Troubleshooter
The smoke first appeared on the horizon at twilight the night before. Morgan Kai had been heading toward it since dawn.
It wasn't that smoke was anything new in the Grand Canyon Province. There were always some Judges burning books...or CHOTA having a party...and, for that matter, Morgan had set his own fair share of fires. No, Morgan Kai smelt something on this smoke. Something metallic and dangerous. It was a signal-a signal that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.
The defenses of the small town closest to the smoke, once a ranger station or some such from what Morgan could determine, were deserted. He had been here once before, also under unpleasant circumstances-armed responses were often necessary, but never enjoyable-and had mapped out the defenses of the town then. Consequently he had a good idea of the fields of fire covered by the watch towers that dotted the town's outer wall, all of which stood conspicuously empty as he approached. Morgan had never held a high opinion of the Vistas, but he knew they weren't this sloppy. The smoke was coming from further north, but things had gone bad here already.
Using the abundant cover of Kaibab Forest, Morgan crept up to the no-man's land surrounding the village where all the shrubbery had been cleared away to deprive any attackers of cover. As he contemplated his next move, cries for help and mercy began from within the settlement, cutting his planning session short. Throwing caution and decades of Vista/Tech hatred to the wind, he dashed across the barren area to the village's main entrance, a stout wooden door that stood slightly ajar.
After all, Vistas were people too. Sometimes. On good days.
The door was well-balanced, moving easily as Morgan laid into it with his shoulder. As he did so, he drew his matched Lemke Arms 9mm pistols from their holsters, ready to scan the village for the source of the screams.
It proved unnecessary.
A dozen decayed, gore-smeared corpses stood in the village square. As one, the dead men turned to face him, vacant expressions in what remained of their faces, their mouths working as if attempting to speak.
Without hesitation Morgan put three bullets into the first walking corpse, dropping it to the ground in a twitching heap. The next corpse followed suit after taking four bullets to the torso and head, at which point Morgan realized this fight was about to get too expensive. He considered withdrawing, coming up with an alternate tactic...and another scream came from a large wood cabin across the square.
Morgan couldn’t leave yet.
So this had to come up a notch.
Taking a few steps back from the corpses stumbling towards him, Morgan concentrated, energizing his synaptic connection to the microscopic nano-machines embedded in his body. Leftovers of his last trip to the cloning chamber, most of the nanites were inactive, but he could change that. In a few seconds he had an army of molecular machines at his command, controlling them through his own electrical nerve impulses. He directed them to his motor and optic nerve clusters, increasing the efficiency of both, and a few scant breaths later the world became much clearer, and much much slower.
Using his new clarity of sight and speed of reflexes, he began firing at the zombies, downing each with a single bullet through the forehead. Thirteen bullets later the village was clear of any corpses with the temerity to walk, but several still had the gall to twitch on the ground in their second death throes.
Morgan reloaded as he ran across the village square, a nigh-unconscious habit after each firefight. He burst through the door to the cabin the screams had come from, knocking another corpse off its feet as he did. Reflexively he put three bullets into the corpse’s skull while it tried to pick itself off the ground. The three other walking dead, all of which had been banging on a closet door in the main room of the cabin, turned just fast enough to get their own bullets through the skull, but not fast enough to do more than fall over into a pile of gore and blood.
"You, in the closet. It's safe. Let's get you out of here before more infected show up." Morgan pulled on the closet door, but someone held it closed from the inside.
Nothing worse than unwilling people in need.
"Who are you?" came the meek reply through the door.
"Morgan Kai. Just come out so we can get out of here. Those things roam in packs, you know." He jostled the door again and considered shooting it open. With infected around he had no time for the standard pleasantries.
"Who are you with?"
Morgan should have known that question was coming. Vistas, especially Eco-Warriors, were not exactly a trusting bunch, but he wasn't up for lying. "Daedalans."
"Get the hell out of here, Tech!" The voice had gone from timid to ferocious in shockingly short order.
So short, in fact, that Morgan decided he had had enough of talking. "Get away from the door!" he yelled, and opened fire on the handle a few seconds later. The door splintered under the swift kick that followed, revealing a scared-looking man in rough and torn homespun clothes, clutching a machete as if his life depended on keeping it, mostly likely because it had only a short while ago.
"We're leaving," Morgan said, grabbing the man by the collar of his shirt and dragging him out of the closet. The man was actually a good bit bigger than Morgan, the sort that one thinks of when you say "mountain man," but his fear had made his will weak, so his body followed Morgan with little resistance. Morgan dragged him out the door to the village center and threw him on the ground while checking for more infected. The gunshots would bring more; they would take awhile to get here, but they would come.
"When did this start?" Morgan asked, concentrating to keep the nanites in his eyes active. He couldn't keep this up for forever, but he'd rather see his death coming than not.
"This morning. They came out of the LifeNet pod this morning, lots of them. We tried to stop them, but there were just too many." The man had picked himself up off the ground and was now looking around the village with the steadfastness of a mouse in a room of cats. His back never faced the same direction for more than three seconds. "Most folks went south to Bellhook, but some of us got cut off."
"How did it start?" The smoke came from just north of town, so Morgan figured he already knew how it started, but it never hurt to rub people's noses in their own stupidity.
The man swallowed loudly, his chunk of humble pie not going down well. "We tried to...destroy the LifeNet pod. We thought it was polluting the area with nanites...so we lit it on fire."
Morgan laughed at this, a hollow, empty sound only made more awful as it echoed around the empty village and the twitching, twice-dead corpses. "Cleanse the earth with fire? Guess you can’t go wrong with the classics." He pulled out a bio-stim, injected it into his arm, and began to feel some of his mental exertion slide away. "So you lit one of the most complex pieces of technology ever made on fire, and then had the nerve to look surprised when something bad happened? You people are idiots."
The man opened and closed his mouth a few times, trying to think of some bit of Vista propaganda to defend his and his neighbors' actions, but instead ended up looking like a fish and saying nothing.
"Bet the main control panel is fried." Morgan popped a few pills from his medkit into his mouth, hoping they'd fight off any diseases the infected may be carrying. "I also bet you killed the caretaker." The man pointed meekly to the nearby gallows, at a freshly rotting corpse, a sight so common in the Grand Canyon Province Morgan had practically ignored it. "Good job. The man who could have stopped this with a few seconds' work, and you killed him. It's a wonder it took you this long to get your village wiped out."
Checking his weapons one last time, Morgan began walking north towards the gate out of town, doing his best not to step on any still-twitching infected as he did so.
"Where are you going?" the man asked, sounding terrified at the prospect of being left alone inside the corpse that used to be his village.
"I’m going to clean up your mess," Morgan said over his shoulder, not stopping. "These things will spread across the province if that LifeNet system isn't rebooted and the cache cleared. I’m damn sure you’re not going to do that, even if you did know how. So go bury your dead, or bang some stones together, or bathe in your own shit, or whatever it is you primitive asswipes do."
Within a minute Morgan disappeared into the trees of the forest. For the next hour, intermittent gunfire boomed from the north, but in time this faded out. The survivor in the village never saw Morgan Kai again.
But he didn’t see any more infected either.
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