Assault or Attrition

by Blake Northcott

  The CDU’s were ubiquitous in the nicer parts of The Fringe, and there were several in the vicinity of the attack. They didn’t make any difference. Unfortunately, a few well-placed shotgun blasts were enough to render them useless, which was exactly what happened. With the cerebral dampeners disabled, real horror was about to begin.

  The video footage was chilling. After a group of masked terrorists cleared the area and destroyed the CDU’s, a man emerged from an unmarked white van. He stepped into the street, tore off his shirt and began to glow. His bizarre and terrifying transformation took only seconds. Pale skin turned to cinder, cracking and peeling, while a copper glow pulsed from beneath the surface. The whites of his eyes burst with lava and his skeleton became visible through flashes of blinding light.

  The final sound before the blast wave was a guttural scream – that’s when half of The Fringe was annihilated.

  At first it looked as if the man had exploded like a biological bomb, with his accomplices standing idly by, making no attempt to escape the blast radius. The satellite weather cams told a much different story. There were no flames, or smoke, or pieces of flying mortar – it all happened in reverse. From a distance it looked like an implosion rather than an explosion, as if everything had been sucked into a gaping black hole. Like water down an invisible drain, matter ceased to exist at the core – pulling inwards from every direction, caught in the undertow of a swirling amber maelstrom.

  It took just a second. A heartbeat passed, and the buildings, cars, and pedestrians were simply gone, culminating with deafening silence. What remained was a crater, impossibly deep, filling from the newly-formed waterfall that flowed in from the Hudson.

  While a series of smaller windows across the top of the holo-screen showed replays of the implosion from different angles, the live simulcast feed continued below. First responders were on-hand, but seemed directionless. They were there to put out fires and save lives, but there was nothing left to do but bear witness. There were a few casualties around the perimeter of the crater, where people were lucky enough to have been standing just outside of the blast radius. Everything else had vanished.

  The remaining boroughs of New York City were shut down, and the police, which suddenly looked more like the military, took over. The last terrorist attack in the city was fifteen years ago, when a small dirty bomb killed three tourists in the northern half of Manhattan. That was all it took. The massive over-correction in security protocols unleashed an entirely new level of police presence, and the technology followed. As soon as the superhuman detonated, everything changed: eight-wheeled armor tanks rolled through the streets, batons collided with skulls, and boots buried in stomachs. Any onlookers who came within arm’s reach of an officer were doused with an experimental new liquid, shocking their nervous system to the point of convulsions.

  As I stood perfectly still, staring into the floating screens with horror, my wrist-com chimed. It was an alert from an old website I’d signed up for years ago. ‘Hyve Mynd’ was the hottest social media tool in 2038 – a place where hipsters could share their thoughts on movies no one had ever heard of, and fashion accessories no one wore. Of course as soon as it went mainstream the core audience abandoned their accounts. My own account, which I’d created for the sole purpose of sending old-school text messages to Gavin and Peyton, had long been abandoned as well – they were the only two followers in my ‘colony’. When the novelty wore off they stopped using the service, and I’d forgotten it existed.

  I accessed my Private Hive to find a single message blinking, awaiting my response.

  Login: TheRealMox

  Password: *********

  Welcome back, TheRealMox! You have ... one ... new message in your Private Hive.

  P!nkM0nst3r: I’m OK.

  TheRealMox: holy crap Peyton i nearly had a heart attack when i saw the simulcast, just found out about this 30 seconds ago

  P!nkM0nst3r: You should see it here, it’s chaos. The looting and riots have already started. I’m hiding out in a friend’s apartment.

  TheRealMox: DO NOT tell me where you are yet in case this is being traced

  P!nkM0nst3r: Thought so. It’s why I didn’t use my wrist-com. At least this can’t be geo located.

  TheRealMox: stay put, i’ll come pick up you and Gav in the jet

  P!nkM0nst3r: Gavin is missing. I haven’t seen him in days. I just hope he wasn’t in the blast zone.

  TheRealMox: WTF?! could he be hiding out somewhere too??

  P!nkM0nst3r: Hopefully he’s in The Dark Zone. He’s been spending a lot of time there since Excelsior burnt down.

  TheRealMox: shit

  P!nkM0nst3r: I know.

  TheRealMox: he’s a tough bastard, if anyone survived this it’s Gav

  P!nkM0nst3r: I would just feel better if I heard from him.

  TheRealMox: me too but he’ll turn up soon i know it. just lay low and stay inside, don’t go near the windows

  P!nkM0nst3r: How are you going to pick me up? The streets are filled with cops and looters.

  TheRealMox: can you get to the roof of the building you’re in?

  P!nkM0nst3r: I think so.

  TheRealMox: good, i’m getting my pilot and some security, be ready and we’ll be there in 90 mins

  P!nkM0nst3r: Please hurry <3

  Seeing the text-based emoticon at the end of her message made me smile, just for a moment. It had no reason to, but Peyton’s signature ‘less-than sign followed by a three’ heart was a small reminder of how things were before I left. Life’s little wrinkles that made me nostalgic for the time before the Red Army wanted my head on a pike, and before I competed inside The Arena. Barely six months had passed, and looking back it seemed like a lifetime.

