All here the weapon book.., p.1
All Here (The Weapon Book 3), page 1
ALL HERE
©2024 Richard Fox
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CONTENTS
Also in Series
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
From the Author
Thank you for reading All Here!
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Rawlins’ Redemption
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ALSO IN SERIES
The Weapon
Battleborn
Red Man
All Here
Check out the entire series here! (Tap or scan)
CHAPTER 1
Itold you…
The world howled at Kadish as he ran down a dark street, the few lit street lights pulsed crimson with his tormentor’s eyes. Every car horn blared at him with the Red Man’s cackle. Every man and woman on the sidewalks wore red, their skin pulsing with a bloody tint as they gawped at the man sprinting across cracked and pitted asphalt with no regard for his safety.
Kadish clutched at his face and head, growling and muttering incoherently. He charged at a wooden fence, the paint chipped and peeled from years of exposure and neglect. He lowered a shoulder and shattered old planks into splinters. He tripped over a cross bar and landed on his face in a dirt lot. He slid to a stop, a cloud of dust billowing around him.
Why so upset? Don’t hear me whining after you tried to kill me.
“I don’t need you,” Kadish got to his knees and forearms, rocking from side to side. “I don’t want you!”
Isn’t that cute… look at me.
Kadish shook his head, his eyes squeezed shut. He’d been so close to being free from the Red Man. He’d found Doctor Tivoli, the scientists behind the Imperative device implanted into his brain that transformed him from a brain dead vegetable into a Revenant soldier. She’d come to help him deactivate the Imperative and exorcise the Red Man from his mind.
She’d plugged into the implant and then… she couldn’t do anything. The Imperative had been disabled years ago when he’d escaped the Revenants after they’d tried to eliminate him. The Imperative wasn’t the Red Man. The Red Man wasn’t the Imperative.
Come on, Dead Man, is this really so bad? We’ve been together for so long, and now you know we’ll be together for ever. Look at me.
“It can’t stay this way,” Kadish leaned back, his legs bent beneath him. “You’re not part of me.”
Look at me.
“No,” Kadish shook his head. “You’re not real.”
A hand gloved in bright-red velvet slid under his chin.
Look. At. Me!
Kadish’s head snapped up and his eyes flew open.
The lot was surrounded by bleachers lit by floodlights. The stands were full of circus goers, all clad in red-patterned clothing. They pointed and laughed at Kadish, faces flush, mouths open and teeth barred as they jeered him all alone in the lot. Flood lights snapped on, the pools of light meandering across the sand and weed patches before concentrating on the Dead Man.
Light washed out his vision, but the laughter was everywhere.
Welcome to the freak show!
A cloud of smoke wafted through the light, casting God rays over him. Floodlights ahead of him snapped off. A dark shape loomed in the darkness, flanked by the edges of packed bleachers. Crimson front lights clicked on, illuminating a wooden stage and a heavy curtain. The folds glistened, soaked through with blood.
A ruby-tipped cane stabbed through the center of the curtain. The Red Man flung the flap away and emerged onto the stage, his arms wide open to greet the cheering crowd. He wore a carnival barker’s costume, complete with a top hat, all in fiery hues.
Hello hello to all the damned and the dead, the Red Man bowed deeply at the waist, top hat sweeping across his chest then held tight against his flank. He looked directly at Kadish, eyes glowing behind ragged strands of hair. His lips pulled back into a rictus grin, shark teeth glinting against the light.
The Red Man stood and flung his cane into the air, and it spun like a baton until the Red Man caught it in a single smooth motion, then leveled the tip at Kadish.
As much as I appreciate a captive audience, let’s get down to the brassiest of tacks. The Red Man danced a Vaudeville jig, thrusting his cane around him before ending with a flourish toward the curtain. It pulled back, revealing an inky abyss.
A figure walked out of the darkness, its limbs flailed about like a puppets. A think strand ran from the back of its head up into the sky, thin strings glimmering in the red light. The featureless face of a Revenant in a burnt and torn set of army fatigues lurched out onto the stage next to the Red Man.
Ladies and gentlemen, who do we have here?
The Red Man spun around, his coat tails whipping up. He snapped the ruby tip of his cane up to the Revenant’s mouth.
No answer.
The Red Man put a gloved fingertip to the Revenant’s chin and pressed the mouth open like a nut cracker.
“I’m the Dead Man.”
The audience howled with laughter. Kadish’s shoulders slumped. A profound feeling of defeat washed through him.
Not to cast aspersions on your word, but you could be any old meat puppet. Let’s make sure we’re talking to the right person.
