43
How long will it take, for death to come to Bellick’s creations? Year for some, minutes for others.
And myself? Where do I fit into this grand scheme?
Break after shattering news break he had stayed out of sight, learning all he could as fast as he could. He had the impunity of a ghost, already dead, needing only to wreak havoc on those who had wronged him in life.
Hurn had sought Bellick in the moments after the boy revealed the truth to him, sought a confrontation, perhaps even retribution, but Bellick was not on the grid. He was nothing if not a cautious, meticulously planning soul, and Hurn did not doubt that his entrance to Bellick’s computer or the boys’ access of his private information had triggered some contingency plan. He was gone. At least for the time being. So, Hurn would not revenge himself or the intrusion on his daughter’s life, but he could still attack a symbol of Bellick’s engineering. The triplets hadn’t been so hard to find. He had found their room after meeting with the boy. He had even backtracked onto Bellick’s computer to do so.
Now he stood at the top of the stairwell leading to the very sight he had seen through Gene’s eyes the day Cordon had died. Visions of the future inhabited him as he descended. His own fate, or so he thought, was becoming increasingly clear. Without the aid of the Biomerge technologists, facilities, and regular servicing of the parts that were so intimately bound to his body, it was only a matter of time before a malfunction somewhere deep in that chemistry, that relationship between man and machine, would kill him. He did not know exactly how this would happen, if the end would take the form of a slow march, with his flesh gently melting like wax from his steel frame, or a sudden conflagration within his nervous system. It would probably be several years before it would happen, years in which he would grow steadily weaker. Bellick’s connections could save him. He knew that just as surely as he knew he would never accept help from that man ever again.
He turned his sense of smell off before slowly sliding the door open onto the scene he knew would greet him. The bloodspattered hallway where Cordon had met his end. There was too much blood to just be Cordon’s. They must have been feeding them something live. He shut the door behind him.
He turned on his camouflage just as one of them stuck his head through the opposite doorway.
Nothing’s dere, numpty,” the dreg shouted back to his brothers.
Hurn walked toward the door as the giant head disappeared again back to the flickering fire that was lighting the room beyond. He crept up to the doorway in artificial silence, and he saw them much the same as they had appeared last time. They sat in the middle of a large concrete room, which was littered with the carcasses of half-consumed livestock. Bones lined the walls. In the middle there was the same rusty oil drum coughing and belching its noxious smoke. Their boorish muttering danced with the firelight that so fascinated them, these creatures that were human creations yet not human themselves. Raised in cultures, the imagination of one man reaching toward the psyche of the collective many, these creatures with bleary automatic minds and unending appetites. They sat stonily, still powerless in the light Hurn would bring to their minds.
He was upon them soon enough, extending a metal sliver from his forefinger to form an invisible dagger, and pausing next to the first of them, who comped and grunted and slobbered grossly over the shank of petrol roasted meat in his hands. Without hesitation and certainly without pity, he slid the weapon directly into the monster’s temple. The dreg slumped where he was, there, sitting now with hands relaxed. Hurn had killed the second with a thrust into the medulla even before he had realized what had happened to his brother. The third had time only to just grasp the fate of his brothers and angrily mutter his own name as if it were a curse upon the encroaching darkness.
I am W, W, William!”
The sliver entered his temple smoothly, quieting, leaving only a tiny droplet of blood to coagulate in its wake.