Machine Man - Max Barry [99]
My claw hand completed retracting into my arm with a thwack. I was in a store. It was a great white cathedral of glass and air. Two dozen people cowered behind counters and display cases. The walls were lined with white flaglike posters like political propaganda and the cases were shrines built around tiny phones and computers and tablets.
Shards of glass fell from me like water. No one ran. No one screamed. I found that a little odd but then again I was in a technology store. Carl, said my parts, and that was a good point. I scanned the wreckage. Maybe he had bounced. He had pretty good armor but not much in the way of shock absorbency, I would have thought. I looked away then back because I had caught motion flare, and he had a tire and was ratcheting back an arm to throw it at me.
I raised the gun arm. This time I would not be distracted by minor projectiles. I squeezed my fist and as the internal barrel spun I thought, Actually, that tire is going to make quite an elastic collision. It hit my gun arm and bounced into my face. My head snapped back. I saw into the heart of the universe. My body sang and my brain crawled in the dark, trying to remember where the controls were. Powdered sheetrock drifted like stardust. I got my head balanced with the horizon. People in hip shirts and cargo pants jostled for the double-door exits in peer-seeking algorithmic patterns, like a school of fish. A man with sledgehammer arms and a yellow-gray exoskeleton ran toward me. He seemed familiar. I knew him from somewhere. I thought, That’s that guy, isn’t it, Carl, and he punched my legs. I jerked but did not fall. The Threes were better than that. Carl’s arm wrapped around my throat. The other clamped on to my tripod arm and bent it back. “Ag,” I said. Red pain waves poured from my elbow. I couldn’t see Carl but fired the claw hand anyway, hoping it might find a way to pull off his head on its own. Instead we tore a chunk out of the floor and hurled it across the store. It was not what I intended but maybe it was intimidating.
“I got her,” Carl said. I felt his hot breath on my cheek. “I went back and got her.” My arm shrieked. There was a squeal of metal. I felt separation. A part of me winked out. My forearm fell to the floor, trailing severed wiring. It did not hurt but the loss was the worst thing I had ever felt.
I rotated. I flailed my gun arm. But I could not reach Carl. His grip on my neck was unbreakable. His thick, blocky digits snapped at my gun biceps. I grieved for my arm. I did not want to be pulled apart. I told my parts, I don’t know how to do this but please just kill him somehow.
The Contours jolted forward. They crashed through a display counter and then another. We accelerated toward a wall. A moment before impact my abdomen rotated.
We hit the wall back-first. Sheetrock burst around me. Everything was dust. Where, I thought, and my parts said, I don’t know, and we took four steps backward and brought the gun arm up. We could not see Carl in the visible spectrum but in EM he was as bright as a star field. We clenched our fist and screamed fury at him through our gun.
WE WAITED. Everything was awash with dust and heat. The floor was littered with broken plastic and glass and electronics. The dust settled. An object coalesced into a body. The gun arm whirred like a suggestion. But we waited, to be sure. Sirens grew. The body did not move. Heat drained from infrared and motion from