Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern (7 page)

“What’s going on in here?” came Zuz’s voice from the hallway, “I’m armed!”

When Zuzelo pushed the door open Mal had already visibly relaxed, and his malleable metallic arms had returned to their normal, more human-looking, state. Although, Mal had to admit, neither “normal” nor “human-looking” were the best way to describe the transforming weapons that had been grafted onto his body.

“So am I, Zuz,” smirked Mal at his friend.

“Yeah, I guess you are, Mal,” Zuz’s said without the hint of laughter in his voice. After a once over of Mal to make sure the soldier was OK, Zuzelo’s eyes went wide at the disarrayed state of the bed. The man rubbed a hand nervously through his goatee and pushed the door open wide behind him, nodding for Mal to follow him, “I’m not going to ask you what happened with the bed, but maybe we can sit down and you can tell me what the hell happened to you.”

“As soon as I figure it out, I’ll let you know,” sighed Mal as he followed his friend out the door.

*****

The two men sat across an ancient iron work table cluttered with what must have been years’ worth of unsorted tools, pencils chewed down to nubs, presumably empty pizza boxes from some place called “Hungry Howie’s Pizza,” dirty rags, and the general clutter of a working man’s garage. Although, this “garage” was actually a ten thousand square foot warehouse in the heart of a monstrous salvage and junkyard that David Zuzelo had converted into his workshop.

Zuzelo informed his friend that he’d purchased the location a few years back when he’d finally had enough of the government. They were surrounded by two hundred tons of steel, aluminum, and various other radar and satellite-blocking materials. In fact, the main building was now located nearly fifty feet underground. No one would be able to find them there. The man’s talk of hiding from the government and keeping “off the grid” amused and relaxed Mal: his old friend hadn’t changed one bit. Zuz had always been about two steps from starring in his own version of ‘Conspiracy Theory.’

Two banks of fluorescent lights, mounted some thirty feet up in the cavernous ceiling, shone down on the immediate area, illuminating the table the men were talking at, a workbench running along at least forty feet of the nearby wall and covered in more junk than Mal had ever seen jammed into one location, and a number of burned out and rusted hulks that had once belonged to cars, tractors and other vehicles. It was a smorgasbord of scrap metal. Mal swore he saw the stripped down frame of an armored personnel carrier off in the shadows that covered most of the huge building.

Mal’s computerized friend blandly informed him of the presence of forty-nine heartbeats in the vicinity: Mal’s, Zuzelo’s, forty-five rats, and a pair of large cats. The voice also laid out the floor plan of the building, located in the City of Industry, California, as had been filed by its original owners when it was built in 1952, and had identified no less than thirteen potential egresses from the building in case of an emergency as Mal gave his friend a full rundown of the events of the last few hours of his life.

Annoying as it was, Mal was beginning to appreciate the strategic value of the system.

“And that’s all you remember? Waking up with a scalpel in your face?” Zuzelo had listened to the story without moving or speaking for almost ten minutes, completely enraptured by Mal’s telling.

Mal shot Zuzelo a sideways glance at the comment, “It wasn’t exactly a “scalpel in my face,” man. I did have to yank something out of the back of my head, though.”

Mal reached around to where the wires had been plugged into his skull.

“There’s something over it now, but when I first woke up there was a huge hole at the base of my skull with cables coming out, covered in a gel of some kind.”

With an eager look on his face, Zuzelo moved around the table to stand next to Mal, and pushed the soldier’s head down, almost slamming it into the tabletop. “Let me see!”

After a moment touching and, to Mal’s discomfort, caressing the area, Zuzelo moved back around to his seat. “Wow. They did a number on you. That thing, it’s a port of some kind…and it goes deep. Looks like it goes directly into your brain, and I can see filaments just under the skin that lead down into your spine and to the arms. At first, I thought you were wearing some kind of high-tech armor, but those things are part of you.”

His lips tightened into a severe line on his tanned face and pulled a hard line between his brows, as Mal nodded grimly. In his heart, he had already known what Zuzelo was saying, but hearing it out loud from someone else caused it all to finally hit home. He dropped his head into the oddly warm metal of his hands, unable to speak.

Quietly, Zuzelo asked, “What’s the last thing you remember before today?”

