Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1)

by Michael Valdez

Chapter 22

  Milser's Desires

  A splash of blood hit the off-white ceramic wall, thick and dark, and Milser fell backward into a tray of kitchen supplies that had been held down by lock switches embedded in the floor. The tray shifted in place, not meant for that much pressure against its locked legs, and didn’t hold him up. Milser tumbled to the floor as whatever was on that tray – dishes, utensils, some pots and pans – clattered around him, the noise an overlong, repeating mess of clank-clank-clink-thud that grated at the ears. Somehow nothing hit him as he shifted his eyes and head all around, knowing this wasn’t over.

  The hammer? Where was the goddamn hammer!? Milser rolled from on his back to hands and knees and looked around, panicked at not having a weapon. He saw it. It fell farther than he did, and was next to a metal colander, under the lip of the kitchen island. He reached the wooden handle and gripped it, then pulled it in as he turned to face the direction he had stumbled into the kitchen from, but no one was there. He breathed hard, fast, waited, and then heard a clumsy climbing directly above his head, on the island. In the fractional moment that he took to focus in that direction, old, fat Bayhick was clambering over, making another racket as he flung dishes in all the directions in a psychotic fury. Bayhick threw himself down at Milser and the pointless, unplanned rage of the attack made the man fall shoulder-first off the kitchen island at the same time the younger man rolled aside. Bayhick thudded to the floor and actually bounced a little before scrambling his feet and making a mad dash to reach Milser.

  Bayhick lost the knife he wielded during his initial reckless attack, and reached for Milser with his bare hands. The old bastard’s eyes were blank like all those blue-eyes that work in cities, except without the color change. There was nothing in Bayhick but blind fury, and his clawing hands extended for Milser’s neck with impressive speed.

  Milser swung the hammer as hard as he could, a cross-body attack that struck one of Bayhick’s forearms, forcing it away. The other arm kept reaching, and Milser stopped it with his his own, grabbing a wrist and twisting. Milser felt an intense sting that went from forearm to upper arm, and remembered that he had gotten sliced halfway between elbow and wrist by the knife that Bayhick no longer held. The thumping pain meant Milser couldn’t hold his enemy back completely, and decided to attack instead. Milser brought the hammer back the way other direction, another lateral movement. He felt his shoulder complain at the speed but didn’t register it until after the nail-remover tongs from the hammer slammed into flesh with a strange pop.

  “Frghaaaaa!” screamed the mindless Bayhick, a high-pitched, rough noise that could cause nightmares.

  Milser kicked him away and crawled quickly toward the fallen contents of the tray. He looked for anything at all he could use as a weapon, and saw nothing. Milser crawled another few steps, tripping over a pan and hitting his knee on the floor. He ignored the new pain.

  “Graaaahg, fruennn, bagh!” Bayhick shouted as he took hold of Milser’s ankle, making him trip again.

  Milser got a grip on the only thing in reach with a handle, a wooden spatula. He turned and only aimed a heartbeat before stabbing forward. Milser hit Bayhick in the face, the flat end of the spatula hitting the older man’s nose horizontally and destroying bone. Bayhick stopped, a confused look on his empty-eyed face. He coughed twice, the second time spitting up blood that had drained down from the wrecked nose.

  Milser took his chance and thrust into Bayhick again, all his strength in that swing, his upper body moving forward to help it hit the same spot again. On impact, the rest of the nose caved in. A third swing missed the already-gone nose, slammed into a still-open mouth and knocked teeth back, causing more blood to splatter. Bayhick’s body slumped to the side as dead meat and lay there oozing from a completely ruined face. After three good breaths, Milser was forced to move thanks to a nearby scream.

  “Fuck,” he muttered as he took hold of the counter next to him and pulled himself up. He pulled the hammer out of Bayhick, then rushed out through a swinging door and was outside the Caravan’s kitchen. This area, which a guide chart had called “barracks,” was big and open, and the next trouble he had to deal with was impossible to miss.

  There was so much blood, all over the floor, beds, and footlockers around the still bodies of Vonstock and Mole. Inni was stabbing Mole over and over despite the fact that he must have been long dead by now, the small knife in her hands from one of the few stocked footlockers in front of the thirty or so unused beds.

  Milser couldn’t risk sneaking up and getting caught, he had to run at her. Milser set himself and then ran as fast as his legs would churn. Inni continued her violence and didn’t turn or flinch at all as Milser reached her in a few seconds and pulled his arm up to swing down at the crazy bitch. While his arm was up, he slipped on blood and failed to bring the weapon down as he careened into Inni at full speed, stopping her but giving himself no room to act. She turned her head to look at him with another set of dead eyes and screamed in wordless, vibrating rage.

