by Ken Rivers
Fire exploded around her. A swirling mix of green and orange flame. The Cullers took turns at her, tearing at and ripping away her black feathers, and spraying the floor and the stored food with her lifeblood.
My hands clenched into fists around the blade but I was still powerless to help her.
She swung wildly at her attackers and when her talons found their mark, black sludge streaked down onto the floor and caked almost immediately. Congealed pitch that fueled their attack.
My skin felt nothing. No swirling air alive with surging energy.
Lana’s orange fire pooled instantly around the fountains of blood gushing from her injuries. She was healing as she fought them. The Cullers were slick with tar and striped in wet gashes from her claws.
I remembered being thrown around like a ragdoll in the temple. I was helpless to stop it. My assault on Tawa had also amounted to nothing. I was not fatigued yet the power would not come to me. I stared at the Surudo blade.
The Culler Elites’ speed and movements did not waver or slow. They moved as if by teleportation, trying to break through her defenses. The healing light around her hadn’t dimmed, but her movements slowed. Her attacks weakened.
I reached as far into myself as I could go but there was nothing to pull from except guilt. I had failed Yari and now I was failing Lana, too.
I heard a snap and she screamed. Her arm hung limp at her side. She was swift enough to back away and lift into the air of the massive storehouse but the Elites were quicker. With a gnarled hand, one of them yanked her out of the air and thrust her into the wood of the floorboards. Her protective flames flickered in the dust of broken store house.
They stood over her with their backs to me. I was no threat to them. They didn’t give me a second look. My powers had abandoned me, but I wouldn’t abandon her. I gripped the knife with both hands and charged them.
I swung with everything I had, and the blade disappeared into the side of the nearest one. Cutting nearly halfway through it, I yanked the knife back out spilling more thick pitch on the shattered floor boards. It didn’t even flinch.
Both of them started on Lana. Stripped plumage stuck to the drying blood on the floor she was sunk into. Her strong sporty body with its perky tits sagged and went limp.
Pulling and slicing repeatedly in vein at the back of the Culler, I watched as her orange light faded and her wounds began to stay open. She had curled into a ball and had stopped fighting back.
The Culler had enough of me dicing up its sides. It swung around, snatched me by the arms, claws dug in deep, and pushed me onto my knees in front of her. I dropped the blade and felt the heat from its maw pouring over my shoulders. The sound of rocks grinding on glass crawled into my ears. “…Watch…” they said in unison.
“…Mark…” Lana’s voice was a mixture of bird and woman. She tried to say something else, coughing up blood and trying to bring her hands up to pray. The black arm of the other Culler went through her hands and plunged elbow-deep into her abdomen. It grinned at me and slowly twisted its limb around inside her. Its teeth screeched and crunched louder and louder as it watched me with the same bulging, bloodshot eyes I first witnessed on the night I met Yari.
It finished, then stood and came for me. I felt a subtle, deep twitch as something snapped inside of my mind. The creature was closing in, its arm cocked back and ready to carve a hole in me as well, but its movements began to slow. Not out of fatigue, but like it was struggling to move quickly while submerged underwater.
The gnarled fingers that were jammed into my arms and held me fast, lost their heat. Squeezed inside the palms of my hands I could feel a spinning ball of clear fire forming, something that I hadn’t experienced before. I clenched down harder and the Culler slowed even further.
I reached over my head, jammed my hand into the mouth of the one behind me, and tore its jaw off. It stumbled backward and let out a gurgling cough, its thick tongue like a slug flexing around, looking for ground to crawl on.
I chucked the jaw back at its face, cleared the few steps between us and buried my arms in its chest. It kicked and scratched at me with its clawed feet as I heaved and ripped my arms free. I knew it was finished and turned to my next victim.
With a clench of both hands, I slammed my fists into the ground and jack-hammered the remaining Culler half-way into the floor-boards. “Stay.”
