by A. A. Allsop
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ISBN: 13: 978-0-9994512-5-0
For my husband & love of my life.
Tom Cutters lowered the Remington GPC automatic rifle back to the towel spread out on his bed and smiled. He had spent the last thirty minutes taking the little beauty apart and cleaning and reassembling her. She was almost gleaming now. A beautiful gun is a beautiful thing.
He flipped on the radio of his small trailer and stripped off his clothes.
“And how do you respond to the growing number of missing persons then, Tom?” the radio chirped.
“Well, Sally,” Tom replied through the speaker, “I’m not saying that something didn’t happen to these people. There are too many reported missing to be mere coincidence, but I’m not so sure something hokey happened to them either.”
“Hokey?” Sally’s reply sounded derisive. “Really?”
Tom plowed on, “Scientists have ruled out the possibility of a second death in AfterLife. As I said earlier, I’m not disputing that something has happened to them, possibly something nefarious—”
“Possibly nefarious, Tom? You are quite the optimist to say something bad might have happened to 1,100 or so humans—that we know of—who have disappeared over the last year from our local Portal Zone alone. Maybe something nefarious?” Sally’s voice dripped with sarcasm, and even over the radio he could tell she was shaking her head. “My god, Tom, we have the largest FBAI investigation in our history going on right now. What will it take to convince you there are real dangers out there?”
“There are storms, class-5 creatures, as well as the day-to-day violence in our overpopulated zones. There have always been real dangers out there, Sally. But I will not be party to causing widespread mania over unsubstantiated rumors—rumors based on little to no evidence.”
“The disappearance of thousands of people across our Portal System is not an unsubstantiated rumor, Tom. It’s a pattern and a prob—”
Tom Cutters clicked off the radio. “I don’t need this shit,” he said out loud. He felt the beginnings of a headache building behind his eyes and sighed. No wonder, either, with the week he was having.
He walked into the trailer’s small bathroom and looked at his reflection. There were lines around his tired, red-rimmed eyes, and the white dusted into the sides of his short, dark hair seemed to be creeping to other areas of his head.
In spite of the signs of aging, his six-two frame was as solid and defined as it was thirty years ago on the day he died. He looked appreciatively at his body and thought of his many friends his age who had let themselves go, particularly around the middle.
He touched his flat stomach and then ran his hand along one of the many scars that he had collected since his death. How’d I get this one again? He tried to think. The scar was long and jagged and ran along the length of his stomach. It had happened so long ago, he’d forgotten most of the details. What he did remember was that he had to hire a two-bit Healer to patch him up. The fucker had been drunk as all Hell and had done a shit job. Still, the guy had patched him up enough for his body to take over the rest of the healing. Something that would have otherwise medically retired him for an indefinite period of his AfterLife—especially in his line of work—ended up only sidelining him for a few short weeks.
Still, he had gone crazy in the short time he was out of work. But now, staring at his reflection in his tiny bathroom, he almost envied the mind-numbing boredom of the three weeks he had been laid out. Anything would’ve been better than the shit he had to put up with this week.
Grabbing his toothbrush and paste, he tried to remember if he’d had a worse first week on the job. Whenever he took a security gig in a BorderWorld—especially the supervisory roles—he went in knowing he would have to deal with BS, but this gig had been different from the start. It was like it was friggin’ cursed.
He spat angrily into the sink and looked up at the ceiling, trying to let his anger go, but it was difficult. The week had started with him having to talk half the crew out of quitting. The locals’ ghost tales had them uneasy, but then, when the media hysteria started about a bunch of idiots who most likely just got lost or ran out on their wives (but had disappeared nonetheless), the men all but panicked.
There was always a certain amount of superstition surrounding a new dig site. Rig boys had their midnight ghost stories about stirring something that slept in the deep, undisturbed parts of these BorderWorlds, but this time, they seemed to be buying their own bullshit.
“Unbelievable,” Cutters said in his quiet, gravely, slightly southern voice.
Then, he’d found out the Department of Regulatory Affairs was coming out to do an impromptu inspection.
If that wasn’t enough, to top it off, a protest started up out of nowhere yesterday at the main dig site. Instead of the normal BS lines about oil being a natural resource, they were actually protesting the “cruel” actions of his contracted security detail. That had been a first for Cutters. Hundreds of know-nothing hippies were going on about them killing animals—which was true. He’d been hired to protect the rig workers from the subterranean creatures that the drills disturbed and from the occasional above-ground or airborne animal that their noise attracted. But it was clear from some of the protesters cardboard painted signs, that they didn’t actually understand what happened when one of these creatures died. “ANIMAL POPULATION DYING OFF!” one sign read, while another said “Extermination = Extinxion!”
