“Yo,” one of the two women eyeing her said. Christine turned toward them. Both of them looked tough and roughly similar: five seven or five eight, tan skin, several prison tattoos; this wasn’t their first time behind bars. One had shaved off all her hair, which made her ears stick out and her face look even meaner; the other had her brown hair up in pigtails much like Christine/Nellie had when she first arrived. The childlike hairstyle clashed horribly with the ex-convict’s scowling face.
“Hi,” Christine replied.
“Heard about you,” Pigtails said. “Missed the show, but guards were talking about you.”
“Killed Green-Go,” Cueball added. “He a tough motherfucker.”
Christine shrugged and stayed quiet. If they wanted something from her, they’d come out and say it eventually. If they were trying to haze her or whatever, words weren’t going to change what would happen. Since the guards would have to unlock the door to the yard and then go through one at a time, any fight that broke out would be over before they could do much about it. It’d be kinda crazy to fight each other when they’d be getting all the gratuitous violence they could handle fairly soon, but she’d long figured out that way too many people did the craziest thing without a second thought.
“So you think that makes you hot shit?” Pigtails said. “I killed a champion too, y’know.”
“Cut ‘is throat, ear to ear, she did,” Cueball confirmed, drawing a thumb over her neck to illustrate.
“That’s pretty awesome,” Christine said. “Hope you kill every d-bag they send your way.”
“Yeah,” Pigtails agreed. “Heard you were with Crazy over there?” She indicated the laughing girl.
Christine nodded.
“She ain’t right in the head. Killed her husband, on account he beat her regular-like. Now she laughing all the time. Made it through four fights so far. Crazy lucky, that bitch is.”
“How many for you?” Christine asked. So much for playing the strong, silent type.
Pigtails looked down. “Tomorrow’s my second one. We both killers. Maybe we get lucky together.”
“Hear they’re throwing Crazy in with you,” the bald chick said. “She ain’t so good in a fight, but she a survivor.”
She may be crazy, but she’s smart enough to let the other two contestants do the fighting and dying for her, Christine thought bitterly. Not that I can blame her.
“Where do you hear all this stuff?”
She grinned. “One of the guards. We got an understanding.” She made an obscene gesture with one hand and her mouth that made it pretty clear what their understanding involved. Gross.
“So, when we go out there, fuck Crazy, let that bitch be the first kill, then maybe we can get in on the motherfuker and cut his throat,” Pigtails said, which explained how she’d won her fight. And what Christine could expect from her.
“Don’t worry about Crazy. I’m going straight for the asshole,” she said, trying her best to sound like Mark, which was kinda like having an attack of Tourette’s. “That should give you a clean shot at the motherfucker’s back. Do me a favor and fuck him up before he fucks me up.”
“You wanna play hero, it’s no skin off my nose.”
The two women walked off, seemingly satisfied. Christine gave them a brief aura scan, partly just to see if her powers were improving, but also to make sure they weren’t harboring any ill-feelings – ill-feelings that might get her killed – towards her.
Catching stray emotions wasn’t an issue, but doing an active scan took effort, and some pain. She had to concentrate, squint really hard, and push. For a moment, all she got for her troubles was a migraine, but the pain was soon followed by something that felt like an elastic band breaking inside her head, and everyone’s aura popped up in their usual rainbow display.
Except a lot of these colors were stained with sickening black-eggplant stains, like a swarm of flies over a birthday cake. She’d noticed Outsider corruption before, but under a deep scan it was clear just about everyone was infected to some degree or another.
She looked down.
Including her.
Earth Fubar, Day Six
Same chainmail bikini. Same screaming crowd.
This time she got a little more love from the mob. More cries of “You go Nellie” along with the customary “Show us your titties!” Of course, any good feelings about the cheers were tempered by the knowledge the crowd would sound just as enthusiastic if some d-bag ripped out her heart as a keepsake. Show business was hard.
What does any of it matter? I’m Tainted. Newest entry in the worst-case scenarios list: become Dark Christine Redux.
