Mutant Chronicles

by Matt Forbeck

  Eventually, Mitch found the scene of the fight he’d heard, but when he got there, it was over. He shone his light around the platform, but it was empty: no soldiers, no mutants, nothing but bullet casings and lots of blood, both black and red. A few pages from a book—it could only have been Samuel’s massive tome—lay scattered about the place, ripped loose from their binding, which he could not find.

  To one side, Mitch spotted a large, charred corpse—the top part of which was missing—lying next to the remnants of a double-barreled shotgun. He crept over and looked down at the remains. A pair of dog tags lay next to the body, but they had melted from the intense heat that had blackened the man from head to toe.

  “El Jesus,” Mitch said. It sounded like goodbye.

  Thinking of his fallen friend, Mitch didn’t hear the mutant sneaking up behind him until it was almost too late. A woman’s voice broke him from his reverie as it called out, “Hunter!”

  Mitch spun about and used his sword to impale the attacker clean through the mouth, the tip of his blade jutting from the back of the monster’s neck. Then, with a mighty twist, he took the thing’s head off.

  As Mitch glanced around to find his benefactor, Severian tumbled down from an arch above. She stared at him with eyes wild with grief, her lips contorting between sadness and rage.

  “When’s the last time you spoke?” Mitch asked.

  Her voice came out in a husky whisper, as if she’d need the better part of a week to clear it properly.

  “I can’t remember.”

  Mitch closed his mouth. She’d broken a sacred vow to save his life. He couldn’t imagine what that meant to her. He said the only thing he could think of.

  “Thanks.”

  “I couldn’t save them. They dragged them all the way to the Machine.”

  Mitch didn’t know if she meant Samuel or Duval or even Steiner, but he supposed it didn’t matter. He bent down and started collecting the loose pages from Samuel’s book.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We need this damned book,” Mitch said. They might not be able to find much of it, but they’d make the most of what they could assemble, he hoped.

  After gathering all the pages he could find, Mitch laid the parchment out on the platform and tried to read them.

  “It is not permitted,” Severian said.

  Mitch ignored her and kept at it. Every page he could find had words in either Latin or Gaelic, neither of which he could understand. Still, he scanned both sides of each page, hoping to find something that could help. Samuel had put so much faith in the book that there had to be some use for it.

  “They took everything,” Severian said, her every word sounding as if it caused her pain.

  Mitch found the final pages of the book. They featured illuminated illustrations of the massive Machine of which Samuel had spoken, the thing that turned humans into mutants—if it actually existed.

  The last page of the book showed a drawing of a large sphere covered by a faint pattern of charcoal circles and glyphs. A hole had been burned through one of the circles.

  “He kept looking at this damned stuff,” Mitch said. He offered it to Severian. “What is this? Read it.”

  Severian shook her head. “I can’t.”

  He shoved the pages at Severian. “Read it!”

  She pushed him away, not with a snarl but with a flush of embarrassment. “I can’t read.”

  Mitch’s jaw dropped. “How can you believe in a book if you can’t read it?”

  “I don’t need to read it to know it’s true. That’s the nature of faith.”

  “Fantastic.”

  Disgusted both with Severian and with a religion that would teach her such bullshit, he hurled the pages to the ground and walked away. Behind him, the woman scooped the pages up reverently and tucked them into her robes.

  What the hell could he do now? They were down to two of them and not a goddamn bomb between them. One of them must have had the thing when they were killed, captured, or whatever. A thing like that didn’t just disappear.

  If so, that meant there was a chance. Any chance was better than none, and as long as he was still breathing, Mitch meant to keep taking whatever opportunities he had.

  He took a quick inventory of what he had: grenades, tripwires, two clips for his rifle, one for his pistol, and his sword. He arranged them around himself for easy access to everything.

  “I don’t believe any of that shit,” he said as he chambered a round in his rifle.

  “What do you believe in?”

  It was just the kind of question he would expect from a monk.