“Lana!” I pulled her from the pit of blood and feathers and bent quills. “Speak to me!”
“…I’m finished. Their blood mixed with mine.” She coughed a dry wheeze, “The rot, even if I healed, would take me. When I go, it will keep only the rage inside of me alive. You have to end it.”
“You’re out of your mind if you think I will.”
“It’s okay. I found you, and that’s all I ever wanted. I want it to be you.”
I kissed her on the forehead. She was losing body heat and slipping away from me. My mind raced. It wasn’t the first time I had to fix something under a time limit, but my emotions were on full blast to keep my power going. My problem-solving ability was set on auto, either kill or protect. I was starting to become no more worthwhile a being than the creatures that ripped out of their skins mere moments before. The one left must know something.
I pulled Lana from the broken timber and carefully laid her back on the flat surface of the floor. The remaining Culler had my full attention. I knelt in front of it like a master in front of a chained and wild yard dog. My fist shut tight again and its arms locked against its sides. It would try to, but it would never reach me.
“Where is Tawa Yen?” I asked.
The body shivered and shook, straining to get to me. Its voice was mostly unhindered by the force of the pressure wave I had brought down on top of its body.
“…Inside, we are—”
I had it by the neck, choked off that old news, and pulled it closer. My nose filled with the smell of sewage and burnt leather. “Answer my question.”
Its eyes bulged even further from its smooth head. “…helplesssss…”
I should’ve known I wouldn’t get anything out of the creature. It was all body and no brain. A manifestation of physical response to stimuli. I thought I might have more luck if I hit the button on its Life-Tech and turned it back into the man it was a few moments earlier.
Then it hit me. I removed the tech from its chest, stood, and closed my fist completely. I watched the pressure ripple across its back. The ripples became larger and larger until its skin’s structure failed and shredded like papier-mâché. I put the remains of it through the floorboards, then the dirt, then the rock under that until it was thin as a piece of paper floating in its own bodily contents.
I slipped the device across Lana’s chest, just like the Elite had, and flipped the switch. Her chest was covered in red light and she opened her eyes.
“What are you doing?” she asked, then her eyes went wide. She saw what I had done. If the rot was sapping her of the ability to heal and would overtake her, then the tech would prevent that, maybe.
She brought her hands up in prayer and laid there silently. Her breathing slowed, then stopped. It was a long moment until the glow of the healing light peaked from between her hands. I sat next to her for as long as it took for her to heal the biggest of the wounds, a gaping hole in her side.
The light faded, but the wound was still life-threatening. She pushed herself up onto her elbows in spite of the pain. “I thought—” she tried to speak, but my tongue got in her way and she let it.
“Don’t ever do that shit again,” I said.
She smiled and ran her hand over my chest, sheathed in unseen armor, “I won’t have to.”
I let her sit and I walked over to the pile of shredded black clothes caked in sludge and muck and Culler skin that Lana had left on the floor. Kicking it over, I found the other Life-Tech trapped around its rent chest cavity. The tech had suffered some damage but I took it anyway. Nothing a little fixing wouldn’t cure.
“Can y
ou stand like that, Lana?”
She had regained enough control over her faculties to shed the avian features and return to her original form. “I don’t have much time, but yes. I don’t expect to be flying for a while though. I’m sorry. I know you need the Flit, but if I changed now, the only thing I’d be good for is a roast with lots of vegetables.”
I embraced her as she stood. “I need all of you, never forget that.”
She hugged me back. When she pulled away, the realities of the day were all I could see on her face. She looked past to the cousin that had been relieved of her gift to live.
“She was our only hope for intel. I mistook her for one of the Elites and finished her before the change became complete.” She bent over her and ran her hands along the iron plate in her skull. “The cousins are always together. If she was here alone, it can only mean that her sister is gone.”
“She wasn’t much on pleasant conversation, but she said her sister was trapped, not lost or dead. Although I’d like to go back and finish the job. Why would she be of any use to us?”
