by Gentry Race
“I’m fucking done with this,” I yelled out.
I turned to Slipstream and knocked the small cipher device on her forehead controlling my gender. My body started to change, to swell into the behemoth giant I’d once been. Gone were the breasts and pert ass. I raised up my large hands and balled them into hardened fists.
“Don’t,” Hera said on the other side of her. “We need her—”
I clapped my metal fists on both sides of the Necro’s head, smashing her brains out and spattering the grey matter all over. I looked at Hera and wiped the gunk from my face, feeling less good inside at that moment and more evil, despite her disapproval. I didn’t care. Crystal, at that moment, was like a stray horse trapped in a necrotizing barbed wire. The only solution was to pull out a pistol and end its misery.
A moment later, a telekinetic burst of energy penetrated my mind and Hera’s. We could feel Jess in distress, pushing only one word into our minds’ eye.
“Help.”
As we ran toward the metal grated elevator that would take us back up, a few villainesses and attendees still lay on the floor, trying to gather their things after the fighting. The looks on their faces when they identified us were priceless.
Another mental projection entered our heads like a splitting headache. A forcefield, Gemini, Lazarus. The images hammered into our minds.
He must be attacking Jess topside.
The Acolytes were behind us, kicking the hordes of attendees and lesser villainesses out of their way. Hera got to the platform first. She was hundreds of feet away. I zoomed in on her face as she looked up, and then looked back at us, unsure what to do. She then closed the door and engaged the elevator.
“No,” I yelled, running as fast as I could. “Wait for us!”
I got to the door and smashed it in. Above us, the grating was slowly coming down. I squatted down and shot up into the air, raising my metal fists in front of me.
CRASH!
I went through the grating and landed topside. My head swiveled around, looking for the culprit. I saw Hera holding her arm and Jess not far from her.
“Hera, are you okay?” I called out.
“He… He broke my arm,” she said, wincing from the pain.
And then I spied him. A man as pale as the moon, his white hair greasily slicked back with two cans of oil short of a change. His eyes were as bright and alabaster as ice. He crinkled a smile under his thick, pale skin. Lazarus.
I charged at him in all my metal glory. He tried to jump into a portal, but I caught him.
CRACK!
My fist landed on his jaw. He fell to the ground. He flickered in appearance, changing into different people.
He’s a goddamn shifter, too! Shifters could morph into other people. For a second, I recognized one of the suits he wore. A brown corduroy suit with thick-frame glasses and thick mustache. The plain man from the government facility.
He smiled, rose up, and changed back to his alabaster self, then walked toward me. His off-colored eyes glimmered in the light, and he changed his appearance with every step. I balled up my fists and charged him again.
BAMF!
He jumped into a portal and came out of one behind me. I fell to the ground with all my momentum. I turned my head to see him looming over me. The air stank of hot brimstone as the purple cloud dissipated.
“You don’t have to do this, Mantium,” he said. “We both want the same thing.”
“What’s that?” I mumbled, trying to regain composure.
“Tessa dead,” he said, smoothing back his white hair and then pointing to the warehouse behind him. “And let me show you how.”
He pulled out a small device that looked like a pistol and pointed it at Hera. He fired. Rippling sound waves echoed out. Jess shot to her feet and jumped in front of the blast. Her body absorbed the waves, and she fell to the ground.
“Jess!” I yelled out.
Her skin became pasty and started crawling with leathery, white tendrils. She had been infected with his Necrovirus.
Hera tended to her, watching the infection spread over her body.
“You will pay for that,” I said.
“You’ve already paid me enough,” Lazarus said, holding the cipher device that once clung to Slipstream’s head. “By showing me how the NaN construct works and giving me the cipher, you’ve given me what I need. I will end Tessa and all that she created.”
“He killed her!” Hera cried out, holding her broken inverted elbow and standing over Jess. “She’s dead.”
I tried to focus, but all I could see was Hera slumped over Jess, sobbing.
