S.T.Y.X. Humanhive

by Arthur Stone

  He could only squat, not lie down, but he continued standing, leaning against and squeezing the bars. That strange delusion his passing acquaintance with Aurelia had created was fading, but it had left deep roots. No matter what he was thinking about, his thoughts would eventually turn back to her.

  And to her words. Those five insane, sweet words uttered just to him. “Release Jupiter. You are able.”

  He yearned to release his Jupiter on her at the earliest opportunity, to kiss her again and again. But he would do anything even for just one glance, one chance at removing the mask, one fleeting touch. Here in this inescapable stone closet, though, his desires would be wet dreams at best. Apparently he did not share Sting’s ability to turn the lock with his mind and will.

  He tried, though. Moving his ears, as Reader had advised, he managed to slow the world a couple of times, but no other abilities showed up. Either the healer had been wrong, or the others would take time to manifest themselves.

  A light filled the narrow corridor which ran thirty feet down from his barred closet. It was one of the guards who was posted down in this cellar. They had taken charge of Boiler from the man who had used hard jabs of the barrel of his rifle to force him down here from the square. The old woman may have heaped praise upon him, but his kidneys weren’t feeling the love.

  The guard approached, waving his double-barreled rifle around and smiling in apparent sincerity, but Boiler sensed incoming pain and stepped back as the barrels hit the bars instead of his fingers. The wretch showed no signs of being upset at missing and cheerfully noted, “You’re quick. And Sabina’s got her eye on you. They say she opened up like a tea rose at the sight of such a handsome young man. So? Do you like her?”

  “I like you better.”

  “Hah! Someone with your face and figure worked as a model, I’m sure, and they’re all gay, aren’t they? So I suppose you do. But I doubt a date with me would go the way you want. First you have an unforgettable night with our hot Sabina. The guys say she practically licked your face right in front of us all, so she definitely likes you. Oh, cheer up. You’ve drawn the right straw! No one knows how old she is. Some even say she’s lived here since the beginning of time, since before the Egyptian desert cluster started bringing in pyramids, and so in public she appears as a mummy. She’s always been a nymphomaniac, too, as long back as anyone remembers. Just imagine how much experience she has, living here since the time of the Pharaohs! Yes, an unforgettable fucking awaits you, pretty boy She’s a bit of a pervert, though.”

  “Like you?”

  “Much worse. Just be submissive and affectionate, and don’t forget to work your tongue to the max, and you’ll escape the barbed wire ass whip she likes. She’s crazy about the sight of blood, I hear.”

  A shadow whisked behind him, and suddenly someone was in the corridor. The guard turned. “What the...”

  Without thinking about the wisdom of the move, Boiler reached through the bars of his cell, grabbed the man’s shotgun with one hand and his wrist with the other, wrenched his hand up to his shoulder, and yanked his stumbling, screaming body back towards him. Over the man’s shoulder, Boiler saw Nimbler moving towards him. The man was not running, but rather levitating in a sort of blurry circle generated by his lightning-speed legs. A moment later he was on the jailer, grabbing the man’s free hand and repeatedly jabbing him in the neck and chest, ignoring the chatterbox’s desperate screams.

  Boiler winced as the blade struck the shoulder he held, but he did not let go. The victim was writhing with an inhuman strength, trying to free himself. The fact that he had been holding the shotgun by the butt sealed his fate, preventing him from reaching the trigger.

  Nimbler dealt at least four dozen blows before the man’s body went limp. Boiler at last let his captor drop and recoiled against the cold concrete, complaining bitterly. “You just cut my fingers with a bloody knife.”

  “Don’t worry. There’s no tetanus here. No AIDS, either.”

  “Yeah, I remember, no dangerous bacteria in the Hive.”

  “Where’s the key?”

  “How should I know?”

  “And how should I?”

  “I think you’re in a better place to search for it. There’s another one wandering around here somewhere.”

  “He’s not wandering, he’s sitting in the monitor room. Er, taking a nap, rather. I’ll go look for the key. Wait here.”

