Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern Page 5

  Mal could hear the squeal of brakes and the smell of burned rubber that announced the LAPD’s arrival at the location. Movement out of the corner of his eye showed the military man in charge of the operation striding out to meet the police officers…probably to try and keep them from getting involved and taking their new prisoner away.

  Car doors were thrown open and the thud of what seemed to be a hundred feet hitting the ground almost simultaneously. The cacophony was quickly followed by the popcorn-like sound of a multitude of rounds being chambered into weapons. Mal’s inner voice told him the “multitude” was actually 12 rounds, but he stopped listening as it started to drone on with the specific breakdown of what those rounds and weapons were. He’d lost the ability to care.

  “Drop your weapons and place your hands where we can see them!” screamed one of the cops—ten meters behind him at just over twenty-seven degrees off-center, quipped the voice. Mal was yanked to his feet from behind and hidden from view by the thick bodies of the men who had captured him.

  “Officers, this is a government-sanctioned operation,” started the head soldier. Mal lost whatever the man said next as he was distracted by an incredibly ugly, incredibly boxy, off-white car hitting the curb nearby and launching itself a few inches into the air with a shower of sparks and tremendous grating noise.

  Glare from the setting sun kept the driver hidden behind the car’s windshield, but Mal was convinced the man was grinning evilly as the vehicle’s brakes shrieked violently, sent up a blast of smoke and the entire thing fishtailed toward him.

  The only thing that saved Mal from being crushed by two-and-a-half tons of a Nissan Cube, spinning nearly out of control, were his supernatural reflexes. Unfortunately, the group of government agents standing in a very tight group around him was not quite so lucky.

  Bodies went flying as the fiberglass frame of the Cube slammed into the men at high speed—the one identified as “Yarges” took a header across the hood of the car, snapping off its radio antenna before he disappeared over the opposite side.

  Injured men fell all around as the car shuddered to a stop, its passenger’s side less than an inch from Mal’s startled face. He had to snap his upper torso backwards and flop onto his side to avoid the Nissan’s rear door as it was thrown open.

  Mal looked into the car and saw a man in his mid-forties, head completely shaved of hair, and a salt-and-pepper goatee encircling his frantically moving mouth. The crazed man looked familiar, but Mal couldn’t quite place his face. The man’s arms waved about insanely. It took Mal a couple of seconds to realize the man was yelling at him.

  “Get in, Mal! They’ve got your face all over the TV!””

  I’ve got it, thought Mal, grinning stupidly as he finally recognized the man. David Zuzelo—Zuz to his buddies—had been a friend of Mal’s back in college.

  “Zuz! Man, what are you doing here,” babbled Mal, trying and failing to stand up.

  The vehicle’s tinted rear windshield exploded as bullets began blasting into the car. A line of bullet holes appeared in the car’s side panel next to the dazed Mal, as if by magic, causing the man to chuckle.

  Another window shattered and sent glass flying.

  “Get in, you asshole, before they kill us both!” bellowed Zuzelo in his heavy New England accent, scrunching down his head behind the steering wheel in a vain attempt to avoid being shot.

  Mal didn’t know what to do. Why was Zuz here…of all places? Was it his imagination?

  “Withdrawal advised. Hostiles closing in on foot,” chimed in the computerized voice of the hitchhiker in Mal’s head, snapping him back to reality.

  Mal made up his mind as he looked around to see some of the soldiers getting back to their feet and going for their weapons. Arms still cuffed with heavy metal manacles behind his back, Mal dove through the open passenger’s side door even as the ungainly vehicle started to pull away, barely making it into the backseat.

  From his stomach-down position on vinyl seats covered in discarded soda cans and fast food wrappers, Mal braced himself as best he could as the driver leaned into the wheel, sending the vehicle into a hairpin turn, nearly slamming the opened door onto the hog-tied man’s flailing feet.

  Zuzelo looked back with a wide, half-insane smile splitting his face and belched out, “Keep your head down…I’ll have us out of here in no time flat!”

