Metal and Ash (Apex Trilogy) Read online

  The glare of the lights made the pilots squint, leaving the Great Maker’s form obscured slightly. But as he neared they could easily see that the man that had spoken to them was not all man. Not at all.

  “What the holy exoskeleton?” Masters exclaimed.

  The Great Maker looked down at himself and grinned. “Ah, right, my appearance must be shocking.”

  “To say the least,” Harlow responded as she studied the braces, cables, wires, struts and hydraulics that framed the man’s body. In place of his eyes were two glowing red sensors. “What are you?”

  “Me?” the Great Maker asked, honestly surprised. “Have my friends not informed you? I am the Great Maker.” He spread his arms wide. “Welcome to the Womb where real life is born.” His red eyes narrowed. “Real life. Not the fragile flesh held together on your frame by sinew and tendon.”

  “Uh…okay,” Masters said.

  The Great Maker looked Harlow up and down and she struggled not to step back from the hunger on his face. He watched her closely then smiled, his cheeks looking like they’d rip apart if the smile was too wide.

  “Do you fear me?” he asked Harlow.

  “Should I?” Harlow countered.

  “Yes,” the Great Maker nodded. “Everyone should.”

  Thirteen

  “Mathew?” Themopolous asked as she gently shook the mech pilot. “Mathew? Wake up.”

  Pilot Mathew Jespers stirred and slowly blinked his eyes open. “Huh? Oh, hey Doc. Did I fall asleep again? What time is it?”

  “0430,” Themopolous said. “You’ve been here all night.”

  Mathew looked about the infirmary, his eyes resting on Rachel’s comatose form briefly. “Where’s the commander? He usually crashes next to her. Something up?”

  “I don’t know,” Themopolous replied as she checked Rachel’s vitals. “I haven’t seen him all night.”

  “All night?” Mathew asked as he stretched and stood up from the cramped chair he’d slept in. “I thought June had the night shift lately.”

  Themopolous just smiled and continued on with her assessment of Rachel’s vital signs.

  “Okay,” Mathew said. “I get it. Not my business.”

  “Hey Matty?” Jethro asked over the com. “You up for a little deader action?”

  Mathew yawned and cracked his back. “Sure. What are we looking at?”

  “About three dozen just outside the first perimeter,” Jethro said. “They’ve learned to stay away from the sonic field and are starting to mass just outside its range.”

  “Mech or carbine?” Mathew asked as he nodded to Themopolous and headed out of the infirmary.

  “Whatever you feel up to,” Jethro said. “They’re a bit outside my gun range without bringing out the hardcore firepower. Otherwise I’d take care of them.”

  Mathew thought about it for a minute. “I haven’t had a good deader squashing in my mech in a while. Can you run through the start up?”

  “Already done,” Jethro replied. “I had a feeling you’d want to stretch your legs.”

  “But the doc just woke me up,” Mathew said. “How would you even know that?”

  “Oh, I keep tabs on all of the pilots’ heart rates,” Jethro said. “That way I know who to call on when I need them. As soon as yours was no longer at rest I began the start up on your mech.”

  “That’s a little unsettling,” Mathew said. “That means you know when the heart rate is up too high, right? Like when a pilot, or pilots, are involved in some sort of strenuous activity.”

  “No comment,” Jethro said.

  “Perv,” Mathew laughed.

  ***

  “Where are you headed?” Capreze asked as he walked in from the open hangar door.

  “I get to stomp some deaders,” Mathew replied as he grabbed the ladder leading up to his mech cockpit. “What are you doing out there?”

  “Clearing my head,” Capreze replied.

  “Bad news?”

  “Not good. Have you seen Themopolous?”

  Mathew studied the commander’s face and quickly realized something more than bad news was on his mind.

  “Just left her in the infirmary,” Mathew said. “You feeling okay?”

  “It’s not about me,” Capreze said. “You go have fun. Give a couple extra stomps for me.”

  “Want to join?” Mathew asked. “May take your mind off your troubles.”

  “Can’t. This trouble has to be dealt with right away.”

  “Rain check?”