  Wait here? Really?

  It was a few minutes before Nimbler returned with a ring of keys. He quickly tried one after another as he babbled excitedly. “These guys were specially picked for their two or three sensory abilities each. Bastards are scanners. Hide wherever you’d like, and they’ll find you anyway.”

  “Sensory abilities?”

  “They can detect living objects hiding behind things, and non-living objects, too, like vehicles, mines, alarm sensors—anything, really. Very useful to have on your team, especially if you’re going monster hunting.”

  Boiler’s head was spinning. “What is this group? What do they want from us?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “How should I? I just got here myself.”

  “How the fuck are you still alive, anyway? You suicidal bastard. These are the Kildings.”

  “The sect?”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know about them!”

  “I don’t, it’s just that, I encountered one of their, uh, party sites out in a meadow once.”

  “Party sites?”

  “Sacrifice sites. What do they want with the village?”

  “You said it. Sacrifice.”

  “A whole village?”

  “What’s so extraordinary about that? It wouldn’t be the first time. But Dicer overplayed his hand on this one. He should have been further west. The benefits of this spot were considerable, but the risks outweighed them.”

  At last the lock clicked, and the door creaked open. Boiler exited into the hall extending his bound hands, and Nimbler’s bloody knife cut the strip of plastic.

  “Loot that one. I’ll take the other,” the raider said. “When you’re done, move down to the end of this corridor and go right. See you there.”

  Boiler searched, untainted by disgust. He found ammo and a knife and checked to make sure the man’s shotgun was loaded, then took his jacket. Fortunately, the man had kept the garment unbuttoned, and the knife had focused on his chest and neck, so the jacket was relatively free of blood.

  Nimbler was in a room packed with cutting-edge technology. There were no bare concrete walls in here. The place was like an office where the windows had been, for some reason, covered with pictures of magnificent nature scenes. Dozens of monitors covered one of the walls. Some were off and others showed static, but many showed black and white surveillance footage.

  “This is where Dicer kept an eye on the area,” Nimbler explained. “Smoker used to be nothing but a hole in the wall place filled with, well, smokers, hence the name. Visiting the place without getting your throat cut was like winning the lottery. Stabbings, drugs, shootings, moles stealing people right from the street.

  “Fracture got the place in order, driving out the worst of its inhabitants, but then an elite broke him and the crown passed on to Dicer. He was just a merchant, a huckster, really. And now he’s given the place to the Kildings. If they hadn’t shown up, the edgers would’ve closed this place down eventually, anyway. A town filled with careless suckers on the edge of the Edge. Look, your backpack and sword are in the corner.”

  “Where’d you find them?”

  “I grabbed them while I was in Gloom’s hut, looking for you.”

  “So what did I deserve to earn this honor, you going looking for me?”

  “You’re my godson. I can’t just let you get dismembered by the jackals. Not a day passed where I didn’t remember you, believe me.”

  “Cried bitter tears?”

  “Buckets.”

  “I already said I didn’t hold it against you.�
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  “Just let me fucking redeem myself, OK?”

  “What about my gun?”

  “I didn’t see a gun. They probably took it. Even professional armies won’t pass up a good spare shotgun.”

  “Too bad. It was a good gun.”

  “You’ll find another. Or, you would, if we had a chance of escaping this place alive.”

  “Your optimism is infectious.”

  “Realism, Boiler, realism. But we’re going to try.”

  Boiler stared at the monitor watching the square. Despite the abundance of lighting in the area, the grainy black-and-white picture was very dark. But he could see the prisoners being driven into a tightly-knit bunch, surrounded by an almost perfect circle of Kildings. Some of the cultists held torches, while others still pointed weapons at the captives.

  “It looks like they’re shouting,” Boiler noticed, “saying something to the whole assembly in unison. See, their mouths are open. Does this thing have sound?”

  “If it does, I don’t know how to turn it on.”

  “Can we turn the camera so it’s looking at that black vehicle?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know the system. Don’t touch anything or you might blow the whole headquarters up. Wait, what the hell is that?”

