A loitering toe tripped me. I fell face first. My nose caught me and it didn’t do it well. I rolled and groaned but couldn’t even hear that.
A mud cracked face suddenly wary asked, “What’s wrong brat?” that peeling feeling flicked the switch again. Clarity snapped my gaze to her gun metal grey eyes. It shocked her enough to reef backwards but she was slow and clumsy.
My little claws were smaller than my brain said they should be and I wondered at the sentiment just as I wondered at the ears in my grip as they began to bleed at the seams.
A little tear, a lot of bucking and squealing. I was being heaved and shaken sideways again and again but I wouldn’t falter. I clung to my prey. Rage, such as I had never known fuelled me further, goaded me to claw and peel.
The noise became deafening, high pitched, and as close as I kept it, my own ear drums perforated. After the pop blissful silence throbbed. Red dripped onto my nose, my lips and chin.
The soldier above me sobbed with a fear she’d never experienced. I saw from her end a creature, bony and deranged, setting her world view of human beings unhinged.
Warm hands suddenly smacked on top op my forehead. Intersected fingers pulled my head back even as I geared up to eat. The woman squealed again and I made another effort to strain forward.
The strength behind me struggled. It was almost evenly matched and I had scattered impulsive needs roaring at me. I gained headway even as the ears began to tear in earnest but as I re gripped the slippery things I was violated.
I fell back onto heat as my entire consciousness was bulldozed through razor wire and captured. It ran, it hid, it struggled. It did not matter. I was violently stolen from myself.
Deli Honey, he gasped. Feel me. Feel me. Only me.
Let me go! I cried. I was suffocating. Couldn’t he see that?
Rage tried to dig into me again as I was punched square in my squashed nose but I could not move. I could clearly see the wide leg stance as my prey prepared to boot me in the ribs.
Her foot never reached its mark.
Clarity returned with Ava and Troy’s horror as they controlled the ear-less harpy above me, almost ignoring the woman as they peered into me.
Suddenly the warmth under me became humidified breaths, panting. Inside I was curled into a forced foetal position. His weight far surpassed anything physical.
You cant let them in Delilah. You cant lose yourself to them. Stay with me.
Please Carne, you’re so heavy, I sobbed. Please let me go. She’s out now, I promised.
No. She’s not.
The weight became heavier, my cage smaller. Ava lifted me and curled me toward her chest in a cradle hold. I lost consciousness as I felt Carne’s hand grip my hair in his fist from Troy’s arms beside us.
“Carne, let go of Delilah,” Troy said, disturbed.
”Never,” Carne panted, straining. “Never,” he whispered manically.
BIO
J.Q. Baldwin is a qualified builder and accomplished author who enjoys physics and science-fiction. She has four children that cropped up rather quickly and a rugged Irishman for a husband.
Her writing reflects her tangled hypotheses of deep social, geopolitical and environmental futures based on our current choices.
Visit her at:
www.jqbaldwin.com
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https://twitter.com/jq_baldwin
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AUTHOR NOTES
Thank you to all of you who have continued this journey with me, you humble me every day. Drop me a line on social media, I love a good chat and especially love an honest review!
Continue on for a preview of Variant Carnage
Coming soon to Pre-Order at Amazon.com
Variant Carnage
Trilogy
Book Three
©J.Q. Baldwin 2018
Chapter One
Delilah
What should have woke me from Lolly’s play-date rape drug was the gouges stinging my shoulder blades from the concrete I’d been launched across. What should have woke me was the crushing force against my trachea, but no, it was the gaping maw of an empty mind strangling me. My mind hadn’t caught up and was in a crazed frenzy searching desperately for the anchor it had always crutched upon.
I screeched into endless infinity.
I could not even tell for what or whom I searched in a seemingly closing space, an intruder shooting nails into my brain. The blindingly bright room hurtled me around in circles, dragging a clawing weight with me. I became ever more frantic; what was my name? The back of my knees bumped something hard as the barricade I couldn’t understand barrelled me backwards. I scratched down my face with jagged nails. Where is – I did not know.