Her evil twin had claimed the stuff couldn’t be removed. Christine had proven her wrong, though. She’d cured Mark. Problem was, curing him had required massive amounts of power, power she didn’t have at the moment. And every time she killed someone, the little black nuggets in her soul would grow, would spread their rootlets and make her enjoy the killing and crave more violence.
Make it through this fight, and maybe you can find a way out.
Not making it through the fight would be a way out, of course, just a suboptimal one.
Once again, she stood in the center of the three-girl formation, which made her the one who’d get the honor of fighting first. Crazy was giggling like a little girl at the prospect. Pigtails looked ready for anything, including sacrificing anyone or anything to survive.
They did the whole intro stuff and went to grab weapons. This time Christine took a couple of short swords, longer than Snipe’s usual weapons, but with a little extra reach and nice points that could punch through armor or inhumanly tough skin. She wasn’t expecting to fight a vanilla human.
“Making his debut on the Arena! Rewarded by the Goddess herself for his courage, and also punished for his impudence! He’s young and brave, and he loves one of the girls he’s about to kill! He’s...!”
Christine’s heart sank.
“Robinson Grace!”
Robb. He’d saved her life, and all he’d gotten out of it was this.
“And joining him, former Sheriff Samuel Bergen, for dereliction of duty and being an all-around a-hole.”
WTF? They were sending two of them?
The crowd loved the idea of seeing a former Watcher getting the slave warrior treatment of course, and Christine wouldn’t mind stomping that evil bastard into the ground, but knowing she’d have to face Robb as well killed any revenge-related joy she might feel. She waited for her enemies to show up.
Enemy, singular. She had to force herself not to throw up at the sight.
What came out of the gate looked nothing like the farm boy she’d briefly known, or the Sheriff who’d watched her get knifed with a smile on his face. Dark Christine had outdone herself: she’d created something that only a fan of the Human Centipede movies could enjoy. It had four arms and four legs. She had brutally twisted the flesh and bones of what had been two human beings, and fused them together to create a grotesque pseudo-centaur. Their lower limbs had been twisted and reshaped into something like a cat’s rear legs, except covered in human skin, which made them look disgustingly hairless. The four arms were long, massive and simian. It dragged both sets of knuckles on the ground as it walked.
Only their heads had been left untouched, looking hideously tiny, placed side by side between the massive shoulders of their new body. Robb threw his head back and howled like a wolf. Sheriff Bergen started fixedly forward, mouth open, mindless, maybe even dead.
They were going to make her kill it – kill them, kill Robb – or die at its hands.
The sheer cruelty of it all was too much to bear. You couldn’t confront it without hating the people responsible, and Christine felt her rage feed the Outsider poison inside her. She didn’t care. All she wanted was a chance to reach the VIP box and rip the Goddess’ head off. She pictured herself rising through the air and using Rend on everyone, turning all the cheering fans around her into bloody goo on the stands. She ha
ted them all, and reveled in her hatred.
“FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” the crowd chanted. She shook her head, clearing off the red haze she’d been in. No time for any of that. She had to live through the next few seconds.
The Robb-Thing leaped forward, each bound of his inhuman limbs covering a dozen feet or more. He bore down on Christine like an avalanche, like a living tsunami. His face was twisted in a bestial snarl, and he showed no more signs of recognizing her than Sheriff Bergen’s empty gaze did. He didn’t hesitate.
Neither did she.
Christine timed his bounding leaps, and rolled away under the one that would have landed on top of her. She recovered and jumped on his back as he tried to stop his forward momentum and turn towards her. One of her swords went spinning away as she put her free arm around Bergen’s neck and stabbed him on the side of his head. The steel point punched through its temple, where the bone was thinnest.
The head of Sheriff Bergen convulsed once, and fell still. Robb screeched in agony, but didn’t die.
How long can he live now that his Siamese twin is dead? she wondered an instant before the Robb-Thing reared up and dropped on his back to crush her beneath his hulking body.
