Beloved Weapon

by Jonathan A. Price

  “My fault? It’s my fault you work for a crime lord who hands out gunshots instead of pink slips when his employees screw up? Ain’t that why your boy Billy’s not around anymore?”

  Chelsea wiped her eyes again. “If you didn’t go to my daddy’s lab that night, it never would have happened. He would still be alive!”

  “Cry me a river, build a bridge and get over it,” Nia said as she shrugged and looked around the room. “Well, let’s see. Hudson’s done, these goons are down…”

  The Security Soldiers started to get back up. Nia frowned.

  “I’m getting so tired of beating up these things…”

  They assumed fighting stances again, produced the stun rods again…

  And then they collapsed again, this time like corpses.

  Both Nia and Chelsea looked dumbfounded as a voice filled the air over the public address system.

  “Nia, it’s Vincent. I’ve done it. I ran a failsafe code through the entire Security Soldier network. Their circuits are fried for good. They won’t be getting back up. I’m on my way up there…but you’ve got the only good key so it might be a while.”

  “Take your time,” Nia said with a smile, even though she knew Vincent couldn’t hear her. “So, like I was saying, I’m pretty much done here. Just one more loose end.”

  She looked toward the floor and saw her father, still sedated and trembling, shackled and unable to move.

  She scoffed. “How the mighty have fallen.”

  Alexander struggled to crane his neck toward his daughter, and his lips started trembling.

  “Oh, now you want to talk rational, pop?” Nia said with a giggle. “I don’t even care anymore. Hudson’s down and out and Vincent stopped the robots. I think I’m going to let Miss Chelsea over there do whatever she wants to you. Because you know, if it is my fault her father’s dead, I figure, she can just have mine. How’s that for a ‘right way to do wrong’? Punk-ass.”

  “N-Nia…” Alexander stammered.

  “What? You got something to say? Say it quick because I’m about to be out.”

  “Behind…”

  Nia gasped and spun around, just in time to duck a particle beam blast from across the room. It cut clear through the double doors of the penthouse and left a smoldering hole.

  Nia rolled and caught herself, looking toward Chelsea. She was holding the Crasher rifle, the same one that Billy Casey used against her, Alexander and Jesús earlier, complete with the damaged chassis from Nia’s gunshot.

  “Girlfriend, you better think about what you’re doing,” Nia said. “The only reason you’re alive right now is because I didn’t think you were a threat. You do not want to fuck with me. You seen what I did to all your little soldiers and all your little weapons and your boss. Think about it.”

  “There is, like, no way I’m gonna just let you walk out of here after what you’ve done,” Chelsea wailed, her eyes flickering with tears, her voice cracking. “You’re so lucky you disabled the targeting system when you shot it before; you’d totally be dead otherwise. But that’s okay! Like, where there’s a will…”

  She fired again and again, forcing Nia to bound out of the way as the beam scorched the walls and the floors and the statues. Chelsea walked forward, holding the massive weapon in both hands and firing with reckless abandon.

  “The Crasher never runs out of ammo! It never needs to be reloaded! The battery lasts for hours! You can’t keep this up forever!”

  Nia took cover behind a statue and raised a pistol.

  She’s actually right about that. I’m getting kind of tired. If Vincent thinks this bitch is so sweet and innocent, he must not know her all that well. It won’t take much for me to take her out. One bullet and that’s it. But I don’t feel right about this. She’s not evil. She’s just angry. She’s doing this because she feels like she has to. Revenge, that’s all that is.

  “Come on out!” Chelsea screamed. “Like, you know you deserve this! You’ll get to be with Alvarez! Your life is totally worthless anyway!”

  Nia grimaced. She sprung from behind the statue and leapt toward Chelsea. Chelsea aimed and fired again, but Nia ducked the shot. She continued to swerve and sway, closing the gap between them.

  Before Chelsea realized what was happening, Nia rose up from directly below her, wrapped one arm around the Crasher and raised the other—with a Baby Eagle barrel pressing into her throat.

  Their eyes met.