  Milser readjusted instantly and swung down, but he was too close. The hammer’s blunt end hit her elbow and cracked something. Just like Bayhick, it didn’t matter that one arm was down for the count, that the pain should have been too much. Inni screamed again and pushed Milser until his back hit Vonstock’s low bed hard.

  Inni kept trying to claw at Milser’s crew cut hair, as if she forgot that he cut his longer locks off weeks ago. He was too close to do anything, and snarled while he tried to get his hammer in place for a better hit. Inni was too close still, and every millimeter he earned while pushing her away she got right back. However, after a few tries she gave up on the non-existent hair and went for his neck, which let Milser push her away.

  Inni stumbled back an arm’s length, bumped into the bed with Mole’s body on it, and came hurdling right back at Milser. She had her hands forward to choke him, and as soon as she got close Milser let the hammer drop to the floor grabbed her by her overlarge shirt with both hands. He pulled her in, twisted at the hip, and tossed her over Vonstock’s bed and corpse. Milser didn’t immediately see the hammer again – it must have rattled down under one of the beds. He didn’t have time to scrounge for it, so he rounded the bed with Vonstockon it, slipped on blood again but kept his balance, and saw Inni getting up.

  He didn’t let her. Milser kicked the woman in the stomach and she sprawled back like she didn’t know how to use her limbs. She flailed herself to the side to get back up and ended up near the metal, calf-high footlocker in front of the empty bunk she was thrown against. Milser charged and shoulder-checked her with abandon, throwing his body into this psycho and slamming her into the footlocker. Again, she didn’t know to react, which meant one final opportunity. Milser wrapped his hands around Inni’s neck and squeezed. He could feel her inaudible screams in his palms as he suffocated her, sensed her throbbing, fast pulse from her jugular on the insides of his fingers. He didn’t want to take the time to choke her to death, he knew exactly how long that took – he’d done it twice before. Instead, he made sure his grip was solid, brought Inni’s head up, and shoved it back against the footlocker.

  The sound of metal on bone echoed, but Inni was still struggling, though dazed from the impact. Milser did it again – head pulled up, head smashed down. There was blood and the sound of shattering bone. He did it one more time, screamed as he did, and the sound of bone breaking was more muted this time, mushier, and the back of Inni’s head leaked like dribbling faucet. She didn’t move, her tongue lolled lazily out of her mouth, and her eyes were more dead than a moment ago, but not by much. He let go of her neck and the corpse slumped down to the tile floor, resting among random splatters of multiple people’s dark blood.

  He got up and sat on the side of the bed, facing the corpses of Vonstock and, one bunk further away, Mole. As much as he knew that he should be thinking something like “my friends are dead,” or whatever, all he could do was realize that his chances of survival were now incredibly
low. That’s all these people, his fellow deprived naturals of Blackbrick ever were: a better chance for him to keep living and figure out what to do next. His desperation made him think things would go well. The four bodies near him now, including Bayhick in the kitchen, proved him as wrong as the other corpses he dumped over the last couple days.

  Footsteps from a hallway behind Milser got his attention, made him think he’d have to fight more crazies. As he started looking for his hammer or Inni’s knife, something, he heard voices, which meant these people were sane.

  “Oh, Hell...” That was Toddler’s voice.

  Milser stood up and faced those people that came. Three men and two women.

  “Who’s left?” Milser asked tersely and impatiently, not caring what they would say about these other bodies.

  Gruedinen, a woman with a rough voice, answered. “Us. And... And the prisoners.”

  Looking at them again, Milser noticed a lot of deep red stains and some injuries on these people. They’d been fighting the rest that went nuts and won.

  “The ones that went after the hermit never came back,” Toddler accused. “That was supposed to be easy!”

  “Fuck off,” Milser fired back.

  “You didn’t tell us our odds were this bad,” Toddler continued, probably saying something he’d been planning to say. “And you sure never told us we might go crazy from this shit.”

  “I didn’t think we could!” Milser yelled, tired of all the goddamn back talk and failure. “Vaiss never said anything about this, about losing our minds. If we got things right when we were supposed to, we’d all be home by now, where we belong.”

  Toddler opened his mouth to say something, but Grue put her hand up to his chest and he stopped.

  “What do we do now?” asked Grue while the other three stared around at the bloody mess in the barracks.