  “I’m not paid to believe,” he said. “I’m paid to fuck shit up. You coming?”

  50

  Mitch and Severian wandered around the chamber of bridges, looking for a way out. Eventually Mitch figured out that they should look for worker mutants toting bodies and follow them wherever they went.

  That worked well, although Mitch’s impatience meant that they not only followed the workers but shoved straight past them when possible.

  The path of the worker mutants wound farther and farther down, deep into the earth. Mitch and Severian kept along it until they reached the bottom. There the workers shuffled out of the chamber into a large tunnel bored through solid rock.

  This tunnel let out into what appeared at first to be a massive natural cavern the size of a sports stadium. The only light in the place came from a flickering red glow that beamed up out of two holes in the cave floor.

  As Mitch stepped into the chamber, though, he realized that the floor was made not of stone but of metal. In fact, the entire chamber was floored with the stuff, which rose in a smooth arc until it covered the walls as well.

  Mitch realized then that they weren’t inside a cave but in the middle of a massive machine. The Machine. This had to be it, the one Samuel kept going on about as he read the book, the thing they’d come to destroy.

  The Machine’s housing stood at least ten stories tall. Mitch couldn’t be sure, as darkness shrouded the distant ceiling. Strange designs encrusted the walls and floors, reminding him of the graffiti he’d seen on the outside of the buried building they’d passed through on the way here. Most of the place was colored black, but red had been splashed all over it. Whether it was paint or blood, Mitch couldn’t tell, but the coppery smell in the air had to be coming from somewhere.

  There was one entrance into the chamber. Through it, worker mutants carried their human cargo and dumped the bodies into one of the holes, never to be seen again. Most of the area was either rust-red or pitch-black, but the paths they walked along were a bright, slick crimson.

  Besides the scent of copper, Mitch could detect the stench of the slaughterhouse: shit, piss, and rot. The heat that rose from the floor made the air feel close and dry like an oven, but for the fluids that dripped steadily from the bodies the mutants carried in.

  As best Mitch could tell, the workers dropped the bigger bodies into one hole and the smaller or broken bodies into the other. He suspected this had to do with the raw materials necessary for making the two main types of mutants they’d seen in this place: warriors and workers.

  The mutants never said a word, not even grunting with the unending effort of hauling their burdens along. The victims had all fallen silent too, none of them giving so much as an involuntary twitch.

  Mitch handed a stack of grenades to Severian and explained his plan. If they couldn’t destroy the Machine, they could at least cut off access to it. To manage that, they only had to blow the entrance into the place away.

  Mitch chose one side of the entrance and sent Severian off to tackle the other. As they went their separate ways, Mitch noticed how their boots clanked on the floor, making a hollow sound. He realized then that they weren’t inside the Machine, just walking across its outer hull. He wondered how large the thing must be, then shoved the thought away.

  Mitch climbed the rocks around the left side of the tunnel’s entrance as
best he could. When he found a place near the top where he had a good foothold, he started fishing out his grenades and hammering them into a crack in the rock, using the butt of his pistol as a hammer.

  Although he wasn’t sure it mattered, he timed the fall of his blows with the churning rhythm coming up from below. None of the mutants glanced up at him even once. After jamming four grenades into the crack, he replaced the fuse of the last grenade with a tripwire that he ran through all four of the grenades’ triggers.

  As he finished up, Mitch looked across the top of the entrance to Severian. She had been doing the same thing, except that she was using the hilt of her sword instead of a pistol to pound the grenades in. When she finished, she looked up and nodded at Mitch.

  Looking down, Mitch could see that the red-painted path the mutants followed to the twin holes resembled a long dagger pointing toward the center of the Machine. At the far end, a crosspiece formed a hilt capped by a semicircle. A word, or perhaps a name, had been emblazoned across the hilt: Algeroth.

  The two of them clambered down and met up near a pile of broken rock they’d spotted along one wall, right where it met the alien hull of the Machine. They took cover behind it and then waited.

