Crysis: Escalation

by Gavin G. Smith

  He hung off the gargoyle one handed, his feet against the stone of the old building. He could see the flickering light and hear the sounds. The flashes threw grotesque shadows in their brief but repeated moments of existence. He too wanted to hunt. He wanted to hunt like a shikari, but he needed to find a place to worship the night sun. He wanted to see the sky burn again. He looked around at his brothers, sadly.

  ‘Clear!’ Hank shouted.

  ‘Not fucking here it isn’t!’ Chino shouted as he fired the last shot from the Majestic. Both he and Hank spun round, exchanging positions. Hank started firing the MMG again immediately. The machine gun’s rounds were blowing chunks out of the creatures as they leapt from desk to desk or just powered through them.

  Chino flipped out the revolver’s wheel, grabbing a speed loader with six of the huge .50 calibre explosive rounds. It was faster to reload the revolver than it was the shotgun.

  Earl let the M14 drop on its sling and fast drew the Mk. 23, already firing as he brought it up to eye level in a two-handed grip. In front of the sniper, five of the things lay dead or twitching on the ground.

  Chino watched in horror as Earl’s pistol rounds sparked off the charging Ceph’s armour. He flipped the revolver’s wheel closed. He knew he was going to be too slow as the Ceph closed with Earl. It was like it was happening in slow motion. He watched the creature raise its bone-like arm blade. Earl was still firing. Chino was raising the Majestic. The alien’s bone blade took Earl straight through the centre of his head. It shot out the back of the sniper’s skull in an explosion of bone, blood and brain matter, splattering Hank. Chino all but put the Majestic up against the soft matter on the creature’s back and pulled the trigger. The Ceph bioform hit the ground, taking Earl’s corpse down with him and battering the body into Hank.

  Chino wanted to cry, freak out, but he’d seen this before. He knew what happened when humans tried to fight these things up close and personal. They needed to be like Dane or Alcatraz if they were going to have a chance. If he wanted to live they needed to move. He couldn’t see an exit from this floor other than the one he’d come through, and yet more Ceph were gathering there. He fired the massive revolver twice and one of them went down, staggering and then stumbling out the window.

  He knew what they were now. The grunts had nicknamed them Stalkers. Fast-moving, close-in killers. But these ones looked different. Devolved somehow, feral. Purer. It seemed they had lost their ability to think tactically, but now, if anything, they were faster, and hunting like a pack, albeit one with deeply suicidal tendencies.

  Chino had a really stupid idea.

  ‘Hank, I need you to trust me and follow me!’ he shouted.

  ‘Where we going?’ Hank shouted back and then continued firing burst after burst.

  ‘Out the window. We’re going to jump to the building opposite, it’s really close,’ Chino lied. Hank didn’t answer.

  Chino ran at one of the broken full-length windows. He fired the Majestic one-handed, as he ran, at the Stalker close to the window. The first shot missed. He had a moment to reflect on the stupidity of basically charging one of these things and fired the second shot when he was practically on top of the thing. The muzzle flash illuminated its alien countenance. It staggered back but didn’t go down, swung at Chino with its bone blade. The blade tore into Chino’s arm as he left the ground, turning him slightly in the air. His blood flew out of the wound in an arc, looking black in the moonlight.

  He was in the air, jumping through the mist. He had no idea if there was a building nearby. He knew that many of the streets and alleys in Chinatown were narrow. He knew that many of the buildings were lower than the one he had jumped from and had flat roofs. And he knew that if there was no roof then the streets below him were submerged under ten feet of water. Falling through the air didn’t seem quite the calculated risk it had moments before, when he was about to get torn apart by the stalkers.

  The roof hit him hard. He screamed as he went down on his already injured leg and collapsed onto the surface of the roof, losing more skin from his arms as he slid and tumbled across it.

  He sat up and looked behind him. The building he’d just jumped from was obscured in the mist. It even distorted the constant staccato hammering of Hank’s MMG. All Chino could see was the muzzle flash from the Georgian’s weapon illuminating the mist from within whenever it fired.