  “You two go to that navigation room and make sure we’re tracking those people right. It’s been two days since they left town and we lost them once already. We need to kill them and get back before any more of us lose it.”

  This time Toddler didn’t stop himself. “I’m real sick of you deciding what...”

  “Shut your mouth,” Milser interrupted disdainfully. “Fine, go find a closet and fuck Grue for a while. I don’t give a shit, but to get these tattoos off us there’s no options left but to find these gray-eyed assholes and contact Vaiss. That’s what I’ll be going on with.”

  Citizen Vaiss had warned Milser to be careful with the people from the camp. They would be loyal to Vaiss, not him. Their personalities would be suppressed for a while, especially if the Citizen was in their presence, otherwise they’d be far less uncontrolled. Now Milser had a bunch of tired, rebellious naturals to deal with, ones with fighting skills better than they ever had before and who thought those new skills made them somehow smarter.

  “The Citizen can give us back our lives,” Milser continued, mentioning the man that enhanced them but also seemed to have broken their minds. “We have to do what we’re told, to the end, because what else is there?”

  “You don’t get it,” said Grue, her tone calming. “We don’t have enough. We’ve seen how much it takes to slow these entourage people down. We’ve had to kill everyone that lost their minds and we’re down to six.”

  “We’ve got the animals. They’re smart, they’ll listen. That’s gonna have to do. For now, you and you,” Milser said as he pointed at Grue and Toddler, “do what I tell you and get back to that navigation room. I found instructions on tracking vibrations or some shit an hour ago, before this mess went down. I’ll use that to find their truck after I clean up this cut. You three blackbag these bodies and put them in those doctor’s rooms back there.”

  He was hoping they wouldn’t argue anymore, because the next person that did was going to get a hammer in the eye as soon as he found the thing. They didn’t. Those lovers Grue and Toddler left for the stairwell in that direction – the elevators didn’t work when they broke in here – and the remaining three people walked across the barracks to the connected medical hall.

  Again sitting on the edge of an empty bed while people went to get body bags for all the corpses they hadn’t already thrown out of escape hatches, Milser watched as blood pooled on his forearm from the cut Bayhick gave him. He felt the pain on the edges of the slice, a thankfully not too deep one, and thought about how he didn’t expect to bleed a single drop when he agreed to help Vaiss. This was all supposed to go fast and trouble free.

  Milser never for a second thought that Saint Dastou was a god, but he was certainly something above a man the way he kept surviving. A bomb at his back, a rain of bullets. Milser wasn’t stupid, he knew Dastou was supposed to survive those attacks by the calm way Vaiss took the news. His camp of naturals were bait. Vaiss lied. Not only about how easy it would be to kill Saint Dastou; Milser also doubted that the man ever intended for any of them to live long enough to ask for what was promised. It’s over, he thought, there was no succeeding in this, not completely.

  That was a sort of freedom in itself, though, a nice breeze on his face. No more stealing food, no more scrounging for supplies, getting whatever clothes would cover him up, hiding from the Counterbalance. Milser resigned himself to death, like Bayhick, Vonstock, Mole, Inni, and all the rest. He dug into the back pocket of his pants, some dark-green slacks he stole from a footlocker that were close enough to his actual size to fit decently. In the pocket was a piece of paper Citizen Vaiss had given him, and on it were seven symbols, like letters. The Citizen said that if his people were causing trouble, Milser could have them look at the paper to make them totally subservient. He had wanted to avoid that, though it seems their attitudes mean he can’t help it now. His own tattoo was different, didn’t feature some of the same control of the others, and he could use the paper on them without worry.

  Then he thought of Grue. She wouldn’t be able to reject him after looking at that slip of paper, would she? Neither would the other woman left, Nollana. Milser smiled. That would be fun, at least. A few final romps before he died, though they’d be with women that would only lay there, hypnotized into compliance. Milser held the piece of paper with the symbols on it tightly. He needed to use it on the people getting the body bags first. Nollana was with them. He’d make them obedient, finally, and then go to Grue and Toddler.

  When he was in Blackbrick, living his underground life, he couldn’t have imagined what he’s imagining now. All he wanted was to see his girlfriend again, who had agreed to marry him. That would never happen. There was only death now, and he had no use for sadness, hesitation, guilt, nostalgia, or respect for others. Milser would do what he wanted with these people around him, kill those three gray-eyed prisoners Vaiss insisted on keeping alive for later, and finish his short life by finding and killing that Saan woman.

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