Infinity Reborn (The Infinity Trilogy Book 3) (13 page)

I just stand there, catching my breath, looking at the hedgehog, feeling like an idiot.

“Where are you guys? Come in!” Bit’s panicked voice says from inside my satchel.

I tuck my flashlight away, pull out my radio, and squeeze the “Talk” button. “We’re here,” I reply.

I can hear her breathe a sigh of relief. “Oh thank god, I looked back, and I couldn’t see you.”

“We’re fine,” I reply as I look ahead, scanning the darkened landscape at the far end of the winding pavement. I can only just make out her shadowy silhouette in the distance. She appears to be standing in the dim glow shining down from a light above what looks like a metal doorway that’s set into the side of the hill. Dr. Pierce is standing at the door behind her, and through the walkie-talkie I can hear him in the background, muttering something about the combination of the lock not being what it’s supposed to be.

“We’ll have the door open soon,” says Bit. “At least I hope we will. Dr. Pierce said he might need to open the panel and manually hot-wire the lock. What’s taking you so long? Is everything OK?”

“Yeah, we’re fine. We strayed off the path, that’s all. I thought I saw something, but it turned out to be a . . . false alarm.”

“Well, hurry up,” replies Bit. “I’m getting some really weird readings from the sensors. They’re not making any sense. The closest three are all triggering now, and I have no idea why.”

Jonah’s voice pipes in over the radio. “Finn, Brody, let me remind you both that you’re supposed to be protecting Bettina and Dr. Pierce. This is a life-or-death situation, so for all our sakes, stop messing around!”

“We know that, Jonah. It’s just that I thought I saw—”

“Listen to me,” Jonah interrupts. “Our two R.A.M.s are getting dangerously close, and we’ve lost sight of Gazelle. If we’re forced to rappel off the other side of this building and run, we’ll do it, but I’d much rather you shut those robots down before they reach us, so pretty please, with hot fudge and a cherry on top . . . GET TO THAT COMPUTER SLATE!”

Brody and I both flinch at the outburst. No one likes being yelled at, but of course Jonah is right. We’re wasting valuable time.

“Sorry, Jonah. We’re going right now.” I quickly tuck my radio away in my bag before he has a chance to start shouting again.

Brody and I turn and start running across the grass back onto the path. “Don’t step on the Lobot,” he says, and I shake my head and quietly chuckle. Someone always has to slip a joke into a crisis, don’t they? He laughs along with me as we run, but I abruptly go silent and look over my shoulder when I hear something that piques my attention. I slow down and jog to a stop, and Brody does the same.

“I think I heard something,” I whisper to Brody as I tilt my head to listen properly. I know Jonah told us not to dawdle, but I can’t help it. That messed-up encounter with Infinity has put me on edge. Mr. Hedgehog was proof of that. Twenty yards behind us, our spiky little friend is making a soft rustling noise as it shuffles into the shrubbery, and crickets are gently warbling in the night, but underneath all that I’m certain that I heard something else.

“What was that?” I ask, and seeing my unease, Brody turns his head to listen as well.

There it is. I did hear something. It’s quiet, but it’s gradually getting louder, and I can tell that Brody hears it, too, because his face instantly drops.

It’s the slow, heavy, repeating thud of footsteps.

“The R.A.M.,” Brody whispers. “It’s here.”

I suddenly remember the binoculars Brody gave me. I open my satchel, fish them out, and hold them up to my eyes. They’re small but powerful, and as I look toward the far end of the promenade, what I see makes my stomach twist into a writhing knot. There, rounding the corner of a gutted building in the distance, is an extraordinarily large and bulbous silhouette. With long, pounding strides, the hulking machine steps out into the light of a lamppost, which, at about ten feet tall, only barely reaches as high as the robot’s hip joint.

My memories of these machines are just as murky as everything else in my head. All I can really remember is the green of their armor, the bright fire erupting from their arms, and the overwhelming terror I felt whenever they were near. The images in my mind have been fuzzy, like seeing pictures through steamed-up glass, but now, the sight of that robotic monster triggers a window of clarity, like a hand wiping a clear patch in the haze, and as the memories pour through into the front of my mind, the details suddenly become sharp and vivid.