  A long, weary sigh escaped through Mal’s half-clenched teeth as he allowed his face to sink down onto the fuzzy, dark-gray seats of the Nissan Cube, eyes already closing as the unwanted passenger in his head stated without passion, “Commencing self-repair. All system shutting down.”

  The last thing Mal heard before the comforting oblivion of exhaustion took him was his old friend belting out ‘Firework’ by Katy Perry at the top of his lungs. Mal thought the sound of distant sirens provided a rather fitting melody as he passed out.

  CHAPTER 5

  The sounds of screeching tires and an automobile engine being pushed to the max, somehow transformed into the high-pitched whine of a UH-60 Black Hawk in hard flight. Malcolm Weir recognized the sound instantly. It had been an almost everyday part of his life for the better part of a decade. There were times he swore he’d spent more time in the belly of a chopper than most pilots clocked behind the flight stick.

  The familiar bumps and jostling of his bolted-down seat in the main cabin, something that had made him violently ill during training, were a soothing massage to his strapped-in body.

  Mal allowed his head to lie back so he could feel the cloth covering on his ACH butt up against the hard metal frame of the helicopter. The ranger had to suppress a chuckle as he felt the sock he kept taped to the inside of his helmet out of nostalgia for basic training tickle the back of his neck.

  This is how things are supposed to be, he thought to himself as he finally let the other voices in the cabin break through his bubble of government-issued comfort.

  “I cannot believe yuh finally doin’ it, El-Tee,” boomed a deep bass voice in the worst attempt at a whisper Mal had ever heard. Corporal John Narcomy was a big man from Houston, Texas, and clocked in at somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds of solid, good-hearted muscle. “It ain’t right!”

  Staring at the dark-skinned man barely contained on the flight bench by straps pushed well beyond their limits, Mal was convinced the Black Hawk was buckled to Narcomy for safety and not the other way around. The ACH cinched onto his head seemed too small to contain it.

  “Got my acceptance yesterday. After we get back from this jaunt, I’m going back to school and then to JAG,” responded a smooth voice seated directly across from Narcomy and to Mal’s immediate left. Tilting his head allowed the young, brown haired Lieutenant Chris Donlin to come into view out of the corner of Mal’s eye. “But don’t worry, old son, I won’t forget the “little” people after I’m gone.”

  A general round of laughter erupted from the six men seat belted into the chairs of the chopper: the men of Mal’s special response unit.

  Technician Third Grade James “Jimmy” Jay, the round-faced ex-baseball player from San Diego sitting on Narcomy’s left, chipped in, “I was going to join up with JAG, but I’d miss the food at Fort Benning way too much.”

  “Yeah and we can tell you ain’t missed food in your entire life, lunch box,” added Sergeant Steve Douros in a thick Philadelphia accent.

  “It just ain’t right, I tell ya,” grumbled Narcomy, visibly upset by the news. “Yuh momma didn’t send yuh to ranger school just to go an’ become a lawyer. Whatta we need lawyers for anyways?”

  Mal laughed out loud, enjoying the banter even if he had heard it all before.

  “If people were honest, we wouldn’t need lawyers, Narc’,” counseled Lieutenant Donlin, grinning from ear-to-ear.

  “And what would we do if lawyers were honest, LT?” Mal quipped at the exact same time the words spilled from Sergeant Douros’s mouth.

  Mal’s eyes went wide even as the res
t of the US ranger unit burst into uncontrolled laughter.

  Something was wrong.

  He HAD heard it all before.

  Oh, no, Mal thought to himself, panicking. And I know what happens next!

  He tried to scream, tried to tear the straps from his chest. Mal found himself unable to move, unable to speak, his face locked into a smile that fit in with the joviality of the men around him. They had no idea.

  They were all going to die.

  The laughter was interrupted as the Black Hawk jerked to one side and the static-filled voice of the co-pilot shrieked over their helmet communication systems.

  “Incoming! Starboard side!”

  It was too late.

  An explosion rocked the chopper, shredding one side of the craft and filling the cabin with fire. All Mal saw before the entire world seemed to spin out of control was big John Narcomy vaporized in a flash of blinding white light.