The Red Man held his top hat up to the Revenant’s face and waggled it from side to side. He waved the tip of his cane against the top several times, wiggling his ass in time with the cane, to the crowd’s delight.
Abracadabra!
The Red Man snatched the top hat away, revealing the Dead Man’s skull face on the Revenant.
That’s him! The one and the only, the Red Man leaned his face closer to the Revenant’s and kicked up on heel as he gave the skull a kiss on the absent cheek. The crowd tittered with laughter.
But is that really the Dead Man? Is this really the dead dead soldier that used to be Johnny Kadish… let’s take a look! The Red Man twirled his cane in his hands, then tapped it against the Revenant’s knee. Arms and legs fell away and thumped against the stage. The head and torso bobbed on the line connected to the Imperative port on the back of the skull.
The crowd ooh’d and ahh’d as the Red Man kicked the limbs off the stage.
That’s not Kadish, those are gifts from the Revenant program… those are all me. The Red Man held up a finger and tickled the tip into the Revenant’s ear. Kadish heard the scritch-scratch. He lifted a shoulder to rub against the side of his head.
Let’s see what’s left!
The Red Man squeezed the ear lobe and tugged at it. The skull face came away with a rubbery snap. The Red Man jerked downward, sloughing off the polymer layer covering the head and torso.
Every artificial part of the Revenant fell away. Kadish recoiled at what remained: there were no eyes, nothing recognizable as human but for a brain riven with gleaming metal wires. The Imperative was a knotted-up rat’s nest where the spine met the cerebellum. The heart and lungs were wrapped in a cocoon of graphenium.
The crowd booed.
What’s this? This isn’t a man, this is the armless, legless wonder of the 21st century! We don’t have a person on display for you fine folks, we’ve got ourselves a freak!
Freak! Freak! Freak!
Kadish tried to get up, but his body refused to obey. He wanted to run from the horror of what was left of him, but the artificial components of his body weren’t his to control anymore.
But there’s good news, the Red Man held a hand over the exposed brai
Soon, there won’t be any Kadish left to delude itself. All we have now are misfiring neurons clinging to the memory of what it used to be. Such a waste of time. Such a waste of space. Soon… all that we be left is me. Me me me.
The Red Man stepped in front of the remains, then hopped backward. The hanging parts snapped into the Red Man. He pointed up to the sky and snapped his fingers. The line connecting to the Imperative spiraled up into the darkness.
Kadish’s arms rose of their own accord. They weren’t his anymore, they belonged to the Red Man.
The Red Man turned his hands over and Kadish’s did the same.
You’ve always been mine… by degrees. Soon, you’ll be all mine.
The Red Man hopped off the stage.
Sure, you brought my mommy dearest in to try and murder me, but am I mad? No! Why not? Because I am inevitable. I knew that. Now you do too.
He got on all fours and crawled toward Kadish, barking and yipping at him.
You see, it doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter if you fight. I won this war before you even woke up to this nightmare. The real question is why you even bother to fight me. Let me handle things from here on out. I’ll make sure you have a front row seat to all the fun.
“No,” Kadish growled. “No, I’m not the monster they made! I-I…”
You’re the Dead Man. You’re mine. Now… we have an appointment.
The Red Man looked east and Kadish’s head turned with his. The bleachers were gone. Over the lot’s fence and beyond the San Bernardino Mountains, the first light of dawn glowed on the horizon.
See, I don’t care if that little twerp lives or dies… but I wouldn’t mind ripping that other cyborg’s face off and feeding it to him. If there’s going to be one swinging dick in the No Go Zone, it’s going to be mine. Let’s go.
The Red Man vanished. Sensation returned to Kadish’s limbs He flexed his hands, squeezing them so tightly the metal in the knuckles squealed beneath the false skin.
A stray dog slipped through a broken slat in the fence. It raised its nose to sniff the air and caught Kadish’s scent. It ducked its head and ran, tail tucked between its legs.
Kadish shattered a segment of the fence with a swift kick and marched through the gap toward the No Go Zone.
CHAPTER 2
Ramirez rapped a code against the hotel room door. The clack of bolts unlocking traveled down the door. It creaked open and Osia leaned against the frame to give Ramirez a once-over.
“It’s just me… and your favorite ice cream is vanilla and cinnamon,” Ramirez held up his empty hands.
“Get in here,” Osia jerked the door open and shut it behind Ramirez.
The room still had Doctor Tivoli’s equipment laid out on the one king-sized bed. The doctor sat in a chair up against the corner, her ankles crossed and a lit cigarette in her hand. She stared across the room, her mind somewhere far away.
“No luck, I take it,” Osia locked the door behind Ramirez.
