by S. A. Lusher
Carefully, he approached the door, strafing when he got close enough to get a clear view in the sliver of space the slightly open door granted him. He saw what appeared to be an immense, mostly empty room.
He also saw who belonged to that armored gauntlet.
“Morris is dead,” he said quietly.
He didn’t even need to check his pulse. It looked like he’d been pulverized. There was a huge dent in his chestplate that must have collapsed his ribcage and his faceplate had been shattered. Blood had sprayed from his mouth, coating it and his face and the helmet, no doubt forced out in a great gushing geyser of red liquid as whatever it was had hit him in the chest like a battering ram, crushing his internal organs and, hopefully, killing him instantly.
No one looked forward to a long, painful death.
Allan pushed through the opening, which was just barely wide enough to admit him and all of his armored bulk. He wondered of Hernandez would fit, she was built bigger than he was. He looked around while the other two squeezed through. The place he had come to was indeed a huge room, the size of a high school gymnasium, maybe even bigger. Most of it was broad, open space. The walls were studded with all manner of gear and technology and equipment. Somewhere beneath the deckplates was the heart of the power plant, the core that pumped out energy. It made the floor thrum and tremble subtly.
There were a handful of dead bodies strewn around, none of them armored, though. So where the hell was Hollis?
What had happened to Morris?
Somewhere nearby, he heard a very human, very pained groan. His head snapped towards the sound and, in the farther recesses of the room, among the shadows and the dead, he spied that armored figure he’d been looking for.
“Hollis!” he called.
“Look out!” Hollis screamed back at him. “It’s coming back!”
Allan began to ask what, but then he heard tremendous footfalls. Each one seemed like a miniature earthquake. Terror froze his veins as he spun back around and found himself looking at an enormous set of double doors set into the far left wall, a good fifteen feet high. Even as he turned to face them, slowly raising his gun, seeing Shaw and Hernandez in his peripheral vision, they burst open to reveal a fresh horror.
It had to be twelve feet tall.
It had bulky limbs that rippled with raw muscle, and in some places, raw, glistening red meat, exposed to the world. Its body was studded randomly with metal plates and stubby nodes of technology that glowered an angry crimson. Its flesh looked stapled on and had taken on a sickly yellow color. Its head was encased in a strange black cage, obscuring its already horrific face. Perhaps the only mercy of the great behemoth was that it had no long-ranged weapons. No barrels growing from its wrists, no launcher mounted on its shoulder.
Instead, one arm ended in a great scythe, the other ended in a flat, solid brick of silver metal. So that’s what happened to Morris, Allan found himself thinking wildly. His gun seemed to move in his hands, coming up, aiming for the tremendous bulk of this new titan. Before he knew what he was doing, he had flipped the gun to full auto and was squeezing the trigger, spraying the thing down with armor-piercing rounds.
“That won’t work!” Hollis screamed, yelling to be heard over the gunfire and the roaring of the beast. He began to say something more but it was lost to the chaos as Shaw and Hernandez added their own rifles to the mix.
The beast began to barrel straight for Allan. He felt momentarily frozen with terror. There was something marrow-freezing about seeing something that big bearing down on you, coming straight for you with murder on its mind. But then his brain flashed him an image of Morris, dead on the deckplates with his chest caved in, like an SOS beacon, and that snapped him right out of it. Allan threw himself to the side and hit the floor rolling. If he hadn’t been wearing power armor, he was sure he’d have felt the breeze of the thing’s passing.
“Take out the transformers!” Hollis was screaming.
Allan scrambled to his feet, trying to discern what the man meant and stay away from the huge creature at the same time. It currently seemed indecisive about who it wanted to kill, looking back and forth between him and the other two.
“What?!” he screamed.
“You have to take out those fucking transformers! Your bullets aren’t getting through! It’s siphoning off power somehow!” Hollis roared.
And Allan realized, all at once, that the man was right. He replayed the last fifteen seconds in his head and knew that he had somehow missed out on the fact that his bullets weren’t quite getting through. They were hitting something. Not a force field exactly, but some low-level, faint energy curtain that awkwardly enveloped the thing. And now that he was looking for it, yes, he could see faint traces of power slipping through the air from four huge transformers, one in each corner, near the ceiling, hanging on the walls like malignant molluscs.
“Take them down!” Hollis bellowed, and the creature decided.
It was coming for Allan.
“Take them down! Shaw! Hernandez! Get on it!” he screamed, and then he punctuated his sentence with a burst of gunfire that did nothing but infuriate the huge thing. “I’ll keep it distracted, get those fucking transformers down!” he roared.
And then he was off and running.
What madness had they stumbled into?
Allan sprinted away from Hollis, away from Shaw and Hernandez, back towards the vast double doors the creature had initially burst out of. The deckplates shook and shuddered as it thundered after him.
It was like the apocalypse.
He heard the gunfire resume, but it was in a different direction. As Allan reached the back wall and ran into the room beyond the bashed-in doors, he heard a low explosion and prayed it was one of the transformers.
“Transformer One down!” Shaw called.
So far, so good. Just three more.
