The guy who ambushed us wasn’t even a Vive Job, just some street mage who got caught and decided to make a stand. Street mage... that’s what we call mages who don’t register themselves with the government like they’re supposed to. Anyway, this particular street mage was fucking around with restricted magic, Conjuration magic, and someone stumbled across the abandoned warehouse where he’d been experimenting with his Tricks out of sight.
When a civilian spots a guy calling up inhuman monsters out of thin air, they tend to call the cops. So a couple of uniforms showed up, quickly realized that the call that brought them to the warehouse wasn’t a hoax or a misunderstanding, but a serious issue, and they called SWAT in.
With a street mage, we don’t go in guns blazing. We’re still cops. Our priority is preservation of life. So with a living mage who’s breaking the law, we have a mandate to try to arrest them, take them alive, like any other criminal.
Of course, half the time, the street mage in question isn’t very interested in being arrested, and they resist. Like this asshole who tore up my team a week and a day ago. They resist, and you have to put them down, because with what some of these jokers can do, you absolutely cannot fuck around.
Desperate people with serious firepower are a dangerous combination.
And as badly as one living, breathing mage was able to tear up my entire team… a team who’s been trained and kitted out for this very situation… dealing with a Vive Job was exponentially worse. As that squad who went after the first Vived wizard found out all those years ago.
I wasn’t on that op; I’d just started in SWAT that year. Lucky for me. Those guys had no idea what they were getting into.
In life, the first Vived mage hadn’t been any superstar. He was just some run of the mill Striker Mage that liked to call himself Tallow. He’d gotten himself killed in some beef between some street mages running with one gang or another out in Chicago… it doesn’t matter.
What matters is, the body got scooped up by Revival Tech for their research. They Vived his corpse, for reasons known only to them, and they assumed everything would be fine, I guess.
Not quite. Just like clockwork, Tallow lost his gourd a few weeks after getting jump-started back to life. Lost his gourd, and went immediately homicidal… like, mass murdering, out of control rampage kinds of homicidal. And even though his magical abilities in life weren’t terribly impressive, and even though he was definitely crazy as all batshit, once he was Revived, his skills were suddenly five stars.
In fact, it was as if his decay-induced Revival Psychosis somehow made his powers even stronger. No more dinky little magedarts poking bullet-sized holes in people; now it was explosive magespears and lightning bolts, even chain lighting and some other flamethrower type of shit they had to come up with a new name for. I think Peter, my team’s Striker mage, is still trying to learn that one, and he’s no novice.
Where did Tallow get his new skills? I don’t know. Maybe his whacked-out mind was able to see around some corners a sane mind couldn’t; whatever the reason, a lot of cops and a lot of civvies got waxed before they finally managed to take him down.
And after that neat little science display, did Revival Tech stop Viving people? Of course not! Okay, one minor glitch, no big deal, let’s keep going. Tallow was dead too long, that’s all, too much decay. We’ll try it with fresher specimens, newer techniques; we’ll get it right… you’ll see.
We saw. We saw plenty. We saw enough to start forming special squads to handle exactly this sort of situation.
SWAT already had special teams to handle the living mages who broke bad. Now, since our city had the glorious luck to have the headquarters of Revival Technologies located smack dab in the middle of it, we had to start creating even more specialized teams and tactics to handle the Vive Jobs who went haywire.
“Reclamation Squads”, they were called at first, or “Wreck Squads”, which I think is a more accurate term, since we usually end up blowing the crap out of the Vive Job’s general vicinity. I’m serious… we operate more like the Marines than SWAT.
Living mages who are breaking the law, we arrest if we can. Vive Jobs, that’s a different story.
With Vive Jobs, there is no such thing as taking them alive. They’re completely homicidal. They’re not out robbing banks or stealing corporate secrets or some other good old fashioned criminal fun and games. They’re completely unhinged and violently out of their minds. What’s wrong with them can’t be fixed. So Wreck Squads are more like executioners than cops.
If some part of you is wondering why the government of a major city would tolerate a constant source of violent crime like Revival Tech, let me tell you, you’re preaching to the choir. Over the years, I had made my position on that psychotic company clear on more occasions than was healthy for my career.
The answer, as usual, was money. Revival Tech was ridiculously well-heeled financially. I mean, who wouldn’t invest in a company that was showing real, measurable results in restoring the dead to life?
What kind of return on investment do you think immortality would bring on the open market? How much do you think a billionaire would be willing to shell out to insure that he got to stick around spending money like a king for the next thousand years?
Sure, Revival Tech couldn’t deliver yet, and sure, their product was intrinsically and massively flawed, but what they had was tantalizingly close. Sometimes, that’s even more compelling to investors than an actual viable product. The price of RTI stock was constantly climbing.
Any politicians that they couldn’t buy off directly with bribes or political donations… which as far as I’m concerned, is the same damn thing… they could influence by wagging the future promise of immortality under their noses.
Rich people aren’t the only ones who want to live forever. Douchebag politicians are high on that list, too.
So Revival Tech got their blank check to keep churning out disaster after disaster in the form of Vive Job after Vive Job. Our Wreck Squads kept cleaning up the mess.
