Mark Alpert - Extinction

“Go, go, go!” Jim shouted. “Push through!”

With a terrific grunt Kirsten slid through the gap. Then Jim reached for his canister of parathion and sprayed the last of the insecticide at the drones. It ran out after six seconds. The poison in the air was so diffuse he could barely smell its rotten-egg odor. He heard some scattered clicks, the sound of a few dozen drones hitting the tunnel’s floor, but most of the flies kept coming.

“ Jim !” Kirsten yelled from the other side of the wall. “ What are you waiting for? ”

Another thought occurred to him. He threw away the canister and pulled out his satellite phone, clicking on the file he’d downloaded from Avin’s flash drive. The image of Medusa reappeared on the screen. But even as he held the phone in the air, with the screen turned toward the approaching swarm, he knew this wasn’t going to work. The electronics in the cyborg flies were simple brain electrodes, not retinal implants, and they’d been designed by Chinese scientists, not Arvin Conway. The buzzing intensified, coming from all sides now.

“Goddamn it!” Kirsten screamed. “Move your ass!”

Out of options, he pocketed the phone, extended the knife from his prosthetic hand, and clambered up the wall again. Groping blindly, he used his prosthesis as a pivot and turned himself around so he could thrust his feet into the hole. Then he slid backward into the gap, frantically squirming. But, as he’d feared, the gap wasn’t wide enough. His feet kicked through to the other side of the wall, but his hips wedged into the dirt. He was stuck, and the drones were swarming toward him. Their infrared cameras had triangulated his position, and their implanted electrodes were steering the insects straight to his head.

Reflexively, he waved his prosthesis in front of his face. His mechanical hand swatted away one of the drones, and the pressure sensors under his palm detected a sudden, sharp sting. It was the drone’s bioweapon, the paralyzing dart. An instant later, he batted two more drones with the back of his hand and three more with his palm. Their darts couldn’t penetrate the hand’s polyimide skin, but the drones were coming in fast, too fast for Jim to swat them all. He tried to push himself backward with his left hand, but his body wouldn’t budge. The buzzing was in his ears now, a high-pitched grinding, horribly close.

“Fuck!” he roared into the darkness. “ You fucking —”

Then he felt Kirsten’s hands around his ankles. She gave them a tremendous yank and pulled Jim through the gap. They both tumbled backward onto a mound of dirt on the other side of the wall.

Jim lifted his head, dizzy and disoriented. He turned on the flashlight function in his phone, and in the glow from the screen he saw the hole he’d just slid through. For a moment he considered trying to plug it, but there was no time. The first drones were already pouring through the gap.

Kirsten jumped to her feet and pulled him up. “Come on! Let’s go!”

They sprinted down the tunnel. Kirsten led the way, keeping a tight grip on Jim’s hand. This section of the tunnel was in a state of general collapse; the concrete walls had buckled in dozens of places, and mounds of dirt covered most of the floor. The footing was treacherous, but they ran like mad and managed to pull ahead of the drones. The buzzing grew fainter. But it didn’t disappear.

After about ten minutes, Kirsten stopped running. She halted so abruptly that Jim nearly bowled into her. Both of them were too winded to talk, so Jim simply raised his sat phone in the air. Just ahead was a stairway leading upward.

“Hallelujah!” Jim shouted. “Let’s get out of here!”

They raced up a flight of steps, then two more. At the top of the third flight was a cramped crawl space, ten feet wide and less than three feet high. The walls and floor were concrete, but the ceiling was a patchwork of wooden boards. Jim slid along the floor and inspected the low ceiling, shining the light from his sat phone all over the boards, but he didn’t spot any handles or hinges. All he saw were the rusted ends of nails that had been hammered from above. “Shit!” he cried. “They sealed off this exit!”

“Okay, calm down,” Kirsten said, although she sounded just as frantic. “Maybe the boards aren’t so strong. Try punching them with your prosthesis.”

Jim studied the ceiling for a moment. The boards were rectangular and nailed at the corners, so the weak spots should be midway along the edges. Jim lay with his back on the floor and positioned himself under one of the weak spots. Then he closed his prosthetic hand into a fist and slammed it against the ceiling.

The impact jarred his whole body, but the boards didn’t budge. In fact, they hardly vibrated. The sound of the punch was a dead, flat thump. He slammed the board again, but the result was no different. The ceiling felt thick and solid. In all likelihood, there was another layer of boards on top of this one. “Damn,” he muttered. “This is bad.”

“Try a different spot,” Kirsten urged.

He slid to another weak spot, this one a little closer to the center of the ceiling, and positioned his fist under it. But again the boards didn’t budge, and the dead thump echoed in the crawl space. As it faded away, Jim could clearly hear the buzzing of the drones. The swarm was closer now. It would reach the stairway very soon.

Desperate, Jim punched the same spot again and again. His prosthesis pumped up and down like a piston. After a dozen punches, though, all he’d done was make a few inch-wide indentations in the wood. And when he looked at his mechanical hand, he saw that he’d scraped the polyimide skin off its knuckles, exposing the hinge joints underneath. He’d lost the temperature sensors in the middle two fingers, and the pressure sensors indicated that the hand was at the breaking point. If he kept pounding the boards like this, the steel fingers would warp and he wouldn’t be able to open his hand anymore.

“ Damn it! ” he screamed. Pulling back his prosthetic arm, he turned to Kirsten, who crouched on the floor beside him, her arms wrapped around her knees. He expected her to make another suggestion, but she just stared at him with her camera-glasses. She looked terrified.

No, he thought. No! There has to be a way out! He focused on Kirsten’s face, the frightened eyes behind the glasses he’d built for her, and out of the blue he recalled an image he’d seen on a Web site a few weeks ago. A home-improvement Web site, of all things. It was an article about how to insulate your attic. The image was a thermal display of a ceiling, with dark lines showing the gaps where cold air was coming through.

He grabbed Kirsten’s arm. “Look at the boards! The whole ceiling! See if there are any thermal differences. Cold spots, warm spots, whatever.”

After a moment she caught on. She lay on her back, looking straight up at the boards. As Jim watched her, the buzzing of the drones grew louder. They were at the bottom of the stairway, he guessed, and their implanted processors were charting a course up the first flight of steps. “Come on!” he yelled. “What do you—”

Kirsten pointed at the ceiling. “There! Around the edges of that board!”

Jim lay next to her and held up the screen of his sat phone. At first glance the board looked the same as the others, but when Jim took a closer look he saw that its edges weren’t flush with the adjacent boards.

“Move over!” he shouted. As Kirsten backed away, he positioned his prosthetic fist under the board’s right edge. Muttering a quick prayer, he threw the punch.

The noise was different this time. The whole ceiling creaked. When Jim looked again at the board, he saw that its right edge had crept upward a quarter-inch. This board was the hatch, he realized. It was jammed into place, but it could be dislodged.