  “You bet,” Capreze smiled as he pointed to the cockpit. “Go have fun.”

  Mathew watched the commander start to leave the hangar and wondered if he shouldn’t just send some of the Railers out with carbines to take care of the deader issue. He had a feeling something big was about to go down.

  “Go!” Capreze shouted as he left the hangar behind.

  “Okay,” Mathew mumbled to himself. “You know what’s going on, Jethro?”

  “Yes,” Jethro answered quickly.

  “You want to fill me in?”

  “Can’t.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “That bad?”

  “That bad.”

  “Great.”

  ***

  Mathew put the drama in the Stronghold out of his mind as he walked his mech out of the hangar and past the first defensive perimeter. He realized he hadn’t been in his mech in more than a week and it felt good to be a part of the metal again. Plus, he really hadn’t put the mech through its paces. After separating from Shiner, Mathew was left mechless and the new one still needed some field testing. Taking out some stray deaders was just perfect.

  Once clear of the second defensive perimeter, Mathew upped his pace and started to jog the mech into the wasteland. His sensors picked up the crowd of deaders outside the sonic field designed to burst the creatures’ brains if they passed between two poles.

  The idea that they were learning to avoid the field was troubling, but Mathew had witnessed way more disturbing things as a mech pilot. The wasteland adapted to everything and a great pilot understood that and went with it.

  “I have visual,” Mathew said to Jethro. “Looks like more than three dozen.”

  “Current count is 58,” Jethro replied. “Not sure where they’re coming from.”

  Mathew scanned the wasteland beyond the deader mob, but no other movement was detected. “I got nothing here.”

  “Well, just send them to Hell and come back in,” Jethro said. “I’ll send out a Railer crew later to clean up the mess and drop some relays. Maybe I’ll pick something up then.”

  “Will do,” Mathew said as he moved towards the deaders.

  As the sun slowly rose across the wasteland, the creatures saw Mathew coming and a couple eager ones breached the sonic field and paid the price. Their putrid brains splattered across the night-cool earth.

  “Guess not all of them have learned,” Mathew said as he went through his weapons check. He wanted to take the time to get to know his mech thoroughly.

  “I already did a full run through,” Jethro said over the com.

  “Just working out the kinks,” Mathew said.

  “Feeling rusty?”

  “A little.”

  Satisfied that the mech was up to the task, Mathew brought up his 50mm guns and took aim. With slow, steady bursts, Mathew obliterated the deaders that crowded outside the perimeter.

  As smoke curled up from the glowing hot guns, Mathew surveyed the destruction he’d wrought. They were deaders just like the thousands and thousands of deaders he’d killed before. But something was different. After the insane Dr. Johnson had turned all of the city/states into nanobot controlled nightmares, Mathew couldn’t help but think how each and every deader had been a living person before.

  “You okay?” Jethro asked. “Got kinda quiet there.”

  “Just thinking,” Mathew answered as he went over his readings to make sure all systems were in the green.
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  “Well, stop that,” Jethro said. “Leave the thinking to the mega super brain.”

  “Mega super, eh?” Mathew laughed. “Mega wasn’t good enough?”

  “I just call it as it is,” Jethro laughed. “Now get in here and I’ll do a real work over on your mech. If it has any flaws I’ll find them.”

  “What’s for breakfast?” Mathew asked as he turned his mech back towards the Stronghold.

  “Pancakes and porridge.”

  “Jeezus,” Mathew swore. “I’ll be constipated for weeks if we don’t get someone to start cooking some real shit.”

  “I’m doing the best I can with the synthesizers,” Jethro said. “But the Stronghold relied mostly on hydroponics.”

  “Which fried when the Stronghold nearly self-destructed.”

  “Bingo was his mother fucking name-o,” Jethro said. “And Jay’s good, but he’s more a hydraulics guy than hydroponics. I don’t think they’ll be online for at...”

  Mathew waited for Jethro to finish. “Hey? You okay?”

  “Turn around,” Jethro said quietly. “Please tell me you don’t see anything.”

  Mathew spun his mech around and nearly shit himself.