  Nia flexed her arm around Chelsea’s weapon until she started crushing it in her grasp. Sparks sputtered out of the mangled gun and Nia forced it out of Chelsea’s hand. It clanged on the floor like a bent tire rim.

  Chelsea forced a swallow past the lump the gun barrel made in her throat. She never looked away. Tears didn’t even well up in her bright green eyes. Her face grew a furious red as she furrowed her brow, pursed her lips and just stared.

  Nia looked calm…and sad.

  “What are you doing this for?”

  “Don’t talk to me. Just shoot,” Chelsea grunted. “You won. You got me, okay? One more notch on your belt.”

  “Ain’t you ever asked yourself why you’re alive?” Nia said. “You said my life is worthless. My dad said that too. Bobby even said something like that. I’m up in here because I’m trying to prove everybody wrong, everybody who ever said that about me. But you…working for Hudson, even after he did what he did to your father, even how he treats his loyal people…he even got you up in here fighting me yourself. You’re the one acting like you don’t care about your life.”

  “Don’t lecture me! Don’t you want to kill me? Just do it! I’ve got nothing without Mr. H anyway…”

  “I never wanted to kill you,” Nia sighed. “But you brought this on yourself. If you could have given me a straight answer, I might have let you go. But you’re just another one of Hudson’s slaves after all, and you ain’t even got a chip in your head…just one on your shoulder. I’m sorry…but I’m done being worried about watching my back.”

  Chelsea took a deep breath, then closed her eyes. Tears began to escape her eyes.

  Nia slid her finger around the trigger.

  Then a massive hand yanked Nia’s forearm to the sky. A bullet struck the ceiling and echoed in the air.

  Nia and Chelsea looked up and gasped at the same time.

  A large man was looming over them, tightly holding Nia’s arm, his fist like a clamp. Then Nia saw the world spin around her as she found herself torn from the floor and hurled across the room!

  She crashed into the reflective doors, the force of her body shattering them completely.

  Satisfied for the moment, the man looked toward his head of Research and Development.

  “Dr. Romedrux,” Maxwell Hudson said, peeling Nia’s flattened bullets from off his unharmed forehead. “You may take the rest of the day off. I shall attend to our guests personally.”

  Thirty-Nine

  Nia Black pushed herself from the floor, struggling to recover as Chelsea Romedrux hurriedly trotted by. Chelsea glanced at Nia, and at her shackled father Alexander, before disappearing from the penthouse.

  The doors closed behind her as Maxwell Hudson took off his suit jacket.

  “Alpha and Omega…the beginning and the end,” said Hudson. “I was always certain I would get one or the other. I never imagined I would have both of you here.”

  Hudson glanced at Alexander, who was forcing himself to sit up.

  “Ah…I suppose the sedative is starting to wear off. Well, we can’t have that.”

  Hudson picked up one of the jet injectors dropped by the Security Soldiers. He immediately slammed his loafer-clad heel on Alexander’s head, forced him to the floor and squeezed the trigger as hard as he could, injecting the entirety of sedative in its chamber directly into his neck.

  “There, that should do it.”

  Alexander slumped back down to the floor and ceased moving.

  “How…” Nia Black coughed out. “H-how the hell are you still alive? I p
ut three bullets in your head.”

  “Remember my experimental bio-weapon projects, ‘Gunner’ and ‘Armstrong’, Miss Black?” Hudson took off his glasses, revealing his burgundy eyes. “Before I tried my weaponization procedures on them, before I had the resources to do so, I decided to use myself as a guinea pig. As you can see, I became a success by taking the greatest risk of all, and it has benefited me spectacularly.”

  Nia finally rose to her feet. “It doesn’t even matter. Your army is shut down. You went and killed all your regular people, replaced them with those zombies, and now you ain’t even got them. You’re through.”

  Hudson chuckled. “Indeed? You may have disabled the existing Soldiers, but the data that created them still exists. I need only start acquiring new subjects. And as soon as I’m through with you, it will be back to business as usual.”

  “What’s the point of all this? Why would you take the people who work for you and turn them into weapons?”