  As Mitch and Severian watched, a worker mutant limped in with another man Mitch recognized on its back.

  “Shit, they’re hauling Steiner,” he said. As he spoke, Steiner opened his eyes, and Mitch saw the man was still alive.

  Mitch pulled the tripwire, and their daisy chain of grenades exploded all at once. Two tons of rock came sliding down in the distance, burying the end of the tunnel entirely.

  As soon as the grenades blew, Mitch charged toward the center of the chamber. Getting nearer, he saw that the worker in front of the one dragging Steiner had Duval with him.

  When Mitch reached the nearest of the glowing holes, the mutant carrying Duval had just pulled her off its back and was preparing to toss her into the Machine. It was then that Mitch saw she still had the black bag strapped to her, the one with the bomb in it. With a single face-smashing blow, he sent the creature reeling back into the hole instead.

  The mutant holding Steiner dropped the man to face the new attacker. Severian kicked the worker in the chest, and it fell into the hole after its compatriot.

  Mitch and Severian moved to help Steiner and Duval to their feet. They had gotten to their hands and knees and were gazing down into the hole into which they’d almost been thrown.

  Inside, Mitch saw the outer face of a gigantic wheel spinning slowly by, grinding along on unseen gears. Every so many feet, a corpse appeared on the edge of the wheel, impaled on one of its countless spikes.

  Duval had been beaten black and blue. Dozens of tiny cuts and a couple nasty ones covered her skin. She’d stopped bleeding and could stand on her own after Mitch helped her up. She nodded her gratitude to him.

  Steiner, on the other hand, was a mess. Much of his flesh had been charred like El Jesus’s, and the pink flesh that showed under the crisp, blackened skin oozed blood. His eyes, though, shone with both pain and determination.

  Mitch pulled out the pack of cigarettes he had taken from the body of that dead soldier in the trenches what seemed like a lifetime ago. He shook out the last stick and lit it. He took one good pull off it and put it in Steiner’s mouth.

  The Bauhauser took a long drag from the cigarette and coughed, then took another. Mitch helped him sit up, and Steiner stayed there under his own power.

  “You still hold a gun?” Mitch asked.

  “Only with my right.” Steiner held up his left hand. The fingers had been fused into a club of melted flesh.

  Mitch grimaced. The smell from the man’s burned skin turned his stomach, but he had no time to get sick over it now.

  “Can you hold a rope?”

  51

  Mitch pulled a rope from Duval’s pack and started to uncoil it. The tunnel was blocked solid. No mutants could come through that way, and that gave them free access to the holes.

  He handed Severian one end of the rope and gestured for her to stand next to Duval at the side of the hole. He took the other end and walked it and Steiner over to a stalagmite stabbing out of the Machine’s metal floor. He set the oberleutnant down a few feet from it, then tied the rope around the base and tested it to make sure it was secure. He left the coiled part of the rope behind Steiner and put the part past that in his good hand.

  “I can’t hold all three of you.”

  “They’re going in.” Mitch jerked his head at Severian and Duval. “I need you to help me make sure we can get them back out.”

  Mitch moved a bit farther down the line and got a two-handed grip on it.

  By that time, Duval had secured the rope around both Severian and herself. She pulled Severian close and held her as she lowered them down the hole.

  Mitch put his back into letting the rope play out a bit at a time. Even with Steiner’s help, it was harder than he’d thought it would be. Severian and Duval didn’t weigh much individually, but put them together and load them up with all their gear and they were bigger than even El Jesus had been.

  Behind him, Mitch heard something tumble over. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the rubble in front of the tunnel starting to move.

  “They’re coming through,” he said to Steiner, jerking his head toward the entrance. “That tunnel’s not going to hold.”

  Mitch’s grip on the rope began to give, and it slipped through his hands. He tried to slow it down, and the friction caused his hands to smoke with the heat.

