by M. K. Gibson
Khlabra nodded, then looked at Yeela, who smiled.
The sisters turned on the three remaining brutes with a savage ferocity. The demons tore into their former allies, literally ripping them apart. The wounded hellions stood no chance against the demons.
I had to watch the slaughter. Not out of sick kicks, but to make sure it looked bloody enough. “More,” I told Yeela. “Golems don’t rip or cut in such precise strikes.”
Yeela looked up at me with purple-black demon blood covering her face. “You want to do it, human?”
“I’m good.”
“I despise repeating myself. But once again, why are we doing this?”
“Because Gerhardt talks too much,” I said.
Khlabra took a moment to stop the dismemberment to stare at me, letting me know I was about an inch away from her turning her murderous abilities on me.
Well, we couldn’t have that shit, now could we?
Demons, whether born topside or OG Hell risers, didn’t follow perceived authority like humans. They followed power, while at the same time plotting to take that power when the opportunity was present.
I squared up on the sisters and glared at them. “I answer to no one. Not even Gh’aliss. You will do as instructed or I will remind you why your mother sought me out. Get it through your head, bitches—I am the one in charge here. Now do as you’re fucking told.”
I didn’t end it with a threat. You give people an option, then sometimes they choose the option. But you also had to be willing to do the horrible things you imply. Right then and there, I would have.
Fuck.
Being around Gh’aliss was really bringing back a part of me I hoped I’d excised a long time ago. In the next few seconds of silence, the air was tense. I flexed my hands, ready to react, balancing on the balls of my feet.
“Whatever,” Khlabra said as she continued tearing the hellions into bloody chunks of meat. Yeela shrugged and dove back into the slaughter, helping her sister turn the entire scene into a bloodbath.
I let out a breath and started walking back towards Fixer territory. I could use some rest and I didn’t want to spend any more time staring at the entrails of the hellions. Hellions I had slaughtered like chattel so my plan could work.
They may have been hellions and criminals, but they were once living beings. No longer. Because I had to succeed, and they were simply casualties of my machinations. Damn. I did deserve to be in prison.
On instinct, I reached for one of my smokes and paused, remembering I’d left Gerhardt’s good ones back in the tower. I fished out the synth brand and lit it.
From behind me, I could still hear the wet, sickening sounds of rending flesh.
************************
“Oh, I missed that,” Gh’aliss said, rolling off me and stretching. I laid next her, sweaty and panting.
“Missed what? We did it all morning before we went out to collect the golem.”
“Not like that, idiot,” she said as she pulled out two cigarettes from the small drawer in her driftwood desk. Lighting them both, she handed me one. “Fucking from a place of power, even if it is this shithole. So, how did it go?”
Gh’aliss had a way with words. Power was an aphrodisiac for her. And her sexuality was mine. As much as I tried to pretend it wasn’t back when we spent two decades together, she was always able to move my blood and flesh.
“I asked you a question.”
“Hmm?” I grunted, paying attention. “Oh the mission. Went fine.”
“And my spawn?”
“They keep challenging my authority,” I said.
“Good. Are you going to explain why you wanted that . . . thing?”
God, Khlabra and her mother were freaking broken records. Why why why? I took a long puff off my smoke. My silence was rewarded with a wing flap in the face.
“I’m talking to you.”
“Ow!” I said as Gh’aliss’s wing knocked my cigarette out of my mouth onto my chest. “Ow ow, ahh.” I picked the lit cigarette up and put it back in my mouth as I pushed her wing away.
“So?”
“OK, look, you remember after you surprised me a couple weeks back and I was taken to Gerhardt’s office?”
“Yes?”
“Well, during our conversation, he said he part built, part grew the golems. He also said he used magic to empower them. So, my guess is they are a mix of cybernetic relays with burst transmission input/output receiver. Probably optical feedback relays with redundant digital storage.”
I smiled as Gh’aliss looked perplexed. Tech jargon tended to baffle demons, and she was no exception. I reached out and patted her thigh. “I think they have tech in them we could use to cement our control over the prison.”
“Oh, why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
“I did.”
“Insufferable. This ‘Salem’ is an asshole.”
I ignored that and puffed on my smoke. “The reason I needed your Brutes was because I needed the incident to look like a chance encounter. If those things do transmit what they see back to Gerhardt, then . . . “
“Mmm, that’s the reason for the tranquilizer, the sackcloth, and my dead Brutes. From a viewer’s standpoint, your Chael destroyed them both. But any investigation into the area would find nothing but dead Brutes, where Chael killed the remaining and took the Golems like he always does. Thus concealing your involvement.”
“Exactly.”
“That, I find alluring,” she said as she kissed me.
“Thank you.”
“Are you ever going to tell me what you are exactly?”
“Maybe one day.”
“What are you really going to do with that golem?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“Are you going to tell me how you get items smuggled into the prison?” I asked.
“Looks like we both have our secrets.” Gh’aliss smiled as she reached down to hold my erection.
“Looks like it. But I think we have better things to do right now.”
