End Program Read online

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Jak found the others standing outside the sec building where Ryan was held, discussing what to do.

  “Robot bikers,” Jak said without preamble. “All got machine inside. Ryan now too.”

  Mildred, Doc and J.B. all turned to face Jak as he continued with his breathless explanation, while Krysty stood by the door to the sec building, her eyes fixed on Ryan. Ricky had found a window ledge to lean on, but he paced around the building to join the others as he heard the conversation developing.

  “Ryan robot eye,” Jak continued. “Mebbe eye something else too. Tells him to chill.”

  J.B. nodded grimly while Doc spoke.

  “Jak could be right,” Doc said. “Ryan’s artificial eye is connected through his optic nerve to his brain. Any corruption in the data could be passed directly up into his brain where it would feed his thoughts.”

  “And if the bikers have mechanical parts too...” J.B. began, looking pensive. “Well, those would also be linked to the brain in some way, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to move them, right, Millie?”

  Mildred nodded slowly. “To move an artificial limb of the types we’ve seen would require a connection to the nervous system. That ultimately would connect those parts to the brain giving the commands, for sure.”

  “But could the process be reversed?” Doc pondered. “Could a limb send instructions to the mind?”

  “It already does,” Mildred stated. “Whenever we touch something, our fingertips tell us how that thing feels, whether it’s hot, cold, sharp, wet, whatever. Our skin gives us a constant update on the immediate conditions around us, our muscles tell us how much pressure they are being put under.”

  “You get stabbed in the foot, you know you got to scream,” Ricky added with a smile.

  “Precisely,” Mildred agreed. “But to send a more complex instruction through the nervous system...?”

  “Wait, what are we saying here?” Krysty asked. “You think that the bikers and Ryan are following the same...program?”

  “Krysty’s right,” Doc stated, turning his head to encompass each of the companions. “We are in the realms of speculation here, with no evidence to support such claims.”

  “I don’t agree,” J.B. said, gesturing to the chaotic ruins of Heartsville. “Look around you, Doc. I think we’ve got just about all the evidence we need.”

  “Circumstantial,” Doc insisted. “We can all see the destruction, but what guided the motorcycle group’s intentions and what caused Ryan to have this...breakdown may well be two separate and entirely unrelated factors.”

  The group went silent then, each person pondering where to go next. Jak snarled with irritation. He just felt sure that the two things were connected somehow.

  “They captured the leader,” Ricky stated, breaking the silence. “A man by the name of Niles, I think. The sec men dumped him and his lady in one of the storage sheds.”

  “You know which one?” J.B. asked.

  Ricky looked uncertain. “I saw them take the two of them—chained up—around to the west,” he said. “Sheds out there store food, I think. They might have used one of those.”

  “Let’s go find out,” J.B. said.

  * * *

  BARON HURST WAS lying in state outside his baronial hall, attended by one of the women—presumably one of his “wives”—whom the companions had first seen guarding him.

  J.B. removed his hat as he, Doc and Jak walked past solemnly while a small crowd of seven people offered the woman their condolences.

  The baron’s other woman was nowhere to be seen, and J.B. guessed she had either been wounded or chilled in the biker attack.

  The three companions made their way to where Ricky had indicated, locating the bike gang leader—Niles—by the hoopla going on around him. Niles had been staked to a lamppost in what had once been a parking lot, with burned-out wags to either side creating a corridor effect, and a high wall behind him so that he had no way to escape.

  A sec man was standing at the far end of the parking lot like a carnival barker, using a cone to amplify his voice, encouraging the ville folk to take a pop at the man who couldn’t take Heartsville down.

  “See him squirm in pain!” the barker teased. “See him cry out for mercy or release! This inhuman son of a bitch, who thought he could destroy our wonderful ville, our wonderful lives, now lies ruined himself. Ruined and pleading for the mercy he never even offered us.”

  Walking past the barker, the companions couldn’t help but recall the mess of ruined villes and farms they had passed on the way here. While the bikers had ultimately been stopped, they had sown seeds of terror right across Northern California, taking countless human lives. It had been almost a ritual purging, a genocide against the living.

  The barker spoke up as J.B., Doc and Jak passed. “Hurt him! Show this foul creature your disgust! Brain him for me, good citizen!”

  It was understandable. The people of Heartsville were hurting. They had lost their baron, their security and many of their own. The base human instinct was for revenge, to see someone suffer for the suffering they had wrought.

  Though chained up, bruised and bloody, Niles was screaming bloody murder at his tormentors. His girlfriend had been stuffed in one of the sheds that had been used to hold spare parts for the wags, but whether she was still alive now—in light of the terrible injuries she had suffered—no one cared to check.

  Niles himself was suffering at the hands of the survivors of the bike attack when J.B., Doc and Jak saw him. Having been pulled from his moving bike, Niles now showed signs of a beating. His face—what was left of it—was raw and bloody, with lines of metal showing clearly through the torn flesh where bone and sinew should be.

  “You all die,” Niles shrieked as a brood of children—two of them streaked with black, presumably from a lucky escape from the fires—stood shouting insults and pitching stones at his head the way a kid might practice pitching a baseball. “Sooner than you think, everyone here will be dead. Even you blighted kids.”

