by K.Z. Freeman
“Guys!” Ty yells as he spots us. “They threw me out!” he says, a bottle of something waving in his hand.
“You mean they threw us out,” says a man next to him. With another man and a women besides him. As much as I couldn’t believe it, Ty’s words had a certain magic to them. When he wanted to be nice, it seemed he could make you do anything, make you believe anything. It didn’t surprise me that he had managed to make friends in such a short while.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us, Ty?” the woman asks.
“Of course, my dear,” he says with a ridiculous bow. “This is Sem, Ruvert, and this, my dear friends,” he says looking at Calyx and me, “is Naya.”
We exchange greetings with the drunken group and continue on our way.
I take a swing of the spirits. It burns like hell. But god damn do I need it. My escapade inside the mind of the old man had made me tired. Not tired the way one is tired after a hard day of work. But tired the way a person is weary when gripped by a disease that eats at him from within. The six of us venture back to The Fane. Eirik had stayed at the bar. He had that look upon him. The type of look that says, ‘I know you saw something, but I’ll let you tell me when you feel like it.’
I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like it. The other two seem oblivious, even Calyx seem to have no idea a whole conversation had passed between me and the sleeper. More than a conversation. But to talk about it now is like torture, my eyes see nothing but a bed. The kind of tired when even the ground would make a perfect mattress. I couldn’t wait to lie down. Which is all the more reason I am pissed as a group of men decide to ambush us. Malkard’s men in gas masks, their rifles bearing that distinct worn-out look, as though whoever had equipped these men didn’t care if the guns exploded upon use. One of our companions, Sem, is too drunk to care. His scream is muffled as he gets incinerated by a shot to the gut. The plasma consumes him as though he were piece of thin plastic. Our other two companions scatter with remarkable swiftness. I suppose a healthy dose of death will do that to a person. But I have seen too much of to run from it. Too much to hide. It simply takes me to another plane of awareness – chisels my mind into a keen edge.
The three of us hunker down behind a building and run around to try and flank our attackers.
“So fast? How?” I ask Ty.
Before he is able to answer, I see one of them behind us, between the buildings. There’s a flash, like flint-spark, and the man is gone. A gasp. I look to see Calyx being held by the man who had just vanished. His gun rests on her temple.
“Don’t worry,” his voice rasps, “perhaps she’ll die, perhaps she won’t. All up to you.”
I felt it then. The anger. It is like a tidal wave. Once it’s set into motion, nothing can stop it until it hits the shore. I gritted my teeth. “Perhaps I’ll carve a trophy from your skull, or a chalice maybe.” I always wanted something to remind people with guns to stay away from me. Why not a skull?
I fire the Mp5 from the hip. The sound of it calms me a bit.
Contrary to popular belief, I too am quite the marksman. Shooting birds out of the sky every day tends to improve your aim. But killing men is different. You either live long enough to see yourself become a master at it, or you die trying.
The bullet punches through the man’s skull, splaying brain-meat and blood over the dusty pavement. He collapses without a sound.
Ty is the first to reach him, kicking him in the head. I’m uncertain if he’s making sure if he’s dead or just for sport.
“Well, it can still work as a trophy,” he smiles. “But a chalice with a hole? That won’t work.”
“Quantum displacement?” Calyx asks, “I think Malkard is something more than a simple slaver.”
I don’t know what she means. The trouble with surviving the apocalypse is that people seem to know certain terms and what they mean, but have no idea how the technology really works, if it works. And so Calyx too had no idea how this ‘quantum displacement’ functioned, she could merely recognize it when she saw it. Before she could explain how she knew the term, however, we are surrounded.
“Huddle up around me,” she orders, and we do. Ty is in his usual, sniper pose, one knee on the ground, while Calyx and I stand back to back. I watch Malkard’s men corner us from all sides, their dark eyes staring behind their gasmasks. Through those eyes, the eyes of my enemy, I find what should have been obvious by now; the enemy hates me. But there is something else there as well. Something I know I can use. It is fear. They open fire and unleash a salvo of sporadic bursts. Sound echoes against the walls and envelops the alley with light. Death is only pleasant when you want it and if it happens when you need it. Then it’s a release. But when you don’t wish it… it is the purest source of something that makes the spot between your legs drip. To my own credit, I rarely piss myself. I watch the shots absorbed in rippling strikes upon an energy bubble, a net around the three of us.
“Radioactivity recharges it,” she says, knowing my next question all too well. “Well? What are you waiting for?”
The next few moments become a mess of fire and return fire. Light flashes like lighting as curses are flung our way. Projectiles smash so close to us I can feel the heat of them as the barrier shrinks around us. Odds, my friends, are something life continuously stacks against us. One might think that bitch called Fate enjoys watching you struggle, and who knows, perhaps she does. But I like to believe that what she enjoys the most, is watching you beat those odds and grind them into dust. We shoot until our fingers hurt as men around us burn on their way to hell. Ty yells something about whores and their mothers in between his shots and I wait until all the said whores and all the said mothers fall. But there must have been something in those spirits Ty had drunk earlier. Something that broke through the bastard at some point. Because when all the bodies fall and we are the last three standing, reeved in dust, I look into the eyes of him, those sunken, sleep-hungry eyes. His hands are limp, his head held low, his gaze downcast. His brow is heavy under his wide-brimmed hat as I observe him wandering between the scorched and the immolated corpses at his feet. The smog and the stink of bodies veils him and I watch him weep.
The sight of him is something I cannot get out of my mind as we wade back to The Fane. The commotion had brought many around us. They all have that look upon them. As though we have done something that cannot be done and they’re unsure if they should fear or despise us. They let us be while we removed the quantum displacement device from the one person that had it and let Ty fiddle with it. After the ordeal, he was like a child. Lost and wondering in a state of confusion. Something moved in me then, something I thought could not be moved or swayed. This something is indefinable and distant in me. It had been bludgeoned by the pulse of life in the wasteland. We don’t speak as we enter The Fane and sit down. I’m so tired I don’t register closing my eyes. But I do notice one thing, the most important thing. It is the feeling of Calyx putting her head on my shoulder.
CHAPTER 14