  Hudson turned his back and looked out the window-wall. “Tell me, Miss Black. What do you think is a soldier’s greatest weakness?”

  Nia wanted to shoot Hudson in the back, but remembered it was useless, no more effective a use of ammo than firing at a brick wall.

  Hudson went on. “As the head of a defense technology firm, I have seen much of the military. Armies around the world train their soldiers to fight, watch the backs of their fellow men, and survive at all costs. They continuously try to create modern means of training new generations of soldiers to make them more efficient.”

  “Yeah? So what?”

  “No amount of training guarantees absolute discipline. No matter how well-designed the weapon in their hands, the will of the soldier is always a liability. No matter how well they’re trained, eventually a weak-willed soldier will defect. He will start to doubt his conviction or his patriotism. He will want to run from his duty. One soldier’s accidental friendly fire can end the life of another, give away a position, and compromise an entire operation. Wartime suicides continue to occur, unabated, and far too many lives—too many skirmishes—are lost. The weakness, Miss Black, is free will. Remove that liability and a soldier becomes unstoppable.”

  “So you just trying to control everybody, huh?”

  “There has never been a guaranteed way to ensure a soldier’s perfect obedience and discipline, never a means to completely eliminate human error, until now.”

  “By making soldiers into robots,” Nia grunted.

  “A crude term, but accurate enough. The idea is simple. By planting control chips in the central cortex of the brain, we can use electronic signals to suppress independent thought, enabling the Security Soldiers to focus solely on their mission by receiving commands from a remote location. You’ve already seen how efficient they are. We only need to improve their physical prowess.”

  “And that’s what you need my dad for,” Nia grumbled.

  Hudson turned back around. “Precisely. When your father escaped me so long ago, I left him a message he would never forget…a message for you as well. Yes, Nia Black. I ordered the death of your mother, Shauntee Lawson. I did this because I wanted to make sure at least one of you came for me eventually.”

  “One of us…? Then, you knew? You knew about me the whole time?!”

  “Of course. I personally led the Hercules project. I knew its mutagenic properties. I only needed the right host, the right biological makeup that could produce the powered offspring. There were many failures, but only one…or rather, two, successes. That is why I named the formula Hercules in the first place; it was designed to create super-powered offspring like the mythological demigod.”

  Nia looked at her own hands, her own body, disgusted by the thought that everything she was, everything that defined her—was planned, designed, orchestrated by the man she despised most.

  “You were my backup plan, Miss Black…my Omega. Now that I have my property back, my Alpha, I can pick up where I left off. I will study your father’s DNA closely, with modern technology. I will finally learn why Hercules only affected him. Then I will redesign it so it will work on all of my Security Soldiers. The next step…to sell the services of my perfected Soldiers to the highest bidders around the world. Terrorists…rebels…it’s all the same to me as long as they pay.”

  “You’re crazy…” Nia gasped. “You’re fucking crazy. These are people. People with lives. What if they don’t want to be Soldiers anymore? What if they want to stop serving?”

  “Through my Security Soldiers, I will control the ultimate private military corporation,” Hudson bellowed, ignoring her outburst. “I will decide the outcomes of the world’s conflicts. In time, Corp Hudson will control everything. But first…”

  Hudson started walking toward Nia.

  “I no longer have need of you, Miss Black.”

  “So, what you’re saying is…I’m worthless?”

  “Understand. The entire reason you exist was an experiment. You were allowed to live only for me to see what Hercules would do to a body when it’s part of your natural chemistry from birth. This was only because I thought your father was lost. You hate your father for leaving you, but if he hadn’t, you would have been dead years ago. You were a substitute, a hypothesis that worked out. Now, the source of the original phenomenon is here. I have no need of a substitute anymore, especially one that would defy me. Accept the truth of your life. You serve no purpose to anyone. You have no meaning. You should want to die.”

  Nia flashed teeth. She raised both her Baby Eagles and opened fire, emptying the clips into Maxwell Hudson’s chest. He stumbled and staggered back, but stood his ground.