Now, not to get killed. Allan looked around the room he’d come into. It seemed like a combination maintenance area and storage bay. The beast roared as it slammed into the room, sending a stack of crates crashing to the floor. Cursing, Allan didn’t bother opening fire on it. It was still all too obviously being protected. As he began to make a wide, curving sprint back for the door after leading the beast deeper into the room, he found himself wondering why they hadn’t encountered this technology sooner than this.
But he kept coming up with the same answer: this place was fucking nuts. There seemed to be no real rhyme or reason to anything.
He ducked as he ran by the flesh-metal titan, which took a swing at him with that huge metal brick attached to its arm and screamed its inhuman, electric fury. Right as Allan burst back into the main area, there was another explosion.
“Transformer Two down!” Hernandez shouted.
“Time to switch places!” Allan called back.
Shaw and Hernandez split up, one on either side of the room, prepared to run past Allan and the monster as he led it straight down the middle. Hollis was still out of the game, though he had his rifle in hand now, prepared for the endgame. Allan turned and fired off a few shots, then sprinted. The titanic meat machine produced a deep, electronically distorted roar and pounded after him, intent on smashing him into a smear of gore.
He caught sight of the other two sprinting along the walls on either side of him. The beast paid no attention to them. Perfect. Once they were past, Allan stopped running dead straight and instead broke right, not wanting to the lead the thing crashing into Hollis. The behemoth stumbled, caught off guard by the sudden change in trajectory, and for a second, that’s exactly what Allan thought was going to happen. But it righted itself and came straight for him. He glanced nervously at the far end of the room and spied the two warriors hard at work on blasting away those two remaining transformers. He was running out of room here.
It was going to be a close call.
Twin eruptions blossomed in brilliant bursts of blue-white fire at roughly the same time. The creature abruptly stopped, as if someone h
ad smacked it hard, straight in the face, and it was still trying to figure out who had sucker-punched it. Allan looked closely and saw that the incorporeal, uncertain shade of energy had dissipated. He snapped his rifle up, aimed and fired off the rest of the rounds left in the magazine.
There weren’t many, but they made contact, and punched straight through the thing’s chest. As he began backing away and slapping a fresh magazine into the rifle, a fresh blast of gunfire cut through the air from his right. Hollis was back in the game, emptying his weapon into the big beast. As Allan brought his rifle back up, Shaw and Hernandez got into the mix and suddenly the giant meat machine horror found itself at the intersection of four steady streams of armor-piercing rounds. It didn’t last long after that.
After a sustained assault, the gunfire fell silent, and the creature toppled over, slamming into the deckplates and denting them deeply.
For a long moment, there was just silence, then Hollis grunted and dropped his rifle. That spurred them back into action. They all converged on him. Shaw knelt by him and began checking him over for wounds while Hernandez stood guard.
“What happened?” Allan asked, although he thought he had a good idea.
“Got here, shot our way through the place. Fuckers got a lucky shot in on Nelson, took him down. We got in here and got blindsided by that thing and a little group of the smaller ones. While we were dealing with them, that big fucker came in and just smashed Morris. I ended up getting shot, one of their bullets made it through the armor,” he said, indicating his stomach, which Shaw was looking at now. “It went through and I managed to take the rest of the little ones down, then I hid myself away and did a quick patch job. The big one wandered away and I passed out for a bit. I tried calling for help, but I think that field that was protecting it blocks communications.”
“I’m sorry about your men,” Allan said.
Hollis began to say something, then hissed in pain as Shaw tended to the wound. “The bleeding’s mostly stopped, I don’t think any major organs have been hit or you’d be in a lot worse shape right now,” she murmured.
“How are things otherwise?” Hollis asked through gritted teeth.
“Defense grid and communications are down, and Hawkins knows the situation. Ward’s team is already making for the castle.”
“Good. We can find a way there ourselves as soon as Shaw finishes up.”
“Sit up,” Shaw replied. “I need to get at your back.”
With a sigh, then a grunt of pain and a little help from Shaw and Allan, Hollis got up. Shaw finished patching him up. While she gave him some painkillers and got his armor back on, Allan considered the situation. Three confirmed kills, no ride and one MIA. It was just getting shittier...but at least they were making noticeable progress. But he couldn’t think about that now, there were still things to do.
“Hernandez, Shaw, head outside and see if you can secure some kind of transport, anything to help us get to the castle.” They both nodded and headed towards the nearest exit. “Hollis, did you manage to plant your explosives?”
“I did, but I’m not sure it’s going to be enough. So, I thought it’d be better if we just set this fucker to overload,” he replied.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Allan murmured. “Can you do it?”
“Yeah, lemme just find the control room.”
It took ten minutes of hunting around, but they found the control room for the power core and Hollis set to work.
“You know, I was admittedly a little worried about figuring out the controls but...well, apparently power plant controls haven’t changed all that much in the last century,” Hollis said as he stood before the huge workstation.
Allan was preparing to give an update to Callie when his radio crackled. “Gray, are you receiving?” Hernandez asked.
“Affirmative, what’s the situation out there?” he replied.
“Good. We found a chopper. I’m certified to fly it,” Hernandez answered.