Leave it; it would come, please let it come!
I batted away the weight at my throat. Who am I?
Yllandra? Furious synapses sparked violently at the assumption. It led to more panicked confusion.
A little bird materialised, perched upon my shoulder, easing a deep hurt.
My eyesight burst and the leeching red fogged. I strained to watch the tiny fluttering thing, no bigger than my thumb, flutter about.
Cracks appeared, corrupting it’s soft and pure humming wings. A scent of broth and sickness snaked out from the widening and deadening faults.
She tweeted beautifully. A twined rope, frayed at the end, looped its yellow foot and spilled her backwards.
She fell to dust.
My psychic energy swept around the remains, listless and sorrowful, a stardust lifting and scattering, clawing for the frayed rope. Searching along it.
I spun, tracing the bright glow coalescing. It sucked the light from the room, from my soul. It twirled into a many faceted diamond, reflecting the fabric of life, of someone’s light.
That light stabbed out and I tripped back, warding it off with crossed forearms.
It kissed my lips. It’s taste of surprises lingered.
It took pressing seconds to remember Delilah and who delivered surprises.
Carne! I screamed, inside the new yawning darkness, and out, audibly. I let spittle rain and my throat run hoarse as I heaved in desolation. The wave of electrical impulses rebounded back so suddenly it was a physical blow. I staggered back the step I’d won and shook some of the confusion lashing me. Air currents warned me of something. What?
Muscle memory smashed my forearm up in a defensive move. I found my feet though they’d slid back, lifting whatever furniture I had biting into my calves. My chin decided my stance. I peered out blurry drugged eyes, half glued with encrusted blood and a stray bedraggled fringe, to the world before me in a glowing panoramic.
He panted heavily on my face with acidic gusts, as confused as me.
Rage slid into the spiked green and brown eyes accompanying the decaying scent of drug driven confusion.
A pneumothorax began gasping inside my chest from a blow he’d delivered. As an example of human nature in its most primal form he strangled me still, with corded strength, but I had remembered now.
Block it Delilah, deal with the here and now. My nerve endings stung with life. I felt like the junkie choking me: strung the fuck out and looking for a fix. Like him I’m sure my muscles stretched taut under my skin, though the animal before me had surely once not been as rangy as he was now.
Breathe. Don’t check the encroaching depths for Carne. You’ve been blocked somehow. Its only temporary, I lied to myself. A phantom feeling scrawed down my arm where my ID Chip was embedded. Was it there?
What if its not?
It is, I promised. I was cracking. Look up!
“Toys break too easy. I don’t want no gift. All these fuckers are too stupid, too stupid! If you have to protect pussy you can’t protect your own cock.” He glanced away down the corridor as if in a forgotten moment but spun back sharply.
“I won. I don’t want no cunt,” he mumbled as he sniffed up my neck distractedly.<
br />
The junkie’s biceps jumped and he shoved me off to one side, tackling me onto unforgiving wet concrete, his grip digging at each of my shoulders. I controlled the gasp, quieted my internal dialogue and forced a calming juxtaposition to the maniac I’d been shoved into a cell with.
It was a cell.
My hard steady gaze met his detached one.
Surprise Fucker, someone is home now!
I let no fear pique my bloodstream. Emitted no pheromones he’d sub consciously learned to crave from my dewed skin. He was lost when my eyes refused to loll back into my head, when I used my fist instead of fingernails to claw. His mind was the only one in the universe open to me and it was a floating leaf compared to the weight I’d carried forever, I let him in.
I stood.
He bounced off the bars of the cell like a boxing ring instead of an electrically charged box and rampaged forward in a burning tunnel. The heel of my palm connected with his nose and the only sound heard down the daunting silent alley was the squelch and crunch of his nose shattering as he wind-milled back. My arms flowed back into position and my foot shifted back in a practised arc.
