NANO Archive 01: The City of Fire

by Jason Crutchfield

  The effects of hyperaugmentation are indisputably observable from contraction all the way to their more terminal stages. To assume that the government was unaware that their experimentally augmented soldiers suffered from those effects would be to assume they somehow missed the rabid mouth foam, rapid twitching, and, oh yes, the gratuitous number of black spirals overtaking their otherwise bloodshot eyeballs.

  No, it was far more likely that a particular batch of soldiers subjected to novel experimentation were classified as failures due to hyperaugmentation; with the introduction of strange static voices in their heads, uncontrollable bouts of inexplicable rage, and unfettered desire to remove the limbs of anything moving, our government simply could not use them in the field. At least, not in any normal deployment. But if anything could be said of our government after squirming through several crippling economic depressions, it would be its newfound obsessive tendencies with maintaining monetary efficiency.

  In all likelihood, the big wigs and movers and shakers knew the madness afflicting their volatile but costly super soldiers was uncontrollable. But what if, I'm sure they pondered, they could simply direct that madness and receive desired results? Thus, the hyped descended upon Yordleton; one could say they were released as animals rather than deployed as soldiers.

  With monstrous efficiency, the American soldiers annihilated the trespassing attack force. I stress the word monstrous over the word efficiency, because the invaders' terrified screams and grotesque howls resembled something from a cheesy horror film. I could scarce differentiate the echo of the pounding rain from the splattering sounds of gore painting the town. In the end, the aggressors' demise was unable to slake the psychosis-driven bloodlust of our army, and they inevitably turned their rancor on the very town which they were sent to protect.

  That night, many families shared my sorrow, forced to watch the people they loved ripped apart by the hands of our stalwart defenders dressed in familiar uniforms which, in the past, inspired feelings of relief and security. The citizens' hellish cries drowned the roaring thunder, and the metallic stench of freshly spilled blood mixed with the aroma of rainfall covering the wet landscape like a pungent spring stew. It was a conjoined, city-wide nightmare from which there was no awakening.

  On my hands and knees inside the closet, hours passed with nothing but the small slit of light from the cracked doorway illuminating my face. Still in shock, it felt like decades since I last blinked or breathed; I feared either of those things would make enough noise to attract the beasts still rummaging about the prison I once considered home. I don't remember at what point I recognized the small piece of a long, familiar rectangular box poking from the top shelf in the closet, nor do I remember standing on my tip toes to drag it down. But I do remember my trembling hands fumbling with the lid and removing my father's old hunting rifle.

  Several engravings ran down the length of the bolt-action rifle's metal body and across its wooden stock. None of them mattered. The only thing that mattered was steadying my shaking limbs long enough to load the thing. It felt like an earthquake racked my entire body, and as I struggled to work the chamber the way I had seen my father do it countless times before, it prematurely snapped down on my fingertip, forcing a whimper from my lips. I immediately regretted my clumsiness.

  The growling racket marking the tirade of the two crazed patriots through my house ceased upon the faint squeak from my hiding place. I froze as though I had just plunged into the freezing waters of the arctic circle. The sound of slow, methodic thumping replaced their zombie-like groans and gnashing teeth as they stomped listlessly across the wooden floor toward my hideaway. The smell of blood, that before only lingered in the air like a bad aftertaste, now assaulted my nostrils with renewed fury as they drew closer step by terrifying step. Hot tears streaked quietly down either side of my face, and my hands began working by themselves to fit a high caliber round within the chamber I had fumbled with seconds prior to garnering the monsters' attentions.

  Just as my heart reached the apex of its thunderous beats and my throat tightened in horror, the sounds of their advancement ceased. They began screaming lewdly at one another, and within seconds I heard a struggle which I presumed to be the two of them fighting. Anything that could possibly be broken within our home shattered in the cataclysmic hurricane of the two in-fighting hyped. The sound, while understandably inducing its own brand of fear, also served to relieve me at the prospect that they temporarily forgot about my existence.