  The sect was pounding the pavement with a pneumatic drill powered by a compressor on a cart. Frightening metal hooks, coils of cable, and massive blocks sat nearby. “It looks like they’re fixing to tie up an elephant in the middle of the square,” Nimbler ventured, confused.

  “Not an elephant. That elite they brought.”

  “What! A living elite?”

  “A fine specimen, in perfect health. Didn’t you see it? They brought it in chained up in a truck.”

  Boiler had never seen Nimbler express any emotion this strongly, never mind horror. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve never seen anything that huge, and I’ve seen a lot of things for my time.”

  “How the hell did they imprison an elite?”

  “Let’s go ask them.”

  “So they’re chopping up the pavement and installing cables to contain their elite. Quite the ceremony.”

  “They’re feeding the elite?”

  “Something like that. If not, whatever they’re doing isn’t good, I can assure you of that. We need to leave. They’ll search here last of all, but they will search here. And blow us up, whether with grenades or with the mines this whole fucking town stockpiles by the hundred. Where did they get so many, anyway? Wish I could stick Dicer’s naked ass on a fire ant hill and ask him. Anyway, I have an idea. I checked out the camera views and noticed a couple of holes in their perimeter. We’ll slip out through the barricades and beat it.”

  “The chained-up ghouls will growl at us, and the mines will growl even louder.”

  “At least we’ll have a chance. There’s no way we can survive by staying here, with those sensors wandering the place. So are you with me or not?”

  Boiler was staring at the monitor, contemplating the impending final solution for Smoker’s inhabitants. His head shook imperceptibly. “No.”

  “Looking to die, then?”

  “I’ve got some business here to take care of.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not going to wait around forever, Boiler.”

  “Go, then. Thank you, Nimbler. You saved my ass, and I won’t forget it.”

  “Sure you will. They’ll shoot your memory dead. What fucking business could you have left in this hellhole, Boiler?”

  “Spoiling their sacrifice.”

  “That’s crazy talk. At least sixty prowling around, if not more.”

  “I’m serious. Go without me, and hurry. Things are about to get hot.”

  Nimbler’s astonishment refused to abate. “Crazy fucking godsons.”

  “Oh, wait, Nimbler—do you know where I can find some mines? You said they were everywhere, but where?”

  “Towards Gloom’s. Third house down. No one lives there, but the building has a basement. They’ve probably already broken the locks to make sure no one was hiding in there. The Kildings wouldn’t mind swiping some mines, either.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This is my final offer, Boiler. It’s a small chance, but at least it’s a chance. Stop this shitheaded suicidal hero nonsense and come with me. Heroes don’t last long in the Hive.”

  “Heroes don’t last long anywhere.”

  “Bingo! Now that’s the sensible Boiler talking.”

  “That’s why I’m not about to be a hero.”

  “So you’ve come to. Let’s go.”

  “We can leave this building together, but then we part ways.”

  “Goddammit. Well, it’s your head, and I suppose you have the right to lose it. I’ll take you to the mine storeroom, then we’ll split up.”

  Chapter 32

  The mines were not very heavy, but one design flaw severely limited their use cases: they were impossible to carry comfortably. One mine could be carried with two hands, but then there was no way to carry a gun. And Boiler was still in nothing but boxers since his rude awakening, plus the jacket and undersized sneakers he had looted from the guard, so he didn’t have much belt space to hang anything on. The dead Kilding’s jacket had pockets, but they were woefully small, lacking the space needed to carry any weapons. The guard’s pants, meanwhile, had been stained clean through with shit and blood. Boiler thought about grabbing his stuff from Gloom’s, but every extra foot he walked meant higher chances of encountering a search team.

  His level of dignity in death mattered little to him. Dying in boxers and a blood-stained jacket wouldn’t be so bad.

  He would die, little doubt about that. The plan concocted in his mind was worse than suicidal, for no ordinary human could escape the jaws of an elite.

