eaten, some turned. By the time they’d figure out that they need to take head shots, it would be chaos. Not to mention that once they’d breach this structure, they’d be paranoid and trigger happy with hundreds of innocent tourists.”

“We need to leave this convention center,” concluded Barnes.

“Right,” agreed Peter. “We can leave through the interior doors. The manager won’t stop us. We can set up some kind of a perimeter…”

“We have no functioning weapons,” Longo reminded.

Just then, Jorge, the manager walked over, which Peter found to be perfect timing, “What are they doing, Lieutenant?”

He was pointing to Carl and Mirabella.

“Oh, they’re just making a sweep…for safety. By the way, where’s your maintenance equipment stored?”

However,
Jorge was not easily convinced. “Sweep for what, Lieutenant?”

“Oh, you know…seismic vibrations.”

“Seismic…vibrations?”

“Yeah, this is a powerful storm. The…barometric pressure might…disturb some of the fault lines
…”

“Fault lines?”

“Yes, fault lines. We are just making sure that the…structural integrity of the building has not been…compromised.”

Jorge looked at Peter as if he was speaking Greek, but didn’t trust that it was actually Greek. “There is a large maintenance shed behind Building H.”

“So where exactly is Building H?”

“You’re not going back outside in the storm, Lieutenant.”

“Jorge, we need to take inventory of the maintenance equipment for the cleanup tomorrow morning.”

“Excuse me, Lieutenant, but isn’t that
our
problem?”

Peter felt the vein on his forehead pulse. This manager was making a royal nuisance of himself.

“Jorge, I’m just trying to do my job here. Just cut me some slack. Where’s Building H?”

Jorge apparently felt he crossed some kind of line, and he shook his head embarrassed. “Sorry, Lieutenant. Of course. I want to cooperate.”

“Building H?”

“Yes, if you leave out those interior doors and make a left, you’ll pass through the Business Center and run into our steakhouse. Go through the steakhouse and out the other side. Make another left, and go around the swimming pool. The building on the left is Building H.”

“Jesus. You get all that Barnes?”

Barnes nodded.

“Jorge, this is very important. Muy importante.”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Once we leave, do not open the door for anyone until morning.”

“I do not understand.”

“You may hear some knocking or banging on the doors or walls. That’s just us testing the structure. But do not, for any reason, open the doors again. That’s a direct order. Comprende?”

Jorge nodded his head enthusiastically. Maybe he really did want to help. Or maybe he just wanted to be rid of them.

“Good. BIRDSALL, MIRABELLA, ARE WE CLEAR?”

They each gave a thumbs up.

Suddenly everything went dark.

“What was that?” Barnes asked.

“Oh, the authorities have just cut the power. We expected this,” Jorge explained.

Peter nodded and humored him. Then, as Jorge went to deliver his update over the
bullhorn, Peter gathered his men close.

“That wasn’t the authorities. It was
them
. Hell’s coming, and we’ve got to throw a welcome party.”

The men nodded. They knew things were about to get hairy, and they knew they had to move.

“Okay guys, lets rock and roll.”

***

Peter closed the doors outside of the auditorium. They were in a large hallway. He imagined that when there was power, there must have been dozens of holographic advertisements for their various business services, conferences, etc.

However,
for the moment the whole place was eerily quiet.

“Find a map of the grounds, there has to be one around here.”

They fanned out with their mini lights.

“Here’s a map,” shouted Mirabella.

Peter came over and scanned it with his Multi-tasker.

“Good. Now we have a map. I’m sending it to each of you…Building H is too far, and it’s too dangerous to go outside. I was hoping to find some machetes, but that’s not an option. SWEEPERS, sweep the walls and keep an eye on your monitors.”

Carl and Mirebella split up and began their sweep. Peter addressed the rest of the group.

“Okay, according to the map, there’s a gym right down that hall.” He pointed at the short hallway opposite the Convention Center doors. “Maybe there are some things we can use.”

“Like what, Lieutenant?” Barnes asked.

“I dunno. Maybe we can use the free weights as weapons, to crush their skulls. We have our batons, but we can use whatever we can get our hands on. Remember, headshots are the name of the game…”

Just
then, they all heard the sounds of breaking glass. It came from the steakhouse. The SWEEPERS stopped their sweep and looked at Peter for direction.

Great
, he thought to himself,
and we don’t have any viable weapons yet.

“It came from the steakhouse.”

The men didn’t know what to do. Their guns were useless. Peter watched as two men came running in, each carrying something.

“Hold it, they’re not ID.”

They were obviously human; maybe some stranded tourists or even a couple of locals. Then Peter saw the AK-47’s.

He raised his weapon and trained it on them. They were arguing in some other language, but when they saw
Peter, they raised their rifles. Peter’s men aimed their defunct weaponry at the two visitors.

The two men were yelling at Peter. Peter took his left hand off his rifle and held his hand out, palm facing them, a gesture for them to calm down.

“Is-is that…” Barnes started.

“Yes,” Peter said in horror. These were terrorists, Order for International Liberation that were still lingering.