He spat, spraying heated copper across the glowing indigo space to slash my face. I didn’t think for a second to wipe it away. I let it stream down my face in a parody of the tears he thought I’d shed.
He smiled sweetly with promise when he drew the blood from his nose with the back of his wrist and inspected it. He laughed grimly then, and bent, sliding an alloy part of his bunk he’d assumedly pried off earlier, from it’s hiding spot.
Loose and ready, with a lower centre of gravity I awaited with a static air of anticipation. My body and mind were weak, my abilities stemmed but I gained strength with every second and the pissant’s mind fell comedically short.
Drugs wafted from his pores, sweat drenched forehead, and every lymph node. He twitched bizarrely.
He erupted in flight.
One of my hands caught his dull baton, the other twisted it over the width of his own wrist. I tugged and watched the smile falter.
His horror lashed out to lick me as I slid the bar further up his forearm. I took a knee abruptly, just as Spartan had done once to me.
The bone banged like a gunshot. An added elbow hung in an abused ‘V’ but I was as still as death, crouched and balanced. My breathing only allowed to whisper although my lung had collapsed.
His caterwauling wound up and with the cell enclosing the crazed mind in with me as surely as it kept others out, it quickly became a deafening minefield.
My head was a gory mess but my body followed what my head could not: Spartan’s training. I let a thought rush by lightly but decided not to hold on for fear of thinking on my crux, my drug.
‘What happens’, Spartan had asked, ‘when you’re all alone Delilah’.
‘Ha,’ I’d answered, ‘I could only fucking wish.’
The squealing hadn’t stopped, instead it hit my ears with a higher pitch as each new feeling overwhelmed the staggering mange. All exclamations, from first the shock, then anger and a sickening worry. A shot wont heal this! This little boggy reject has killed me!
I kicked out his legs to force him down. The wandering was dizzying while I acclimated to the limited capacity of my cognitive abilities. He toppled and I pounced over his chest with one knee high to pin his flailing and wobbling arm to the ground with my foot.
My toes pinched into his bicep. I hadn’t any shoes?
“Where am I?” I asked strangely. Then screamed it. I lobbed the screeching thing’s head at the ground. I’d crack his skull to get answers if I had to. He keened through gritted teeth. The grounding of them squeaked and the lashing of his self-righteous fury built.
“The reject shop; the recycle bin,” he tried to laugh.
Creeping sanity flipped my eyes in all directions for the surveillance. It was in full view with no pretence of hiding and had panned to capture all the movement.
The junkie spat as he chuckled, then winced and tried to buck me off. It annoyed me. He had no real strength. I fingered the underarm of his sweaty and threadbare stained singlet and ripped it in jagged tears.
Rejects.
His coding was patchy, sparse and faded down his mottled and pock marked skin. Recognition gave him lucid information.
“She didn’t know?” he told himself.
Was I a reject? I’d revealed an underdeveloped understanding of trust, that much was true. I’d been tossed to this mange’s cell. I was a reject to whoever had taken me. Was I important enough for my kidnappers to watch right now or was the surveillance recorded.
A gargling sound encouraged me to look down. Foam bubbled and the squalid reject cocked his throat up in an effort to spew or get air.
I jumped up in shock. He started to twitch roughly.
“Ggll early,” he glugged thickly and began seizing. His muscles visibly contracting over and over. He wailed with disbelief.
“Ah stars,” I toed him to his side and pressed him to the ground with a heavy foot. The seizure continued on and my new cell mate started to expire.
Two drones shot by our box distracting me from the erratic heartbeat under my foot. The machines flew by, fuzzy against the fluro blue glow of our cell. My eyesight took advantage of their shadow; the fluro blue was a terrible pestilence.
I stole back into the corner while my cell mate died.
He’d been strong enough, could have permanently brain damaged me if I hadn’t come out of my semi-conscious state.
He couldn’t have killed me that way, my conscience kicked me.
