Between a Bear and a Hard Place(77)

“I think we might have him to thank for more than just this little trip,” she said. “But if you weren’t upstairs, then you’re also not the only bears who got out that night.”

Fury stared at her for a moment, eyes a storm of green and gold. After he processed for a split-second that they might not be as alone as he thought, he turned back to the ladder. “I can barely see this thing.”

She took the hint. The time for wondering and thinking was over. It was time to jump.

“On three?” she asked.

The rhythmic pounding of jackboots was closer. Claire turned back toward the darkness and saw that it was only when the world was dark that the soldiers became as creepy as they possibly could. Their eyes – goggles glowed red in the darkness, no doubt to illuminate the world in infrared so they could see just as well in the dark as in the day.

“We’re gonna do this, and then we’re going up to help,” she said. “We have to help him find his answers.”

Fury nodded. “I wouldn’t let him down.”

“One,” Claire said under her breath.

“Wait, do we jump when you say three or do you say three and then we jump, like you’re really counting to four? One-two then jump on three, or—“

“You’re stalling. Two,” Claire couldn’t help but smile.

She wasn’t afraid. Not one bit. Never once in her life had she been anything but a semi-ambitious scientist who kinda hated working more than forty hours a week, but did it anyway. Now, here she was, about to make some ridiculous leap, and save a bunch of bears.

“I’m not stalling,” Fury said. “Three!”

Turns out, Claire meant count to three and then jump. Fury meant to jump on three.

She got a whole lot closer to that river than she ever wanted to get.

*

It only took fourteen kicks and one shoulder butt that clanged so loud in his digitally enhanced ears that Eighty-Three thought he was going to fall unconscious. When his brain rang with that metallic sound, he vaguely remembered being in a massive crowd and watching some very lithe, very skinny man shimmy back and forth behind a microphone.

His ears had rung then, but it was a different kind. There was a pleasing tune accompanying the dancing man. As he sat there, regaining his nerve – which is another way he knew he wasn’t a robot, or if he was, that the operation didn’t take fully – the first few bars of Sympathy for the Devil played in Eighty-Three’s brain. Then he began to recall the words, the poem that came behind the music.

He couldn’t place it, but at least today’s flash of memory was a pleasant one, and didn’t at all involve faceless men cutting into him and putting metal in his chest.

Eighty-Three’s finger joints whirred softly as he grasped the handle on the door, and squeezed. Once he reached the limit of his natural capacity to grip, the rotors in his hands took over. The steel bar dented slightly where each of his fingers were.

“Give me your hand!” he heard from down below. “I got you! Just swing the other one up!”

Oh no, he thought. I bet they jumped at different times. That’s always a problem. Just like with playing paper-rock-scissors.

The handle kept collapsing, but Eighty-Three paused at that second memory as well. Paper... rock... He looked down to find the first two fingers in his non-door-crushing hand were extended in a horizontal peace sign. He was ready to cut someone’s paper, should they be dumb enough to pick it.

He shook his head to clear his thoughts – robots didn’t need to do that.

“I got it!”

“Thank everything!” he heard Claire shout. “Remind me to ask him what my foot almost went into when we get out of here.”

The heart that Eighty-Three wouldn’t have had if he were actually a robot felt like it welled up. Moisture pooled in his one good eye and ran down his face before being automatically dried by the moisture stabilizing unit in his mask. My friends are okay, he thought. Everything is going to work. We’re all going to be fine.

He realized, just then, that his enhanced fingers had just about made wadded up tinfoil out of the handle. He tried it once more.

It swung open, bending backward around hinges he’d mangled with his assault on the door.

Inside, there were lavish decorations – a large, and very soft rug only a few feet from where he stood. A panel of massive screens that tracked movement all around the installation. Above, a ceiling fan beat a slow whop-whop rhythm that reminded Four of the beat of a helicopter’s blades and, oddly, of the groove of another song that the skinny dancing man had sung.

Sparsely placed paintings lined the walls, and then, as his eyes fell on the mahogany desk, and the round, bald-headed man behind it, with his throat wrapped in a scarf, Eighty-Three felt a surge of hate in his throat. It tasted sour and sweet at the same time, but the more important thing is that it tasted.