  But he had promised someone he would do this. Not verbally, but promised nonetheless. Perhaps he was truly going insane, or perhaps that sorceress Aurelia had some unfathomable pull on his mind, a beautiful narcotic that forbade his withdrawal from her plea.

  It was the first deadly addiction he had ever wanted to keep.

  The truck holding Jupiter was a full five hundred feet away from the square. To appease the beast’s hatred, the only source of the profane bright lights were in the distance, the headlights illuminating the center of town. Boiler had to make his way through the alleys. Whoever was in the cab of that truck would notice the direct approach of a man in boxers and a bloody jacket.

  The oversized oyster sensed the human’s approach and groaned loudly through its muzzle. Jerking and jingling its chains, its whole body surged forward, yearning for a taste of elusive Boiler meat. But the man stopped a few steps out of reach, placed his shotgun on the ground, pulled out his sword from the slit he had crafted in his jacket, pressed the mine against his chest, and pronounced the beast’s fate.

  “This bomb can take out a tank, buddy. I doubt you’ll even leave a stain. Come on then, eat me and we’ll die together.

  He took a step. And then another. Jupiter was hardly the stupidest of beasts, but he failed to understand how ridiculous the half-naked man’s threats were. For the mine to trigger, Boiler would have had to impart a crushing force to its surface. The mine was designed to be triggered by tanks, after all, not two-legged string beans. Even if he could impart such force, though, nothing would happen. He had failed to find a fuse, meaning this bomb was as harmful as a game piece from a Risk set.

  It looked dangerous, though, and Boiler’s acting talent was impressive. Perhaps this beast could recall memories from his old life, or even from his new, demonstrating that these small fragile beings were capable of very sophisticated traps and tricks. Boiler had staked his plan on this unlikely assumption.

  It worked. Jupiter rattled his chains but made no haste to meet the man, instead backing away in an attempt to stay as far as possible from the suicidal maniac in his half-bloody, half-immodest serial killer outfit.
Boiler pressed on.

  “This will kill me, too, but I’m as good as dead anyway. The village is surrounded. So how about I kill us both? What’s that? You’re scared? Not so eager to die in the prime of life, are you? You will, my dear, if you so much as step in the wrong direction. So be a good boy. You know, I’ll even free you from your chains and let you eat whoever you want, if you just listen to me.”

  He saw that the beast was bound by more than its chains. Thick black cables led to copper bracelets around its legs. They appeared to zap the elite with high voltage if it misbehaved.

  Crazy cult or not, the group had indeed equipped this truck to securely transport an elite. Most of its old frame had been dismantled and replaced with sturdy, welded steel built to hold the chains. The fetters reached to a winching mechanism at the back of the cab, a way to increase or decrease the creature’s freedom of movement. A mysterious long box hung in the same area, with wires protruding from it in all directions. Boiler guessed it was the battery pack for the electric shock system.

  He quickly determined that the steel shackles on the creature’s legs and hands could not be removed. They were riveted firmly in place. But Aurelia must have given him the key for a reason. It must open something.

  Never tearing his intense gaze away from the partially subdued Jupiter, Boiler reached the mechanism and located a massive padlock holding the winch in place. Unsurprisingly, the key fit the lock, and turned without resistance. This entire sequence took less than a minute, but he had to be careful not to make enough noise to give himself away. Someone was stationed inside the cab. Jupiter was also a threat, of course, still staring at the bottomless man, panting through the drool flowing out from his muzzle. He was waiting for his opportunity to reduce the lunatic to yet another pile of gnawed bones.

  Boiler stepped away from the cabin and approached the beast. Jupiter backed away, and the winch mechanism squealed its cry of freedom as the cables holding the beast gave up their ground. Jupiter realized that he was free to move and yanked at his bonds with conscious effort, his chained paws moving with shocking dexterity.

  The door of the cab flew outwards, and the driver followed. His eyes had not adjusted to the darkness, but he had heard the alarming creaking noise. A powerful lantern revealed Jupiter’s self-liberation, flanked now by dozens of feet of unraveling chains.