  I hugged the rifle to my chest as though it were my father personified and waited. Before long, the struggle careened onto a separate battleground which I presumed was once our kitchen. What initially began as a fight eventually became a slaughter. The sounds of one of the men changed from unbridled rage to gurgling whimpers accompanied by thrashing limbs like a child throwing a tantrum over losing a board game. The two contestants of this game, however, played for keeps.

  A few moments later, a pregnant hush fell over the house. Faintly, I heard the squeaks of a swinging decoration, likely a picture frame, as it dangled from a broken string on a nearby wall. I stood and, using the tip of the rifle's barrel, pushed open the closet door. I began my slow gait into the dim light, and it struck me, then, how burdensome the weight of my father's gun felt within my shaking hands.

  Outside, the rain streamed steadily in the night, painting shadows of streaking water that danced against my face and the white nightgown adorning my small frame. I crept toward the kitchen while choking back fragile whimpers. The wooden floor creaked ever so softly, and with each step I held my breath expecting one of the brutes to lunge from the kitchen.

  I carefully stepped over the mutilated bodies of my parents. I dared not behold their expressions in the dim light, lest whatever resolve I had accumulated up to that point would be drained to despair. Instead, I focused my sights ahead on the kitchen doorway. The myriad of fallen lamps and dull light cascading from the ceiling fixture plastered a large man's shadow against the wall. As I approached, I distinctly heard guttural sobbing. Upon closer inspection, I saw the disfigured shadow hunched over in a contorted husk bobbing up and down in intervals synchronized with the mournful cries.

  Tears dripped from the sides of my cheeks in silent rivulets. As I rounded the corner into the kitchen, I saw the two soldiers amid a broken pile of wood that once served as our dining room table. One soldier, a large African American, lay flat on his back staring at the ceiling with lifeless eyes. The deep black and purple blotches around his neck indicated that his regretful comrade strangled him to death, but at the time I was too young to know and too grief-stricken to care. The other man, a Caucasian with brown hair and a broad back, slowly turned toward me with a tear stained face and bemuddled look within his spiraling black eyes.

  ‘I… what have I… what's happening to me? Help me, please… I…’ The man shook with the same ardent fear that overtook me moments ago. His face was adorned with confusion and woe, as though the entirety of the events played out before him like a bad movie without a happy ending. His voice, still tainted by the slight ravings of madness that crafted his growls and roars earlier, cracked with a sense of innocent sadness longing for the reassurance that his unforgivable crimes were not his doing but that of a foul entity somehow separated from him.

  ‘… You took them away. All of them. Everyone,’ I meekly muttered my response and slowly lifted the rifle to my shoulder like I had seen my father do in the forest surrounding our town. Since I turned thirteen he had just begun taking me with him when he hunted, and now he would never take me again. I would never run back to the house with rabbits in tow to the mixed look of amusement and disgust on my mother's face at the prospect that such manly endeavors tainted her little lady. I would never hear their laughter again. I would never see their smiles. Even as I stood with the rifle aimed at the confused soldier's face, I tried to remember those happy faces. Instead, I saw only their visa
ges frozen in horror.

  ‘Wait, little girl… please, I don't know what happened… please calm down, I'm so sorry… I need help.’ The man slowly stretched his hand toward me. Help? He needed help? The same man who helped himself to my mother with wild abandon? Yet he sat there on his knees daring to ask me for help? Something snapped in me, then.

  I felt the color drain from my face and the sparkle of innocent youth fade from my eyes. My body, once vibrating with uncontrollable fear and confusion, steadied into an incorruptible calm. A long, deep exhale flowed from my lips as I squeezed the trigger. The resulting cacophonous kaboom simultaneously sent our bodies in opposite directions. The surprise on the soldier's face lasted only a moment before the bullet's impact catapulted him back to join his friend in the pile of debris. The soldier's face splattered into a scarlet mess that sent his body into post mortem convulsions.

  The rifle shot launched me in the opposite direction against a countertop, coincidentally upon which sat a wooden contraption responsible for housing an assortment of long, sharp kitchen knives. The combined force of the rifle's recoil and my resulting impact against the counter shattered my shoulder, and I promptly slumped to a seat on the mahogany floor. My reverberating thud against the counter toppled the knives' sanctuary, but as two blades found new sheathes, one in my right thigh the other in my left bicep, I noticed a growing apathy spring to life within me.