  A sec man with a scarred left cheek had been posted to monitor the bike gang leader where he was chained up, and he had a bucket filled with stones and bits of broken wood that he offered to the companions as they appeared.

  “You want to toss something at this fuck-wit?” the sec man encouraged.

  In reply to the sec man’s offer, J.B. shook his head no. “Mighty generous offer, but we just came to talk to him,” he explained.

  The sec man eyed J.B. and his two companions warily. “You sure that’s all you’re gonna do? Have I seen you around before, hat?”

  “Arrived yesterday afternoon,” J.B. told him.

  “You have every right to be cautious,” Doc said, placating the man, “but I can assure you none of us are here to free this violent reprobate, nor to object to whatever punishment you ultimately decide to inflict upon him.”

  The sec man looked from J.B. to Doc, then his eyes fixed on Jak and he smiled. “And what’s your story, whitey?”

  “Fought for ville,” Jak said. “Would do again.”

  “Jak’s summed up our position pretty darn well,” J.B. said. “Now, you are you going to let us talk to this idiot, or you just going to insist we throw stones at him?”

  As J.B. spoke, a young couple passed the strange scene, a man and woman, he sporting a sling over his left arm. They carried a heavy bucket between them, and as they passed Niles they upended it over him in a shower of feces and rotten scraps. “That’s for my sister,” the woman said, spitting a gob of saliva at the chained-up biker.

  “She was one of the lucky ones, dead-thing,” Niles hissed back but the couple had already hurried on. “All of you are dead. Whatever is alive is just a thing waiting to die. Plague on earth, waiting to be expunged.”

  The stench
of the biker’s impromptu shower made J.B.’s nose wrinkle as he neared the man, while beside him Doc was trying to hold back a choked cough. The kids hurried away, shouting rhyming taunts in their wake as they skipped down the road past buildings damaged in the midnight attack.

  Once they had gone, J.B. stepped closer to the chained man until he stood over him. “Need to ask you some questions,” he said.

  “Dead,” Niles replied. “All of you. I can see you right now, see what the bones look like when they got no more flesh to hold on to them.”

  “How can you see this?” Doc asked, his face a grimace as he tried not to smell the stink of human excrement on the man.

  Niles pierced the white-haired man with a fearsome look of deadly earnest. “Everything human will die to wipe the slate clean,” he said. “You, him, all of you—you’re just sacks of meat waiting to get fried.”

  “But you’re human too,” Doc reasoned, trying to understand the man’s logic.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Niles growled. “You’re dead, deader with every step, every breath.”

  As he spoke, the sec man with the bucket produced a stone about the size of a child’s ball and threw it at the chained biker. “Shut up, scum! The only death you’re gonna see today is your own, and mebbe your girlfriend’s.”

  Niles spit out a gob of bloody saliva and cursed the sec man. “Dead thing tells me I’m going to die,” he taunted with a braying laugh. “Dead thing that smells of death and walks like death and gets death seeping into his brain-dead brain, dying with every dead breath he takes.” He continued in this vein a while longer as the companions stood there, but most of it failed to make much sense.

  Jak hung back, watching the chained man’s movements with keen eyes. Those movements looked natural enough, but there was something forced about them, a pattern of repetition to the way the captive biker shook and struggled. He was human, smelled human, had that undefined aura that Jak knew came only from living creatures. But he also had a system to his movements that, for all its apparent randomness, was as precise as the movement of hands on a chron.

  “This is getting us nowhere,” Doc complained as the chained biker continued to rant.

  More locals had arrived, some of them with their own projectiles and makeshift weapons to take out their frustrations on the helpless bike leader. J.B. stepped aside, drawing Doc and Jak away from the mob as the next group came to pay horrific tribute to their tormentor. A bearded man led them. He was holding a strip of wood with two nails protruding from its edge. As J.B. and his companions walked away, they heard the man begin to beat Niles. In response, the bike gang leader just laughed, barking more insults in his babbling, dreamlike way, stating how everything he saw was dead anyway and how none of this mattered.

  At the end of the corridor of felled wags, J.B. turned back, his hand on his holstered blaster. “I should chill him, put him out of his misery.”

  Doc placed a steadying hand on J.B.’s arm. “Do not waste a bullet, John Barrymore. Repellent as it is, the ville folk deserve their revenge. They have lost so much this day, and this process—however awful—is their hope for catharsis.”

  J.B. shook his head with regret. “Chill him like a man—the one thing he’d hate,” he said. But he returned his blaster to its holster and, after a moment, turned away from the horrific scene of revenge.

  * * *

  AS THE TRIO trudged across the ville and back to where Ryan was being held, Jak outlined what he had observed. “Bike Man move like machine,” he said. “Clever-made, but machine all same.”

  “Are you sure?” Doc asked.

  Jak’s brow furrowed with vexation. “Smell human,” he explained, “but move like puppet.”

  J.B. scratched his nose thoughtfully. “A control system?” he said. “One that takes over the person’s body, mebbe?”