  CHAPTER 6

  Malcolm Weir woke himself screaming, entangled in ragged strips of linen from the small cot he had been lying on, and covered in a fine dusting of what appeared to be goose down. For some reason his left arm was lodged in the middle of the bed, clean through mattress, metal springs and into the wooden base the entire thing rested upon.

  It took Mal a moment to realize he was the perpetrator of the mattress-cide. His new body must have responded to the highly emotional state the nightmare had evoked in him and reacted accordingly. The hand Mal pulled up to inspect had formed the razor sharp knife-fingers he had seen during his escape from the Project: Hardwired labs, and a quick look at his shoulder revealed the defensive spines and plates had emerged as the living metal quickly adopted a more aggressive profile.

  Standing up and disengaging himself from the tattered mess of the tiny bed, the smells of old laundry, dust and papers left too long filtered to his nose.

  “Where am I?” muttered Mal to himself.

  Mal let his gaze wander slowly. A cramped back-office somewhere was the answer he received from the rickety Swedish-made desk with an old computer monitor and phone resting on it, piles of white copy paper boxes over-flowing with old paperwork and invoices of some kind, and coat rack with a pair of dirty overalls he found during his search. The walls were off-white with a band of ugly gray coloring them for a foot up from the floor. A single spiral energy-saver bulb was stuck into the double light fixture overhead - Mal noticed the glass covering for which sat dangerously close to the edge of one of the stacks of boxes - although the light was off and the room almost pitch dark. A tiny, curtainless window on the wall above the destroyed cot and a half-opened door on the opposite one were the only exits from the space.

  A spear of light from the open door seemed to bring with it the smell of old oil, gasoline, rusted metal and rubber.

  A garage?

  “Better go see where I am.”

  Blowing a stray feather from its ticklish perch on his upper lip, Mal’s head snapped to attention, the spines on his arms flexing. Heavy boots on concrete. Someone was coming.

  As if in answer to his next unasked question, the computerized voice announced, “Inbound target identified: David Anthony Zuzelo. Arrival in ten point two seconds. Target unarmed.”

  “What’s going on in here?” came Zuz’s voice from the hallway, “I’m armed!”

  When Zuzelo pushed the door open Mal had already visibly relaxed, and his malleable metallic arms had returned to their normal, more human-looking, state. Although, Mal had to admit, neither “normal” nor “human-looking” were the best way to describe the transforming weapons that had been grafted onto his body.

  “So am I, Zuz,” smirked Mal at his friend.

  “Yeah, I guess you are, Mal,” Zuz’s said without the hint of laughter in his voice. After a once over of Mal to make sure the soldier was OK, Zuzelo’s eyes went wide at the disarrayed state of the bed. The man rubbed a hand nervously through his goatee and pushed the door open wide behind him, nodding for Mal to follow him, “I’m not going to ask you what happened with the bed, but maybe we can sit down and you can tell me what the hell happened to you.”

  “As soon as I figure it out, I’ll let you know,” sighed Mal as he followed his friend out the door.

  *****

  The two men sat across an ancient iron work table cluttered with what must have been years’ worth of unsorted tools, pencils chewed down to nubs, presumably empty pizza boxes from some place called “Hungry Howie’s Pizza,” dirty rags, and the general clutter of a working man’s garage. Although, this “garage” was actually a ten thousand square foot warehouse in the heart of a monstrous salvage and junkyard that David Zuzelo had converted into his workshop.

  Zuzelo informed his friend that he’d purchased the location a few years back when he’d finally had enough of the government. They were surrounded by two hundred tons of steel, aluminum, and various other radar and satellite-blocking materials. In fact, the main building was now located nearly fifty feet underground. No one would be able to find them there. The man’s talk of hiding from the government and keeping “off the grid” amused and relaxed Mal: his old friend hadn’t changed one bit. Zuz had always been about two steps from starring in his own version of ‘Conspiracy Theory.’

