Nigel dropped Nene off a block away from the Olympic Stadium. Without clearance, or a four wheel drive, he wasn't able to go any further as the road turned into a genocidal thoroughfare of discarded boomer bodies and shapes. Nene at first picked her way between the thickening carpet, at any point she expected to see a resemblance of Mackey lying face up in her path. There were mechanical boomer faces, boxy and camera-eyed. There were doll-human looking faces, plastic sheened. The further she went along the road of the dead the more human looking and once alive she saw them all. Mackey was one of them and the government wanted to put him here, tossed into the mass grave with the care of a discarded toaster oven.
She didn't notice that she was crying as the road turned into an incline, the beginning of the mound of a race destroyed whose peak capped in the centre of the Stadium now coming into view. The effort, physical and more-so emotional, quickly weighed on her than when she had been prying the core batteries free. Fevered hope drove her then. Despair assailed her now. Not just the carelessness of man, to throw away so much, the evil of it to create the simulacrum and so readily destroy it.
She slipped and fell into the arms of rigamortis, frozen herself in near terror, until the resolve returned her calm. Ruined faces, smiling, rogue-melted, stared at her with their dead black eyes. Limbs trembling she managed to drag herself out of the pit and continue onward and upward into the Stadium as twilight lengthened the shadows and masked away the dreadful personality of it into an awful storeroom accident of collapsed mannequins.
Her goal was an easily reachable boomer, still intact, that she could hook her jumper leads to the hardsuit core batteries and literally jumpstart/defibrillate. If it worked – it had to work - she would do the same to Mackey with the other two stronger batteries. Bring him back to her. And she'd yell at him so much, so loudly, for so long, battering him with her small fists until she didn't have the strength to be angry any him for not being there any more. And he'd apologise and say something stupid and it would just go away and nothing would matter anymore. She'd have him back and that was it. That was all that mattered.
Arms, legs, flowers of grasping hands, industrial bodies juttered out like a horror movie graveyard scene. Nene looked about cursing that she had not brought a torch this time despite being outside, the cadaverous overhanging walls of the stadium denied the outside light of the city. She clambered further up towards the top on hands and knees, slipping more often as the surface became increasingly sticky and foul smelling. She used the limbs to right herself, self-disgusted. She looked up and saw somebody standing not far way.
"Hey!
Over here."
They didn't move. Colder know in her heart than at any earlier time Nene compelled herself towards the stranger. As she closed the figure resolved into a woman's shape in a tattered uniform. Completely still.
A boomer.
Standing when all else were lying distorted.
Carefully and with no small fear, Nene circled the boomer. Its eyes were just as dead as the others. Could it have been stood up as a joke to frighten anybody who came? A scarecrow to keep away the loitering birds? Or just another joke at the boomer's expense? Resolved that it wouldn't suddenly come to life and attack her Nene let her bag drop and sat down beside it. This was the boomer, stocking legs covered in its own mechanical blood. Maybe that was a good sign. If she woke it, it would not be operational for long before its own injuries and the dissipating charge returned it to sleep for good.
Nene shocked herself at the ease her own thinking took at reducing this boomer to the status of a test machine unworthy of life beside her own Mackey.
"Next I'll be supporting Galatea," she muttered.
She ate and darkness overtook the day. The tops of distant skytowers pulsed intermittent red. Silence had erupted save for the sound of her own activity.
When she had finished, Nene worked under the small glow of her phone screen tied to place with strips of the boomer's uniform, woman's shape exposed by careless violence. Nene spit open the boomer's stomach and inserted metal rods to keep the gaping wound open. The boomer didn't react, its face set in the same plain mask that it had been when she had found it. Grimacing she inserted her hand and forearm into the boomer, reaching upwards to where the core would be. The boomer interior had no organs, a gelatinous pulpy mass that kept its human shape. Whatever, it was disgusting to push through without the tactile denying hardsuit armoured fist and careless anger that drove it.
She found the core and drove up the jump wires and pushed them deep into the core. Withdrawing her hands she wiped them on the boomer's weather stained jacket. It was now.
The two core batteries she twisted into the mound until they stood secured and then wired both of them to the jump wires. Lastly there was her jury rigged ignition switch. A simple thing, in her own mind, that when she pressed the singular button would engage the core batteries and jolt their remaining energy up through the wires into the boomer's core as fast as it could in a series of heart starting pulses.
"I need you, Mackey."
Nene pressed the button.