  Hudson took hold of the collar of his dress shirt, shredded and perforated from Nia’s gunshots, and tore it away from his torso. The bullets sat flattened on his broad chest. Aside from burn marks, he was unscathed. Hudson swept the bullets off like they were pieces of paper stuck to his skin.

  Nia kept pulling her triggers, then the guns clicked.

  “Let me tell you something,” Nia grunted, tossing her guns away. “I’ve been beat up, insulted, played, shot, stabbed and told over and over that I was worthless. But I’m up here, here and now, standing on my own two feet, here because I want to be here. I’m not like that dumb-ass laying on the floor who walked into your trap. My pop’s getting old, Hudson. He’s slipping. Meanwhile, I’m getting stronger. I just figured it out. My dad, he’s the one that’s a substitute. He’s the artificial one. I was born with it. I’m the real deal!”

  “Is that a fact? Then by all means, show me. Show me what you’re worth, Target Omega,” Hudson cracked his knuckles.

  Nia inhaled sharply. She wiggled her fingers, formed fists, and shook her shoulders.

  Running toward Hudson, Nia leaped in the air, stretching her knee toward his belly, her movements a blur.

  Maxwell Hudson calmly opened his left hand and outstretched his arm.

  Nia froze in the air with a thump.

  Her face landed in his palm, her knee falling far short of his body, her legs dangling like loose threads.

  Hudson looked back upon the little woman in his grip with condescending eyes. He inhaled, raised his arm and hurled Nia away.

  Nia flew through the air until her back crashed into one of the pedestals, hitting it so hard the stone knight standing on it fell off and shattered on the carpet only inches away from her.

  Nia clutched her torso when she felt a shooting pain in her side. One of her ribs was cracked.

  Hudson walked toward Nia, his shadow looming over her like a colossus, his footsteps shaking the floor.

  Nia rolled over and tried to push herself up, but Hudson took hold of her ankle, scraped her off the floor, swung her by the leg and tossed her into a window-wall, her back crashing into the Plexiglas as the whole room seemed to shake.

  Nia rolled to the floor and coughed blood.

  She forced herself to her feet again, defying the pain racing through her body, and ran toward Hudson. Hudson reach
ed for her as she closed in, but Nia reacted this time. She knocked his hand aside with an elbow and followed up with a roundhouse kick, slamming her heel into his belly.

  Hudson stumbled back with a sigh. “As I was saying—eh?”

  He appeared to choke for a moment. He pressed his fingers to his lip and raised his hand to examine it. Blood.

  Hudson smiled.

  “That was quite a blow, Miss Black. That means you must be getting there. A little more.”

  He took hold of Nia’s torso faster than she could blink. Hudson clawed her abdomen in both hands and lifted her in the air.

  “So small…” he muttered before swinging his body backward, smashing Nia through his desk headfirst!

  Nia risibly tumbled and landed prone on the carpet, laying in a pile of wood and metal shards. She stared as the upside-down Hudson walked toward her again, raising his foot.

  He thrust his heel into her face, the floor rumbling underneath her skull.

  “I was actually expecting a workout,” Hudson sighed. “But all I’ve gotten out of this is a need for new furniture. Pity. You said you were superior to your father’s strength. I disagree.”

  He smashed his foot into Nia’s face again.

  And again. And again.

  Blood shot out from her mouth and nose like fireworks with every thunderous stomp. The world shook around her, her head throbbing as Hudson’s foot pounded her head like a drum.

  Hudson raised his foot one more time and barreled it down. Then Nia jutted her hand up, caught his shoe in her tiny palm, and swung her arm, sending Hudson stumbling backward.

  She sprung to her feet and wiped the blood from her mouth, staring at Hudson with, dilated pupils, blind rage written all over her face. Her muscles were larger, pushing the seams of her clothes to the limit.

  Hudson regained his balance and smiled.

  “Ah, there it is.”

  Nia seethed through her teeth and stormed toward Maxwell Hudson, slammed her fists into his chest, leaped and kicked his belly, swirled around and slammed her knees into his sides.