  Two banks of fluorescent lights, mounted some thirty feet up in the cavernous ceiling, shone down on the immediate area, illuminating the table the men were talking at, a workbench running along at least forty feet of the nearby wall and covered in more junk than Mal had ever seen jammed into one location, and a number of burned out and rusted hulks that had once belonged to cars, tractors and other vehicles. It was a smorgasbord of scrap metal. Mal swore he saw the stripped down frame of an armored personnel carrier off in the shadows that covered most of the huge building.

  Mal’s computerized friend blandly informed him of the presence of forty-nine heartbeats in the vicinity: Mal’s, Zuzelo’s, forty-five rats, and a pair of large cats. The voice also laid out the floor plan of the building, located in the City of Industry, California, as had been filed by its original owners when it was built in 1952, and had identified no less than thirteen potential egresses from the building in case of an emergency as Mal gave his friend a full rundown of the events of the last few hours of his life.

  Annoying as it was, Mal was beginning to appreciate the strategic value of the system.

  “And that’s all you remember? Waking up with a scalpel in your face?” Zuzelo had listened to the story without moving or speaking for almost ten minutes, completely enraptured by Mal’s telling.

  Mal shot Zuzelo a sideways glance at the comment, “It wasn’t exactly a “scalpel in my face,” man. I did have to yank something out of the back of my head, though.”

  Mal reached around to where the wires had been plugged into his skull.

  “There’s something over it now, but when I first woke up there was a huge hole at the base of my skull with cables coming out, covered in a gel of some kind.”

  With an eager look on his face, Zuzelo moved around the table to stand next to Mal, and pushed the soldier’s head down, almost slamming it into the tabletop. “Let me see!”

  After a moment touching and, to Mal’s discomfort, caressing the area, Zuzelo moved back around to his seat. “Wow. They did a number on you. That thing, it’s a port of some kind…and it goes deep. Looks like it goes directly into your brain, and I can see filaments just under the skin that lead down into your spine and to the arms. At first, I thought you were wearing some kind of high-tech armor, but those things are part of you.”

  His lips tightened into a severe line on his tanned face and pulled a hard line between his brows, as Mal nodded grimly. In his heart, he had already known what Zuzelo was saying, but hearing it out loud from someone else caused it all to finally hit home. He dropped his head into the oddly warm metal of his hands, unable to speak.

  Quietly, Zuzelo asked, “What’s the last thing you remember before today?”

  “Before today?” Mal thought ha
rd; a metallic finger traced a wrinkle down the center of his cheek, scratching over the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow forming on his chin. “We were on maneuvers in the mountains just north of Dahuk in Iraq. Everyone in my unit was…”

  The rough emotions, still fresh for Mal, welled up in him, choking off his voice. His heart raced so fast he thought it was going to punch through his chest.

  “It’s ok, Mal, man…you don’t have to finish.” Zuzelo’s voice softened, unused to seeing the Army ranger in such a vulnerable state.

  Mal continued, ignoring the pause, unable to stop now that he had started, “It was a night op and we were flying low over the hills in a chopper, there were six of us. We were hit by something and the chopper went up like a roman candle. I must have blacked out in the crash.”

  “We went down in a ball of fire…I wasn’t sure any of us were going to make it out alive,” standing, Mal gestured at his sides and chest. “By the looks of things, I’m not sure I did.”

  “If that’s not a mind-fuck, I don’t know what is. How long do you think you were out?”

  “Beats me. What day is it?” Mal replied with a baffled look on his face.

  Zuzelo had to think for a moment: keeping up on “trivial” things like that date had never been his strong suit. “I dunno, man. March 25th…26th?”

  “March 25th…?” All of the blood rushed from Mal’s face.

  “Yeah. Or 26th.”

  “The mission was April 3rd,” realization hit Mal right before horror swooped in and took control. “What year is it?”

  Zuzelo told him.

  “A year…I’ve lost a year.”

  “My, god,” Zuzelo reached out to put his hand on Mal’s shoulder and shied away as his fingers brushed the cool metal surface.