“You fucking bastard!” I yelled, throwing a hard punch at Lazarus, who was now disguised as the plain man.
He sidestepped into a portal and came out from behind me again, kicking me down in one swoop.
I fell to ground. My head spun. All I could hear was Hera trying to hold Jess with her broken limb. Jess — she was gone. The thought of her gone was like a cleaving knife left in my mind. The first person I ever loved — and lost.
I felt my arm twist back. He was strong… Stronger than me.
“We come from the same lineage, Mantium,” Lazarus finally said. “You created Tessa, and Tessa created me.”
“If she made you then why do you want her dead?” I eked out.
“I worked in the BAMF program, bringing Tessa women from seedy brothels. But as you know, she’s not one for sharing. She took the person that meant the most to me,” Lazarus said painfully, re-holstering his wave gun. “Now I am going to give her a dose of her own medicine.”
I sparked up my the red fire in my eyes that could burn this sociopath to hell. I turned my head and blasted hate-filled energy into his side. He fell a couple of steps back, stunned. He looked down in horror. His suit and skin were being dissolved and eaten away. A piece of him dropped to the ground.
He shifted back to his alabaster self. In one final attempt to keep his ground, he clenched his fist and fell backward into the purple gaseous tear of the SubSpace. In a sudden BAMF cloud, he was gone.
I looked around steadily. Returning my furious eyes to normal. Gone was the creature was that inflicted all of this horror, leaving nothing but a hole blown in the middle of my life. I saw Aulani walking over in shock and picking up the piece of suit I was able to tear off with my blast. She inspected it closely.
I slowly got up, eyeing Jess’s condition. Her stomach had two large punctures in it, where white, diseased flesh had begun covering her body. I fell to the ground at her side and placed my large hand over her chest, feeling for movement, but there was nothing. At first I felt anger in the pit of my stomach, but that was quickly drowned out by grief. My poor Jessica had given her life for this team.
“She was infected by Lazarus,” Hera cried out as the others ran up, tears running down her face, muddying her thick eyeliner and bright green eyeshadow. “And he took Gemini!”
Hera clung to me, coddling her arm and crying into my chest. The rest of the Acololytes and Ari joined up behind me. I could distinguish Aulani’s smaller shadow in the desolate streetlamp light. Then Blitzkrieg’s overly large frame. A rustling snort came from behind her tusks, and she seemed to let out a growl that sounded like a chuckle.
“Tough break,” Blitzkrieg finally said.
I snapped.
I let go of Hera and lunged for Blitzkrieg’s neck. Her hazel eyes showed no fear when I wrapped my cold metal hands around her neck. She snorted again and choked on the saliva that normally came from her jutting mouth. She looked like a fearless pig about to be cut.
“I will make you squeal!” I yelled.
“Mantium,” Aulani cried out. “She is not your enemy!”
“We lose a member,” I said, flames engulfing my eyes, “you lose a member.”
Ari hissed and grabbed Slipstream from behind.
“We lost two,” he reminded me.
“Why did the infection kill her?” I screamed.
“Mantium, let h
er go,” Aulani pleaded. “The Necrovirus only infects villainesses. Jess was good. Her super virus must have rejected it.”
I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to hear Jess’s voice, the sweet tone of her presence in my mind when she read it. It was a goddamn standoff.
The complications of killing two of the Acolytes would only muddy the waters. Hera knew this and rose to her feet. She gently placed her hand on my shoulder.
“It wasn’t them that caused this,” she said.
I dropped Blitzkrieg like the pig she was and caught Hera’s deep brown eyes. For a moment, I could remember looking into them a year before. When we only worked together. Jess had been my everything. Then and now. All of my team was my everything. And now she was gone. Crystal was gone. Gem had been taken again. I hadn’t the slightest clue why Lazarus wanted her, but there was only one way to find out.
Tessa.