Cutters shook his head, thinking about the ignorance of the entire event. For one thing, when an animal was killed, it would immediately reincarnate as an infant in a nearby location. It was unbelievable how few people seemed to understand this very basic fact.
For another, these animals were not the cute, fluffy kind that people kept as pets. These were friggin’ monsters—literal, actual monsters that the government reg
istered as class-6 or -7. They were dangerous creatures. The only reason these things did not kill them and any other human, creature, or organism within their immediate sight was that it was impossible to kill human beings in AfterLife.
Shit… he thought. There were worse things than a second death. The things these class-6s could do to the human body… The thought made Cutters shiver, and he blinked away memories of one of his men lying on the ground, dismembered … and still screaming.
He shook his head to clear it of ghosts and stepped into the shower.
Five minutes later, Cutters was outside his small, tactical desert field trailer, surveying the surrounding brown, barren landscape. His trailer was located in the center of the command post, which was the largest of ten locations for this rig job. command housed the barracks and trailers, a medical trailer, the mess hall, showers, and a few mobile workstations set up under large tents and storage.
The wind picked up and, agitated, Cutters adjusted his goggles. He never used to mind rig security gigs before, but this one was getting to him. He really needed to snap out of it. He needed to be alert. Too much shit had gone wrong already, and he suspected he had not gotten rid of all the protestors. “Set up a wider green line,” he said into a walkie he had unclipped from his belt.
“How wide, sir?” the response squawked into the radio in his ear.
“Two miles,” Cutter responded, “and double security sweeps. Let’s make sure none of those hippies stayed behind.”
“10-4,” the radio chirped.
“One, come in,” Cutters barked as he walked over to his T9-83 Desert Terrain ATV.
“One in, over.”
Cutters paused by the vehicle, not wanting to start her up and drown out his own voice on the walkie. “Make sure the mother’s brain center is watched constantly. No one takes a piss without having a cover there.”
“10-4.”
Cutters checked the compartments of his ATV, making sure he was stocked with supplies, a habit he’d picked up from his days in the military. When his check was done, he sat down and turned her engine on. He smiled one of his rare, fleeting smiles.
And then the earth shook with an ear-shattering boom, nearly knocking him off his seat.
He grabbed the vehicle and righted himself as shocked yells and cries erupted around him. Cutters grabbed his walkie and shouted, “Status update. Report! What happened? Over!”
Immediately, a voice sounded on the walkie, “Broken stump. Area 1.”
Shit, Cutters thought. Friggin’ cursed… “Area 3, go to support. Area 4, split your team and cover three. One, what’s the status?”
The response came quickly. “Pressure bomb, two civvies down. No flames yet. How we got that fucking lucky, boss… Beats me.”
Lucky… it didn’t feel like it, but Cutters knew he was right. A firestorm almost always followed an explosion.
“What’s happening? What’s going on?” David Windover’s assistant huffed as he ran toward Cutters. Windover, financier of three of Cutters’ past contracts, liked his assistants young, male, and as easy as they were skinny. He would go through about three or four of them per gig, so Cutters never bothered to learn their names.
“Not now,” Cutters responded shortly. He held the walkie and replied, “Good. Pull a Henry. Don’t let anyone be a hero. Put on the fire slims, just in case, and keep the civvies out of the war zone. I’ll be there in five.”
As he spoke, he watched the young assistant huff as he walked away.
“Actually, hang on,” Cutters called. On second thought, he could use his help. What was his friggin’ name? “Hey!” Cutters revved up the ATV and jerked forward, stopping beside him.
“We had something go wrong with a rig in one. Send a repo team there.”
“A Repo?” The assistant looked blank, and then his expression changed in an instant. “Someone to fix it? Yeah, I’ll send Dr. McKelling’s team over.”
Cutters nodded and pulled forward, pleased with the kid’s ability to put two and two together. Shame he was gonna get replaced in a month with someone younger and prettier.
Cutters made the short trek to Area 1 from command in five minutes. The distance was short, but the terrain was too bumpy and full of random boulders and rocks to take it at higher speeds than he was already going. He pushed the boundaries of what he knew his ATV could take and almost tipped over several times.
He nearly ran over a few people running away from the rig. When he parked his vehicle, he grabbed his bright-orange fire-retardant suit. He pulled on his suit in about thirty seconds, zipping it up but leaving the hood down. As he ran toward the massive rig, the loose material shrunk to hug his clothes like a second skin. It had the most advanced technology that not only retarded flames, but also reconverted the oxygen absorbed by the flames back into usable air.
