Between a Bear and a Hard Place(80)

“You’ll die... too,” the toad-like scientist croaked.

“We’ll see about that.”

Whistling, Eighty-Three tossed the orb up in the air, catching it like someone playing idly with a baseball. “We shall see, old friend. We shall see.”





-24-


“I can’t believe it’s all over. I really, really can’t.”


-Claire


“That got out of hand quickly.” Claire dodged around yet another lumbering automaton. “At least they’re moving slow, for whatever reason.”

“It probably has something to do with our buddy upstairs!” Fury shouted back, clearing three of them from his path with a sweep of his paw. “But this place is heating up. We gotta get out of here!”

“Not before we find the rest of the bears.”

“Us,” Fury corrected her. “The rest of us.”

God, he’s right, isn’t he? Somehow, someway, I am one of them. When the hell did that happen? How the hell did it happen?

It didn’t matter though, in the end, the way it happened was just another detail in a long line of them. She didn’t care, not really, though she was curious, that’s all it was. She belonged, for the first time in her life, she really belonged. It didn’t matter that it was with a bunch of ancient werebears, she was a part of something bigger.

Overhead, a handful of fire sprinklers engaged and soaked the area below them. Droplets of water refracting the spider’s web of security lasers crisscrossing the whole place only a couple of feet above their heads. The water slowed the soldiers’ movements even more than they already were, and the blaring, violently loud alarm sent waves of nausea through Claire’s belly with every pulse of sound.

“Where are they?” she called out.

Fury was running along the wall of the enormous steel and concrete room in front of her, knocking on walls in between knocking off soldiers. “They’re close! I can feel Stone’s energy. Can’t you?”

“Yeah,” Claire called back, her entire person soaked through with the water that kept spraying out of the ceiling as the alarms blared louder and louder. Voices were coming through the speakers, but it was only a static rendition of those long series of disjointed, nonsense numbers. Orders to a legion who took them no other way, instructions to an army of mindless creatures intent on nothing but following orders.

Except, there was one of them moving in a different way from all the rest. The slower, the more plodding, the movements of the others became, the closer one of them drew.

“Claire!” it shouted. “Fury! They’re waiting!”

“Eighty-Three?” she clucked, whirling around. “Is that you?”

“My name turns out to be James, and I almost choked Eckert to death, but left him on the floor.”

“More for me,” Fury said with a growl in his throat. “What the hell’s wrong with the robots though?”

“I shut off the network. That would be the alarms and the sprinklers and everything else. I got through to Rogue on the way down here – they’re circling a field two miles from here. All we have to do is get your friends and get out.”

Something rumbled deep under the earth, what felt like miles below their feet. Like the earth rolling over in its sleep, the cracking, grumbling groan went back and forth twice, and then settled again.

That’s when the first scream caught their ears.

“That wasn’t a soldier,” Claire said. “It was coming from inside the wall.”

When she looked back to Fury, she saw a look of confused agony on his beautiful face. She saw him with his eyes closed, his lips pulled up into a snarl. He was fighting back tears he didn’t know he was going to shed.

“It’s them, Claire,” he said in something approaching a whisper. “All these years, and we’re this fucking close and all I can see is blank wall.”

“That’s because you can’t see what I can see. This is the holding cell. We blow this room, break the circuits that control it, and this place will be crawling with bears before you can say... well, pretend I said some witty bear pun.”

“But how could we do that?”

Eighty-Three tossed the baseball sized orb up, and caught it with a swift pass of his arm. “This EMP will blow every fuse in the place. Every shred of electronics will be fried to a crisp. About five minutes after that, the whole building will go up in a fireball.”

“What’ll happen to all of them?” Claire asked.

“They’ll probably be either freed from the network permanently, or...”

“What are they?” Fury asked.

Eighty-Three shook his head. “No time for explanations. The summation is that some of them – of us – have more human parts than machine. That segment will probably be fine. Those with more electronics than human bits will cease to function.”