  “That would certainly tie in with what we have speculated regarding Ryan,” Doc agreed.

  “Yeah,” J.B. muttered.

  “But what can we do about it now?” Doc asked.

  “Remove the program,” J.B. concluded.

  “How?” Doc asked, and Jak looked similarly intrigued.

  “Pluck out his eye,” J.B. stated.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Getting Ryan back to Progress would not be easy. The man had to remain doped up, otherwise he could turn violent and sabotage the plan. J.B. looked out on the wreckage from the battle of Heartsville and started to wonder what they could do.

  “I see the little cogs working inside that mind of yours,” Doc teased as J.B. stood smoking a hand rolled cheroot a sec man had given him. Mildred frowned on the habit, but J.B. occasionally indulged. And at the moment, he wanted to indulge.

  “We could use the bikes to get back to Progress,” J.B. suggested.

  Doc followed where the Armorer was looking, saw the wrecked remains of a dozen vehicles including the burned front end of the war wag where it was being hauled back into the compound. “It does not look like there are a lot of bikes left,” he said.

  “Not complete, mebbe,” J.B. agreed, “but the parts are all there. We just have to figure a way to combine them to make something that’ll survive the terrain till we get where we’re going.”

  Doc held his hands up as if in surrender. “The workings of the combustion engine are rather beyond my field of expertise,” he admitted.

  “I know a bit, and I figure we can recruit some of the ville folk to mebbe help us.”

  “They have a lot on their plates already,” Doc told him.

  J.B. blew a trail of gray smoke through his nostrils. “No harm in asking,” he said. With that, he made his way to the ville’s garage.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER the companions had bikes. They were not pretty-looking machines, nor were they especially comfortable, cobbled together as they were from the wrecks left over by the attack. But they functioned and were hardy enough to take the terrain, albeit with an average top speed of below 40 mph.

  J.B. had convinced the mechanics to help him out by petitioning the baron’s wife and successor, who had taken temporary charge of the ville during the extended mop-up. When he outlined their theory about the source of the attacks and how one of their own may hold the key—J.B. was very careful to avoid stating that Ryan was infected—the new baron agreed to help for the good of the ville.

  “If it means keeping these coldhearts away from the ville in future,” she said, “then we’ll do everything we can to assist.”

  “Everything” proved to be repurposing the wrecks of over a dozen motorcycles into five functioning vehicles, one of which included a camperlike box over its four rear wheels where Ryan could be transported while under heavy sedation.

  Five bikes sped out of the repaired gates of Heartsville, with J.B. and Jak leading the way. Mildred rode the camper-type trike with Ryan held securely in its riding compartment, Doc and Ricky shared driving chores on a slope-sided bike balanced on thick wheels taken from one of the destroyed war wags, and Krysty rode alone beside Mildred, keeping pace with her and remaining close to Ryan.

  Behind them, the ville retreated into the distance, patchwork walls still showing evidence of the night attack from two days earlier, the gate blasters repaired and serviced by J.B. in part-payment for the bikes.

  The engines roared as they left the expanse of cleared ground and struck out toward Progress.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “There she is,” J.B. said as the bikes pulled up at the top of the valley overlooking Progress. “The perfect ville.” He said that last with a hint of caution.

  The smell of alcohol was strong in the air. The bikes ran on alcohol, which meant they were easy enough to fuel but they stank like a distillery when ridden. J.B. didn’t mind that so much; it just kind of made him long for a drink. They had
ridden for the best part of a day, setting out from Heartsville an hour after dawn and only now pulling up in sight of Progress as the sun sank below the horizon.

  It had been hard riding, some of it on cracked roads, but they often utilized dirt tracks and paths through the overgrowth where plants had reclaimed the ruined wasteland. J.B. had pushed his companions on. He hadn’t wanted to stretch this out any longer, not with Ryan the way that he was. Plus he knew that the longer they spent on the road, the more exposed they were to other threats. Unpopulated didn’t mean the same as untraveled, and sometimes the most unlikely villes existed just out of eyesight.

  They had traveled a different route to the circuitous one they had used to reach Heartsville, following the roads but keeping to an easterly direction. They had passed two burned-out villes set back from the road, both smaller than Heartsville, but with evidence of protective high walls and sec measures that had proved to be inadequate against the attacking bikers. They knew it was bikers who had done the deed because there was bike wreckage left within the undergrowth—bent wheels, broken exhausts and other parts gleaming chrome.

  They had also passed more than a half dozen farms, these too destroyed—buildings gutted by fire, the fields swept clear by the same.

  At one point they had driven past a stream littered with the detritus of wrecked boats used to house people, now monuments to fire and death. Someone had gone to a lot of effort to lay waste to this little corner of the Deathlands, someone who wanted to make sure no one ever lived here again.

  They had passed a different kind of ruin at one point too, a predark town, its streets overgrown with weeds and grass, its shops and offices and homes reclaimed by the elements until they looked like nothing more than a washed-out painting, colors faded, its definition gone. Maybe people had tried to resettle here after the great shake-up of the nukecaust, but it was hard to see any evidence of life here now. There was no time to search for items that would have been useful to the group.