Terminal (Visceral Book 4)

by Adam Thielen

  To this, Sai did not have a response.

  “I know you tried to talk them out of it,” she added. “We can’t control what other people do, only ourselves.”

  “Let’s not be morbid,” said Sai, flopping onto his favorite chair again. “We’re surviving, and we’ll make the life we want someday.”

  Nina stood behind Sai and placed her hand on his shoulder. “The life I wanted… just ended.”

  “Dammit, Neen.”

  “But I trust you,” she said. “I know you want what’s best, and wherever we end up, I will try to be happy.”

  “That’s all I want,” he said. “You know that.”

  “We waited here for so long, so convinced we’d get our moment,” lamented Nina. “Always wanted to see what those drones of yours could do.”

  “Aye,” he said. “No one has flyers like mine.”

  “I remember when you made me those stabilizers,” she continued, stroking the back of his head. “I was so excited. That’s when I knew… well, thought I knew, I’d soon show those UTI bastards the error of their ways.”

  “Am I supposed to just let you run off and die with those fools?”

  “No, no,” she said. “Like you said, we’re gonna live. For five years after this, when the pain and sorrow has subsided; for ten years after that, when we pay lip service to the people we used to know as friends; for fifteen years after that, when we are too old to fight and only our coms remember who Abriham and Jack and Daria were.”

  “Great fuckin’ Milenko, Nina. People get old, they move on. That’s life. Shit!”

  “And then we’ll die,” she said in a faux soothing tone. “We might be together, we might have gone our separate ways, but we’ll die all the same. Not together, of course, but one of us. Then the other will be the last of our group, a group of five lost souls that found each other for a brief time and were faced with challenges that decided the fate of future generations of the unfit, the impure, the deformed, the awakened.”

  Sai’s face contorted as he listened.

  “I hope I go first,” she said. “It’s selfish, but I can’t imagine the sense of emptiness I’d feel when even a small flutter of recognition graces my aged mind for the moments we had, the moment we have now. Remembering would be a torture I’d endure only out of an instinctual fear of oblivion while I spend my days fantasizing about the next pureed meal and reruns of my favorite sit-com.”

  “God dammit, Nina.”

  Episode 17: Devoted Betrayal

  After a stop in the locker room, Tsenka Cho arrived at the cage for her semifinal bout with only minutes to spare. This time the center of the pod was packed, with many nocturnals bringing their own chairs or standing back behind the bleachers.

  Entering the ring with her was the only other woman in the contest, Margaret Branch, known as ‘Red’ within the city for her natural red hair that normally fell to her hips but was rolled up into two tight buns for the contest. She stood across the cage, hopping from one foot to the other in anticipation.

  Cho looked out at the audience, spotting both Matthias and Diego sitting together. Gimon waved excitedly and Tsenka hesitated before returning the gesture. Matthias cupped his hands like a megaphone and shouted something she couldn’t make out, and she assumed it was the typical encouragement he would give.

  The announcer introduced both fighters. His voice boomed throughout the pod and likely the entire Refuge. The crowd roared and the referee stepped into the center of the ring and clapped his hands together. “Fight!”

  Red rushed the center as the ref moved back out of the way. She was fast and peppered Cho with jabs, throwing a straight kick to her shins at random intervals. Tsenka charged to grapple, but Branch moved out of the way and threw two more jabs, both landing on Tsenka’s cheek.

  “Yeah, you don’t even want it,” taunted Red. Her head movement was superb, and Cho found it difficult to learn her timing, all the while eating knuckle sandwiches. Mesmerized by her motion, Cho froze when Branch darted forward with a hook, landing it on the temple. The stadium spun and Tsenka fell backward.

  Red charged at her, ready to finish Tsenka off, but Tsenka recovered and tried again to grab Branch around the waist. Branch pushed her head down and circled around behind Tsenka, wrapping her legs around Cho’s body. Red then snuck her arm around Tsenka’s neck to secure a choke.

  Cho knew she was in trouble. Her instinct was to grab Red’s arm and hope to pull her off her back, but she realized that would be risky, and if she stayed on the defensive for the remainder of the fight, tangled up in Branch’s legs, she would lose. Cho decided to take a chance. She powered to her knees, using her hands to push herself up. It allowed Red to lock the choke in and squeeze.

  Tsenka felt as if her neck would snap and her head would pop off, but she struggled to her feet even as Red stayed attached to her back. Cho hopped little short hops, using Red’s weight against her, forcing her legs to untangle and support her body. She still had the choke, but from a standing position could not exert the same amount of pressure.

