Adam Christopher - The Age Atomic

“You wouldn’t shoot a defenseless old man, would you now?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” said Rad. “But then you’re not a man, are you? You’re another machine, like Cliff. One of the ‘upgraded’ models.” He raised the gun.

“Mr Bradley, please. Violence is not the answer.”

“Not always, but sometimes,” said Rad. He took a step backwards and his right heel touched the stairwell behind him. He was running out of room.

“Besides, robots are bulletproof. Or hadn’t you heard?”

Rad gritted his teeth. He thought back to Cliff and the little metal tube. Was it a weakness? He’d felled that machine with a single punch, but, Rad knew, either his blow had been very lucky or the robot had been faulty or damaged in some way…

“You cannot leave, Mr Bradley,” said the King. “I need Kane’s power. I have a city to protect, and I need you and Jennifer Jones for my army. I need you alive to begin the process, but I do not necessarily need you to be… intact.”

The King stepped forward and reached towards Rad, his fingers curled into claws and the serene smile still on his fake face.

Rad was out of options. He raised the gun, aimed along the barrel at the King’s head, and fired once, twice, three times.

The first shot tugged another chunk of artificial flesh off the King’s face, but the second hit his left eye. The orb shattered in a shower of glassy splinters and the King staggered backwards, his head dipping so that Rad’s third shot cut a strip off the robot’s fake scalp.

It wasn’t the result Rad had been hoping for, but it wasn’t bad. As the King raised his head, thick black liquid oozing from the damaged eye, he snarled and lunged forward. Rad stepped back and nearly tripped on the stairs, but forced himself to take rough aim at the King’s head. As he fell against the staircase, he fired five more times, hoping that at least one round would hit the mark.

The King pulled up as he was hit, the artificial flesh of his face shredded by the shots. There was a louder bang and his head was thrown back, then flopped forward.

Rad had hit the other eye. The robot was now blind.

The machine screeched, the sound inhuman and terrifying, enough to snap Rad back to reality. The robot lunged forward again but Rad pulled himself up the stairs and out of the way with ease. As the King fumbled on the bottom stairs, Rad braced himself against the railing and kicked out, sending the robot cartwheeling backwards. It hit the furnace door and shrieked again, like it had been burnt, and as it tried to pull itself back upright Rad saw its head was at a slight angle, like the neck was damaged. It moved forward, arms outstretched, but it was slow and awkward.

Rad saw the opportunity. He ducked back down the stairs and, pushing the King’s shoulder, spun the robot around, easily avoiding the outstretched hands. With the King’s back to him, Rad reached around and plucked the keys out of the robot’s jacket pocket. Then he gave the King a shove. The robot screeched and overbalanced, falling to the floor.

Keys in one hand, gun in the other, Rad took the stairs two at a time. He slammed the reinforced door of the furnace room shut and locked it. Then he took off back down the corridor.

The lobby outside the doors of Tisiphone Realty was empty except for a man sitting in one of the two couches, silent but for the rustle of the newspaper he was holding. There was a coffee table, on which was scattered a few copies of Life and Time , and by the window a water cooler — the kind that came with those ridiculous paper cone cups that you couldn’t put down anywhere. The window itself looked out over West 34th Street. Today the sun was shining. It was a beautiful morning in New York City.

The man on the sofa recrossed his legs and flicked the center of the New York Times he wasn’t reading. His shift was due to end in fifteen minutes, when he’d be replaced by another man in another suit. The first man would fold the newspaper nosily and deposit it on the table and check his watch, complain about being late for an appointment he’d forgotten downtown, and dart off towards the elevators while his replacement grabbed a cone of water and took in the view.

This scene would be repeated every four hours.

The agent scanned the article on page five of the newspaper for the tenth time. His name was Jan Holzer, and he was looking forward to getting back to his apartment in Queens and getting some coffee and some sleep. Jan drank coffee for the taste — ten years with the Secret Service had made him immune to the effects of caffeine — and a cup of joe (milky, a habit he’d picked up from his German-English parents, to the horror of his friends) was the perfect nightcap after a shift at the Empire State Building.

Jan flicked the paper again and collapsed it in half, then half again. He uncrossed his legs, crossed them again in the opposite direction, and checked his watch.

His replacement was late. This wasn’t unusual in itself, nor any particular reason for concern. The security details had some leeway programmed into them, so agents could come a little early or a little late; a few minutes here and there didn’t make much difference, and it added to the cover, if anyone happened to be watching.

Although this time Jan’s replacement, Eddie Ellroy, was ten minutes late. This was, strictly speaking, against the rules, but Eddie was Eddie.

Jan sighed. He didn’t like Eddie. Eddie always cracked a joke about Jan’s German heritage and found it hilarious to call Jan “Einstein” because, as a security agent for a government scientific department, Jan was clearly working beneath his station and really should have been behind the door they guarded, working on the affairs of state with the other brainiacs.

Eddie Ellroy was a real jerk. And right now, he was a real late jerk.

The door of the Department opened. Jan tensed, ready for action, years of Secret Service training kicking in, preparing him for anything. Expect the unexpected. In Nimrod’s world, the unexpected was very often the case.

A young man in a grey suit emerged from the Department, his hair slick, his shoes shined. He let the door swing closed behind him and, without a glance at Jan, took off down the corridor.

Jan clicked his tongue. Things were in a real state in there, he imagined, since the whole Department had suddenly gone on alert. But as a security agent it paid to keep out of such things, keep his mind clear, focus on the job at hand. Departmental alert or not, his job didn’t change.

The elevator pinged, out of sight, and the lobby was silent again. Jan got back to reading the front page of the newspaper for the one-hundredth time.

A moment later the elevator sounded again. Finally. Jan braced himself for the one-way delivery of jokes at his expense, and stood to get another cup of water. All part of the act.

“The traffic today is the pits!”

Jan turned at the voice, cone of water halfway to his mouth. Eddie Ellroy was still absent. Standing in the lobby was a woman, dressed in expensive furs and high heels, a hat that was really a little too large for her balanced on top of a haircut Jan hadn’t seen outside the pages of Life magazine. The woman smiled, the movement of her chin making the veil in front of her face move.

Jan drained his cup and crushed the paper cone in his fist. “Excuse me?” he said, outwardly polite, inwardly wondering who the hell she was and where the hell Ellroy had got to. Jerk.

The woman sat on the edge of the sofa and began shuffling through the magazines on the coffee table. Selecting an issue of Time , she sat back and studied the cover intently.

Jan reached for the inside pocket of his jacket, sliding the fingers of his right hand between the buttons of his suit. In a hair under two seconds he could have his gun out and trained on the intruder. There was no reason for anyone who wasn’t involved with Nimrod’s Department to be on this floor, and his replacement security detail had failed to show, all of which was totally wrong. There was a telephone on the wall; all Jan had to do was keep the gun on the woman and call for more security.