She pushed herself off of him and managed to get clear of the impact. The dirt-covered ground shook when he hit it: his new body must weight over a thousand pounds. Heavy, strong and fast.
Pigtails and Crazy were holding back, too intimidated by the monster’s size and speed. They might be whacked and vicious, but definitely not stupid. Robb rolled to his feet with incredible ease; if they’d tried anything they would have been slaughtered.
A hand the size of a baby seat reached for Christine. She slashed it with her sword, which gave her just enough time to dodge an overhand punch that would have driven her into the ground like an effing lawn dart. Robb roared at her, an overwhelming combination of deafening sound and terminal bad breath that almost knocked her out. He reared up once more, fists held over his head for another crushing blow.
She ran away. His fists struck the dirt where she’d stood with a loud thud.
Nothing in the rules said they couldn’t switch weapons, if they could live long enough to reach the racks along the arena walls. Problem was, the Robb-Thing was right behind her, and he would catch her before she could arm herself. She changed plans in the time it took her to reach the nearest weapon stand, one with several spears, halberds and pikes, just the thing to fight a cross between a lion and a bull gorilla. Except by the time she grabbed one of them and turned around, Robb would have reached her and proceeded to teach her the true meaning of ‘drawn and quartered.’
Instead of grabbing a weapon, she leaped up as high as she could. Her fingertips reached the edge of the wall, and she held onto the wire fence on top of it, drawing her legs up an instant before Robb crashed into the wall like a freight train. The impact almost dislodged her from the fence, but not quite. She looked down.
Robb had smashed the weapons rack and most of the weapons into kindling. A spearhead was sticking out of one of his arms, right below the wrist. He’d also managed to drive most of a halberd into his chest. Running into pointy things was never a good idea.
Neither wound looked mortal, though. Christine jumped from the wall before the Watchers came over and used their batons on her. She landed ten or fifteen feet away from Robb, who was shaking his head, still half-stunned by the impact against the wall. The movement made Bergen’s lifeless head loll back and forth, as if it was nodding in approval.
She dashed towards the nearest weapon stand. A roar behind her let her know Robb had recovered.
No halberds and spears on that rack. She grabbed a tetsubo, a Japanese two-handed studded club. Not her first choice, but everything else in the rack was too light to be of much use against Robb. She whirled in place, ready to meet another charge.
She needn’t have bothered. Robb had gone after someone else instead.
Pigtails screeched and swung a fireman’s axe with all her strength, hitting Robb in the lower ribs and drawing blood, just before his terrible fists came down on her. What was left afterwards didn’t look anything like a human being.
Crazy laughed while Robb pounded on the bloody mess at his feet, pulping the remains of what had been a living woman moments before. He turned towards the sound of laughter after he was done, and looked at Crazy, who was backpedaling away, no longer amused, her buckler and trident looking inadequate for the job of handling a thousand-pound mass of sinew, muscle and reinforced bones.
Let him have her, and you can blindside him.
It was a good idea. Instead, Christine ran towards him, tetsubo raised high, screaming like a banshee.
Robb forgot about Crazy and rushed towards her.
Ducking his initial charge was easy enough. Landing a two-handed swing right on the spot where Pigtails’ axe had damaged his ribcage was a lot harder, but she managed. He felt the impact, and the sudden pain made him trip and fall on his uninjured side. She stepped up, swinging for the fences, the hard metal-studded wood landing with solid smacking sounds as she hit his flailing arms, trying to land a blow somewhere vital – and failing.
A swing from one of his oversized fists struck the club. The world became an indistinct blur for a second. When she could focus again, Christine was on the ground, still holding onto the handle of the tetsubo, although she couldn’t feel anything in either hand, or anything below her elbows for that matter. The rest of the weapon have been sheared off, leaving her with a jagged, splintered stub. The impact had numbed her arms and knocked the wind out of her.