They continued to yell at him and point their weapons. Peter and his men kept bluffing with theirs. Peter kept telling them to calm down.

Thankfully, no one had fired a shot, as it would only have been from the terrorists. Apparently Peter’s bluff was working.

“Don’t lower your weapons,” he instructed to his men.

This was quite the delicate stalemate, and undoubtedly a diversion that they didn’t need at the moment. Soon the ID would be upon them, and they needed to find something to fight with and a place to make their stand.

Carl stepped forward, holding his MR.UD down at his side and his other hand out, showing that it was empty. One of the men pointed his AK at him and yelled. The other kept his gun on Peter.

“Carl, what the hell are you doing?”

However, before Peter could say or do anything else, Carl held his arms out stiffly in front of him and began to walk funny, groaning and snapping his jaws.

The two men apparently forgot about Peter and the others for a moment and just gawked at this funny man walking like a mummy.

Carl stopped and said loudly, “Zom-bies. Zom-bies. Yes?”

One of the men said something in his language, and both began to nod emphatically. It seemed that they understood his pantomiming.

Carl then gestured with his free hand in a sweeping motion ending in his pointing at the ground. “They’re coming…HERE. They will be here.”

Then he pointed his MR.UD at the windows
as if it was a rifle and mimicked shooting at the windows.

“Jesus Christ, Carl,” Peter said, but he watched the two men closely. Maybe they understood.

“We have to fight to-ge-ther,” Carl said. “To-ge-ther.” He made a wide gesture encompassing everyone ending with his one hand shaking the other in pantomimed agreement.

The two men looked at each other and nodded, but they continued to train their AK’s on Peter.

“I don’t think it’s working,” Peter murmured to Carl out of the corner of his mouth.

Then
the best thing that could’ve happened did. There were more sounds of broken glass, and several ID came stomping through the steakhouse and in their direction.

“Shit, they’re already here,” said Longo.

“Fall back!” Peter ordered.

Their two guests had other ideas. They began to open fire at the approaching ID. The ID stumbled and staggered through the gunfire, but only one that had been hit in the head (probably accidentally) was stopped permanently.

Carl ran up to one of the men and tapped him on the shoulder. The man looked over at Carl angrily as he continued to fire into the closing ID.

Carl made a gun with his thumb and index finger and pantomimed shooting himself in the head. The man shot him a look that could only be construed as pure bile, and then he aimed his rifle higher.

He took out two of the closest ID with headshots, but both men’s bursts were too erratic and uncontrolled. They’d be out of bullets before disposing of the ID.

“Carl!” Peter yelled. Carl turned back to look at Peter. Peter made a swirling motion with his finger and then gestured with all five fingers on a straightened hand to move into the gym.

Peter retreated into the hallway, and his men followed. During the brief pauses between gunfire, Peter heard the tourists on the other side of the convention doors yelling out.

Jorge, don’t open those doors, whatever you do.
He tried to open the glass doors to the gym, but they were locked. He smashed the glass with the butt of his rifle and breached the entrance.

All of the men filed into the gym. They began to look around for anything they could use.

Behind them, they heard one of the terrorists screaming and banging on the convention doors. It appeared the ID were doing their thing, and quite effectively from the sounds of it.

“Quick, grab some free weights,” Peter ordered. He went and grabbed a straight bar lying on the floor without weights on it. He wielded it to get a feel for it, like a kid taking a practice swing on deck at a little league game. It was longer and heavier than the baton he carried.

Carl put down his MR.UD and was looking around. “Where’re we making our stand, Lieutenant?”

Peter looked around the gym. There were two sets of stairs separated by a landing leading to the machines upstairs.

“We go up. We can barricade the top with the machines. As they make it up and over one or a couple at a time, we smash their skulls in.”

“Wait,” Carl pointed over to the benches. “Let’s load up the bars
with the weights on them and take them up. We can drop them from the top and take a bunch of them down at once.”

“Good idea, Carl. Barnes, Longo, and Munger, help Carl. Mirabella, Hasbro, and Smithe, bring as many free weights as you can up the stairs.”

The hallway was eerily quiet. The ID were feeding.

“Let’s move it, men. We only have until when the ID have finished the
ir snack.”

Carl and Barnes loaded up one bar with heavy weights and each took a side. They walked quickly but carefully towards the stairs, grunting under the weight of their load. Longo and Munger loaded up their bar and were right behind them.

They started up the stairs and were nearly startled into dropping their loads as the back glass door cracked from the impact of a rather large ID. Outside they were being blown all over the place. But the large, glass windows of the modern gym might as well have been a supermarket window, and the ID were getting a good glimpse of the food running around inside.

They all saw Peter and his men, and they were all converging on the gym in their relentless way, persevering in the 175 mile per hour wind.

“Hurry up! We gotta move!” Pete yelled in encouragement. Carl, Barnes, Longo, and Munger just reached the top when the ID started barging into the gym on the other side from the hallway.

“The machines, move ‘em!”

They took treadmills, elliptical machines, anything they could find, and they piled them in a heap at the top of the stairs, wedging them into the rails at the sides.