  My shadow danced and flickered on the floor with the changing light as the ceiling fixture chaotically wobbled. I felt nothing for the corpses on the ground, nor did I respond to the aching nerves in my body warning me of the hazards of the two knives impaling my figure. And I could not have cared less about the throbbing in my broken shoulder.

  Instead, I found myself slowly rising to my feet. My entire body tingled with latent anticipation as I dragged the muzzle of my father's rifle behind me and walked toward the door. I could still hear the distant cries of agony and pleas for help from my neighbors over the scrape of the weapon's metal tip against the wooden floor. Though their volume and frequency declined with each passing second, they were still there. As I gripped the knob of my front door, I felt my broken bone crunch back into place as Panacea went to work. Those same nanites slowly pushed the knives from my wounds like a splinter's natural ejection from the flesh.

  When I finally swung the door open, I stood as an ominous figure in the dim light. Fires had sprung from all corners of the city consuming everything they touched. The dim orange glow roared and hissed as the clouds desperately dumped their water from the heavens as though consciously trying to quell the flames. Despite the graphic scene from the bowels of hell into which my town steadily descended, I remained unfeeling. As though a part of me had broken when I fired that shot in the kitchen. While the images of my happy memories burned up like the houses in front of me casting a tingling chill of dread down the length of my spine, it was also strangely liberating like each memory was a chain wrenching itself loose from my heart.

  I never blinked, but for some reason the involuntary stream of tears relentlessly poured from my jaded eyes anyway. The scene in front of me elicited no emotion. Even as several crazed shadows I assumed were hyped soldiers pounded at lifeless hunks of meat I assumed were my fellow townsmen, I felt serene. In fact, despite their madness as their attention slowly lifted with gaping anticipation at the prospect of new prey, a look of bewilderment struck them. While my matted hair and the shadow of night cast darkness across my face, the occasional illuminating bolt of lightning revealed my unmoving expression to them; I wore a twisted smile.

  I knew I would die, but I did not care. I knew I would only be able to shoot one or two of them before they overwhelmed me, but I did not care. As they hunched over and prepared to charge with ferocious growls and hungry glares, I lifted my father's rifle, my rifle, to my shoulder. I decided that the first to move would be the first blown apart, and afterward I would resign myself to whatever fate decided. As it turned out, fate had something far different in mind than I did.

  Before the first lunatic lunged, enthusiastic sounds of hooting and cawing exploded from a hillside near my obliterated home. The revving of several engines and grinding of tires propelled three jeeps through the sky over the side of said hill. The vehicles drew my attention and snapped me from my morbid staring contest with the hyped soldiers. The jeeps traveled in a spearhead fashion; their glaring headlights evoked hisses from the enraged hyped, who lifted their arms to shield their eyes.

  The point jeep in their spearhead assortment fish-tailed into a group of soldiers and stopped directly in front of me. I watched the spray of blood and limbs with a mild numbness that steadily faded from my shattered young spirit in lieu of hope. The vehicle's driver was a large, black muscled man with a gruff face and scruffy beard. A cigar perched between his lips ended in a dull red ember from which curls of smoke rose through the spits of rain still dotting the landscape with far less fervor than the earlier storm. The other three passengers arrayed the jeep with simulated organization. Of all the members of all three vehicles, only one man stood in the back with an automatic weapon.

  That figure radiated authority despite the slender cut of his frame. Long, wavy brown hair framed a chiseled face, and despite the thin manner by which he was designed, his form was carved with enviable, sleek muscles. An aura of absolute confidence emanated from his hazel eyes. Extraordinarily young, I would later find out that, at that point in time, he was twenty-three years old, yet the entire squadron obeyed his commands without hesitation. Charismatic, strong, and commanding, he looked like a pillar on which his men leaned.

  ‘Bradich, sir, looks like we got here too late,’ one of the men barked and hopped down from the shotgun seat next to the older gentleman smoking the cigar. I watched as he casually strolled to one of the staggering hyped and promptly smashed his face in with the stock of his semi-automatic rifle.