“I’m out there looking for a male suspect who can be literally any other description,” Ramirez sat gently on the foot of the bed so as not to disturb the equipment. “Just about anyone could be Kadish. I don’t know why I even bothered.”
“At least it’s a male we’re looking for,” Osia said. “So only about half of the people out there could be him… unless,” she tapped her chin. “Doc, can he use his skin and voice changing to pass as a woman?”
“Can he grow tits?” Ramirez half turned to look at Tivoli.
Osia gave him a somewhat gentle slap on the back of the head.
“All the Revenants are male,” Tivoli tapped ash into a mostly empty food carton. “There was talk of slapping inflatable breast augmentations in them, but their bone structure wouldn’t fool anyone. Perhaps you both have a better understanding why pains were taken to keep them from going off the reservation. Good luck tracking down a Revenant when they can be anyone and no one. I am so fucked.”
“All our asses are in the fire with Kadish,” Osia said. “We came here to help him, and we’re not going to quit just because of a setback.”
“A ‘setback’?” Tivoli scoffed. “Perhaps you didn’t quite understand what I told you earlier.”
“Well I’m no psychologist. Try explaining it to Ramirez here. Small words,” Osia said.
“It’s a neurological dysfunction, not psychological,” Tivoli rolled her eyes. “Though my colleges back at Cornell would—anyway.”
She picked up a data slate and swiped the screen several times, then tossed it to Ramirez. An image of Kadish’s brain and the intrusive wires from the Imperative pulsed red on the screen.
“The Imperative has advanced further into the patient’s cerebrum than any other Revenant we ever had. Most expansion comes from the Imperative recruiting more neurons for problem solving or memory access to augment built-in skills. Any Revenant could dissemble and reassemble most any weapon in the world, but if the host had experience with a task that was more efficient, the Imperative would incorporate that knowledge. Kadish being conscious should’ve resulted in a massive stroke from his mind competing with the Imperative, but he proved to be something of an outlier,” Tivoli took a drag on her cigarette.
“The Imperative advanced a great deal while he was still in the Revenant Program. I disabled most of the Imperative’s functionality when I helped him escape, but there were command codes firewalled off from what I could affect. The default aggression coding, in particular,” she said.
“That’s how we were always supposed to be in the infantry,” Ramirez said. “Default aggressive.”
“My boss was exceedingly paranoid about the Revenants losing connection to command and control networks and either being captured or wandering off like one of those old vacuum bots. So they had the default aggressive fail safes built into them. They go without orders for too long and they turn highly aggressive. Programmed to attack any and all humans they encounter.”
“Jesus,” Ramirez shook his head. “What was that going to accomplish?”
“They’d eventually attract a force with enough firepower to put them down. When that happens, the micros in their system would burn out the bodies into nothing recognizable and stop the Revenants from being traced back to my boss,” Tivoli reached down into a case and held up a pill blister. “I brought fresh micros for him. They repair his body, and he looked like hell.”
“Back to what’s wrong with Kadish,” Ramirez said.
“I just told—I’ll dumb it down some more,” Tivoli flicked her hair back. “When I helped Kadish escape, I disabled as much of the Imperative as I could. Turns out the default aggression protocols were firewalled. So while anyone with the correct voice print can no longer order him around—because that was turned off—the part of the Imperative that’s still active is what’s driving him insane.”
“This Red Man he spoke of,” Osia sat next to Ramirez and set her hand in his, “you didn’t program that?”
“No, it must be some sort of schizophrenic hallucination,” Tivoli said quietly.
“That’s treatable, right?” Ramirez asked. “We’ll get him to a hospital or the VA—”
“You think the VA’s going to fix him?” Osia have him an incredulous look.
“I’m spit ballin’ here,” Ramirez shrugged. “I’m not willing to quit on the objective, not when we’ve got the super brain doctor here who did this to him.”
“The firewall remains in place,” Tivoli tossed the data slate onto the bed. “Even if I did have the codes disable the core programming… shutting down his cerebellum would kill him. They weren’t built to be returned to their original state. I’ve been staring at his chart since he left and… he’s degrading. The part of him that’s in control is losing ground. Digesting micros seem to accelerate the default aggression’s hold on him.”
Osia stood up.
“Then he gets off of those—”
“He’ll fall apart,” Tivoli said. “His non-biological components will decay, he’ll lose the ability to keep his brain oxygenated, and he’ll die. That’s a few weeks away in his current state. We pump him full of micros to stop that from happening and that… Red Man will bury his conscious as the default aggression programming will still remain. I can butcher the Imperative, but that will certainly turn him into a vegetable. You want my medical opinion? The patient is expectant. Terminally ill.”