  ‘C’mon man!’ Chino shouted, mostly to himself. ‘Jump, bitch!’

  He had holstered his Majestic and was sliding a shell into his shotgun when the firing stopped. He heard Hank screaming. It was getting closer. Chino saw the ex-marine appear through the mist. He impacted at chest height against the edge of the building, spitting out blood. Chino reached for him. A Stalker appeared out of the mist right behind him, flying towards them.

  Chino brought the shotgun up one-handed and fired the only round the weapon had in it. The recoil almost took his arm off. The blast caught the Stalker, spinning it in mid air. It hit the side of the building and bounced. Chino reached for Hank, who in turn was reaching for him. The second Stalker practically landed on Hank’s back. Chino let the shotgun drop on its sling and drew the Majestic. The Stalker was repeatedly stabbing Hank with its blades, holding onto him with its strangely jointed legs. Hank let go of the building. Chino moved to the edge. He saw his buddy disappear into the mist below, the Stalker still savaging him. He didn’t even hear the splash.

  Part of the building seemed to explode, throwing fragments into the air that tore into Chino’s exposed flesh on his arms and face. The heavy calibre tracers looked slow far away, but a trick of perception made them seem to accelerate the closer they got. More than one gun emplacement was targeting the roof he was on. Chino staggered to his feet and took off at a limping run, parts of the roof collapsing behind him.

  ‘Give me a break, you fuckers!’ Chino reached the other side of the roof and jumped.

  The fire was daring the lesser gods to strike him down. They didn’t. He smeared the ash on his face, covering it. Making it grey. He would become one of the dead.

  His prey hung from the partially destroyed false ceiling of the open plan office he’d found. He pushed the knife into exposed flesh and forced it down, trying to gut it like it was Earthly, though its kind had been here longer than humanity.

  The blood wasn’t a different colour to his but it was thicker somehow, more viscous. He collected it in an oversized novelty NYC mug.

  ‘Sorry, brother,’ he told his prey. ‘I need to take your spirit so I can hunt.’

  As he used the blood to make a horizontal line across the ash on his face, over his eyes, he saw them. The dead surrounded him. Those he’d seen die, those he’d killed, human, Ceph, it didn’t matter. Aztec and Jester stood at the fore. They said nothing, they just watched him.

  ‘There’s still shackles on the human spirit, brothers. Our enemy’s hiding in the same place it always has. Inside.’ They said nothing, watching him, judging him. Dane looked away first. ‘I’m waiting for the Sun King,’ he told them. He knew it wasn’t enough, though he’d seen the sky catch fire.

  Chino reflected on the training that kept him fighting against inevitability.

  He’d jumped, blindly, fallen about five storeys into water. The water had slowed him significantly but he’d still hit the street under it hard. Pain had shot through his already wounded leg and he’d all but kneed himself in the jaw.

  He found a place to lie low but he could still hear the hooting and the clicking. There was movement in the water and movement through the surrounding buildings. They were still hunting him.

  But they’re a pack, he told himself, packs are finite.

  He had dried, stripped, cleaned and reloaded the Marshall shotgun and the Majestic revolver. Then, moving as stealthily as he could, he had gone looking for a place for his last stand.

  What he’d found, tactically speaking, was a shit place for a last stand. It was surrounded on all sides by high buildings. Chino was hop
ing that the narrow street would shield him from the CELL gun emplacements.

  He slid into the water quietly. I’m the alligator, he thought inanely, overcoming the urge to giggle brought on by tension. He did the breaststroke out to the submerged delivery van. Most of it was under the water. Only the roof showed over the surface. By using this at least I have a moat, he thought. The Stalkers would have to swim to him, or jump, he thought. During the New York incursion the Stalkers had had some kind of ranged weapon. He hadn’t seen these new ones use it yet. Either they’d run out of ammunition or this purer form preferred the blades. He was banking on that. If they could engage him at range he was screwed.