“Perfect. Get it checked out and prepared. We’ll be out shortly.”
“Affirmative.”
Allan called out to Callie. “Callie, we’ve found Hollis and are taking down the power station now. Morris and Nelson are KIA. We’ve located transport and will pick you and your team up en route to the final destination.”
“I’m sorry to hear that...but don’t worry about us, Allan. We’ve located a land rover and a road and we’ve already made great progress. I got a good view of the area around the castle when we crested a rise in the land and saw a small town at the base of the mountain. I think it would make a great meeting point,” Callie replied.
“Understood. We’ll be there as soon as we can. Out.”
“Good luck. Out.”
“Done,” Hollis said.
“Perfect, let’s get the fuck out of here,” Allan replied. He wasn’t in the best of moods and just wanted this to be over.
As he and Hollis left the power station and made for the chopper, he couldn’t help but feel that it was just going to get worse before it got any better.
CHAPTER 10
–Order of Operations–
Callie hated waiting.
They’d made great time on the land rover they’d discovered and commandeered on the way to the castle. It had been tucked away in a battered, old garage that had long since gone to the elements, but the interior was well-built enough that the old rover inside, which was also pretty well-built, was still intact. There had been signs of recent entry in the garage, however, and it was obvious that a bit of basic, quick-and-dirty work had been done on the rover. She imagined the technos were planning on using it at some point or another.
Well, too bad for them.
She, Pendleton and Han had gotten it working, swapped out the power cell and forced open the ancient garage door. From there, it had been a relatively easy drive along an overgrown service road. The trip had made Callie paranoid and anxious. It was too easy again. What were they preparing this time? What were the technos getting ready to unleash upon them now? She carefully looked out the broken window at the front of the empty structure that might have once been a house she and the others currently occupied.
They’d ditched the rover about a half mile away, back in the jungle, and had hoofed it the rest of the way, slipping in through the back door of the first structure they’d come across on the outskirts of town. She studied the street of cracked pavement in front of the house, the other derelict buildings that lined the street on either side of her, the broken windows and warped and rusted metal frames. Beyond it all, dead ahead, was the rising, dark bulk of the mountain range the city was built at the base of. And, high up above: the castle.
It stared down on the city like a dead-eyed malignant sentinel.
So far, they hadn’t encountered a single hostile. The city was dead and Callie was kind of hoping that it would stay that way, because the less they had to fight on the way to their objective, the less they’d all have to risk their lives. Then again, another part of her, a darker, more primal part, was clamoring for more blood, more jerking limbs, more targets. And not just because part of her desire for violence, but also because that part was afraid of the quiet, afraid of the static situation. Because then it was left alone with its thoughts.
She was left alone with her thoughts.
And that rarely turned out to be a good thing.
“Contact,” Han said quietly, his voice a ghost of a whisper over the network. Almost as soon as he said this, the comm cracked gently.
“Callie, friendlies coming in from the south.” It was Allan.
“Affirmative, you have our location?” she asked, moving back and letting Pendleton take over front guard.
“Yes. We’re all accounted for. We’ll be there in fifteen seconds.”
She moved back to the entrance they’d used not all that long ago and joined Han. The jungle had grown practically right up to the door itself. Through the dense foliage and the trees and the plants, she could see dar
k movement. It quickly coalesced into a quartet of armored figures. She felt relief, like cool water, flowing through her again at the sight of Allan. To hear him was one thing, to actually see him was quite another. So much of the modern world relied so desperately on long-distance communications and simply trusting that things would work out.
Allan led the others into the house.
“What’s the situation?” he asked.
“So far we haven’t had any contact of any kind,” Callie replied.
“That’s odd,” Allan said. “We managed to pick up some transmissions on the flight over. There were several references to some kind of base of operations in the center of this village. We were thinking that we should hit it, try to gather some more intel before we hit the castle.”
“That makes sense,” Callie replied. She looked back at Hollis. “You okay?” she asked.
He nodded, though he looked pale and he was sweating beneath his faceplate. “I’ll hold together,” he replied. “I’ve been through worse. I was thinking we should do another pincer attack. Two groups, find this place, hit it at the same time.”
“Good idea,” Allan said. He looked around at the group, seeming to consider each. Finally, he made his decision. “Hollis, Han, with me. We’ll break right.”
“Pendleton, Hernandez, Shaw, with me, we’ll flank left. Make for the center of town. Faster the better,” Callie said.
There were a string of affirmative replies. Still no time for pleasantries, but of course not, they were neck-deep in responsibility. Allan caught her eyes with his, staring at her intensely. She nodded tightly to him and he nodded back. It would have to be enough. They headed up to the front of the house.
“Pendleton?” she asked.
“Clear,” he replied.
They filed out of the house, splitting up. Callie looked down a long, broken road that loomed ahead of them. She glanced up. The almost-white sun was high in the sky now, baking everything beneath it. Along either side of her, rows of derelict, rust-eaten houses seemed to stare at her with the black eyes of broken windows. The city, she realized quickly, had a haze to it, a miasma of tension, of slow, cold dread.
