Nina Munteanu
The ruins of the city rippled in the heat like a bad movie. Gunther raked his fingers through his hair and paced the exposed second floor of the dilapidated building. His gaze panned the city. Haze the color of rust lingered over phantom pools on the horizon.
“It’s hot as hell,” he complained, shrugging his Computerized Automatic Rifle over his shoulder. His camouflage fatigues clung to his body like something he needed to shed. “I’m dying in this heat.” Several flies buzzed around his head and he flapped his gangly arm madly in the air. “Damn flies.”
Slouched against some rubble, Rick ignored him and ran diagnostics on the CARifle stretched out on his lap, verifying the output data on his eye-com. Rick’s sullen face was barely visible under the V-set strapped to his head. Gunther pulled out a stick of gum, unraveled the wrapper and pushed the wad into his mouth. Smacking his lips, he savored the mint flavor and tossed the wrapper.
“Ass hole!” Rick snapped. “Pick that up.”
Gunther snatched the wrapper. The rifle slipped off his shoulder and clattered to the ground. Forcing on a nervous grin he scrambled to pick up the weapon then stepped on the vee-set he’d yanked off earlier.
“We’re Gaians.” Rick’s finger stabbed the green band on his arm. “Protectors of the Earth, ass hole.” He turned back to his CARifle and muttered, “Just like a filthy Techno. . . no idea why you’re doing anything.”
Gunther replaced the V-set on his head and slung the CARifle over his shoulder. He sagged under its weight and let his gaze stray to where the roof had been blasted away. The air smelled of smoke and burning metal. He blinked away the sweat that ran into his eyes and squinted at the sun, suspended in a yellow dust cloud. “Those lousy Technos caused this heat wave. We’re turning into a desert!”
Rick ignored him and kept tinkering with his weapon.
“Hell, if it weren’t for this revolution,” Gunther continued, “the planet would be toast already . . .” he trailed, lost for a moment in a terrifying place. More flies buzzed furiously around his head. “Get off!” he shouted and shook his head violently. He frowned and muttered, “We better see some action soon.” Gunther poked the rubble with his rifle. “When I took this post I was glad I’d be toasting any coward Technos trying to escape the city.” He raised his rifle, aimed at an imaginary target and made clicking sounds with his tongue. “When I asked the Gaian committee for this post—”
“Ass hole!” Rick spat. “You didn’t ask for it; they assigned you.”
Gunther half-grinned, exposing dirty teeth, and shrugged.
Rick spit on the ground. “I know your story, turd. You hid in some hole during the whole clone siege. Waiting to find out who won so you could take their side.”
Gunther inhaled the gum and coughed.
Rick sneered. “I figure they put you with me to keep an eye on you. Make sure you don’t run away like them other Technos.” He rubbed the graying stubble on his creased face and his eyes narrowed to slits. “Hell, you were probably a Techno before we found you. Come to mind, you look like one of them. . . .”
Gunther’s heart pounded. He followed Rick’s gaze to his own smooth hands then glanced toward the outskirts of town and felt his throat swell. He thought of the Techno shop he worked in until that man with the horse-face came and asked him all those questions about his sister, insinuating that she was leading a Gaian underground: which she was. Shivering inside, Gunther said in a hollow voice, “Techno-clones murdered my sister. I could kill—”
“You could never kill anyone, ass hole. And how is it that you got away, huh?” Rick raised his brows.
Gunther stroked his rifle with short nervous motions, face burning. Rick made a scoffing sound and returned to his diagnostics. Gunther swallowed, wondering if he was going to vomit. He forced down the intrusive nightmare: his sister being bludgeoned to death in her city-center apartment the night the horse-faced man had questioned him. Gunther had been too frightened to even warn her. Instead he’d sat in the silence of his apartment, hands poised over the V-caller, and watched the lights of the city strobe like an old movie reel across his wall. Early the next morning, a friend of Kelly’s V’d Gunther with the news and he fled to the streets, afraid to return to the shop or to his apartment. He hid in Metro Park and watched Techno-clones, half-human and half-machine, raid house after house. Then one night the Gaians bombed the Metro Tower Complex, knocking the lights out of the city ― and him. Some Gaian found him passed out among some rubble and now he was with Rick. Gunther blurted, “Didn’t you lose family?”
“My family are the Gaians. So are yours, ass hole. Remember that.” Rick checked his V-set and pushed himself off the ground. “Let’s grab a bite. No one’s coming now in the middle of the day.”
Gunther nodded, trying to smile. The thought of food revolted him. As he turned, Gunther spotted a man, woman and child on the street below, furtively making their way toward them. “Hey! Look!” he pointed, gulping in air and chest heaving.
“Where the hell did they find time to have a kid in all this,” Rick snarled. “We should shoot them all.”