  ‘Let’s get this over and done with,’ Chino muttered to himself. He lit two road flares and held them up high. They illuminated the dark, narrow, Chinatown street with their phosphorescent, flickering, red glare.

  Whatever happens tonight some other motherfuckers are dying with me, he thought.

  He looked up, searching for the moon, and howled at the broken cityscape.

  Then he waited, listened and watched.

  He heard the clicking and the hooting first. Then the sound of water gently rippling against the side of the sunken delivery van. Then the sound of blades scraping against stone. He could see them now, dark shapes in the water. Dark shapes clinging to the side of buildings, moving towards him.

  He dropped one of the road flares into the water. It spiralled down to the bottom, illuminating alien shapes moving sinuously towards the submerged delivery van.

  Chino took an M17 fragmentation grenade out of one of the pouches on his webbing. He removed the pin and let the spoon flip off. He started counting. On three-Mississippi he tossed the second flare into the water on the other side of the van. It illuminated more shapes in the water. He needed them out of the water, ballistics were for shit in liquids. On four-Mississippi he held the grenade just a bit longer. For a less than a moment he remembered playing softball in the park with his brothers and sisters in East LA during family cookouts. Then he threw.

  With less than a second left on the fuse, the grenade exploded in the air. Fragments tore into alien flesh. Concussive force battered and broke their forms, bounced them off the wall and into the water.

  Chino had turned his back and put his hand over the back of his head. Fragments imbedded themselves in his body armour and tore into his arm, but he barely felt it. The force of the explosion staggered him. He went down on one knee.

  One of them shot out of the water next to him. The barrel of the shotgun was almost touching the fleshy matter behind its jagged biosteel head and shoulder armour. He pulled the trigger. The alien flesh exploded. Chino stood up and helped the Stalker back into the water with the toe of his boot, as he worked the slide on his shotgun. He felt calm.

  Another Stalker burst out of the water at the opposite end of the van. He raised the shotgun, aimed for flesh. Shot sparked off armour as he worked the slide again. He fired. The Stalker fell back into the water. Another shot out of the water to his left. He walked at it, taking his time, aiming the shotgun. He felt its bone blade hit his armour. He shot it at point blank range. It flew backwards, the dark water engulfing it.

  One of them stabbed at him from the water, overextending itself. He stepped back, pushed the shotgun against its tentacled back hump and pulled the trigger.

  For a moment he was on top of the van on his own. He took a moment to fire four rounds at the dark shapes crawling across the sides of the nearest building. One of them fell off. Others started leaping. The shotgun was empty.

  Now it gets interesting.

  He let the shotgun drop on its sling and drew the Majestic. He was peripherally aware of the gun emplacements firing again, more than one of them. There was tracer fire raining in from multiple directions. Chunks of the buildings were being blown off. Rents were torn through concrete and brick by the heavy calibre fire, but it was inaccurate. They had no eyes on the target, not when the target was down between the buildings on a street this narrow. It was just a fireworks display. The backdrop for his death.

  It was beautiful. Yesterday he had seen the sun fall from the sky. Now it was the stars.

  One and then another landed on the roof. Chino moved at them, firing. Two shots and the first fell, the huge .50 calibre rounds exploding inside it. The second he killed with just one round. He swung on a third. Its head exploded as he raised the revolver. He didn’t have a moment to be surprised. More of them were landing on the van and climbing out of the water. After all, they were a reactive species. They’d worked out that they could get him in a rush.

  The next one he killed by putting the barrel of the big revolver against its flesh and pulling the trigger. Then something heavy and sharp hit him. Took him down onto the roof of the van. He angled the revolver up and almost broke his wrist firing the final two shots. He dropped the revolver and rolled into a crouch. Another died charging him, shot through the head by someone unseen, giving him the moment he needed to draw his large knife.

  He looked through the tech scope at the Stalkers clambering onto the roof of the sunken delivery van. He squeezed the trigger. The electromagnetic field generated by the coils shot the ten-millimetre armour piercing solid slug out of the barrel of the gauss sniper rifle at hypersonic speeds. The slug shot though the armour and then the flesh of a Stalker. It was dropping as he moved to the next target. That one fell. Then the next. Reload.