And now they’ve Vived Maestro Polonius, and he was way out there even when he was alive.
***
“Polonius? Polonius? Are you people in some sort of a contest to see who can go the furthest out of their minds?”
Edison bristled. “Hey, Wheeler, Doctor Adjani doesn’t have to...”
“The guy’s been dead for over a year, Edison!”
“We had him preserved,” Doctor Adjani said. “A combination of cryo and certain embalming fluids.”
“Oh, my,” Cass said with a smile. “Well, that seems to have made all the difference then, hasn’t it?”
"There were no indications he would go rogue," Doctor Adjani said, looking impatient, looking like he was tired of explaining himself for the umpteenth time. "Maestro Polonius took the news of his Revival very well. Indeed, he expressed a great deal of interest about the process, and even offered suggestions on how to improve the procedure."
"I’ll bet he did."
“We put a number of safeguards in place to prevent any positive loss of control.”
Cass’s grin widened. “Well, doc, I’m no scientist, but I’d say your safeguards were fairly fucking ineffective.”
Adjani’s expression never changed. In fact, he looked as if he were completely ignoring anything Cass had to say.
"The Maestro was conducting experiments when he died, research that was critical to the next level in Revival technology..."
"Is that what he's doing now?" Cass asked. "Conducting research?"
“Wheeler...” Edison said.
“Oh, fine,” she said, waving Edison off. “Who did you send in?”
Edison blinked in surprise at the question. “Hunh?”
“Don’t give me ‘hunh’. You called me eight hours after first contact; no way we’re the first team you called. So who was it? Who did you sent in first?”
“Shifty and Peter are back,” Dread said, nodding toward two men picking their wa
y through the obstacle course of cops and vehicles.
Cass nodded in acknowledgement and turned back to Edison. “So?”
“Two,” Edison finally said. “I sent in Squad Two.”
“Kerry’s squad.”
“Unh-hunh. We lost contact with them four hours ago.”
Cass snorted. “You mean they’re all dead.”
Edison looked as if he wanted to make a let’s-not-jump-to-conclusions comment, but even he knew it would be pointless. “Probably.”
"Six?"
"Six tried to insert by chopper two hours ago. The wreckage is over there," Edison said, pointing to the burned-out hull of an assault helicopter.
Cass looked over the huge, squat building again. It was massive and black and vaguely pyramidal, a man-made mountain of concrete and steel and once-dead nightmares. The rooftop blunted what should be the tip of the pyramid, and looked like the waiting mouth of some carnivorous plant, waiting to swallow whoever was so foolish as to follow Squad Two to face the nightmares within.
“So we’re all that’s left,” she said.
Images came to her from a week and a day earlier.
They got the call from SWAT, assembled, and mobilized. The target was still holed up in his warehouse in the lousiest part of town. He hadn’t tried to make a run for it, hadn’t responded to any calls for surrender. Finally, the powers that be got tired of waiting and gave Cass and her team the order to go in.
It was dark in the warehouse, the kind of dark that was so complete it was nearly palpable. The power was out to the entire city block surrounding the warehouse; not even street lights were working. Cass wasn’t sure if that was deliberate on the part of the street mage, or a consequence of this run-down section of the city being mostly abandoned buildings.
It didn’t matter. All that mattered was, the only light for hundreds of yards was the spotlights aimed at the building from the police perimeter, and those didn’t make it past the warehouse walls. Inside, only the beams from the flashlights mounted under their weapons pierced the absolute blackness.
The quiet was as complete as the darkness. The only sound was their booted feet scrunching over the dirt and debris that was scattered across the abandoned warehouse’s floor. That, and her whispered commands to her team.
And then, out of the black, they came. Slashers. Of course, they hadn’t known what to call them at the time; it was only after, during their debriefing, that some expert or another let them know the name of the nightmare that had torn them to bloody shreds.
The Slashers were tall, black, cornstalk-thin creatures with a trio of eyes on the top of their bodies. They were covered in long tentacles, each tipped with a razor-sharp claw, and when they swarmed out of the darkness and got close enough to touch, they each spun like a top, whipping those razor-claws outwards to slice flesh to ribbons.
They were surrounded almost before they even knew that they were being attacked. The Slashers were everywhere, spinning in close and then further away and then back again, some of their number sliding into the middle of the team’s ranks by virtue of their beanpole bodies.
Cass waved her weapon around frantically, but she couldn’t shoot; none of them could, the Slashers were everywhere, moving too fast, darting all around them, all amongst them, and the team would all end up shooting each other by accident if they tried to fire their weapons.
Screams and shouts of pain started punctuating the darkness, screams from her team as they were carved and cut and ripped to pieces. One by one, everybody else was wounded, and then it was her turn.
Pain burned along her thigh where a spinning claw found her, and as she turned to face her attacker, it disappeared back into the blackness, and another line of fire opened up on her arm as she was cut from another direction. Turning to face this second attacker proved just as useless; it had melded back into the darkness before she could try to fight back.
