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She stared in shock so profound, it paralyzed. What she’d imagined was some bizarre morgue with decapitated heads mounted for study was quite a bit worse than that. The four heads, the heads without bodies, were alive! Alive and watching her, their eyes wide, their mouths moving soundlessly.
But maybe not really soundlessly.
Dekka spotted a handle in the side of the nearest bell jar, lifted the glass, and hurled it aside. And now the mouth was no longer silent. In a wheezing but unmistakably human voice, the head said, “Don’t hurt us!”
“Wha . . . what . . .” No more eloquent words came.
“Don’t hurt us!” the voice repeated, and it was a child’s voice, a child’s voice and, Dekka saw, a child’s face, a child’s head.
All four heads belonged to young people, the youngest maybe ten, the oldest perhaps sixteen, three yelling soundlessly beneath bell jars, the fourth crying, “I want to go home, I want to go home, don’t hurt us, I want to go home!”
“What are you? Who are you?”
“I’m Lashawn Wilkins,” the near head responded, voice tearful and terrified.
“What are you doing here?” Dekka demanded, but before she could get an answer a second drone came whizzing through the hole she’d made in the outer glass. It zoomed in, hesitated as its controller searched for the target, and then leveled its machine gun right at Dekka’s head.
The drone spoke with the mechanically distorted voice of Tom Peaks. “Dekka, stand down, I don’t want to hurt you.”
“What in God’s name are you doing here?” Dekka cried.
“Surviving,” the drone with Peaks’s voice said. “These four will form the vanguard of a cyborg force capable of taking on people like . . .”
“Like me,” Dekka supplied.
“Simple choice, Dekka: You serve your country, or you are an enemy. Join us, or die.”
Why was he explaining? Then Dekka saw his problem: the drone couldn’t fire at her without hitting some of the decapitated heads. Yes, she thought, but it could still maneuver to get a different angle.
He’s stalling!
There was a shwoop from a steel door opening quickly at the far end of the room, a door large enough to drive a car through. And indeed, through the door came a vehicle unlike anything Dekka had ever seen. It had rubber tank treads rather than wheels and lay wide and low to the ground, rising no more than three feet. A blank steel box with treads, but even as it pelted toward her the front panel dimpled and a cannon barrel protruded.
And yet it, too, did not fire. It might not need to, for from one side of the robot vehicle now grew an articulated mechanical arm, and at the end of that arm was a whirling blade, like a table saw.
Someone’s been watching robot wars on YouTube.
Dekka dropped to her knees, aimed her hands, and shredded the drone, which came apart as if it were made of confetti.
The tracked vehicle zoomed to its left, trying to come around the table. Dekka crawled and then jumped up and dodged left, keeping the four heads between her and the tank.
Now a voice came booming through the public address system: Tom Peaks sounding like Jehovah in a bad mood. “Carl! Kill her and I will free you!”
There was a shwoop sound once again, but smaller, nearer, and from the corner of her eye Dekka saw that one of the massive glass cell doors was sliding open.
From that cell emerged a nightmare creature. It had four legs, legs as thick as tree trunks. Its torso was vaguely human, as if the four legs had been grafted onto a white, hairless body that bulged with coiled muscle. The thing had two arms, each maybe eight feet long, so long they would trail on the ground if the creature dropped them. The arms ended in claws that glittered with the dangerous hardness of titanium.
The head was twice normal human size, slung forward on an elongated neck that seemed barely able to carry the weight. The creature’s face . . . ah, that’s what stopped Dekka from instantly shredding it, for the face was undeniably human—twisted by a mouth bulging with dagger teeth, and with small eyes that blazed red, but that were still unmistakably human.
“Take her, Carl! Now!” Peaks shouted from everywhere at once.
The monster with the prosaic name of Carl rushed with supernatural speed. In half the blink of an eye it was on her, its massive arms coiled around her waist, pinning her arms to her side, and though this strange body of hers was strong, it was like a child in the grip of the creature.
Its huge head, its glittering, mesmerizing mouth, was inches from her face. And it spoke.
“Kill me,” it rasped.
“I-I-can’t breathe,” she managed.
