Echopraxia Read Online Free Page A

sensitive enough to register that difference, of course. To see the truth from heat signatures alone you’d need to look inside the very head of your target, to squint until you could see deltas of maybe a tenth of a degree. You’d look at the hippocampus, and see that it was dark. You’d listen to the prefrontal cortex, and hear that it was silent. And then maybe you’d notice all that extra wiring, the force-grown neural lattices connecting midbrain to motor strip, the high-speed expressways bypassing the anterior cingulate gyrus—and those extra ganglia clinging like tumors to the visual pathways, fishing endlessly for the telltale neural signatures of seek and destroy .
    It would be a lot easier to spot those differences in visible light: Just look into the eyes, and see nothing at all looking back. Of course, if it ever got that close you’d be dead already. It wouldn’t leave you time to beg. It wouldn’t even understand your pleas. It would simply kill you, if that’s what it had been told to do, more efficiently than any conscious being because there was nothing left to get in the way: no second thoughts, no pulled punches, not even the basic glucose-sucking awareness of its own existence. It was stripped down to pure reptile, and it was dedicated .
    Less than a kilometer away now.
    Something inside Daniel Brüks split down the middle. One half clamped its hands over its ears and denied everything— what the fuck why would anyone must be some kind of mistake— but the other remembered the universal human fondness for scapegoats, the thousands who’d died thanks to dumb ol’ Backdoor Brüks, the odds that at least one of those victims might have been survived by next of kin with the resources to set a military-grade zombie on his trail.
    How could they.
    How could you let them …
    The ATB hissed beneath him as its tires inhaled. The charge cord pulled him briefly off balance before tearing free. He plunged through a gap in the trees and down the scree, skidding sideways: hit the base of the slope and the desert spun around him, slimy and frictionless. The stream nearly took him out right there. Brüks fought for control as the bike one-eightied, but those marvelous marshmallow tires kept him miraculously upright. Then he was racing east across the fractured valley floor.
    Sagebrush tore at him as he passed. He cursed his own blindness; these days, no self-respecting grad student would be caught dead in the field without rattlesnake receptors in their eyes. But Brüks was an old man, baseline, night-blind. He didn’t even dare use the headlamp. So he hurtled through the night, smashing through petrified shrubs, bucking over unseen outcroppings of bedrock. He fumbled one-handed through the bike’s saddlebags, came up with the gogs, slapped them over his eyes. The desert sprang into view, green and grainy.
    0247 , the goggles told him from the corner of his eye. Three hours to sunrise. He tried pinging his network but if any part of it remained alive, it was out of range. He wondered if the zombie had made it to camp yet. He wondered how close it had come to catching him.
    Doesn’t matter. Can’t catch me now, motherfucker. Not on foot. Not even undead. You can kiss my ass good-bye.
    Then he checked the charge gauge and his stomach dropped away all over again.
    Cloudy skies. An old battery, a year past its best-before. A charging blanket that hadn’t been cleaned in a month.
    The ATB had ten kilometers in it. Fifteen, tops.
    He braked and brought it around in a spray of dirt. His own trail extended behind him, an unmistakable line of intermittent carnage wrought upon the desert floor: broken plants, sun-cracked tiles of ancient lakebed crushed in passing. He was running but he wasn’t hiding. As long as he stayed on the valley floor, they’d be able to track him.
    Who, exactly?
    He switched from StarlAmp to infrared, zoomed the