Christine heard a sound between a growl and a whimper coming from behind her. She rolled around to see.
Robb was hunched down on his lower limbs. The head of the tetsubo was sticking out of his right eye. Pure dumb luck had spun the broken weapon right into his face. He growled and whimpered again as he began to reach for the wound but hesitated before his fingers could touch the embedded chunk of wood in his eye.
Crazy ran up and speared him from behind. Robb roared in fresh agony and began to turn around.
Christine leaped onto his back again, holding the remnants of the tetsubo with one hand while she grabbed Robb’s head by its hair and drew it back. Before he could reach for her she stabbed him in the neck with the splintered piece of wood. His skin was tough, but not tough enough. A torrent of blood exploded out of a pierced jugular vein, and she jumped clear just before he went down, for good this time.
She didn’t need the calls to “Kill!” to prompt her. Limping and tired as she was, she walked over to her dying friend and finished him off. It took a while; the mutated body died hard.
“I’m sorry, Robb,” she said as life finally left his eyes and he lay still.
Her words were lost in the roar of the crowd.
* * *
That night she started to learn how to cleanse herself of the Taint.
As a game, it was never going to outdo Tetris, but it was certainly challenging. The rules were simple, but mastering them was nearly impossible.
Rule One: don’t draw more than a trickle of power from the Source. That one was pretty easy, since she could barely summon said trickle.
Rule Two: shape that power into a virtual scalpel, one designed to cut into your very soul. That took a while.
Rule Three: cut around the Taint, never touching it. The purple-black stuff didn’t react well with other forms of energy, especially from the Source. That meant she was cutting into healthy ‘soul tissue,’ and it hurt horribly, far beyond any physical pain. It was like sawing off your own leg, without anesthesia, while you watched everyone you’d ever loved die a slow, lingering death. Definitely not for the faint of heart.
That was it. Three simple rules. Repeat as needed.
Arctic Sanctuary, July 17, 2014
Cassius opened his eyes.
“How are you feeling?” Christine asked him.
“Like I’ve been tortured for several years. A feeling I know only to
o well,” he said, but his voice was calm enough, and so was his aura.
“It was only five hours, but yeah, felt like that for me, too.”
“But the Taint…”
“It’s mostly gone. Like eighty percent. Most of that was the stuff that was growing out of control, for whatever reason. What’s left is mostly inside the older nodes of infection, and those are going to take a while. But now I know how to get them.”
“How did you figure it out?”
“A few months back, I was infected. Luckily it happened while I was inside someone else’s body, or my fail-safe implants would have blown my head off. I learned how to cleanse myself, by trial and error. Mostly error. I recently remembered how I did it. If I hadn’t been wallowing in self-pity because of the other stuff I remembered, I would have come here sooner. Sorry about that.”
“I feel better than I have in months, so I will accept your apology.”
“And I’ll keep on working on you, at least two or three times a week. No more excuses.”
And I’ll also need to figure out where all this extra Outsider energy is coming from.
If she didn’t know better, she’d suspect Mister Night was involved.
Hunters and Hunted
New York City, New York, July 18, 2014
“You jumped the gun, mistress mine,” Daedalus Smith said, with too much smugness in his voice.
What followed over the next few minutes was painful and very, very nasty. It was a memorable experience, even for someone who had spent some very rough months in the hands of the master torturers of the Dragon Empire.
“Are you going to diss me again, d-bag?” Dark Christine asked him sweetly as he stared fixedly into space.
“Probably,” he said, and he felt a thrill of pleasure at the sight of her shocked expression. “Pain is just noise generated by the nervous system. It’s meaningless except as a warning system, and in this case the warning is unnecessary. You aren’t going to kill me while I’m still of use to you. And I am damned, remember? Oblivion is my inevitable end state, once the Outsiders are done with me. It’s not only inevitable, it’s what I desire most. The only reason I don’t kill myself is that I fear that our Masters won’t let me die until I’m done being useful, and will punish me for trying.”
New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative Page 13