He knew it was regulation to have all rig workers wear the slims while working in the pit of the mother rig, the most dangerous part of the rig. It didn’t keep their limbs attached during an explosion, but it did help them to breathe if they got trapped. There were no second deaths for humans in AfterLife, but suppressed brain function and permanent and semipermanent disfigurement could last for years. Cutters wondered how many of the crew were in regulation. If one of them took it off ’cause they were getting too hot, he was going to make sure heads rolled.
Helena, the rig’s official name, loomed in front of him. She clocked in at 280,000 tons and was over 2,300 feet long. Less than half of that was above ground, but that didn’t stop Cutters from being impressed by her every time he saw her. Men were yelling and running away from her, and in spite of the commotion and confusion and the unforgiving gleam off her metal frame, Cutters could see the problem was not coming from Helena’s brain or pit, the two most expensive and devastating places it could come from.
Unofficially known as the “brain,” the Crown was Helena’s massive rectangular section at the top. In this model, the brain housed most of the controls and electrical equipment that powered and controlled the drill. The pit, located inside the base of the tower at ground level, was where the drill penetrated the ground, and it housed the pulley and pipes systems that pumped the oil up from beneath the earth. However, the smoke and dark liquid were pouring out from somewhere in the center of her frame, in between both areas. Cutters could see a hole about the width of grown man, which he took as a good sign for the circumstances. But what the hell did he know about drill rigs? He only fought their monsters.
Just as he approached Helena, several trucks pulled up, and the repo team jumped out and begain unloading their trucks.
Cutters did not wait for them but walked up to Helena. “Update,” he barked when he was approached by a man in an orange slim walking from Helena’s base. Haans Fleeterman, or Fleet to anyone who ever worked with him responded, “Extraction in progress. The workers are saying it wasn’t a broken stump.”
Cutters nodded. That had been obvious the moment he laid eyes on her. The men called it a “broken stump” when the drill line cracked with so much force it exploded, usually totaling the rig and severely injuring anyone in the vicinity.
“Might be safe to keep the workers on site, especially the ones who know how to fix it,” said Fleet.
“Wait till Repo gives the all clear.” Cutters pulled out his walkie and said, “Double teams. Perimeter eye sweeps from tower. Make it a five klick sweep and don’t forget to check your horizon. Give us a heads-up if you can. Ground teams have seismographs on every man monitored and all men armed. Our luck this explosion didn’t attract the type of company we don’t want.”
Fleet, the team lead for this area, nodded and eyed the ground nervously before radioing in his own commands. Rarely could something big enough to eat a fully grown man move around underground and not set off the seismographs.
After Repo cleared the area for the crew to return, the place was still a mess, but Cutters wouldn’t let any of the men stay on ground level surrounding the drill for at least
a couple more hours. They were either up, on, or inside the rig, or they were at command post. Men were escorted to and from their vehicles at a hurried pace, but none of the crew complained. Most of them were seasoned and knew what could happen shortly after a rig mishap, and Cutters even saw a few with scars that looked like burns or bites.
He and his men were on high alert for a couple hours, but things calmed down and stayed calm. The seismographs were still showing everything all clear, and the horizon wasn’t showing the telltale dust clouds or lines in the ground like it usually did when they had trouble. Cutters allowed himself a sigh of relief. He didn’t need any more trouble than he already had. He was already two hours behind preparing for the inspector.
He left Fleet to it and shifted into high gear, making his rounds and checking to make sure all was in compliance, he began to mull over all the events since he’d started this gig. The area of the BorderWorld that Windover Enterprises contracted for its excavation was the largest that Cutters had ever run security for—over fifty square miles of desert terrain divided into the ten drill sites and the command post.
The opposite side of the world was actually quite beautiful, though dangerous, and inhabited by less sophisticated humans. The locals were friendly, but highly superstitious of the region that they were now inhabiting—and for good reason, Cutters admitted. As dangerous as it was in the shark-infested waters and the thick jungles full of snakes and poisonous spiders that inhabited a good portion of the other side, most injuries in those parts could heal within a month to two. The desert offered much worse. Heat stroke and lack of water could shut down their organs and brains and leave them incapable of wiping their own asses for years.
Cutters was nervous that the desert was all unchartered. He almost hadn’t taken the job for that reason. Normally, he and a team of men would fully vet the dig sites and the surrounding areas months before equipment and civvies were brought in. But he’d been hired as a replacement head of security, after the gig had all but started, left to clean up the mess of the man who had quit last minute.
