by Ben Stevens
It was too late for Sofia. In her passion, she had lost all sense of tactics and timing. She raged at the men in her way and shoved them aside. The cyborg bitch didn’t seem to notice her. Hungry lust flashed across her eyes, and she waited just a second as Lucy turned her back to deal with another kamikaze sentry and then lunged… right into the tip of Lucy’s Macuahuitl.
A small gasp, more of surprise than pain, escaped Sofia’s mouth. Lucy looked coolly over her shoulder into Sofia’s face. The melee seemed to freeze for a second, the vampires and men around them not sure what to do with their leader incapacitated. Sofia could see the light from the nearby scattered fires reflected in Lucy’s eyes. For the first time since the night's combat had begun, a hint of emotion rippled across the placid sea that was Lucy’s face. Sofia didn’t miss it, even though it was barely there—the genesis of a smile at the far corners of her full lips.
“You are as much of a killer as I am… A wolf like me…” Sofia managed to hiss out, the surprise in her voice there for all to hear.
“Not a wolf. A jaguar,” Lucy whispered just loudly enough to reach Sofia’s supernatural ears, and then she spun in a tight circle, pulling her obsidian-bladed club from Sofia’s stomach and bringing her second one to bear at the queen’s neckline.
Lucy waited a moment longer than she should have and watched with barely hidden satisfaction as Sofia’s head sailed into the crowd of stunned onlookers. She brought her war-clubs into a defensive cross guard and eyed the crowd, testing them, daring them. Will they rally toward me again, or has the fight gone out of them? she wondered, and then the electricity hit her in the small of her back like a punch from a Heavy Mech.
Running across the entire length of the plaza from the outside perimeter to the stage was a thick braid of power cords covered by a small wooden ramp to prevent tripping. Don Luis had had it built to provide power to the impromptu stage. This Día De Los Muertos witch-woman was damn near straddling it as she stood there, pretending first not to see, then stabbing his wife in the belly.
This was his one chance. He moved with preternatural speed, nothing more than a blur that zig-zagged across the blood-soaked pavers, with only an imperceptible pause as he stooped mid-stride to rip and tear the electric braid free from the wooden half-hex that covered it and bound it to the ground. Like a bolt of lightning that streaks across the sky, making its jagged way from cloud to ground, Don Luis moved through the survivors of the melee and connected with Lucy. She didn’t even have time to hear the snapping and sizzling of the live braid, nor did she detect the subtle shift in the air currents as the king of New Puebla raced toward her. She had erred and let her emotions come out to play. Although it lasted only a mere second or two, her pause to take in the victory against one as evil as Sofia, and to allow the throng of hostile humans to back down, had cost her everything.
Don Luis appeared at her side and back like a tango dancer, and where his right hand should have caressed the curve of her back had they been dancing, he stabbed her cybernetic spine with a fistful of severed, snapping, live electrical wires.
Her cybernetic body never felt pain, though it was designed to send reports of damage and malfunction to her brain, so her internal computers and servos could re-direct power and react accordingly. This time, however, the signal that she had been hit didn’t even make it up the channels to her brain. The electricity had done its job most effectively, resulting in nothing less than a full and complete short-circuit. No messages were going anywhere, up or down the channels.
She was in what she called full S-Dep, total sensory deprivation, completely cut off from the world outside her consciousness. Still, Lucy knew something bad had happened. She was still aware, still conscious, though her body had shut down, taking with it her vision, her tactile sense, and her hearing, all fully cybernetic. She still had some sense of smell, the nose-olfactory combo being the only sense organ that was linked directly to the brain, allowing it to bypass the backed-up traffic and circuitous byways of the nervous system. But her lungs were nothing more than mechanical intakes that filtered the air in the environment and delivered the oxygen that her organic brain still needed oh-so-badly, and they’d gone down with the rest of her systems.