“Yeah! We should!” Gunther cried in a shrill voice between racing shallow breaths. “All that technology and then those awful clones.”
“You talk too much,” Rick said. He checked the setting on his rifle. “Let’s go.”
They scrambled down from their perch and dropped in front of the three travelers. The woman shrieked and gathered up the whimpering three-year old who buried his face in her chest. She was young, about Gunther’s age, and might have been pretty, except her dirty hair hung in a tangled mat over a face gaunt from lack of food. Avoiding those saucer eyes that stared at him from cavernous pits, his gaze slid to the scrawny man. The man cast his eyes down and shoved his hands in his pockets.
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“Where d’you think you’re going?” Rick challenged, pointing his rifle at them. “You know there’s a curfew. No one’s allowed in or out of the city.”
“But we’re not Technos,” the man stammered. His eyes darted from the green band on Gunther’s arm to Rick’s rifle.
“You’re either with the Gaians saving the planet or with the Technos who’re destroying it,” Rick said. “There’s no in-between, ass hole.”
Sensing her husband’s hesitation, the woman straightened up. “Our child’s so young,” she said in a quivering voice, her gaze darting between Rick and Gunther. “He’s starving here, in the city. He knows nothing of revolution or war. We have friends in the country who can feed him. Surely you can take pity on him and let us go. We can’t be of use to you burdened with him—”
Gunther flinched at the gunshot.
The impact tore the boy from her arms and splattered her face with blood. Gunther’s gaze lurched from Rick’s CARifle to the child sailing to the pavement as the mother reeled backwards. She scrambled to the dead boy and fell to her knees.
“Liam!” she wailed, scooping up the limp body and clutching it to her breast, rocking. “My baby!”
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” The man danced nervously around his sobbing wife.
“Shut up!” Gunther shrieked, shivering adrenaline. He forced down the vile fluid that wanted to come up. “Shut the fuck up!” He stabbed the air repeatedly with his rifle.
“Now, go back and do your duty for the planet,” said Rick with icy calmness. “Or I’ll have to shoot you as well.”
The man seized his wife but she refused to get up. Her chest glistened with blood as she clutched the dead child and rocked in a kind of stupor, moaning. He yanked her to her feet with violent force. “Sylvia! Come on!” After a terrified glance at Rick, the man pulled her like a puppet down the street.
Releasing a frantic energy, Gunther sent a stutter of shots around them. “Faster, Technos! Faster!” His gaze darted fearfully to his brooding colleague. Then he laughed hysterically when one of his shots caught the man in the shoulder. The man twitched, stumbled briefly then drove on. “Th-that’ll teach ‘em,” Gunther stammered, watching their figures ripple in the distance, and avoided a glance down at the dark pool of blood, already shimmering with flies. His ears rang in the crushing silence. Until the flies swarmed around his head again, buzzing like a bad channel-connection.
“Get over here, ass hole!” Rick hissed from behind a pile of mortar and brick. Gunther scrambled over to Rick, hunching up his shoulder to keep his rifle from falling off. He dove next to Rick and peered over the top. What he saw made him shiver. Seven large figures marched toward them in V-formation, brash steps clanking in unison, burnished skulls glaring in the heat. Gunther fixed his stare on the leader, whose binocular eyes protruded over pale cheeks. A metal snake slithered across his left cheek, molded to his translucent skin, and slid into the corner of his mouth. Gunther’s eyes darted to the clone’s left arm. All metal and technology, it glinted menacingly. He was half-human, half-metal. A Techno-clone.
“Shit,” Rick whispered in a hoarse voice that betrayed fear. “I thought we got them all.” He unclipped the lock trigger to his CARifle with shaking hands and adjusted the eye-com of his V-set. Gunther saw fierce determination supplant the fear in the old man’s eyes. “They’re not taking me before I get a few ass holes first.” His eyes narrowed as he aimed.
Gunther’s heart pounded and he shrank down, trying to make himself as small as possible. Rick’s rifle squealed. The leader jerked back and fell. The rest of the Technos scattered. Rick sprang up. “Cover me!” he shouted. Shots screamed out of his rifle as he darted after the fleeing cyborgs. “Bastards! You killed my planet!”
Gunther watched two more technos fall before a clone’s shot caught Rick. He twitched, spun and fell. The V-set flew off his head and his CARifle clattered meters in front of him. A cloud of dust rose around his twisted body as Rick groped for the rifle. “Cover me, ass hole!” he snarled. Gunther trembled behind his hideout, stiff with fear.
The four remaining clones cocked their weapons and crept toward Rick’s squirming body.
“Gunther! You ass hole!” Rick wheezed. A clone stepped on his outstretched arm. Rick’s head jerked up. The Techno aimed and shot. Rick’s head what was left of it fell back. The clone stepped over Rick’s body and looked straight at Gunther. Alarm pounded in his head as Gunther shrank down and pressed his shivering body against the bricks until it hurt.