  Mac was nowhere to be found, so I sent Chandler to search for him and pass along a message. We were heading for New York, and wheels needed to be up in ten.

  Valentina didn’t answer her wrist-com either, and she wasn’t in her room. I scoured the fortress. Time was ticking away, and searching her most likely hiding places was taking longer than I’d hoped. I passed the chef while running through the main corridor, who said he’d spotted Valentina heading towards the hangar around an hour ago.

  I sprinted down the length of the hangar, past the fleet of aircraft and through the open blast doors. A few flakes of snow drifted in through the opening as I approached, and as I stepped into the morning sunlight I saw her near the end of the runway.

  Valentina was in full winter camouflage, dressed head-to-toe in white thermal hunting gear, complete with yellow-tinted shooting glasses. She was peering through the scope of a sniper rifle into the forest below. I jogged towards the end of the runway and shouted as I approached. “Sorry to interrupt your caribou hunting, but we have a problem.”

  “I’m not shooting caribou,” she mumbled without looking away from the eyepiece. “I’m shooting campers.”

  “What?” I stared out into the distance and saw a small hunting party warming themselves by a fire. From what I could tell there were at least three of them in the camp; they’d pitched a small tent next to an all-terrain vehicle. “Are you out of your fucking mind? You can’t just shoot people for fun!”

  She turned to me and held up the rifle, cocking an eyebrow. “You don’t recognize the piece?”

  I squinted at the military-style weapon. I’d never seen it before.

  “It’s one of your sniper rifles, Moxon. The ones you printed last week? It only fires marshmallows, remember? And not even that far, either – I’ve been shooting at those dicks for an hour and haven’t come close to pegging one.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten. It was time to up my meds, because my short-term memory loss wasn’t showing any signs of improvement. “Right, right. Well sorry to interrupt your long-distance food fight, but half of The Fringe just disappeared thanks to a superhuman suicide bomber. New York City is on lockdown.”

  “I guess the NYPD has their hands full,” she said with a half-hearted
shrug, reaching into her pocket in search of additional ammunition. She popped a marshmallow into her mouth before feeding a new one into the chamber. “Not our problem,” she mumbled as she chewed.

  “I have friends in the city,” I said, raising my voice, “so it’s a pretty goddamned huge problem for me. I need you to come with me and Mac, we’re picking them up.”

  “All right, take it easy,” she replied calmly, adjusting the gun’s strap before flinging it over her shoulder. “I’m in. A security op beats standing around here firing confectionery at endangered birds.”

  Great. So in addition to answering for numerous crimes that I wasn’t responsible for, I was probably going to start getting angry calls from the Canadian wildlife preservation society.

  “But,” she added, poking a gloved finger into my chest, “...you’re not coming along for the ride.”

  “Why the hell not?” I asked sharply.

  “You know why the hell not,” she fired back. “We both know why this happened. It doesn’t matter whether this was Red Army or an independent act of aggression: New York is going to pin the blame on someone, and since the bomber died it’s going to be your stupid ass. You pay me to be your bodyguard, and this is me, guarding your body. Stay here, lay low and keep out of trouble – we’ll be back with your girlfriend in a couple hours.”

  “But—“

  “But nothing,” she insisted. “You’re not a superhuman, and you never will be. Acting like one will just get you killed.”

  She stomped down the runway and into the hangar, already screaming into her wrist-com at Mac to hurry up.

  Valentina was blunt, but she was right. The group of suicide bombers parked their van directly across the street from my old apartment, which wasn’t far from Excelsior Retro Comics. They knew exactly what they were doing, and there were no other explanations for their attack; The Fringe wasn’t a military target, and had no political or social significance outside of the fact that it was my neighborhood. If they weren’t there with a plan to vaporize me, then the target they selected was a pretty big coincidence.

  Staying behind made sense. There wasn’t much I could do to help, and this was a two-person operation. With Valentina as security and Mac piloting, I would just be dead weight. And if they got stopped and searched, however slim the chance, having me on-board could make matters considerably worse. When there is a tragedy of this scale, politics dictate that someone has to shoulder the blame. Logically the Red Army should have the finger pointed in their direction, but in times of crisis, rational thought is rarely the first reaction.

  ***

  The following hour was torture. Even though I knew the operation was a routine pick-up, waiting for Peyton to arrive drove me into a chest-tightening panic. Mac suggested that he could send me real-time updates, or hook me into the jet’s in-cabin video feed so I could be in constant contact. It was a nice thought, though I didn’t think it would allay my anxieties. I needed someone real to talk to, and I needed a distraction.

  After quickly explaining the situation to Brynja, she did her best to keep me occupied. She suggested popcorn and a movie to keep my mind off of current events. I reluctantly agreed, but twenty minutes in I was fidgeting in my seat, unable to maintain my focus. I wanted to continually check the news feeds, and scour simulcasts in search of any tidbit of information – no matter how small – that New York might be improving. Something that would indicate that Peyton’s situation wasn’t as grave as I’d feared.