“Mmm, yes we do. Reynolds may have been a bastard in life, but Salem is a right bastard in the bedroom.”
Gh’aliss and I fell back into our routine of lies and sex nicely. No doubt she was playing me, just as I was playing her. The question was, who would win?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Don’t Leave Me
Over the next six weeks, true to my word, Flotsam Prison was ours. With my technological breakthrough, and Chael and Gh’aliss’s access to outside goods coupled with control over the Brutes, none could stand up to us.
It may have been a shit heap prison island in the Chesapeake, but Flotsam was mine. The Fixers, Makers and the Growers all bent their knees to us. Gh’aliss and I slept and fucked on the cleanest beds in the nicest rooms while eating the best food the island could produce.
I mean, it was all complete shit. But it was better than anyone else had. And that was all that mattered.
On some days I liked to walk without Chael. Just to see people’s reaction. It was funny. Just a few short months ago, I was naked and afraid. Now I was clothed and powerful. Demons, hellions, cyborgs, and humans turned away, or offered services of all kinds to me.
I hated to admit it. It felt good.
And I hated that it felt good.
If Gerhardt was accurate, then any day now, Archduchess Lady Bathin would come here to deliver my sentence. After that, the future was unknown. But what I did know was that I had not thought of Löngutangar in some time.
Thinking on that, I fell into another level of self-loathing.
I knew it was foolish. I knew I’d told myself not to think of them. To wall myself off. But I made that decision in a state of fear, when I was cold and alone and focused on survival. Not when I ate moderately well and had a warm bed and willing partner every night.
In those times, I should have thought of them. But I didn’t. I only thought of expanding my little empire.
I think th
at was why I found myself back at Chael’s tower on that cold February morning. The sleet was coming down heavier than usual. Everything was frozen over, giving it a shiny, translucent sheen. It was peaceful and quiet.
In a weird, weird way, I was going to miss this place. Then I rubbed at the scar under my chin.
“Fuck that,” I said to myself as I entered the hole in the wall and saw Chael sitting on his beach, watching the cold waters.
I sat down next to the big guy and lit a smoke. “Chael, have I changed?”
“Change is the essence of existence. Suffering the eventuality of heat death as the last star burns out.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” I said, taking a drag. “I’ve been slipping back into Reynolds. And the worst part is, I like it. At least a little.”
“We all wear masks, illusion and reflections of the things we never were and could be again.”
“I’m afraid, bud. I’m afraid of what may come with the verdict. And, damn it, what I may become if it goes against me. If they say I’m guilty for all time, then what? Do I go through with the escape plan? A fugitive? I can’t help my friends that way. Do I stay here and rule this lot of criminals? Sometimes . . . damn it, sometimes I wonder why I even try at all. It would be easier to just lie down and die.”
“Isaac was meant for the slaughter by father Abraham until the blessing God in the form an angel stopped Abraham’s blade because Abraham knew the fear of God.”
“What are you getting at?” I asked Chael.
“Fear is good. Darkness brings fear. Courage is facing your fear in the darkest of places.”
“That—that’s actually good advice.”
“Until you dwell so long in the darkness that the darkness consumes you, ever turning and roiling inside you until you serve The Darkness.”
“Yeah, let’s just stick to the courage part,” I said, standing. “Thanks, Chael. I needed to be reminded of who I was. Oh, how are our guests?”
“Less annoying than you.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Salem,” Chael said, his white eyes flashing back to brilliant blue for a brief moment.
“Yeah bud?”
“Don’t leave me.”
There was something so simple, so childlike and so infinitely sad in his request, that I felt a tremor of emotion ripple from my stomach and along my spine. I dropped down next to him.
“Are you kidding me? No matter what happens, you’re going with me.”
“Good,” Chael whispered as he put a massive arm around me. The appendage almost engulfed me as his arm gave me a hug so powerful I felt my bones hurt.
His eyes turned back to their normal milky white. “But if I don’t get my bunny, I’ll kill you.”
Chael released me, then rolled over on his bed. Despite it only being morning, he fell fast asleep. I left the sleeping giant lie, as one should, and returned to my old room in the tower. Despite the ease of entering the tower stairwell through the seven-foot hole in the wall, this place was the safest and most secure in Flotsam. Mostly because no one would dare cross into Chael’s domain.
My old room within the tower was where I kept the secret to my success along with a few other experiments and plans. The room held two guests. On my old bed was my source of power.
A nearly vivified, yet living and unconscious flesh golem.
I hadn’t lied at all to Gh’aliss. In studying the remains of the golems outside of Chael’s home, I noted very advanced circuitry. When I was in the office with Gerhardt, he confirmed it when he mentioned their creation and my bone structure. When the golems tried to break my legs, the golems looked as if they were receiving commands. I didn’t see any cameras in there, so my hunch was that they were mobile wireless transmitters.
And I was right. In my study of them, they were also mobile jammers, stopping any signal, including my own internal one, from leaving the island. My first reaction was to work my own signal through them and contact home, but they were woefully under-powered to break through the jamming and reach home. But I had managed to get a few local area calls out. Backup in case I needed it.