He heard steps crunching on the rubble. Fear shook him like a vile wind and he wet his pants. He squeezed his eyes shut and heard the shots scream like a tortured woman over his head. The bricks cracked and pinged, spitting grit into his face. Something large thudded beside him. His ears rang in the silence that followed. One eye squinted open and he saw the Techno-clone lying next to him.
Something sprang onto the rubble pile above him and Gunther gasped at the slim warrior with a cyborg face. Then the warrior pulled off the vee-set, and a thick mane of dark brown hair tumbled down around the face of an angel. She leaned forward to touch his shoulders gently. “It’s okay, soldier,” she assured him in a liquid-honey voice. “I’m a Gaian. You’re safe. I got them all.” He saw the green Gaian arm band on her left arm for the first time. “I’m sorry I arrived too late to help your partner.” She bent on one knee to check him for injuries. “I’m Wanda. You don’t look hurt. We’ll have you back on duty in no time.”
His throat closed and everything shut off.
Gunther and Wanda picked their way carefully down a side street strewn with chunks of brick and mortar, glass fragments and garbage. Shrugging to keep his CARifle slung over his shoulder, Gunther adjusted the V-set on his head and glanced anxiously behind him. The cloying stink of diesel fuel and decaying food made him feel sick. Flies buzzed around his head, making him twitch.
Wanda rolled her eyes. “You’re not getting squirmy on me again, are you?”
He forced a smile and hung his head. She had insisted that he join her patrol. He wondered if it had been to protect him or to set him straight. He envied Wanda’s drive and courage. He stole a glance along her lithe form, somehow still attractive in camouflaged fatigues, and bright green arm-band tied to her left arm. He guessed she was about his age — 25 — but she seemed much older, more sure of herself. He focused on her full lips, held firmly in reproach. The V-set hid part of her face. Beauty and machine-beast. She didn’t seem to have a problem embracing the Techno’s tools to fight a war against Techno-technology.
“We’re just going to blow away a new tech-hideout where Technos are building V-coms,” Wanda said. That simple.
Gunther frowned. “Something about this makes me feel creepy,” he admitted. “What if the tip we got is wrong? What if it isn’t a hideout and this is an ambush?”
“They aren’t that organized. It’s not like there’s any government left. Why do you even think like that?”
“But they say the Technos are building a new army too. Some say they’ve created a new set of clones even better than the last ones.”
Wanda rolled her eyes. “Those clones I saved you from are original models, Gunther. There are no new ones. You’ve got a bad attitude. We destroyed all their labs and shops. They can’t make more clones,” she said. “There’s just a few of the old ones left, like the ones you had a run in with last week.”
He shrugged and tried to hide the worry on his face.
Her expression softened. “Oh, Gunther,” she sighed, reminding him of his older sister. She hadn’t seen it coming until it was too late either. They were sitting ducks. He glanced at the green band brandished on his left arm. Technos lurked behind every corner, just waiting for him. He was advertising himself with the stupid thing: here I am. Come and get me! As for the V-sets and eye-coms and fancy CARifles — Hell, it was all Techno-equipment. Some of it he’d even helped put together. What a joke!
“Wanda, how do you know you’re on the right side?”
She halted and turned, now looking really ticked off. “Listen, Gunther.” She planted her long legs apart and gazed at him sternly. “You can’t spend your days being afraid of death, wondering who’s going to win.” She shook her head. “You can’t choose how you die, but you can choose how you live, Gunther. That’s what you take with you.”
She sounded just like his sister. Kelly always knew what she wanted. She’d been so sure about her choice against the Technos. He remembered her railing at him about his own indecision. “Gunther, make up your mind,” he still heard Kelly’s soft voice, “then live by it.” Or die by it, Sis. He squinted and shrugged.
Sighting the house, Wanda began to walk briskly. “Come on,” she said. “Lets get in there and blow away that filthy Techno hole for Gaia.”
Gunther scrambled after her, not wanting to be left behind.
Wanda slid to a window with fluid elegance and lobbed a gas bomb. It smashed the glass and exploded inside. A noxious blue gas billowed out of the window. Wanda and Gunther unslung their rifles, raced to the door and waited. Gunther’s heart pounded. He broke into a sweat. This was the part he hated.
The door flew open and a family emerged, coughing and groping with tearful eyes. First a man, then a woman, herding out two young children. Aside from her eyes widening with surprise Wanda didn’t hesitate: she opened fire, catching them all before they had a chance to scream or bolt for safety or use the weapons clutched in their hands — even the kids. Careful not to look anyone in the eyes, Gunther winced as he fired. His CARifle punched gaping holes into what he knew was already a dead man.