Shit, was the only distracting thought that ran through Lucy’s mind, and then with no more effort than it would take a fully organic human to act on the decision to get up and move, Lucy sent signal after signal in vain to her absentee body in an attempt to get her emergency systems back up and running. She could survive without breathing for thirty minutes, for her body always stored oxygen in its reserves and was ahead of the curve when it came to filtering in the oxygen. But if the motors and servos that powered her reserve system were shorted out too, then her brain would die from oxygen starvation, and soon…
“What a lovely sight!” Don Luis Fernando laughed aloud and tossed the electric anaconda to the side. He looked down at the helpless cyborg and smiled. One of the vampires at the edge of the mob moved in fast, his body language revealing his intention to rip Lucy apart. King Fernando crouched over his kill and bared his fangs, hissing. He was the alpha wolf; this prey was his. The other stopped in his tracks and, lowering his head, began to take steps backward away from his king. Satisfied that his pack knew their place, he returned his affections to Lucy. He kicked her clubs away with a brisk brush of his boot and smiled, his lips pulling back over his elongated canines as he bent down and picked up her BFG.
“Oh, mami. I like. It’s mucho grande. Like me.” He grabbed at himself obscenely as he mocked, holding the massive pistol up and turning it from side to side. “But I like mine better,” he added, putting Lucy’s sidearm into the waistband of his pants, then withdrawing his antique chrome laser pistol from his hip holster. His informants had done him a solid by reporting to him his wife’s intention to betray him, though now he would be using the weapon to burn the new wife, and not the old.
“You see, the Aztec club thing? I don’t get it. It doesn’t do it for me,” he explained to himself, not knowing that Lucy couldn’t hear him. “Honorable and traditional. What a bunch of crap. Granted, I love being close to my prey when I kill them. I want them to see it in my face, the triumph. I want them to see me. Do you see me, bitch?” He squatted back down and got close enough to kiss her. His left hand grabbed her chin and rolled her head back so he was looking directly into her face.
“Now a good gun, on the other hand…” He licked his fangs and brought the pistol flush against Lucy’s forehead. “It’s like a strong hard cock, no?” Don Luis duck-walked back two steps and probed down Lucy’s prone body with the muzzle of the pistol in his right hand, tearing away her black battle fatigues with his left. “Fucking cyborg bitch. Why would you go and remove your only useful part?” He sneered in disappointment and stood back up.
“When I have the gun, you know that I have the power. When I have the power, you respect me. You fucking disrespect me, I teach you a lesson.” Don Luis continued like this, his brief thoughts of rape already forgotten. This was his favorite part. This was why he’d worked for the same cartel that had killed his father. This was why he had sold his soul to the devil. This was why he had crowned himself king. He loved the feeling he got when people needed him, or feared him, or otherwise acknowledged and lent credibility to his notion that he was better, richer and more powerful than them. He was a born leader.
Don Luis quit his ranting and again crouched down near Lucy, this time sitting on her chest. He held his left hand out and willed his nails to grow into sharp claws. Even over the chaos of whatever was happening behind him on the stage—the Lily Sapphire bitch would be next; she wasn’t going anywhere soon—he could hear the creak of the transformation. He reached out and dragged the pointy tips of his dagger-like nails down Lucy’s cheek with just enough pressure to snag and tear open the skin. Her skin was organic and fed with artificial blood, but stretched over an armored exoskeleton, jaw included, that now showed through the pool of blood behind her flayed cheek meat.
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br /> “This is gonna be fun. Too bad you’re not here to see it, Sofi. See? I can play with my food too.”
Lucy couldn’t feel the cut or hear his taunts, but she knew a threat was there. Alone, with her consciousness floating in the void of true sensory deprivation, she calmly waited, as warriors oft do, for her emergency protocol to activate fully.
“Boss!” a voice shouted from the crowd. “King Fernando!”
“What?” He looked up from his new toy, a scowl of angry impatience smeared across his face.
“They are getting away!” the oaf said and pointed toward the stage. Don Luis turned fully, coming to his feet over the fallen Lucy, and beheld the one he knew as Lily Sapphire, with that nerdy boy of hers, lifting above the crowd on some kind of oversized surfboard. The golden bubble had vanished, and his wife-to-be turned traitor was indeed getting away. The look of impatience melted into disgust and hatred.
