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Read Ebook: Security by Walton Bryce
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Ebook has 91 lines and 7846 words, and 2 pages
"Where?" he heard her yelling after him as he went around the corner.
He glanced back around the corner and saw the herd of mechanized human beings slogging toward him.
"Near the gate," Lewis said.
He ran toward the Pit.
He ran down the steps, into the console room and looked into the lenticular disc where a ghostly blue radiance shadowed the walls.
"We're going to do ourselves some good after all, Monster," Lewis said tightly.
He gripped the controls and sent the Monster its last set of orders. It hurled tons of drone plane motors into the shielding walls, and its huge mandibles ripped open the shielding and peeled it away like a food canister. Smoke began to boil. Flames crackled in blue arcs. Steel beams crumbled like wax. Globs of concrete fell in a cloud of dust swirling debris.
Lewis grabbed the intercom, dialed the Commander's office. No answer. He got through the exchange and got the Commander's apartment. He heard a drunken whine and behind that the drunken depraved laughter of officers and their wives and the sound of bongo drums.
"The Monster's breaking out of the Pit," Lewis said. "It's shooting out more than enough deadly radioactivity to kill all of you if you don't get the hell out and get out fast."
"What, what's that?"
"If you think I'm having a nightmare," Lewis continued, "take a look out the window, Commander."
Lewis dropped the intercom. The Monster could go quite a distance before it stopped, its remote control radius probably not exceeding three miles.
The Monster went out of the Pit, taking walls and flooring with it. The entire structure trembled, beams fell, ceilings crumbled, and the Monster went through the smoking debris like a juggernaut.
A Guard lay crushed under a steel beam. Lewis took the stungun from his hand and went up the debris choked stairs. Outside, he saw figures streaming out into the starlight, and the lab buildings bursting into flames. He also saw the Monster, glowing with bluish radiance, moving straight ahead toward the electric fence.
The siren was screaming and howling. Shadows seemed to be streaming toward air-raid shelters. That was all right. The security curtain was torn down. They could come back up later into the light and wonder what had happened and find out where they really were.
Guards were running about like ugly toys out of control, looking, listening for commands.
Lewis ran through thickening smoke, and saw the jeep by the South Gate. Betty was in it, together with Brogarth and Nemerov.
"Hurry, hurry, run," he heard Betty scream.
The Guard was cutting at an angle toward Lewis, between him and the jeep. Beyond the Guard was a gaping hole in the fence and on the other side of that he could see the gigantic flickering nimbus of the Monster still walking toward the East.
Lewis kept running. Five feet away he brought up the stungun and shot the Guard in the face. Lewis jumped under the wheel of the jeep, slammed it into gear and they headed down the concrete strip and straight for the gap in the fence.
"What happened to Cardoza?" Lewis asked.
Brogarth said from the back seat, "He said he didn't want to be labeled a security risk and be executed for sabotage."
Nemerov was drunk and he kept mumbling incoherently, and sometimes giving out with bits and pieces of half remembered poetry.
About a mile out in the sand and next to a wall of sandstone, they waited for any signs of pursuit. There were none. They rested there until morning, only an hour and a half away, and when they looked back toward the location of the Project, they could see nothing that looked any different from sand, brush, rocks and red sandstone.
"Perfect camouflage," Nemerov said as the jeep started up again. "You could walk within fifty feet of that fence and never know there was any Project there."
Later a hot wind came up and they ran into the Monster lying dead on its face with dust devils dancing over it.
An old prospector leading a burro came around the wall of sandstone and looked at the Monster, then at the occupants of the jeep.
"Howdy, folks," he said.
"Hello," Lewis said. "We're lost. Where are we and which way do we go to get to civilization?"
"What's that thing?" the prospector asked, looking at the Monster.
"A scientific experiment that was never finished," Lewis said.
"What I figured," the prospector said. "You scientists out here always up to something." He pointed to the right. "Keep going that way and you'll find a narrow road. Follow it and you'll hit the middle of the valley and a highway right into the Chocolate Mountains."
Lewis knew where he was. The Chocolate Mountains walled off the rushing Colorado River from the Imperial Valley and Los Angeles farther on.
"Thanks," Lewis said.
"How's the war going these days?" Betty asked.
The prospector scratched his head and replaced his felt hat. He looked at them oddly.
"You must have been holed up in the hills a long time, Miss. There ain't been any war for two years. They started one, but the first couple of days scared everybody too much and they called the whole thing off. Where you folks been anyways, to the Moon?"
"Practically," Lewis said.
As the jeep moved away, Nemerov turned and looked back at the Monster and the old prospector who still stood there gazing at it.
"'My name,'" Nemerov said, "'is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.'"
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