I Am Automaton: A Military Science Fiction Novel (33 page)

“And nothing, Carl. Just a few days. I think it’ll be good for you.”

“So I don’t lose my humanity?”

“I didn’t say that, but now that you mention it, yes. I think that you need to care for your father.”

“Doing what I do every day is caring for my father and every other American. True care is sacrifice, doing what needs to be done even to your own detriment.”

“Go home, Carl.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I already arranged for a pass. Major Lewis approved it.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“And when you come back I want you to report to radiology for testing.”

“Can’t I have Kettle hold up a MR.UD to my head?”

“CARL.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Now get out of my office. Talking to you is exhausting.”

Carl stood up, saluted, and smirked. “Thank you, Fiona.”

“Scram.”

***

Carl walked up his front walk to his house and rang the doorbell. There was a period of silence, and just as he was about to scan and let himself in
, he heard his dad shuffling to the door. The door opened.

“Hi, Dad.”

Carl was astounded when he saw the state of his father. It was 11:00 and the man was still in his robe, his hair jutting out to one side, at least a few days of whiskers on his face, and he reeked of body odor.

“Jesus, Dad. Are you okay?”

“Come on in,” his father said almost absent mindedly.

He followed his father into the living room, which contained waist high piles of garbage, laundry, and all other kinds of discarded things.

“Dad, what happened?”

“You, know Carl, I expected to hear the news about your brother from you, not some bureaucrat I don’t know.”

“Dad, there was no time.”

“Dammit, Carl, there’s always time.”

“We spoke over the com.”

“A quick call isn’t enough. It was hard enough losing your mother. But now
, Peter too…”

“Dad, I was there, remember? I know what happened.”

Carl’s father got right in his face, his breath pungent. “Oh yeah? So what did happen, exactly? You gonna give me some bullshit about Peter being a hero in some vague combat situation. Shit, I don’t even know where you guys were!”

Carl thought for a minute. His father had
received the “official version” of what happened, the runaround designed to make grieving parents feel proud without revealing any sensitive information.

“I’ll tell you, Dad. I’ll tell you everything.”

His father looked dumbfounded. He hadn’t quite expected that answer. “You wouldn’t. You can’t.”

“Technically you’re right,
Dad, but you deserve the truth. But only under one condition.”

“Okay.”

“You must take it to your grave.”

“What?”

“It’s very classified, Dad. Not even all of the army knows about it.”

His father walked into the kitchen and cleared some garbage off of a chair. Carl came in and leaned on the kitchen counter like he and Peter always used to do.

“Dad, Pete and I were working on something very classified. Something very important. Something that might make us start to win against these terrorists.”

“Yeah, Carl, did you hear about the other attacks? The President is bombing Afghanistan, but those terrorists hide like rats in the caves. We can’t get to them.”

“Funny you should bring that up, Dad.”

And Carl began to tell him about the ID Program, the Labyrinth, and the training exercises. He told his father about Peter’s involvement in operations against the Navajas cartel in Mexico, what happened in Tijuana, and the botched mission in Xcaret that left his father with only one son.

At first, his father thought he was joking. But as Carl told the story and filled it in with such inexplicable detail, he began to realize that this was no tale. Carl was definitely breaking protocol by telling his father, but Major Lewis was in no position to do anything about it.

There was also the risk of the information leaking out to the public, but Carl trusted his father. Besides, once he got to Afghanistan and scorched the earth, the government would want to publicize their use of the I
nsidious Drones.

When Carl was done bringing his father up to date, his father just sat there staring at him.

“Well, that’s what has been happening.”

“And…you’re going to be leading these Insidious Drones?”

“Yup.”

“And you can control them…with your mind.”

“Exactly.”

His father let out a loud sigh. “Carl, don’t you think there’s been enough loss?”

“I-I don’t know what you mean, Dad.”

“You’re all I have left. These bastards took my wife and one of my sons. And now they’re going to finish the job with you.”

“Dad, I have to do it. No one else can, not like I can.”

“But why not someone else this time, Carl? You can come home, live here as long as you like. Maybe go back to school.”

School. Wow. Carl hadn’t thought about school in quite some time. At this moment, classes and homework seemed silly. Ridiculous even.

“Dad, there’s nothing for me here. School is pointless. There are no jobs. And what am I supposed to do? Go from hunting terrorists to sitting in a cubicle making copies all day?”

“You’d be safe.”

“Like
Mom? No one’s safe, Dad. Don’t you see? Unless we do something about the evil that’s out there, there is no safe. There won’t be any companies or employees or colleges or students.”

His father put his palm gently on Carl’s face. “You used to be my little boy. You were so young, and smart, and full of life. Now I don’t recognize you. You are so hard, and full of scars.”

“I’m a man now, Dad. I’m no longer a boy. You raised me to do right, not play it safe. And I’m doing right. And believe me, once I get out there with the ID, nothing will be the same again.”

“I just wish it didn’t have to be you.”

“Dad, there will come the day when you will be proud it’s me. I know this is all hitting you at once, and it’s a lot for you to digest, and you don’t fully understand all of it. But trust me. Someday soon you will understand.”

His father threw his hands down at his sides and stood there resigned.

“And by the way,” Carl continued, changing the subject, “at what point did you start living like this? Pete didn’t tell me anything about this.”