“Someone is always trying to ruin my fun,” Don Luis spat, frowning. He raised the pistol and aimed.
A bright red beam of superheated light exploded into the night. The beam ripped from its muzzle at near the speed of light and lanced Ratt’s hoverboard. One second, it was there, structurally sound, and the next, it seemed to come apart as if the very molecules that constituted it became suddenly and instantly magnetically opposed to each other. Maya cried out like a bird shot on the wing as a piece of flaming hoverboard burst forth and punctured her ankle. Ratt, too, was hit with shrapnel from the exploding board, but he was too exhausted to scream in pain; he simply cried and moaned, and then both of them were falling to the ground and the crowd below.
Belly-laughing, Don Luis watched them fall into the mess of people and again summoned his dark powers to project his voice out over the plaza. Silence followed his wolf roar. No one moved. His subjects, human and vampire alike, turned to look at him. Even though half his face and his hands were black and cracked from the damage of the surprise attack, they could see why he was their king. Power and defiance personified stood before them. In his charred hand, his prized pistol, a single shot from which would ignite and destroy any vampire as surely as sunlight. At his feet, the fallen enemy, she who had single-handedly slain at least three dozen of New Puebla’s best. He looked in the direction of those closest to where Lily and her boy had fallen.
“Bring them to me.”
Don Luis turned back to Lucy. Knowing that he had a better toy on the way, he decided to end this quickly.
“Now…” He let his voice linger in the air like the smell of the burning vampires scattered throughout the plaza. “How does one kill a cyborg, exactly?” he sneered in a mocking tone, knowing full well that her brain was all that remained of her organic organs. And with that, he squatted over her once more, bringing the tip of his pistol against her left temple. He grinned into her expressionless face and said, “Bitch.”
BOOM!
Maya screamed bloody murder and would have fallen to her knees were she not being held aloft by two of Fernando’s thugs.
But the shot hadn’t come from the laser gun.
Don Luis’s right arm separated from his torso in a fine mist of deep crimson, and the stone paver just upstream of Lucy’s head exploded.
High up on the mountain, Carbine grinned behind the cowl of his sniper hood.
20
Carbine’s grin disappeared as quickly as his railgun’s victims. There one second, gone the next. Through the sights of his rifle, he watched Don Luis Fernando’s arm fly off. He had been aiming for the torso and missed, but he would take this consolation prize; it had, after all, saved Lucy. Then, as he reached up to chamber another round, a round that was intended to finish the job—as much as was possible anyway, the vampires’ regeneration being a factor—he watched in stunned shock as Don Luis sprang forward off of Lucy, fast enough to become blurry, following the chrome laser pistol as it skipped across the pavers. The vampire king moved like a demon possessed, seemingly as much immune to pain as Lucy was, and displaying the same tightly tuned reflexes that she possessed as well.
By the time Carbine realized what was happening, it was too late. His heart thumped in his chest as he fumbled the bolt handle in an attempt to re-chamber his rifle. Don Luis ducked into a roll, grabbing up the pistol mid-roll with his left hand, and turned to face the sniper as he came up on one knee and squeezed off an impossible shot, drawing on his supernatural senses to perfectly re-trace the trajectory of the shot that had severed his arm.
A line of crimson light sliced through the night, tracing its way from Don Luis straight to and up the barrel of Carbine’s railgun, igniting the air in its wake. The high-powered rifle exploded in Carbine’s hands. He rolled backward from the explosion, pain racking his body. He hit a rock outcropping and tumbled down to the left and below his encampment.
His face broke the roll. He spat dry, dusty dirt out of his mouth, his saliva flecked with blood and mud, and then pushed himself up to his feet. Herculean levels of adrenaline surged through his body. Carbine surveyed the carnage. The railgun was no more, just a pile of scrap; his hands were charred, numb, and bruised bloody. Small dots of bright red seeped out his pores, forming constellations of crimson against the black, burnt, and mud-caked skin. He took a step forward and winced, stopping mid-stride. He quickly found it was difficult to walk when he had an orange-sized chunk of rifle protruding from his hip. His hand reflexively reached down to the source of his pain and felt the embedded foreign object, surrounded by wet fabric.