  ‘A shame. I can only hope the spirits of those that died forgive our tardiness. Take 'em out, boys.’ The man they called Bradich lifted a hand in a sweeping motion and the night sky lit up with the fire cracking sounds of automatic fire. The hyped soldiers screamed out in near unison as a hail of gunfire mowed them down like dysfunctional cattle. It was not long before one of the executioners noticed me.

  ‘Uh oh, boss, looks like we have a survivor. She's a young one, too. About twelve, maybe thirteen.’ A flashlight on the man's helmet blinded me to details, yet it also served as a catalyst that snapped me from my numb stupor altogether. I dropped to my knees, still clutching my rifle, and began to sob.

  ‘Yikes! Whoa, hey, stop that. Boss! She's crying, and she won't stop!’ The man looked over toward their leader who sauntered up to me with the background noise of heavy machine gun fire rattling the night air.

  ‘… Sorry child, we ran into traffic.’ His heartless answer should have angered me, but instead I just kept crying like the small child I was.

  ‘Do you want to stay here or come with us? Although I'd venture to say there's not much for you here,’ he looked around at the ruins once called Yordleton. I followed his gaze before my eyes came back to rest on his frame. He stood over me with his hand extended as though if I would only take it, my world would fill with color once more.

  ‘Are you serious, boss!? She's like thirteen! And what are we supposed to do with her anyway? You can't be…’ The goon's voice trailed off as I reached up and took Bradich's hand. At thirteen years old, I watched my parents die; at thirteen years old, I shed my innocence by taking my first life; and at thirteen years old, I became the youngest member of Bradich's run-and-gun mercenary group, The Bald Eagles.

  Adjusting to life as a mercenary was rough at first. The shock of my parents' deaths and the grief of losing my home heavily weighed upon me in the early days traveling with the Eagles. Even in my sorrow, however, I learned much about the colorful people who became my new family. As I grew accustomed to my new li
fe among the rough elements of the mercenary group, I found my place in the hearts of the band of misfits. Within a year, my unspoken adoption became as unshakeable as my blood ties with my late parents.

  Bradich himself favored the use of twin daggers for all his melee needs, and it was Bradich himself that trained me to use mine. But after seeing my attachment to my father's rifle, Bradich introduced me to Larz who trained me in marksmanship for the next several years. Between the two of us, our sniping nests became legends told to our enemies to scare them into staying awake on watch. Ultimately, I would end up replacing Larz as the company's sole sniper when he met an unfortunate demise at the hands of an enemy marksman. Another gray day full of rain and tears, that one, but I was more prepared than when my parents were snatched from me by the maw of the Reaper, so I feel the process was healthier when we lost Larz.

  Every day a new adventure shaded my life with a different color. Slowly the shell of icy trauma that took hold of my young soul cracked away, and I returned to an image of my former self. The Bald Eagles became my family; their nuances and habits peppered my life with a combination of excitement and familiarity. Though at first I was ill-received among the hardened mercenaries, their days raising me as a group strengthened the bonds we all shared on and off the battlefield. When our members died, we grieved together. When we emerged victorious and collected our bounties, we celebrated together.

  Everyone, that is, except Bradich. I saw little of him during the majority of my time as a mercenary. He spent most of his time alone or with contacts preparing the next job. We worked almost exclusively for our own country, at best deviating only to take on the odd jobs from her allies. The government and military cared little for mercenaries like us, making us ideal squads to send into one-way missions. We preferred it that way, not having to worry about anything but our objective and one another.

  The few times Bradich joined us in merriment or around the occasional campfire, I found him most pleasant and understood why the men surrounding him would die if he told them it was for the group's best interests. No matter what events transpired, the minute Bradich entered the group all attention swarmed to him as though he was a dazzling jewel cast among rubbish. I remember, one time, he tried to convince us that a ‘bald eagle’ was a bird that once served as our great country's mascot; riotous laughter erupted throughout the camp. First, the concept of a bird being bald reminded me more of dinner than something alive; second, why in the world would a featherless bird represent one of the greatest world powers?