“Before today?” Mal thought hard; a metallic finger traced a wrinkle down the center of his cheek, scratching over the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow forming on his chin. “We were on maneuvers in the mountains just north of Dahuk in Iraq. Everyone in my unit was…”

The rough emotions, still fresh for Mal, welled up in him, choking off his voice. His heart raced so fast he thought it was going to punch through his chest.

“It’s ok, Mal, man…you don’t have to finish.” Zuzelo’s voice softened, unused to seeing the Army ranger in such a vulnerable state.

Mal continued, ignoring the pause, unable to stop now that he had started, “It was a night op and we were flying low over the hills in a chopper, there were six of us. We were hit by something and the chopper went up like a roman candle. I must have blacked out in the crash.”

“We went down in a ball of fire…I wasn’t sure any of us were going to make it out alive,” standing, Mal gestured at his sides and chest. “By the looks of things, I’m not sure I did.”

“If that’s not a mind-fuck, I don’t know what is. How long do you think you were out?”

“Beats me. What day is it?” Mal replied with a baffled look on his face.

Zuzelo had to think for a moment: keeping up on “trivial” things like that date had never been his strong suit. “I dunno, man. March 25th…26th?”

“March 25th…?” All of the blood rushed from Mal’s face.

“Yeah. Or 26th.”

“The mission was April 3rd,” realization hit Mal right before horror swooped in and took control. “What year is it?”

Zuzelo told him.

“A year…I’ve lost a year.”

“My, god,” Zuzelo reached out to put his hand on Mal’s shoulder and shied away as his fingers brushed the cool metal surface.

Head down, arms limp at his sides, Mal didn’t seem to notice the uneasiness in his old friend’s actions and pushed past him. The sound of metal on metal echoed through the empty space of the warehouse, bouncing off of the wreckage before disappearing into the distance as Mal leaned down onto the half-rusted table, bracing himself on widespread hands.

“Mal…if there’s anything I can do…”

A thunderous boom and the sound of shrieking, tearing metal interrupted David Zuzelo’s attempt to comfort his friend. One moment, his forty-year old solid steel work table had been whole, the next it was dented nearly in half by a single blow from a gleaming metal fist. The force of the blow was so great, its reverberation so powerful, it knocked Zuzelo off his feet and painfully onto his rear end.

The pure fury of Malcolm Weir was visible to his friend, even from behind, and five more titanic blows reduced the half-ton table to a demolished ruin. Each blow sent another spider web of cracks streaking out in the concrete floor from beneath the mess of tortured iron.

Before his anger was spent, Mal gripped two sides of the bent and ruined six hundred pound tabletop in his mighty hands and, straining, tore the piece from its welded mountings. With a primal scream he threw the unwieldy projectile with enough brute force to obliterate the burned out Volkswagen frame it slammed into at nearly sixty miles per hour.

Scrambling to his feet, Zuzelo dove behind the poor cover of a rolling tool rack for safety.

“Dude, Mal! I think you skipped a couple of grief stages and went right to ‘pissed off!’ I know you’re mad, but don’t destroy my home, man.” Zuzelo’s voice leapt five octaves as he yelled at the maddened cyborg. “Stop!”

The hammering fists stopped their relentless assault on the now nearly formless lump of steel, seemingly halted by Zuzelo’s plea. Shoulders shaking from the adrenaline shooting through his veins, Mal bowed his head for a moment and replayed the day in his head, analyzing every second that had gone by with a microscopic gaze.

He had missed something and it was nagging at the back of his mind.

“How did you find me?” he finally said, in a voice far too calm to be natural, or safe.

From behind his shield of plastic and nylon, David Zuzelo responded meekly, “Excuse me?”

Mal shot a glance at Zuzelo over his shoulder; eyes alight with a rapidly rekindled fire. “I disappeared for a year—you haven’t seen me in five years—and you knew right where to find me. How did you know, Zuz?”

“Mal, I…you…” before Zuzelo could finish, Mal had moved across the floor with the speed of a serpent’s strike, covering the twenty foot distance between them in the blink of an eye. The cyborg sent the protective chair spinning across the floor with a backhanded blow, and jerked the nearly two hundred and twenty-five pound man to his feet as if he weighed nothing at all. It took every ounce of control Zuzelo had to avoid soiling himself in response.

