Machine Man - Max Barry [69]
“What? Let’s go.”
“I can’t hold you.”
“Sure you can.” She held out her arms. “I’m little.”
“When we land, you’ll weigh as much as a car.” To her expression, I added, “That’s not me. That’s physics.” I looked at my metal fingers. If I’d had the arms, this might have been doable.
“Are you bleeding?”
“Oh. Yes.” I showed her my biceps. “I got damaged.”
“You mean injured.”
“What did I say?”
“You …” She shook her head. “What happened?”
“They shot me.”
“Who shot you?”
“The company. Guards.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“Why would they do that? Charlie?”
“I kicked the CEO.”
Lola’s eyebrows leaped. “Oh, no.”
“It was an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“How badly hurt is he?”
“Um …”
“They have really good doctors here. Maybe—”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh, Charlie.”
“I’m sorry.” I meant for upsetting Lola. The Manager I was still mad at.
“And now they want to kill you?”
“I don’t know. They shot at me.”
“They must think you’re dangerous. It’s a misunderstanding.”
“Should I try to talk to them?”
Lola frowned. “What did you mean before, ‘That was me’? How did you make that smoke?”
“I kicked a car. It tried to run me over. I had to kick it. Into the building.”
“Oh. Oh.”
“That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“I think that’s really bad.”
“They’re putting parts in people. Military parts. They gave you a military heart.”
“A what?”
“A military—”
“What does that mean? What the fuck is a military heart?”
“I don’t—” Something went dink. “Was that the elevator?”
“We have to get out of here,” said Lola.
“Yes.”
“Pick me up and run. We can go down the stairs.”
“The Contours aren’t good on stairs.”
“What does that mean?”
“A bug, I guess. I haven’t had a chance to go through the software—”
“What does that mean for us?”
“It means we can’t take the stairs.”
“Okay. We can … let’s try to sneak down in the elevators.”
“The elevators won’t work unless …” Footsteps. Lola squeezed my hand. I felt that strange attractive force stir, trying to pull my fingers toward her chest.
“Charlie …”
It was a puzzle, I realized. Like having a bag of corn, a chicken, a fox, and a boat that could bear only one object across the river at a time. I could jump out of here, but Lola couldn’t. She couldn’t open the stairwell doors, assuming security had locked everything down, but she could walk down stairs, which I couldn’t.
“Can you stomp through the floor?”
“What? It’s reinforced concrete.”
“Is that a no?”
“Obviously it’s a no!”
“Don’t look at me like that!”
“I just …” I had it. It was simple. I would accompany Lola to a stairwell. Kick open the door. Jump down to ground level. Reenter the building. Kick open the door at ground level. Grab her. Run away. It was a good plan. Simple. It made a few assumptions about my likelihood of being shot. But it was a solution. I took her hand and entered the suite.
A man appeared in the doorway. A guard. And I stood there, my plan forgotten, because the guard was Carl.
HE LOOKED different. At first I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was distracted by other thoughts, like why he was here. I had thought he was gone. Terminated, one way or another. But here he was, blocking the only exit that didn’t require falling eighty feet.
“Hi, Carl.” The light from the corridor made it hard to see his face. “How are you?”
He didn’t move. Lola peeked around me.
Still nothing. He was wearing his security uniform, although that looked different, too. “There has been a strange series of events,” I said. “I don’t know which side of the story you heard, but …”
Carl stepped into the room. What was different about him became clear. I hadn’t clicked earlier because Carl had always been big. But not this big. Not so big he had to turn sideways to fit through a door.
His arms were concealed beneath his uniform. But where his hands protruded from his sleeves they were thick blocks of gray metal. They looked like sledgehammers. I had never seen these before.
“Miss Shanks,” Carl said. “You were always very kind to me.”
His