  “Oh, fuck, wish I could, man.”

  ***

  It was as if the ground itself was alive.

  That’s how Mathew saw it as he watched wave after wave of deaders lift themselves up and shake the wasteland earth off their undead bodies.

  “Where did they all fucking come from?” Mathew asked as he quickly reactivated his weapons. “Jethro?”

  “I don’t know, Matty!” Jethro shouted. “They weren’t there and then they were!”

  “For how fucking long?” Mathew yelled. “They came right out of the fucking ground!”

  “I know, I know!” Jethro yelled back. “How about you stop analyzing and start shooting?!”

  Mathew opened up. His 50mm guns sent thousands of rounds after thousands of rounds into the deader horde that seemed to just keep swelling. For every twenty he shredded another twenty took their place. Mathew switched to RPGs and sent four into the deader mob. Rotten limbs and heads flew everywhere.

  But they still kept coming.

  “What the fuck?” Mathew asked as dozens grouped around one of the perimeter poles. “Jethro, are you seeing this?”

  “That’s not possible,” Jethro said. If he had a head that wasn’t hooked up to tubes and wires he would have shaken it in disbelief. “That’s a coordinated attack. Not just pack mentality, but real fucking problem solving.”

  “What do I fucking do?” Mathew shouted afraid to shoot the crowd for fear of taking out the pole.

  “I don’t know!” Jethro yelled. “I’ll get you back up!”

  “Ya think?!”

  Mathew watched in horrified amazement as the pole was toppled and crushed under the mass of deaders. A few lost their heads before the sonic field was disrupted, but most didn’t. And they came for Mathew.

  “Why isn’t the field bypassing that pole?!” Mathew cried. “Jethro? Where’s the fucking fail safe?”

  “It’s down, Matty,” Jethro said. “Check your sensors. They’re everywhere.”

  Mathew did as Jethro said and wished he’d hadn’t. Perimeter poles all along the line were being disabled by deaders.

  “Ahh, fuck this,” Mathew said as he bounced his mech up and down a couple times. “It’s squishing time.”

  He waded his mech into the swarm of undead and started firing, blasting, stomping and crushing. His mech training told him it was the absolute wrong thing to do. Physics were physics especially for a 50 ton war machine. The numbers were too great for any one mech to handle. More experienced, legendary mech pilots had been taken down by numbers like what Mathew faced.

  So fucking what.

  Mathew slammed a giant fist down, crushing a dozen deaders, then swept his leg and sent another two dozen flying back into the wasteland. He leapt and rolled, smashing thirty or so deaders as he came down, and then came up on one knee, his 50mm guns ripping wave after wave of deaders into ribbons.

  “Damn!” Jethro hooted. “Look at you!”

  “Shut the fuck up, Jethro,” Mathew growled.

  “Right.”

  Both fists flew and punched holes in the mob. As Mathew pulled back he activated his flames and torched another fifty deaders, sneering as the zombies dashed about like firecrackers with legs.

  “Back down, Matty,” Jethro said. “They’re massing on your left. Matty? Mathew!”

  But Mathew wasn’t listening. He was in the killing zone. He had his violence on and it felt great. He hadn’t realized how much he’d craved wiping out the undead. He’d always told himself he joined up to be a mech pilot to do his duty, to help rid the wasteland of the deader plague. Who was he kidding? He’d joined up because he wanted 50 tons of metal around him as he ripped limbs from torsos and popped heads from necks.

  Unfortunately, the rush from battle didn’t stop that pesky physics thing. Easily a hundred deaders took him from the left, swarming up and over his mech, bringing the two-story battle machine to the ground under their weight.

  “Okay,” Mathew said as he watched mouths and claws bite and scrape at the cockpit, so eager for the tasty meal inside. “I see what you were saying. How’s that back up coming?”

  Fourteen

  The look on Commander Capreze’s face would have ripped the skin of a million deaders. To say he struggled to keep his rage under check was not a fair assessment.

  “Were you ever going to tell me?” Capreze asked Dr. Themopolous as she sat in front of his desk.

  “No,” Themopolous said. “Not if I didn’t have to.”