  His goat was doing well, he reflected, or at least his goat was still alive.

  Another one died before it reached him. A Stalker threw itself at Chino and he rolled with it, coming up on top. Screaming, he repeatedly stabbed at the creature with his knife. Alien blood spattered all over him. He could taste it.

  I killed one hand-to-hand he exulted, then he was torn off his victim. Chino screamed as he was lifted high into the air, a bone blade through his left arm and another through his right side.

  He was moving now. Running through the falling stars’ impacts. He was an invisible ghost. He saw his goat lifted high up into the air. He stopped and fired.

  The Stalker lifting him up collapsed under him. Chino did some screaming as the bone blades moved in his flesh. He was stuck, impaled. More of them were climbing out of the water and another landed on the roof. They towered over the ex-marine as they moved towards him.

  ‘Yeah, fuck you! I killed more of you than you killed of me!’

  He should be in agony, he knew, but there was only anger and tears of frustration. He’d fought too hard. He didn’t deserve this.

  Something landed on the roof of the submerged delivery van. The night air moved strangely behind one of the Stalkers. The Ceph stopped and seemed to shake. The bloody point of a knife appeared through its flesh. The armoured figure appeared behind it and threw the dying creature against the wall of one of the buildings that lined the narrow street. It’s like watching a demigod move amongst mortals and monsters, Chino thought.

  One of the Stalkers swung at Dane. Dane stepped back and then rammed his bloody knife into a soft part of the alien. He left the knife there. He kicked the alien, knocking it back and then drawing his Hammer II automatic, which he shot twice at point blank range. The Stalker hit the roof of the van and slid into the water.

  Chino could feel the pain now. His vision was getting hazy but it looked like Dane was fighting with his visor down. He had painted his face like a corpse and smeared blood across it. Dane turned round and grabbed a bone blade that had been thrust at him, broke the blade, and then shot the Ceph three times. Chino could see that there was something wrong with the back of Dane’s armour. It looked like it had been partially melted, somehow, and had only been able to repair some of the damage.

  Dane made the killing of the remaining Stalker look very casual.

  Chino blacked out.

  He came to with Dane’s bizarre visage leaning over him.

  ‘I’ve got to lift you off its blades. Sorry, brother, this is going to hurt.’

 
; He hadn’t lied. Chino did some screaming and then passed out.

  There was a fire. It didn’t smell good. It had the sort of acrid quality to it that came with burning man-made fibres. There was still a lot of pain. Chino was hoping he was stabilised, as he had some morphine ampules in his med kit that he was going to treat himself to.

  Even looking around was painful. He broke into a cold sweat. They were on one of the higher floors of a skyscraper somewhere in Midtown. He could see the glow of the lights from CELL’s various construction sites around the ruined city. The rest of what was left of New York was quiet and dark.

  Dane was sat around a campfire he’d made in the centre of an open plan office. There was a gutted Stalker hanging down from the ceiling. That stank as well.

  ‘The guns, they’ll see the fire, man,’ Chino managed. ‘Fucking Psycho. Where is he?’

  Dane shook his head sadly.

  ‘Psycho’s gone, man, somewhere I can’t see or reach.’ The armoured figure moved over and knelt by Chino.

  ‘I’ve bound your wounds. You’re messed up, but you’ll live.’

  ‘What happened? Where were you, man?’

  Dane looked at him as if making a decision.

  ‘I saw the sky catch fire,’ he finally told Chino.

  More crazy Lazy Dane shit, Chino thought.

  ‘The fucking Brits sold us out,’ Chino said, pained. Dane was shaking his head.

  ‘No, they were true, righteous. The sun fell to Earth. They walk with me now.’

  Chino tried to make sense of this.

  ‘Shit,’ he finally said. ‘It’s over then.’

  Dane shrugged.

  ‘Nothing’s ever over man, we just change state.’