That’s my blood…
He knew he had to do something. He took his hand away, and even in the dark of night, he could see the river of black pouring down his leg.
“That’s a lot of blood. Why couldn’t it hit me in the… metal one?” Carbine clamped his hand over the wound and tried to apply pressure, but the area was too big, the chunk of rifle too irregular. “Have to… make it to the supplies, have to… find a torch or…” Carbine willed himself to finish the step he started, but fell to the sloped ground below. He nearly passed out then, but managed to summon his deeply-ingrained soldier spirit and began to crawl, pulling his burnt and battered body over the mountain’s jagged rocks. He had to get just a few yards up the hill to the stash of supplies they had left when Maya, Lucy, and Ratt had departed down the hill for the city. He was pretty sure Ratt had a laser torch in there somewhere, but would it be enough to stop the bleeding?
“Someone bring whoever that was to me.” Don Luis Fernando stood and studied his serfs. A quiet had settled over the city. The battle was over. Don Luis looked down to his still mostly missing arm and watched it regrow before his eyes. He set his jaw firmly and puffed his chest up.
“No one fucks with me and gets away with it!” As he finished this proclamation, he mentally noted to find out who had conveniently been missing, only to show up with his traitorous wife. Her failed betrayal ended up being his saving grace, but the intent to mutiny was still there. They would be made examples of. But all in due time.
A dozen or so of the surviving vampires broke off from the crowd and made for the city gate. Don Luis knew that the lower creatures—the ones he’d made, as opposed to himself, made by the demon-urchin—lacked the level of powers he possessed. It might take them longer to find and capture the sniper, whoever he was, but that didn’t matter. Don Luis had seen the target get hit with his preternatural vision and knew he had nothing to fear from that one any longer. His thoughts were interrupted by a parting of the crowd. Don Luis looked up into the face of Lily Sapphire, and he grinned like a wolf licking blood off its teeth.
“You little slut.” He gestured for the men carrying her to bring her to him as he waltzed over to Lucy’s still, prone body.
“I’m gonna make you watch as I tear this one’s brains out.”
Maya made a face and whimpered, struggling in vain against her captors’ grip.
“And then I think I will give you your little wish. What was it, to be taken by me in front of everyone? Yeah, that was it. Wasn�
�t it?”
Maya knew that nothing she said would soothe his rage. She had already played her hand. The time for games was over. This was it. A flash of thoughts and emotions raced through her mind while she watched in slow motion as Don Luis first leered at, then bent down to Lucy. Thoughts swirled of their mission, of the little girl Wyntr, of her poor doomed guardians, Lucy, Ratt, Carbine, and Jon, the Morning Star, the Harvesters, Umbra, her late husband whom she never spoke of. Her husband… her husband…
Jon stood in place and recognized his fear. He knew he was in the presence of something truly evil, on the level of the Harvesters for sure. He focused his mind and in turn seized control of his body, as one would slowly yet confidently approach a wild horse to calm it, soothing its flight instincts, cooing to it, stroking its neck and then gently placing a bridle and reins on it. I am in charge, Jon thought to himself, and I can do this.
His meditative focus was of the little girl who had first enchanted him back in Home, had driven him to commit treason against his State, had brought him here and was even now up top risking her life to allow Jon unfettered access to the palace depths. She was no little girl, Jon reflected; she was a goddess. And he believed that he was falling in love with her.
Please, please let this work.
With that, Jon loosened his grip on the hammer's haft and let it slip down to the floor. He took one step into the darkness and could hear the hungry slithering of the needles as they shot in and out of the tubular mouths crowning the tips of each of the urchin’s hundred tentacles. He stopped where he was and removed first the poncho, then his Republic body armor, and finally his form-fitting shirt, tossing them to the side of the chamber as if he would never need them again.