More important to my immediate survival, I had access to the other golems. I knew their locations and what they were seeing and perceiving. Through them, I knew the movements of and listened in on the half-heard conversations of prisoners.
Like they always say, knowledge is power.
But the real reason I stayed in power was because of my other guest. Twitch.
The cyber-hacker was made for this. Literally. I sometimes allowed myself to eavesdrop on the golem signal, but with how often I had to be seen in public, or time alone with Gh’aliss, I couldn’t appear to be distracted while I sifted through countless audio and visual transmissions.
Hence Twitch. The cyborg already had the augmentation to scan everything and send me what I needed.
After I was taken by the golems, following Bhalin’s death, apparently Twitch tried to attack Chael. He found it so cute that he brought her back to his lair and tried feeding her raw fish and kelp . . . baby bird/mama bird style.
It came as a surprise to me when I returned to the tower to get some sleep after my meeting with Gerhardt and Gh’aliss to find Twitch in my room. A scuffle and few choice profanities later, we struck up a mutually beneficial deal. She pretended to be missing and work for me while I gave her a place to live, food, and safety.
She also demanded I help her kill Gh’aliss and Yeela for the death of Bhalin. I still didn’t know if I was going to allow her to go through with it or not.
I looked over a certain experiment I was working on thanks to the smuggled chemicals and mixture of base materials gathered on the island. If this worked, then things would get really interesting.
I set a small flameless heater to cook down a portion of the product. If I was right, what would be left would be exactly what I needed. I was going off an old recipe we used back in the first war. And, if memory served me, thanks to my crappy chemistry skills, this shit went south one in three times.
“Is the first batch done?” I asked.
Twitch nodded. “Over there,” she said, pointing to a small rack drying in the corner of the room. I collected the experiment and placed it in a small container, which I slipped into a special thigh holster under my pants.
“Enjoy your time with her?” Twitch asked as she worked.
“Not now, Twitch,” I said, sitting down to the work table we’d set up for projects. Her hatred for Gh’aliss was incessant.
A hand-woven, low-tech fiber-jack was plugged into a port in her head with the other end of the lead implanted in the golem. Our own personal short-wave police scanner. Once more, her perpetual scowl was firmly etched into her young face as her hand moved of its own volition, copying anything of pertinent value.
“When? When is the right time? When you’re balls deep in that bitch? Or when you’re lording over this crap hole?”
I started skimming the handwritten logs. I let the Collective do most of the heavy lifting, parsing the information into relevant news bites for my immediate attention. Golem movements seemed to be the same, which means they weren’t aware we were piggybacking their signal.
I hoped.
Growers and Makers continued to hide items from the Brutes and overcharge the Fixers. I’d have to put a stop to that. Strange sightings of the air itself shifting and moving around inmates. Chalk that one up to Mastema’s power on account I couldn’t explain it. Occasional assaults and beatings in island neutral zones over petty bullshit. So, everything seemed to be running with relative smoothness and normalcy.
“I asked you a question,” Twitch said from her position at the table.
“And I ignored it,” I said, continuing to get my information.
Twitch grumbled as she worked. It was clear she was getting antsy for revenge. I didn’t know how much longer I could hold her off. I’d have to make a decision, and soon. Whose life did I value more? Whose trust and loyalty did I put m
y faith in? The woman who served as my watcher and live-in spy lifetimes ago, who was no doubt using me, or the woman who betrayed me to her demon lover only to later befriend me when it suited her?
It was clear both would turn on me the moment it was beneficial for them. Might as well ask how you would like to be violated, ass or mouth? A real Sophie’s Choice moment. Or maybe it wasn’t. I dunno, I never saw the movie.
“Hey Salem, you might wanna tune into this one,” Twitch said as her hand went to her ear, concentrating on the signal.
“What it is?” I asked as I started to command the Collective to open a data link, but Twitch shook her head.
“Gone now.”
“What was it?”
“Inbound helicopter,” she said.
“Nothing new,” I said, reaching for a cigarette.
“This one is coming in with royal clearance codes.”
Oh shit. I knew it was any day now. I just didn’t think it was this day. “How soon?” I asked quietly while I smoked my cigarette, the gears in my head turning, considering what yet needed to be done.
“Within an hour is my guess. They’re finishing pre-flight on the main land. Once they are loaded, transported and received, my guess it they’ll come for you within an hour at minimum.
“Salem, you good?”
“Huh? Yeah, yeah I’m good.”
“This is it, isn’t it?”
“Yeah . . . this is it.”
“Regardless of what happens, we still have our contingency plans.”
“Yeah, yeah we do. Look, Twitch, I gotta go. I have to head back.”
“I know, go get lucky one more time?”
I slammed my hand down on the table. “The fuck is your problem?! Huh?! Yeah, I am sleeping with her. Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t you playing some rough two-on-one alleyway fantasy with a couple of hellions on the night we met?!”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“Clearly I don’t,” I said.
“You have a chance to leave here. Either through the front door or by escape. And then you have a chance at living again.”