9
Dismantled
I slowly opened my eyes to the musty hotel room that we were all projecting into the SubSpace from. I lifted my head as my visual acclimated to reality. I could see Crystal not moving. Jess was across from her. They were dead, encapsulated in their ARMOR coffins. The infection Lazarus had given them was real and had somehow ported itself via the projection code into their DNA, corrupting it.
This changed things.
Gone were the days of dying in the SubSpace and coming back in a respawn. Now if you died in the SubSpace, you died in reality.
Sniffling and sobbing came from Hera’s rig as she rose. Her arm was fine, but she was a mess internally. She had known Jess through me, but for the last sixth months, we’d bonded like a family. This included Gemini, who was now also lost, separated from us.
My mind hurt from the pain — the constant aberration of feelings. I wanted to kill Tessa for what she had started. It was like she’d planned all of this. She’d wanted her revenge, and now she had gotten it.
Ari slowly rose up, still wearing the PINK hoodie Jess had given him. He ran his scaly hands over the white embossed letters.
I rolled my body out of the rig, head low. The Acolytes each rose from their rigs. Aulani wore a sad expression as she slipped out of her ARMOR. She still held part of Lazarus’s suit in her hand. She walked over to a machine and placed the piece inside, submitting it for analysis.
“Mantium,” she said softly. “I am sorry for your losses.”
“Shut up,” I said.
Slipstream and Aeropounder were awake but quiet. If they knew what was good for them, they would remain that way.
I looked to Blitzkrieg and could tell by her dumbfounded expression she was not the wiser of how close she was to losing her life in there. I began to dissipate my organic metal skin, revealing my true form underneath.
“We’ll wrap ‘em up in the hotel bedding,” I said, walking to Jess. I gently touched her cheek. “We will give them a proper burial.”
“And what about my fucking scrambler?” Slipstream asked, pointing to the ported socket on her head before pulling on her thick, leather, thigh-high boots.
I was silent, still dwelling on both Crystal and Jess.
“Mantium,” Aulani said. “We can’t let him get away—”
“Shut the fuck up,” I said.
I was done. Done with it all. I felt the large ‘M’ emblem on my chest, the label Jess had made. Just feeling her work, something she’d touched, killed me inside.
“I am done with this,” I finally said. “You are on your own now.”
“Wait,” Hera interjected. “We can’t give up now. Gem needs us.”
“We need to find out what Lazarus wants her for,” Ari added.
I walked to the dirty window, rubbing a small bit clean with my finger to look out over the harsh world we were living in.
“I heard the truth in there,” I said. “Tessa created him and now he wants revenge.”
“What?” Ari said.
“That is bullshit, Mantium,” Aulani said, walking to me and placing her small hand on my shoulder. “She wouldn’t have sent her Acolytes to hunt him. I promise you, on my life and as her personal assistant, she did not create him.”
I brushed her hand from my shoulder and walked to the other side of the room, defending my belief as I moved. “You don’t know Tessa like I do. She will watch the world burn, and when it cries for relief, she will be there with a tank of gasoline.”
“You are wrong,” Blitzkrieg said. “Tessa has helped all of us. Slipstream and I were on the streets before she showed us the way. Now we have purpose. She gave us that.”
Ari said, “We should try, Michael.”
The word was always like knifes in my ear, knowing it’s origins and what who it was related to. My older brother James picked that name for me. He told me picked it after learning about the great Saint Michael. He was sometimes depicted holding a sword and balancing scales. But that balance felt gone now.
“You are blind to the truth,” I said. “She will not stop until everything I know and love is gone.”
“How are you so sure?” Ari said.
“Tessa killed his brother,” Hera admitted.
Everyone’s eyes widened, and the room fell into an awkward silence. Ari’s lizard-like mouth fell agape, exposing his forked tongue. I left the room.