“She’s alive? They are less themselves and more Tawa after centuries of consuming his seed but that means they always know where he is. She can lead us to Tawa.”
“Which means if we can find her, she can help us find Yari!?”
“If she chooses to. There is nothing I can do to force that out of her.” She stood and looked outside. “We need to leave. More will come, and if that happens, they will all come.”
“I don’t think they’re anything to worry about. Let me rip through all of them in a minute or two and be done with it.”
“No. Like I said, we don’t know which of them support our cause. Starting a battle here would out them and put the villagers at risk. Plus, I’m not sure how long I can stay upright.”
“But I could—"
“Mark, there’s no need for you to be full-tilt Father mode right now. Maybe save it for when we need it?”
“But we need it now.”
I honestly felt like ridding the world of a large section of Jian-Di and however many Cullers were about, Elite or otherwise. I was on the verge of ignoring her and heading out to do what I thought was best.
She put her hand on my chest again, and kissed the shield covering my lips. I didn’t feel a thing.
“See,” she said, “You’re losing your human emotions and only thinking about the win. Save the power and come back to me. Please.”
Looking inside was hard. Harder than brutalizing an Elite Culler. She was right. I dug down deep to the love I had for all of my girls and let go of the rage. The air-over-skin effect calmed, and feeling came back to me. A welcome balance from the linear intentions of super-me.
“You’re right. I’ll have to keep myself in—”
She threw a kiss on me that would stop a planet in its orbital track. “You won’t need to. The girls and I will take care of that for you.”
She grabbed my hand and I followed her out into the night.
21
We spent close to an hour flitting between the dark alleyways and torch-lit walls of the village. I kept my blade in one hand and Lana’s in the other. She was still badly hurt and couldn’t move well. When we cleared the last building, the sun had just cleared the horizon and was lighting the yellow rolling hills before us.
“How far did you say it was?” I asked.
“I flew, and it took a few minutes. We need to be careful crossing open ground. The Jian-Di are fractured and spread apart now, but they still have scouts and spies who will keep their posts regardless of the circumstances.”
We kept low and ran across the sea of soft mustard blades. Ripples of wind rhythmically swept over us and the ground that tracked us to our freedom. We stopped between two rises and I looked around for any followers. Through a small grove to our left, I thought I saw a ripple in the air. Lana couldn’t fly but her eyes were still better than mine.
“Wait. Over there.” I pointed.
“I saw them, too. Three of them. They’re tracking us, waiting to see where we go.”
I thought about pounding them all into the dirt, but I wasn’t sure if I could stop all three of them at once. If one of them got past me, one arrow would end Lana.
“Wait…” she said, squinting. “I can see their arrowheads. They’re enchanted. One hit from those, and the air around you will become a vacuum.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“The pocket follows you, so you suffocate and die.”
A twinge of doubt crept around the edge of my mind.
“You’ve seen what I can do. Will those hurt me?”
“Tawa kept them a tightly-guarded secret so if he feared them, then…”
“Shit. Get down! Something’s coming!”
The three archers broke their cloaking and spread out, arrows nocked, but they weren’t aiming at us. A fast-approaching whoosh of air rushed past and over our heads, gliding on air, were Pusi and B on the rail-bike.
Arrows sheathed in gray smoke streaked past them as they maneuvered through the volley. I watched the girls as Lana kept an eye on the archers. One of the arrows hit the back of the bike and bloomed into a sphere filled with black sky dotted with stars. B pulled out of the vacuum but was having a hard time pitching the craft around.
“Mark, one of them is aiming at us!”
I turned to see a gray line arcing toward us and readied myself, armor up and stamina near max. My hands closed into fists and the arrow slowed, but its trajectory remained the same.
It was like trying to wrap my hand around a needle and grip it. I used both hands and pushed the arrow into the dirt. It exploded halfway to us. Above the pocket of airless space, a second and third arrow hummed past. I tried to grab them both, but they were too fast for me. I braced for the impact.
