Kevin Anderson - Resurrection, Inc.

He hadn’t meant to do it. It was an accident! He wasn’t able to stop himself. He had lost control, and the demons had escaped.

Francois Nathans was slaughtered… but Nathans had intentionally unleashed something buried within Danal, recklessly playing with a deadly weapon. But this tech had simply stood in the way at the wrong moment, an innocent bystander, before Danal could get a grip on his accelerated reflexes, on the juggernaut within him. Danal had only meant to brush him aside, just to knock him out of the way.

What good were apologies now?

Before the tears could blur his vision, Danal picked up Rodney Quick’s broken body and carried it like a doll into Nathans’s office. Gently he lay the tech on the sofa and straightened his arms. Blood seeped from the back of his head into the red crushed velvet of the arm rest.

Danal recognized him as the technician who had been present at his awakening down on Lower Level Six, and felt a deeper sadness. Rodney Quick.

“I’m sorry I can’t do anything else for you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

The Servant lurched blindly into the lift without looking back and mumbled for the elevator to take him back to the lobby. He stared at his sticky hands, and his face went slack. Even with stepped-up thinking, he couldn’t resolve his questions, his contradictions, his suspicions.

Who was he, really?

His ingrained Servant conditioning fought with itself in an utter failure to comprehend. The dark personality submerged beneath Danal’s outer skin had broken through his Servant identity, leaving him helpless, overriding his real wishes. The most terrifying part was that it had been so easy—Danal had been helpless to stop it from happening.

Was this what he had wanted to know? Did he want to remember who the original Danal had been? What type of person could be capable of such abominable, unprovoked actions?

As the lift pulled him upward, he felt the scar on his chest from the sacrificial knife, and once again he allowed the flashback of the neo-Satanist ritual to flood into his mind, making his temples pound.

What had he done to deserve a death as violent and as terrible as that, with the heart cut from his chest by a dull blade?

Danal no longer wanted to discover the origin of his flashbacks. He wanted to start all over again. He wanted to be a simple Servant, following orders, without the slightest inkling of his past. He wanted forgiveness for his awful crime.

But he would get none—they would terminate him. He would die again.

The lobby spread out in front of him as the lift doors parted, but now the microprocessor drove his brain at a snail’s pace. Events whirled around him like a maelstrom of razor blades. He stepped out of the elevator, holding his blood-covered hands dumbly before him.

Several people noticed him at once. The receptionist looked up, cocked her head, and calmly screamed in the exact pitch that activated the droning alarms.

One of the Enforcer escorts had just entered the lobby and stood contemplating the large Metroplex map on the wall, searching for the location of his next delivery. Danal noted instantly that the Enforcer was tall and thin, and his hands and wrists showed black skin that would normally have been covered by armored gloves. The same Enforcer who had escorted him to the Van Ryman mansion, seemingly a lifetime before.

As the alarms throbbed through the intercom, the Enforcer whirled and fumbled at his armor. Behind the black visor he tried to grasp the situation and choose the proper weapon for combat.

In a daze Danal turned away and stumbled toward the transplastic door. It was too late now. He saw no way out, and he still had no answers.

“Servant! Halt!” the Enforcer shouted, finally sliding a wide-barreled pocket bazooka from its holster.

Danal hesitated a moment. The Enforcer, in his alarm, had not used the Command phrase. Danal knew he would be terminated if he stopped. He had murdered Francois Nathans and Rodney Quick.

He did not want to die a second time.

Danal had no other decision to make. Without a thought he burst toward the door, pumping his legs faster than any normal human could. The Enforcer blinked in amazement. The receptionist screamed again.

The Enforcer pointed his weapon and launched a projectile.

Danal plowed through the revolving doors as a blast shattered the transplastic and blew shrapnel outward. He let out a cry of pain as something ripped through his shoulder, but he swallowed his fear and rushed into the milling streets.

“Rebel!” the Enforcer cried. He fired again, blasting away the debris of the door, and climbed rapidly through the jagged opening.

Danal floundered among the gawking pedestrians, trying to swim through the crowd, but he could not cloak himself in anonymity. The crowd hated him, hated all Servants. They stared at him with mocking expressions. But they would not help anybody; they hated Enforcers, too.

The Enforcer danced through the churning bodies and fired a third time.

A woman beside Danal screamed and fell to the pavement with blood dribbling out the back of her head. Ice began to form in his stomach as he ran, waiting for a projectile to pierce his body and detonate, which would leave nothing for anyone to resurrect. He dodged, running much faster than his pursuer but much slower than any exploding bullet that might be launched after him.

The Enforcer stopped, looking down helplessly at his weapon in horror or confusion, but the visor hid all expressions.

Danal’s chest ached where his original heart had once been, but that heart had been torn from him by a murderer’s hand, replaced with a biomechanical pump. Danal clutched his torn shoulder and saw clear synBlood oozing between his fingers.

The Enforcer moved again, shoving a man out of his way. Someone else screamed next to the fallen woman. The Enforcer took out his riot club, swinging it but hitting no one.

“You can’t treat citizens like that!” someone shouted. The crowd’s anger began to ignite like a match.

In the wake of Danal’s flight, a man fell into an old woman; he regained his balance and angrily swung at her. The Enforcer fired twice, but into the air this time. Several screams echoed in the crowd as Danal continued to flee. A man struck the Enforcer from behind, but he turned and convulsively struck the man full in the face with the riot club. Some of the people were hitting each other in a senseless release of their anger.

And Danal ran to escape from the mob that was drawing in like a noose around the hapless Enforcer. The black monster of his imprisoned memory battered his Servant identity, and Danal fought against releasing it.

He was a murderer . Unprovoked, he had slaughtered two men. He had resisted direct orders from an Enforcer, and he had fled from justice.

Danal was terrified by his own capabilities, by what was locked in the mausoleum of his dead memory. He did not want to know what his flashbacks signified. He wanted only to forget.

He looked ahead of himself with tunnel vision, seeing only the path of least resistance, the confused route that let him avoid as many people as possible yet left enough of them in the way to baffle the Enforcer’s line of fire.

Just ahead of him, Danal fixed his gaze on a thin man with square-cut salt-and-pepper hair, grinning and strutting proudly down the street with a female Servant. Details flooded into his mind—he saw the insignia of a Guildsman on the man’s lapel; he saw indigo lines tattooed into the wrinkles around his eyes; he saw one of the Guildsman’s knobby hands massaging the female Servant’s buttocks. She seemed not to notice at all.

The other Servant wore the usual gray jumpsuit, but the old man had placed a long blond wig on her head and flowers in the artificial hair. He had draped jewelry on her neck and wrists. She walked like a piece of livestock.