  “From day one?”

  “Yes, sir,” Themopolous nodded. “The mech base was my assignment.”

  “What for?” Capreze asked. “What intel could you possibly have needed? We were an open book. The UDC knew everything about us. Anyone could have read my logs, watched the security vid, checked com transcripts. There was nothing hidden.”

  “You know that’s not true,” Themopolous said. “And the fact you still haven’t been honest with me considering the stakes is just astounding.”

  Capreze studied Themopolous for a long, silent minute.

  “I’ll bite, Doc,” Capreze. “What the holy fuck are you talking about?”

  “Rachel,” Themopolous stated flatly.

  Capreze’s blood ran cold, his insides turned to ice blocks and he felt as if the entire world had flipped on him.

  “What...?”

  “Don’t,” Themopolous said. “I’m here because of her. You have no idea how important that daughter of yours is.”

  Capreze was up out of his chair, around his desk and lifting Themopolous by the collar before the last word had left the doctor’s lips.

  “Do you want to fucking die, Doctor?” Capreze snarled, spit flying from his lips as his face was nearly pressed against hers. “Just say that bullshit one more time and your wish will come true.”

  Themopolous’s guts twisted with fear. She was a medical professional, trained in every discipline of medicine, including psychiatry. The look on Capreze’s face was the look of barely controlled homicide. She knew one wrong word, one wrong move, one mistimed blink, and her neck would be snapped by the hands of a desperate father. It took all of Themopolous’s willpower not to piss herself.

  Capreze had to talk himself back from the edge. He was commanding officer, in charge of the Stronghold and all the souls that dwelled inside, whether directly under his command or not. If he lost control, if he tore Themopolous’s head off then all would be lost.

  His fingers cracked as he relaxed them and let Themopolous fall back onto the concrete of his office floor.

  “Get out,” he whispered.

  “Sir?” Themopolous asked, not believing what she had heard. “I should explain more.”

  Capreze rounded on her and Themopolous scrambled for the door, a frightened whimper caught in her throat.<
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  “GET THE FUCK OUT!” Capreze roared as he kicked out, his foot connecting with Themopolous’s side, sending her rolling into the hallway. He slammed the door so he couldn’t chase her into the hallway and rip her fucking terrified face right off.

  Alone with himself the adrenaline of betrayal started to wear off and he felt like he could just fall on the floor and curl up into a ball. His mind couldn’t accept what he’d heard.

  He had been so careful to make sure no one knew about Rachel. He’d been so careful.

  ***

  Jethro watched and heard the entire exchange, but didn’t have time to let Capreze gather himself.

  “Commander?” Jethro said urgently.

  “Not know, Jethro,” Capreze snapped. “Go bug Jay.”

  “But, sir I really-.”

  “Not now, Jethro!” Capreze roared.

  Claxons blared in the Stronghold.

  “Perimeter breach,” an automated voice said. “All hands to stations. Defensive perimeter breach.”

  “What the fuck?!” Capreze said as he bolted from his office. “You could have just told me!”

  “I was trying to, sir,” Jethro said over the com as Capreze raced through the hallways to the mech hangar. “But you weren’t going to listen.”

  “What the holy hell?!” Jay yelled as he, Marin and several of the Railer mechanics hurried to make sure two mechs were ready for combat. “Jethro!”

  “Matty is down at the last perimeter,” Jethro said. “Mother fucking deader horde came out of nowhere!”

  “Jeezus,” Jay snarled. “Just what we need while we’re low on idiot pilots.”

  “You and me,” Capreze said as he ran to his mech and climbed up to the cockpit. “We can handle this.”

  “Oh, I fucking know I can handle this,” Jay said as he unscrewed a flask, took a long drink, and tossed the empty flask to Marin. “I just don’t fucking want to.”

  “No time for start up,” Jethro said. “I’ll monitor all systems. I see anything not acting right and I’ll fix it on the go.”

  “Not acting right?” Jay said as he strapped in and integrated with the mech. “Every god damn one of these fucking machines is in tip top mother fucking shape, asshole!”