I presumed too much in those disorientating moments I realised, still, I couldn’t ascertain how he expired now. A broken arm wouldn’t kill him. And a concussion wouldn’t lead to those sorts of seizures.
“What was early?”
A slight movement slapped my attention down the alley. I thought I saw a face.
The vast space was filled only with the dying man’s frightened gurgles.
The cold seeped towards me with silent bony fingers.
I searched through the distorted darkness, out beyond the fringe of light.
A wan face, ghostly still against the blue startled me. I stepped closer. He was handsome despite notable deterioration. I almost called out when he slid into a patch of dark without the background blue.
He was not an apparition but a man. A real person, not a grim remnant of buried history I had almost convinced myself of.
“This will bring guards,” he whispered the fact without any true emotion. My cell prevented his emptiness invading me. My breath fogged with relief.
“Where are we?” I asked without stepping forward into any light.
“I can only hold the camera’s microphone for seconds at a time. Tynan won last week’s round. You took him out while dazed and limited.”
‘’I just fucked my options,” I agreed. The feed had caught everything I was idiotic enough to show.
“Being a reject here is the best one can hope for,” the prisoner warned. He’d lingered on ‘hope’ with perhaps a lifetime of it fleeting with his words.
A small hover vehicle neared. The trek of the underground tunnel was hard to gauge with deep resounding echoes.
I looked back down to the other cell but the prisoner had moved away. As I panned down I could make out many blue lines. The furthest becoming less fuzzy but so far away there must have been hundreds. All spaced so far apart there was no chance of reaching the next one. Space was vast and isolation the premium.
The hum became a present throb and the small vehicle pulled to a stop mechanically, right before my cell.
I evaluated a strategy calculated to result in my best outcome.
“If it’s dead it’s your turn to hook it to the drag line,” a tidy guard threatened as he unfolded himself from the small uplifted door and tugged his shirt’s centre line, ribbed in a navy, down neatly.
As the scented and purified air from the vehicle reached my senses I reali
sed how utterly putrid and filthy my conditions truly were.
“Wait and see if it’s actually dead first, Cal. Don’t want it bleeding all the way to the bin like the last one.”
“If its bleeding out we’ll have to wait for it to finish, Keyes.”
I squatted, like an animal I presumed they thought me. Barred my teeth and adopted a feral and terrified snarl. None of it was falsified.
Cal waited for Keyes before they padded casually toward the cell. They seemed completely innocuous, especially with their matching navy fatigues, crisp shirts, haircuts and march. Both were Variants, of a sort. Both moved with synchronization bred from cohesive training. Actually, genetically, their scent varied little. But they were not clones of each other. Perhaps more like cousins, with the same cowlick paving their chestnut hair slightly to one side.
Like an invisible safety barrier brocaded their way, the guards both stopped a metre shy of the blue fuzz.
“It’s not dead,” Keyes said with annoyance as he bent a little to peer in at Tynan, the dying junkie. “See that,” he pointed to Tynan’s foaming and convulsing throat. “It won’t finish for hours yet but we can burn it this time instead of dragging it. This one’s rubbish, but we’ll still have to wait it out.” He nodded to the camera.
“Well, I’m waiting in the HV till it’s over,” Cal said disgustedly, spinning on the spot. I couldn’t perceive Cal but I had plenty of practice in human behaviour and his disgust was not for the man expiring but the time it stole from him.
“I’ll pop the pet first, give it a taste,” Keyes called over his shoulder to his retreating partner. Retrieving something from his utility belt, I couldn’t believe was going to be pleasant for me, he strolled up to the cell. He didn’t slow. He looked straight through me as he wound his arm back and lobbed a beeping plate at me.
It glided into the cell, straight through the barrier, to clatter and scrape down near me.
I would have talked. Maybe reason.
A high powered light emitted a glowing halo. An increasing buzz vibrated through my marrow. The light blew, and pulsed out.
Variant Evasion: Trilogy (Variant Trilogy Book 2) Page 12