  “These rocks are not going to hold their weight much longer,” Steiner said. Looking at the metallic floor, Mitch wondered how well the stalagmite could be attached to it, and he knew Steiner was right.

  He wondered how the women were doing in the Machine and how much farther they had to go before they reached someplace they could stand. He hoped it wouldn’t take much longer.

  “Can’t go any faster,” he said.

  The rope lurched forward, whistling through Mitch’s hands. He knew that if he grabbed it and held on tight the sudden jerk would pull him off balance, and then he would be finished. The weight of the women would haul him straight into the hole after them, and they would all end up as fodder for that awful Machine.

  Mitch tightened his grip on the rope as fast as he could. He could smell the rising scent of his burning flesh.

  Although he managed to keep his balance, the weight of the women dragged him forward, closer and closer to the hole. He dug in his heels as hard as he could, but he could find no purchase on the smooth metallic floor. He knew he would only have one chance to catch himself on the very lip of the hole, and if he failed, the women and he would die.

  “Oh!” With one final effort and the hole coming up fast, Mitch shoved his heels into the floor and pushed back as hard as he could. The strain nearly stood him up in his tracks, but he fought back down to keep his angle flat.

  “Oh, shit!” At the hole’s edge, his boots finally caught, but the force nearly blew out his knees. He hauled up against it with all his might and stopped there dead on the lip.

  Blood welled up between his fingers. He wondered if the fluid would make the rope slippery, but he held his hands so tight on it that nothing could come between the fibers and his flesh.

  “Ah!”

  He glanced behind him to see what had happened to Steiner.

  The Bauhauser was gone.

  Mitch growled and wrapped the rope around his waist. Using himself as a large pin, he slowly played out the rope, letting the women descend at a more reasonable clip.

  “Steiner.” Mitch called for the man. He turned back and finally spotted the oberleutnant limping toward the open tunnel, which now was choked with the shadows of mutants digging their way through the rubble.

  “Steiner!”

  The Bauhauser started to say something. In the vast metallic chamber, his voice echoed off the walls, and his words came to Mitch’s ears. They were in the man’s n
ative tongue.

  “Ich bin Maximillian von Steiner, und ich schicke Sie alles zur Hölle.”

  Steiner turned back to Mitch. When he saw the sergeant watching him, he snapped a salute with his left hand.

  Something shiny dangled from the man’s fingers, and Mitch realized it was the pin to one of the grenades he wore on a bandolier around his chest.

  Mitch’s eyes widened. Before he could say a word, Steiner exploded.

  The blast filled the tunnel with fire and then brought it down. The force of the explosion knocked Mitch back toward the hole, and he went tumbling in. The rope slipped from his hands as he fell.

  Mitch saw the spike sticking up from the great wheel as he tumbled toward it, but he had no way to avoid it. He twisted around the best he could, but when he smashed down on the unforgiving metal, he felt the sharp tip stab up through his flesh, slashing open his neck.

  Another spike popped out of the Machine and drove straight through his arm, pinning him to the Machine. For a moment, Mitch exulted in the fact he was still breathing. Then he wondered if, trapped as he was, that was such a good thing after all. It meant he would be alive for whatever happened next.

  52

  As the wheel ground slowly around, Mitch struggled against the spike in his arm, but it held him fast. He gritted his teeth to make one last attempt with every bit of his strength, but at that moment clamps snaked out from the wheel, binding him to it by his arms and legs.

  Mitch snarled in frustration but could do nothing to free himself. The wheel kept turning. When it reached the next station, a diagnostic array emerged from inside the wheel and scanned his body with white-hot energy. The heat evaporated the blood and dirt caked on his body, turning it all to dust, and it singed his hair and left his clothes and skin scorched and smoking.

  “Jesus, no!” Mitch shouted, but the Machine ignored his complaint.

  Next, a mechanical arm unfolded from the side of the wheel and spat staples into him like bullets from a machine gun. The small silver bands sutured together his many cuts, including the fresh one on his neck. The bleeding from it stopped.