Endgame (Doom Book 4) by Dafydd ab Hugh & Brad Linaweaver

Author:Dafydd ab Hugh & Brad Linaweaver [ab Hugh, Dafydd]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2016-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

13

If you looked up the word “stupefied” in the dictionary, you’d have found a picture of Overcaptain Tokughavita. He was more stunned than any six other people I’d ever known . . . for about ten seconds. Then all of a sudden, his expression vanished, replaced by that air of insufferable intelligence I knew meant the Newbie disease had taken control once again.

This time, we were ready. Arlene and I grabbed him, one at each end; that force plus the cuffs meant he was effectively neutralized. Time for the interrogation.

“What is your name?” I asked.

He—they, whatever—looked me up and down; in a flash, it must have comprehended how much we knew or had guessed. “We are now the resuscitators.”

“Why—”

“Because we bring the dead back to life.”

“How much access—”

“Most of the long-term verbal memory, no associative or fantasy memory.”

I held up my hand. “Halt! Wait until I finish the question before you answer it, so Arlene can follow the—debriefing.”

“Signal when you are done.”

“I’ll nod my head. You don’t mind answering questions?” Silence. Then I remembered to nod my head.

“We exchange information, however you prefer it.”

The speech patterns were utterly different: Tokughavita was using articles and explicating the subject; I was about a hundred percent convinced that this really was a different person. Well, ninety-nine percent, maybe. He even looked different; there was no emotion, no impatience, no shred of self remaining. Maybe the Newbies, the Resuscitators, had emotions, but they simply reacted so differently that we couldn’t understand them.

“What should we call you?”

“Resuscitators.”

Arlene snorted, and I translated perfectly in my head, Another goddamned hive-collective! We had already known that would be the case from the last Newbie we had interrogated; I don’t know why she was so outraged. I asked him, or them, a few more innocuous questions to put them off their guard; then I took a sudden left turn: “So why haven’t you infected Arlene and me?” I nodded, but they remained silent.

I had struck a nerve. There was no change in expression, respiration, heart rate—but I knew I had actually touched a point that puzzled and frustrated the Resuscitators. At once, I realized why they had gone to such lengths to question us about our faith—Arlene in mankind and me in God. They had figured out that our faith was somehow connected to their own inability to get inside of us.

Evidently, Arlene followed the same train of thought. “We’re immune!” she exclaimed, smiling in triumph. “You can’t get inside us, can you?”

“We can say nothing now.” Now that their game was blown, the Newbies didn’t bother speaking like the humans of the People’s State of Earth.

“Of course you can’t,” I said, sticking my face right next to Tokughavita’s. “You’re smarter than us . . . smart enough to know you can’t lie your way out of it, smart enough to know how dangerous we are, so suddenly you don’t want to answer questions anymore.”

The Resuscitators abruptly faded from the human’s face. Over the next ten or fifteen seconds, the brain of Tokughavita returned, cold-booting.

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