Barry
looked sheepish. “He didn’t want you to worry.”

“Come on, Dad. You’ve got to start taking better care of yourself. Let me help you clean up. Then we’re going to go out for lunch. My treat, of course.”

Carl began to help his father clean up the kitchen and then the living room. It was such a herculean task that Carl sent out for lunch, and they went out to dinner later that evening.

Carl recognized that Fiona was right. It did feel good to see his father. His dad needed him. He’d never understand what Carl had been through or why Peter died, but Carl needed to be a son to his father.

He’d have all the time in the world to be a fearless warrior on the battlefield. But being with his father reminded him of what he was doing it all for, and his resolve grew even stronger.

***

Somewhere in Mexico

A man sat alone in the dark, hands tightly bound behind his back, drenched with sweat, with a burlap sack over his head. He found it difficult to breathe, his hot, uneven breath hitting the inside of the burlap and bouncing back on his face, smothering him.

If the Navajas had wanted him dead, he would have been dead already. They were keeping him alive, but to what purpose he was not certain. He had been moved around, dragged in and out of vehicles blindly. There had been no contact since he had been taken, save for an occasional sip of water in the dark. But whatever it was, he was resolved not to cooperate, even if it meant his demise.

He heard a door open and footsteps in the dirt. He braced himself for whatever was coming. He was forcibly bent forward at the waist so that the person was able to grab him by his bindings and hoist him up. He rose to his feet with a grunt of pain and was shoved forward, stumbling as he went.

They left whatever structure he was being kept in, because sunlight began to penetrate the gaps in the burlap and he began to hear the ambient sounds of the outdoors. After a few minutes of being led blindly, his captor yanked him to a halt by his bindings, and he stood there waiting for whatever was in store for him. He whispered a silent prayer for the strength to resist whatever came next.

After standing for some indeterminate amount of time waiting, he heard multiple sets of footsteps approach. The burlap sack was yanked off of his head. As sunlight flooded his vision, he struggled to make out his surroundings.

He was correct in concluding that he was outside. He was in a sizable clearing, about the size of a football field, with lush vegetation surrounding it. There were men in tattered black outfits, approximately sixty of them, standing motionless at attention.

They looked like soldiers, but as his eyes adjusted he saw that they were not human, and they were not standing at attention…they were completely still. The commander of this outfit, a Navajas, approached him accompanied by a smaller man. The commander began to bark at him in Spanish. A heartbeat delayed, the smaller man began to translate.

“You will help us to use these monsters. You will teach us how to make them follow commands. You will teach us how to control them. You will teach us how to make them kill. If you do not, you will be tortured.”

Although the smaller man was translating, the prisoner never took his eyes off the Navajas commander. He hesitated, gathering saliva in his mouth, and spat on the ground, spraying the commander’s boots. The commander sneered, baring yellow teeth, and struck him hard on the side of his head, catching his ear. The ringing was so loud that he could not hear what the translator said next.

The translator apparently realized this and began to speak in hushed tones to the commander. The commander nodded. The man who dragged the prisoner out shoved him forward towards the decrepit men in black standing in rows.

The prisoner was guided right up to one in the front row and was shoved face-to-face with it. It had no breath, but a stench emanated from its mouth that nearly made him lose his lunch.

He was then pulled away, and again the commander barked at him. The smaller man translated. “You will teach us, or we will feed you to this one piece by piece, and you will watch as it feeds on your appendages.”

Shit, these guys weren’t playing around. The prisoner shrugged. “I don’t even know what these things are. How the hell am I supposed to teach you how to use them?”

The small man translated back to the commander, who shook his head in defiance. Then he got in his face and shouted, covering the man’s face with spittle.

“He says that you will teach his men, or he will start by feeding the monster your…manhood.”

Certainly not the way he wanted to go. He was thinking of something like a decapitation, or being shot in the back of the head. Maybe there was another way out of this, a way that if he was going to die he could take as many of these bastards with him.

He smiled wryly. “When do I start?”

The commander, upon hearing the translation, smiled triumphantly. He signaled to another man, who handed a small apparatus to the prisoner. The prisoner looked down and saw a remote control with a button. He held it up towards the monsters standing in rows and pressed the button. They began to move forward, reaching out for the commander and his little translator.

The translator shouted, “Stop!” The commander backed away behind his translator, training his gun on the prisoner and shouting in Spanish.

The prisoner smiled defiantly, “Go ahead and shoot me. You won’t escape.”

“We have someone important to you,” shouted the translator.

This got the prisoner’s attention. What did they have up their sleeves now? He had a feeling he knew, but he hoped he was wrong. “Prove it.”

The translator took out his Mini-com, activated the video feature, and tossed it to the prisoner. The prisoner looked down at the screen, and his face went white.

The monsters were closing in on the commander, who now had his handgun trained on them. The prisoner pressed the button, and the monsters came to a stop. He was furious as he looked down at the Mini-com screen. They weren’t bluffing.

“Do you see that monster standing over him in the wedding dress?” the translator gloated. “We will feed him to it, and you will watch.”

“And what makes me think you won’t harm him if I do what you ask?” the prisoner asked through gritted teeth.

“He will die quickly, senor…” the man looked at his rank on his uniform, “…Lieutenant. But if you don’t, his death will be slow and painful.”