Wanda sprinted past the bodies and disappeared inside for a few terrifying moments. She emerged in a rush and flung her arm forward for him to follow. Gunther sprang after her as she pounded down the stairs without a second look at the sprawled mass of bodies and threw herself behind a pile of rubble. The building exploded and grit and dust flew out like a spouting volcano. Wanda got up and wiped her hands on her fatigues, coughing in the thick dust. Her face glowered. “Those bastards are even using kids now. They make me sick.”
Still, she hadn’t hesitated to shoot them, Gunther thought.
“Kids with guns,” she said, disgusted. “God, what’ll they do next?” She turned and strode toward the alley that would take them home, Gunther scrambling behind her.
Gunther stopped shaking once they rounded a corner of the long alley, where the sweet pungent smell of rotting food and burning metal was welcome. She’d taken him back to firm Gaian territory. Wanda turned to him with a casual smile. “Do you think the Gaians will hold elections the first year?” She obviously intended to set him at ease.
Gunther began to relax. “I don’t know—”
A sharp tug on his left arm jerked him off his feet. A gun shot rang. His arm exploded with pain. Tears sprang to his eyes and he felt sick as he fell.
Wanda crouched instantly and swung her rifle in the direction of the sound of the blast. Gunther saw her take a sighting on a nearby building through her eye-com, aim and shoot twice. A figure toppled. It sailed down the twenty-story building and thudded meters away. Gunther saw his white arm band: a Techno sniper.
Wanda scrambled to Gunther and bent over him. Her face softened with concern. He followed her gaze to where his arm was bleeding profusely. It was torn apart at the elbow and the lower arm lay in an unnatural position. His head rang with panic. “It hurts, Wanda.”
“I know,” she said, touching him gently. Urgent again, “Stay still. I’ll put pressure on the wound with. . .” she looked around frantically, “this,” and untied her green arm band. He grimaced with pain while she tied it on his gaping wound as tightly as possible. It wasn’t enough. The blood continued to seep out. Wanda dashed to the destroyed figure of the Techno sniper, removed his white arm band and returned to Gunther. Blood had soaked both green arm bands, turning them black. She tied the white arm band as tightly as possible, well above the wound. It seemed to work as a tourniquet.
“Come on,” she commanded. “I’ll help you back. You’ll have to walk, Gunther.” She hoisted him up using his good arm. He stumbled to his feet and passed out briefly. When he came to, she was dragging him down the alley. He forced his wobbly legs to keep up with her pace. “Good.” She nodded, panting as she bore most of his weight. “Not much farther and we’ll be there. You can do it, Gunther.”
He focused on her lips, drawn back and moist with effort, and knew that he would follow her wherever she went.
They emerged into Hanging Square. An angry Gaian mob thronged around a makeshift scaffold and shouted as the body of a Techno partisan swung slowly on the rope. A girl at the edge of the crowd called above the general raucous. “Look!” she pointed to Wanda and Gunther. “More Technos!”
Gunther glanced from the girl to the white Techno band on his arm. His stomach lurched.
The crowd rushed them like a violent storm. Wanda dropped Gunther and he collapsed to the ground. He expected her to pelt out of there to safety but she stayed with him and swung her rifle up. “We’re not Technos!” she screamed. “We’re—”
Someone hit her. The rifle fell and she tottered. The crowd held her up. They tore off her V-set and smashed her face. She went limp but they kept beating her. His body clenched like an insect pinned against a wall, watching them beat Wanda in staccato.
A dark silhouette obliterated the glaring sun overhead. A shovel, brandished high, swung down as if in slow motion. When it struck his face, it only stung for a moment. He saw himself collapse into an empty husk. It grew thick with flies, sissing like static and filling the darkness of his mouth, his nose, his brain. He scrambled in a panic for a clear image but the picture faded.
NOTE
The short story was previously published in “Natural Selection” (Pixl Press) in 2013.
COVER IMAGEN: Ai WordPress
Nina Munteanu
I am an award-winning Canadian novelist and short story author of science fiction, fantasy and eco-fiction. I am also an ecologist and scientist. I teach writing at the University of Toronto and write for various magazines, including essays on science and futurism. My short work has appeared in Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine, Chiaroscuro, subTerrain, Apex Magazine, Metastellar, and several “Best of” anthologies. I currently have 10 novels published and several non-fiction books on writing and science. My book “Water Is…” (Pixl Press)—a scientific study and personal journey as limnologist, mother, and teacher—was Margaret Atwood’s pick in 2016 in the New York Times‘The Year in Reading.’ My most recent novel, “A Diary in the Age of Water” by Inanna Publicationswas a Foreword Indies winner and a finalist in the International Book Awards in 2020. My novel “Gaia’s Revolution” is currently in production with Dragon Moon Press.
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