Both arrows stalled in mid-flight. Between them stood my furry calico-colored warrior, holding both shafts.
“Two at same time, no problem,” she growled. She took off toward the archers, weaving right and left, dodging volley after volley.
When she flipped, twisted in mid-air, and rolled out of the way of their last shot, they hesitated. In that moment, she struck. She flung both arrows at them. One hit its target, engulfing the Levani hunter and suffocating him instantly. He spun slowly upside down, choking on his last seconds of life.
The other arrow just missed its mark as he dove out of its path. Pusi jumped on the third one, who almost had an arrow nocked. She tackled him to ground and rolled to a stop, his jugular in her mouth gushing blood onto the yellow blades of grass beneath them.
“Pusi, behind you!”
She was like a lioness singularly focused on its prey, suffocating the life out of her target. She didn’t see the second archer stand, arrowless, and reach for his chest.
“He’s an Elite!” Lana screamed.
Pusi’s ears went flat against her head and her hair stood on end.
B was coming in fast. I waved at her to slow down. All she needed to do was get me over there, and I would finish off the dirty asshole. She blew right past. “B! It’s too dangerous! STOP!” I ran after her, knowing I would have to save both of them.
The change was fast. As the black ring of rot rushed up his body to cover and encase his head in a mask of death, the sound of meat on metal thudded over the plains. The rail-bike slammed into it at full speed, breaking through three tree trunks until sticking into the fourth.
The Elite coughed and wheezed and sucked air. Its claws scraped frantically over the front of my rail-bike, trying to get free. B locked the sputtering bike in gear, jumped off, and buried her battle-wand into the Culler’s forehead. It shuddered and then went limp.
“See, lover boy,” she yelled, pointing at it. “That’s how it’s done!”
I walked the rest of the way, and Lana came up behind me. Pusi sat next to her kill, dragging her tongue over her arms and cleaning off the blood shower she just took.
Circling around my ride, I poked the Cull
er with my blade to make sure it was dead and checked out the damage. “The bike is in rough shape and needs repairs that we don’t have time to make.”
“We’ll have to make time,” Lana said. “We are very far from the border. Walking would take us too long. Plus, the only one who knows where we need to go is the cousin trapped in rubble back at the base.”
“Lana’s right,” B said as she sat on the grass. “We need her at full strength. Pusi might be able to sniff Yari out, but it would take too long to cover that much ground. There’s massive devastation over too wide and deep an area. That’s where Mark comes in.”
I nodded. “So, we need this bike repaired. And, we need to figure out where the fuck we’re supposed to be going. We’ll have to take our chances here in the grove. As long as we don’t make any noise, there’s no reason for anybody to pass through and bother us.”
“I help Lana heal,” Pusi said suddenly.
Lana was a lot brighter in demeanor since she fully came to our side, but pure doubt covered her face right then. “How can a Pusani help me heal?”
“Just trust. Now, teamwork. B rest. Marrrk make repair. You, come.”
I dislodged the bike from the tree and B helped me push it into the grove until we were hidden from possible prying eyes. B hopped into one of the pods and took a nap while I opened up the front paneling to check the gravity-drive.
Laid on the grass and legs spread half-eagle, Lana waited nervously while Pusi hovered over her, sniffing and lightly touching her wounds. I had to turn to the job at hand and actually felt B’s cameras would’ve come in handy.
I stood by my poor baby. It shuddered and stalled against the tree. I knew it was a cooling issue and had my arm shoulder-deep through the front of her, rooting around for any overheated or warped parts.
I heard B yawn from the pod. “Is it bad?”
“The worst that’s been done to her yet. Your fault.”
“What can I say, I ride hard and fast.”
“It’ll be hard to forget. Don’t worry though, it’s nothing a little tender love and care can’t handle.” My hand ran over a hot spot so I pulled out, grabbed my tool, and went back in to relieve the issue.