She didn’t know what to do. There was no way to control the angles of attack, no way to coordinate a defense, no time to catch a single breath to try to make sense of any of it, there was only pain and blood and screams and terror…
Cass shook herself out of her daydream with difficulty, driving off the nightmare. It went, reluctantly.
She stole another look at the Revival Tech building. Maestro Polonius was light years beyond the street mage who had ambushed them in that dark warehouse. There was no way to anticipate what he might have waiting for them in the office building he’d now made into his fortress.
“So long, Kerry,” she whispered, then returned to business once Shifty and Peter were by her side.
“Who’s the Vive Job?” Shifty asked, directing his question towards Dread, as always.
“Maestro Polonius,” the big man answered.
“Je-sus!” Peter said, tugging at his beard.
“Here’s what I need,” Cass said. “Floor plans of the building, including any air ducts or ventilation shafts or any other pain in the ass stuff like that. I need a report on Polonius’s capabilities while he was alive, and a list of what he’s shown us he can do now that he’s back.”
“It should be a pretty tricked up list,” Peter said. “Maestro Polonius was the mage’s Mozart for his time. He wrote the book.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“I mean it, Cass,” Peter said. “He literally wrote the book. I have books he wrote… and I don’t understand half of it.”
Cass tried her best to ignore that and go on. “Dread said he’s got a dozen or so custodial staff in there."
“Yeah?” Edison said.
“So, if they’re still alive, I need to know who's the priority here; the Vive or the hostages?”
“This guy could wreck the entire city, Wheeler. Terminate with Extreme Prejudice.”
Cass and Dread traded looks as a uniformed cop waved a mobile phone in Edison’s direction. “Sir! Sir! We have another contact!”
“That simplifies things, at least,” Dread muttered to Cass, as they followed Edison over to the communications van.
“Where the hell are Mike and Tara and Ste..." Cass began to say, cutting herself short just in time. Stephen's dead, remember? her mind filled in for her, in the awful half-second Dread paused before answering.
"I, um... I'll send Shifty to go look for Mike and Tara," he said.
Cass bit her lip. "Have him make sure they're geared up and ready to go. We’ll have to get Edison to scrounge us up a replacement Healer mage.”
“Maestro Polonius,” Edison said, into the mobile phone linked directly into the building’s communications system. “We demand that you...”
“There he is!” somebody yelled, and then BOOM! Every cop within thirty feet jumped out of their skin as a thunderclap of cordite went off at ground level. Cass, Dread, and Peter all whirled and very nearly pounded the offender to dust; Cass and Dread with their pistols, Peter with a four-foot magespear glowing brightly in his upraised fist.
“I hit him!”
The sniper was fresh-faced, in his mid-twenties, grinning from ear to ear behind his fine-tuned rifle. His SWAT baseball cap was on backwards, and he let his rifle lean forward on its bipod as he said toward Edison, “I shot him!”
“You didn’t shoot shit, trooper,” Cass said, holstering her weapon.
“I did! I shot him! I... I...” the sniper’s smile faded into a confused and concerned look as he held his hand over his stomach.
“You shot an illusion, kid,” Dread said, holstering his sidearm and turning away so that he wouldn’t have to watch. “Tell me when it’s over, Cass.”
Polonius
The first came for me at dusk, as if they believed the last dying rays of sunlight could afford them more power than was theirs. They came with guns and magefire, and I broke their backs on my altar. The memory of their screams still sings a satisfying chorus in my ears.
More gathered about my temple, and some tried to speak with me using magic or technology. The arrogance, to think that they could dictate
terms to me. Any terms.
When I finally determined the time was right to address them using an illusory copy of my form, one of the crawling insects gathered below tried to attack me with a rifle. As if it were that easy to kill me, as if I were a human being.
As if I were one of them.
Once, perhaps. Once, before my resurrection. No longer.
They do not know, they do not understand what they face. I have returned from the far side of the Styx with my mind stretched wide for the wisdom of the universe to fill. They think themselves powerful because they can bring back the dead with technology aiding their magic.
They are nothing. They know nothing of power. They sit beside their flashing squad cars and think they face a man raised from the dead.
I am no longer a man. I have become a god.
The Egyptians tell the tale of Osiris, the great god, who died and was resurrected with the aid of his goddess, Isis. Died, resurrected, and returned to life with more power than ever.
I see it now. It is all so clear to me. The story is mine. How could I not see it before?
Such has always been my destiny. I know that now. So much has become clear. Before, I was a dim, confused creature, flailing in the dark in search of the path.
The path first brought me here, to Revival Technologies.
The one called Adjani and his cronies called to me, to aid them in their quest. Pitiable specimens, all of them. So confident in their intellect, so mistaken in that confidence. They were ants trying their hand at particle physics; they never had a chance to make good on their promises to the world.
And so they came to me with their problems and their complications and their schemes. They sought to perform the impossible; to bring the dead back to life. But they were limited, far too limited, and they had failed again and again.
Help us, they said to me.
I came to them, the premier mage of my time, and still, I found my talents insufficient to the task. Of course they were. I was still locked in the limited form of a mortal man. I had not yet had my transformation.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 3