Not far from the hotel room, on the edge of the city, was a rock quarry. The night had cooled from the hot, arid desert sun earlier in the day. And it was quiet, save for the random traveling motorist zooming by on the highway and trailing off in sound. The only evidence ever seen of them was oncoming white and trailing red. A metaphor for what I seemed to experience in my life — the coming and going — the arrived and the gone.
I sat perched above the makeshift graves every night for a week, mourning the losses of my team. Jess — or Corset, what she liked to be called, and Crystal, the newest member of my team.
While I had known Jess since high school, we had never planned this journey ahead of us. When she got infected by Tessa and was corrupted, I understood what she was going through, I always had and she had I. I didn’t care what people would think about us. Hera and I had cured her, and Jess and I set about making up for the mistakes we’d made.
I recollected our lives together as I watched the two stone markers indicating their graves. That’s all they would get. Two stone markers next to a random rock quarry in Nevada. For all their contributions, this was the life dealt to the hunters.
I heard footsteps behind me and felt a soft hand on my shoulder. Hera’s hand. She crisscrossed her thick, toned legs and sat down next to me. I could smell her perfume, but it only reminded me of the team we once were. The nights Jess, Hera and I would snuggle and end all tangled up with each other by morning.
“Jess would want this,” Hera said.
“This is my fault, Hera,” I said. “And I am done losing the ones I care about.”
She was silent, looking at the graves not far off.
“If we don’t help Gem,” she said eventually, “she will suffer the same fate Crystal and Jess did.”
“I have lost so many close to me because of our mission,” I said, looking off at the starry horizon above the desert mountains. Their light twinkled like glittering sand. “I’m tired of the hunt. The super abilities. I’m tired of being caught in the tangle of Tessa’s life.”
“I don’t believe Lazarus,” Hera said, extending her legs out and scooting closer to me. “The fact that Tessa would create something that would destroy her kind is crazy.”
“But that’s what Tessa is,” I said. “Crazy. And when did you start trusting villainesses?”
“I guess teaming up with them has shown me that the world is not black and white,” Hera said with a cringing smile.
I chuckled at her comment.
“Plus, he does have the perfect weapon to finish her off,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Hera asked.
“Back in Edwards Air Force Base, when they were trying to capture you, I saw blu
eprints for a device the military was working on. A wave gun. From what he did to Jess, it looks like he found a way to administer his necrovirus via waves.”
“Waves?” Hera asked. “Like sound waves?”
“Yes,” I said. “You saw something like it when we were still working at Iconoclast. Computers were being infected with malware via their microphones. We’ve already seen this latest in high tech. This will be the way to get her, no matter what NaN construct she makes.”
“Jesus, that’s what he wants Gemini for,” Hera realized.
“Perhaps,” I agreed.
She nodded and took a breath, looking at Crystal’s grave marker.
I waited for her to speak her mind.
“I barely got to know Crystal,” she said.
“She wanted to find her sister. Another one taken by Lazarus,” I said.
“She had a sister?” Hera asked, wrapping her arm around my waist to keep warm.
“A twin.” I nodded and took a moment, remembering something. “Lazarus told me he wanted to kill Tessa because she took someone from him. I believe him. I know what it’s like to experience her wrath. That’s how I lost James.”
“I remember,” Hera said, shaking her head. “But why would Tessa do something like that?”
“Because she isn’t looking for anything logical, like money,” I said as a tear rolled down my face. I was quick to wipe it away. “She can't be bought or bullied, or reasoned or negotiated with. She just wants to watch the world burn. She always has.”
”Until now,” a small voice interrupted from behind us.
We turned around to see the golden Aulani, reflecting a cooler tone in the brisk starry night. She held the piece of Lazarus’s exosuit. She sat down next to me and handed it to me.
“I finished my analysis,” she said, looking somberly at the two marked graves. “Looks like he has a weakness.”
“When I fought him. I could barely land a hit on him,” Hera said. “And I when I did, it was like he was indestructible.
“Yes,” Aulani said. “Just like Mantium. But there is one thing that can destroy him.”