  Unable to sit still, I excused myself and left the media center, retreating to my room. I paced the long row of windows that lined the entire length of my chamber, staring out into the mountain range. That’s when I detected some unusual movement.

  In the distance, down in the forest clearing was a newly erected camp site. More elaborate than the previous one that Valentina had spotted from the runway, this site was large enough to accommodate a hunting party of twenty, possibly more. Several ATVs were parked around the perimeter, as well as a pair of small hover jets. Since I’d been here I hadn’t seen a single person anywhere near the fortress, and the staff had always noted that over the course of the last year, there hadn’t been anyone in the vicinity – not a single camper, hunter or tourist. This was the second group to set up camp on the edge of my property in less than twenty-four hours, and the timing was suspicious.

  Gazing out the window, I was startled by a series of raps at my bedroom door. It was Chandler, accompanied by London floating close behind.

  I forced a smile and gestured for him to enter. “Did you notice the campers outside?” I asked, motioning towards the forest clearing.

  “I did,” he replied, peering out the window. “But not those ones. I mean, I can see them, obviously – I’m not blind. But there are more...the other ones. They’re here. Knocking.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Even for you, that was a really weird sentence.”

  Chandler’s pale cheeks glowed a bright shade of crimson. “I’m so sorry Mister Moxon, sir. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay,” I reassured him. “Just relax. What’s going on?”

  He asked London to give us a look at Fortress 23’s main runway, accessing the micro-cams outside of the hangar’s blast doors.

  “Absolutely,” London replied cheerfully. “Serving the handsome and talented Matthew Moxon is my genuine pleasure.”

  “What was that about?” I laughed.

  “Remember when you asked me to stop London...you know, with the Frost compliments? How she...it always talked about him? Well I tried, but since you’re the default owner of the fortress now, it...well, I screwed up.”

  The two floating orange spheres merged as if they were made of liquid, flattening and expanding into a rectangular screen. The security feed blipped to life.

  The screen displayed a young girl standing at the blast doors, rapping her knuckles against the steel surface. The fur-lined hood of her winter coat obscured most of her face, but from what I could tell she was a child who couldn’t have been older than twelve. Flanking her was a pair of large men wearing hunting jackets, with military-grade hardware strapped to their shoulders – old AK-47 machine guns, from what I could tell. They were the campers that Valentina was using for target practice earlier, and they looked pissed. Something told me the assault rifles they brandished weren’t designed to fire marshmallows.

  “This is irregular,” Chandler mumbled to himself. “This is highly...I mean, we don’t usually get guests. Or visitors. Not that we’re going to invite them in, obviously, that would be up to you because you’re the new Frost. I mean, you’re not him, you’re the—”

  “Chandler,” I interrupted, patting him on the shoulder. “I get it, this is strange. Let’s just go down and check things out.”

  Not the best with confrontation, Chandler opted to stay upstairs and observe from a safe distance. He informed me that I could open the massive interlocking doors to the hangar, but leave a transparent blast shield in place. It doesn’t offer the same measure of protection as the regular doors, but the micro-alloy could withstand a grenade blast without suffering so much as a scratch, which would provide me with more than enough security. There was no way the visitors were getting past it.

  I marched through the hangar to its cavernous opening, and waited patiently as the blast doors inched their way open. A narrow stream of light poured through the crack. It slowly revealed my visitor, standing just an arm’s length away, separated by a thin sheet of protective glass.

  She was a porcelain doll; beautiful and pristine, her lips a pale shade of pink, cheeks stung red from the arctic air. She pulled her hood back with both hands, revealing a ribbon of golden blond hair and intense crystal-blue eyes. I’d only witnessed a gaze that piercing once in my life. It was in The Arena, right before I watched a man die at my feet.

  The girl standing before me was the only living relative of the late Sergei Taktarov – his little sister, Valeriya.

  And I knew exactly what sh
e wanted.

  Chapter Ten

  “We have not been introduced, you and I.” Her English was clearer since the last time I’d heard her speak, her Russian accent barely perceptible.

  The weird thing about coming face to face with an arch-nemesis is that it’s rarely the person you expect – at least that’s how it happened for me. I’m sure Bruce Wayne didn’t anticipate using millions of dollars worth of high-tech equipment to battle a deranged clown; or that Clark Kent, an alien with the powers of a god, would spend most of his time fighting a businessman. And the last person who I expected to come knocking at my door (in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, no less) was a pre-teen girl backed by a group of heavily-armed thugs.

  I’d seen Valeriya Taktarov’s iTube video that went live shortly after Arena Mode. She threatened me for what I’d done to her brother, and invited the downtrodden to join a new Red Army. Her words were articulate, impassioned, and more than a little bit frightening, especially spilling from the lips of a young child who’d just lost her only living relative. And that was the last I’d seen of her.

  Months had drifted by, and there had been no follow-up. Valeriya had disappeared, or so I thought. I assumed she’d gone somewhere to grieve, and would eventually move on with her life. When The Red Army surfaced and the movement gained momentum, I had no idea that she wasn’t just the inspiration, or the catalyst – she was the puppeteer, pulling the strings from behind the curtain.