“How did you find me? Answer me!” Mal raged, spittle flying as he shook his friend like a rag doll, lifting his bulk four inches off the floor. “Did they send you?! Tell me! Tell me! How did you find me?”

“I…ack…”

Unable to speak as he was being manhandled by his enraged half-machine friend, David Zuzelo reached into the inner pocket of his worn denim jacket and started to pull something out. Mal saw the movement and responded with all of the inhuman speed his living metal implants had given him. He locked one hand around the throat of his supposed savior, suspending him in the air with the sheer power of his arm, and caught the man’s hand in a crushing grip with the other.

“You…” choked Zuzelo as unyielding metallic fingers cut off his oxygen.

“Not so fast,” spat Mal, barely contained fury threatened to bubble over into more violence. In his grip, Zuzelo choked and sputtered and squirmed, trying to free himself. Mal sneered to himself as he flipped the man’s hand over to see whatever weapon he had hidden. All that greeted him was the sight of a thin black cellphone, clutched tightly in a hand rapidly turning purple from the loss of circulation Mal was inflecting upon it.

“Aw, shit, Zuz…” Mal released his hold on the nearly unconscious man and tried to help him to the nearby water cooler for a drink. Zuzelo was having none of it and slapped the cyborg’s offending hand away and stumbled his way to snatch a tiny paper cup from its receptacle and pour icy liquid down his half-crushed throat.

After a moment of sputtering and coughing, Zuzelo barked, “You’ve got a funny way of thanking a guy for saving your bacon.”

Fists thrust hard into his sides and still far from trusting, “How did you find me, Zuz?”

“I got your damn text, you douche bag.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Zuz?” Mal’s eyes turned to slits as he watched the man warily.

“Your text came through…you told me where you were and when to get you,” seeing Mal’s quizzical look, Zuzelo tossed his cellphone to Mal and added, “Take a look for yourself.”

With a quick flick of his wrist, Mal caught the phone and brought it up to his face for a closer look. Still unsure of his newfound strength, he delicately pulled open the phone’s history and saw a series of messages sent from his cellphone. Zuzelo had even programmed it to display an old, drunken college picture of the two of them whenever Mal called.

There were three messages in total, giving the address where Mal had woken up, the request for a fast car, and a demand for Zuzelo to hurry. Looking at the time stamp for the first text, Mal saw it went through at almost the exact same time he came to in the operating room.

He had no idea what was going on, but Mal knew those messages weren’t his. Hell, he didn’t even know where his phone was.

“They’re not from me, Zuz. Someone else sent them.” Seeing the confused look on his friend’s face, Mal told him about the time stamps on the messages and that there was no way he could have sent them.

“You’ve got yourself into some deep shit,” whistled Zuzelo in astonishment.

“Yeah, I guess I do. I’ve got no idea who had me or why, and I have even less of an idea of who called you. None of it makes any sense.”

“I still can’t believe it, Mal…gone for a year and waking up with metal arms. It’s like everything we talk about online is true—abductions, conspiracies, cover-ups—and all of it’s happening to you. Oh, shit,” eyes wide, a pained and worried look formed on Zuzelo’s rather expressive face. “You weren’t…probed were you?”

Mal looked at his friend, taken completely by surprise. Then, over the course of two heartbeats, a giant smile split his face from ear to ear.

“You’re a nut, Zuz,” laughed Mal. “You’re crazy.”

“I’m crazy?” retorted Zuzelo from behind an incredulous smirk. “Says the man who just tore a bunch of rent-a-cops to shreds with his freaky metal arms…yeah, I’m the one with issues here.”

Mal let loose with a great belly laugh and clapped his friend on the back, causing Zuzelo to cringe a bit from the impact. The recently awakened cyborg still didn’t have a handle on the extent of his new strength. He was going to have to walk on eggshells when interacting with normal people for a while.

“Sorry…still getting used to these things. It’s not every day a guy wakes up with stainless steel arms, right?”

“Speaking of which…” Zuzelo said from beneath a bushy graying eyebrow, intrigued. “Let’s take a look at those things and see what’s going on. See if we can figure out exactly what those jack-booted pawns of the imperialistic establishment did to you”

Mal stared back at his friend, completely unconvinced.

“C’mon, let’s check those puppies out!” David Zuzelo tapped his teeth for a moment while he stared intently at the gleaming metal of Mal’s arms and chest. Mal could almost see the man thinking.