I see my teacher Miss Cole and two of my classmates, Ashley Farver and Sherrie Polito. A sick feeling boils and swells in my gut as I watch them screaming and holding their hands out in front of them before they are obliterated in a flurry of shredded clothing and splatters of blood. Their bodies seem to explode, scattering scraps of flesh in all directions. I remember two more classmates, Millie Grantham and Amy Dee, aghast with anguish, their open-mouthed shrieks completely drowned out by the sound of the R.A.M.’s deafening gunfire as their pale, tortured faces were speckled red with the remains of the other young women. I wince and grit my teeth as the images sting like acid in my mind, and a tremor of anger and revulsion ripples through my entire body as I remember exactly how brutally lethal that machine over there is. It’s a walking golem of death and destruction.

Maybe Brent was right. Maybe this place is a slaughterhouse, and that robot is a thirty-foot-tall meat grinder. Even though the giant monster is a good four of five hundred yards away, as long as it exists on planet Earth, it will always be too close for my liking. I lower the binoculars, and Brody takes them from my hand to see for himself. He’s still looking as I yank on his sleeve. “We need to go.”

“Hell yeah we do, look!” he says, thrusting the binoculars back into my hand.

I raise the glasses to my face, and I see exactly what he means. How could I not; even from this distance their dark bodies are a bold contrast to the stark white of the pavement.

“Those are not hedgehogs,” whispers Brody.

“No, they most definitely are not,” I reply as two Lobots scuttle through the circle of light cast by a lamppost and into the shadows on the other side. They must have sensed us, because they’re heading this way, and they’re moving fast. So quickly that in just a few seconds, they have scampered up over a fallen section of track and are darting toward the line of cherry trees.

Suddenly, almost as if the two Lobots had tipped it off to our exact location, the huge dome head on top of the R.A.M.’s wide, rounded shoulders swivels toward us and jolts to a stop. It sees us, glaring at us with eyes shining red through the night like two portals to hell as it raises one of its weaponized arms in our direction.

At the sudden real threat of being cut down by a torrential rain of brutal gunfire, I bark at Brody, “Move!” With an urgency borne from desperately wanting to stay alive, both of us take off running as I shove the binoculars back into my bag.

In the distance Bit and Dr. Pierce are still standing at a closed door. I look back over my shoulder, scanning the shadows for the two Lobots, and I see something that at first glance doesn’t make any sense. The white promenade around the feet of the R.A.M. is very rapidly turning black, as if it’s gradually being covered by a dark, writhing carpet.

It’s then that two things become frighteningly apparent. Firstly, it explains why the sensors were going haywire, and secondly, Dr. Pierce was so very, very wrong. There aren’t four or five prototype Lobots out there. Oh no. There are
hundreds
of them, and I get the feeling that the R.A.M. wasn’t pointing at us to open fire. If it was, it would’ve done it already. I think it’s sending the rest of those brain spiders after us, and now here they come, squirming across the promenade, following right after the first two.

Glancing back in horror, I see the edge of the dark, shapeless mass move up over that pile of rubble and begin pouring over the top of it in a wriggling waterfall of spiders.

“Just keep running,” I hiss between breaths. “Don’t look back.”

I should’ve known better than to tell Brody
not
to do something, because as soon as I say it, he looks over his shoulder, and his eyes go wide with panic.

“Hoooly craaaaap!” he wails as we run side by side through the night. We’ve still got at least two hundred yards to go until we reach Bit and Dr. Pierce. I can run a lot faster than Brody, but he’s going as quickly as he can, and I’m not going to leave him. When I take another glance over my shoulder, a selfish urge deep inside me almost makes me want to eat my words.

The first two Lobots must have cut directly across the grass in a straight line between here and the promenade . . . because they’ve scampered out onto the path only 150 yards behind us. I look ahead, and as we get closer to the door in the hillside, I’m utterly dismayed that it appears Dr. Pierce is still trying to open it.

I reach inside the bag and retrieve my radio, which is a lot easier said than done when running. I squeeze the “Talk” button and shout into it. “Open the door! Open the door now!”

“What’s wrong?” Bit replies anxiously, clearly alerted by the panic in my voice. I’m about to warn her about the Lobots when a misplaced step almost results in me rolling my ankle. I stumble and regain my footing, but the walkie-talkie slips from my fingertips and clatters onto the path. I look over my shoulder and see the two Lobots are closing in way too
fast
.

They’re so close now that I can make out details of their bodies, which, just like Dr. Pierce said, resemble large black robotic spiders, with four small round, glowing red circles for eyes on the front of their heads. Dr. Pierce said the Lobots seek out movement and heat, and it becomes glaringly obvious that’s exactly what they’ve found as every one of those eyes is focused directly on us.

The Lobots have a disturbing scrambling, galloping way of running, a flurry of multiple legs tapping on the concrete. They’re so close I fear we’ll soon have no choice but to face them and fight, but as my dropped walkie-talkie bounces on the pavement right in front of them, they skid to a stop, and there’s a rapid succession of spitting sounds as multiple cable-like filaments suddenly shoot out from underneath their bodies and coil around the radio like thin prehensile tentacles.

I can’t make out what she’s saying, but Bit’s voice is still shouting from the speaker of the radio as the Lobots scuttle around in a bizarre little circular, dancing tug-of-war, grappling for possession of the walkie-talkie.

Brody and I don’t stop for a second, and I’m thankful for the chance to put some much-needed distance between us and those creepy robotic spiders. We sprint on, covering good ground, but with another quick glance over my shoulder, I’m disappointed to see that my walkie-talkie hasn’t distracted the Lobots for as long as I hoped it would. The spiders’ filaments retract back into their bodies, leaving my radio lying on the path before turning to resume the chase, scurrying at a frightening pace toward us.

My legs are aching, and my lungs are beginning to burn, but Brody looks as if he’s much worse off than me. He’s trying his best, but he’s wheezing and slowing down to a dangerous degree. I grab his shirt at the shoulder in an effort to pull him along, but all I succeed in doing is slowing myself down, too. “We’re almost there,” I hiss through my teeth, and a red-faced, openmouthed Brody nods painfully as he gulps at the air.

Eighty yards to go, it isn’t far, but I can hear the scuttling footsteps of the Lobots right behind us, and I’m afraid that eighty yards might as well be eight hundred. My fears come true as I hear a series of rapid spits and see half a dozen thin black cables suddenly coil around Brody’s lower leg like a tangle of parasitic worms. He lets out a panicked grunt but carries on running as hard as he can, and he doesn’t look back, but I do. One of the Lobots leaps off the ground and speeds through the air, its multiple legs open like claws as it reels itself in. Riding the black cables all the way to Brody, it clamps on to his leg, and he cries out in pain as it digs its head into his calf muscle.

The lightning-fast attack happened in less than three seconds, but the fear on Brody’s face as he falls will stay with me forever. Or maybe it won’t, because if we can’t escape from these Lobots, both our minds are only a moment away from being completely wiped clean.

Brody hits the ground and rolls, and I skid to a stop. Thrusting my hand into the satchel, my fingertips find the flashlight as the second Lobot leaps from the pavement and comes sailing through the air, directly at my head.

In one fluid movement, I whip the flashlight from the bag and swing my arm as hard as I can. Lucky strike or not, the hit is good. Splinters of black plastic shatter from the Lobot as the flashlight connects square in the center of its head, smashing three of its eyes and knocking it out of the air with a loud and satisfying crack. The robotic spider hits the path and skitters on its back across the pavement into the grass, its spindly limbs twitching as its one remaining red eye fades, then flickers out.

“Finn! Help me!” shouts a terrified Brody as he attempts to hobble up onto his feet. “I can’t feel my leg!”

Brody falls to the ground again, and I leap at the spider clamped onto his calf. I want to bash its head in, just like I did with the other one, but it’s tucked underneath its body, biting into Brody. I smash the flashlight hard onto the back of its black dinner-plate-size body, and I succeed in putting a deep dent into it, but the damn thing doesn’t let go. I try again and again and again, pummeling it with all my might, and on the fourth strike, to my relief, the thin cables unravel from Brody’s leg, and the robotic spider finally releases him.

Unfortunately my apparent victory is very short lived, as the Lobot’s head emerges from the underside, and its four glowing red eyes swivel around to face me. Its multiple legs, which were curving around Brody, fold up toward me, scrabbling in the air like long, gnarled witch fingers. I target its head, and I’m raising my flashlight when there’s a spitting sound, followed by a puff of mist, and I yelp with fright as two black cables suddenly fire out from the spider. One of them instantly coils around my neck, and the other wraps all the way around the crown of my head. They’re not cables at all; they’re some kind of cold, wet, slimy substance. I can feel them moving against my skin and sliding through my hair as the Lobot begins reeling the strands in.