  Cho pushed her back against the cage, then spun her body to face Branch, removing herself from danger. Red began to pummel Tsenka’s midsection instead of moving away from the cage, and Cho took advantage. She bent her arms, forming sharp points with her elbows, then swung, her body and shoulders moving with her. Cho’s elbow slammed into Branch’s forehead, and blood began to spill from a large cut, creating a wide stripe of red over her nose and mouth, and barely missing her eyes.

  Red blocked the next two elbows and saw her blood splatter onto Tsenka and her own hands, and panicked. She turned and tried to move around Cho to get away from her and the cage. Tsenka threw her leg up at an angle, and Branch could not see it coming. She ran into Cho’s foot, and the blood from her forehead flew outward, hitting the cage, Tsenka, the sand, and a few lucky attendees.

  Margaret the Red fell forward as if being tripped, and the referee intervened, declaring Tsenka the winner. Cho knelt next to her opponent, who lay still save for wheezing, and consoled her. “You’re fast,” she said. “Almost had me.”

  Without pulling her head from the sand, Red lifted her arm and shook Tsenka’s hand, then resumed her rest. Cho stood and bowed to the crowd. She was now in the finals, a main event to be held just three hours away.

  Trent and Gimon met her outside the gate as security pushed back the standing crowds. Recognizing the successor, they let him pass. He ran up to Tsenka and grabbed her around the waist, pushing his lips against hers. She fought the urge to pull away, and forced herself to kiss him back. He pulled back with a look of concern.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Ya… tough fight.”

  “It was, wasn’t it,” he said. “But you did it! You are amazing. The crowd is loving you, too.”

  She smiled weakly.

  “The current champ will be tough, though,” he continued. “I could give you some pointers—”

  “Sounds good,” she said. “But first, I need some food. Would you mind terribly if I went somewhere with Matthias? I need to talk to him about some personal matters.”

  “Uh, sure,” he said, turning to Trent. “No funny biz, brol.”

  “Well, not this time,” replied Matthias.

  “Ey, come on, don’t bait me, man.”

  “You wish,” said Trent.

  Diego laughed. “Yeah, maybe. I’ll catch you both later.”

  Matthias and Tsenka made their way through a fenced-off path leading from the ring to the locker room, and from there, they went to an adjacent pod. Cho led him to a pasta cafe with tables out in the commons.

  “Did you really have something to talk about, or just trying to get some space?” he asked, taking a seat.

  “I slept with him,” she said.

  “Well… I sort of assumed that given our earlier conversation. Congratulations?”

  “Then I sort of snooped on his computer,” she continued.

  “Can’t say I’m sho
cked,” he said, looking down at the table and ordering through its touch screen. “Perhaps disappointed.”

  “He asked you to invite me here, didn’t he?” she asked.

  Trent’s hand moved off the screen and he looked up, meeting her eyes. “I always wanted to,” he said. “But… yes, he told me I should.” His stomach churned, and he lost interest in the prospect of food. “What did you find?”

  And so she told him. Bit by bit, she tore down his new home, the only place he had felt truly comfortable since leaving daylight behind.

  “Who else knows?” he asked.

  “What does that have to do with it?” she challenged. “You know me.”

  “Do I?”

  Tsenka’s expression flattened then turned angry. “Fuck you. Check with the coms manager in the infosec offices. He helped me get the data.”

  Matthias brooded silently for a moment. “Let this go,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’ve caught them,” he said. “That’s good. But even with proof, they’ll destroy you. If we confront him privately, we’ll have leverage.”

  Cho’s eyes widened. “Leverage to what?”

  “Defuse this,” he hissed.

  “It’s too late for that,” said Cho. “If I don’t expose them, Rogers—the infosec guy—will.”

  “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?” said Matthias, his voice turning into a yell at the end. He looked to a pair of patrons, now staring, then back at Tsenka.

  “Don’t you get it?” she asked. “He hates you.”

  “No,” said Matthias. “He doesn’t. I know he doesn’t. Maybe he did a long time ago. I can’t blame him for that. But he doesn’t.”

  Tsenka shook her head. “I’m going to my room to rest.”

  “Maybe this Rogers will see reason,” said Matthias.

  “We really don’t know each other anymore,” said Tsenka, standing to leave without ordering. “Everyone here is in danger, and all you care about is yourself. When the fuck did that happen?”

  “Don’t do this to me,” he said weakly.

  “Goodbye, Matt,” she said, walking past him toward the residential section of the pod.

  * * *

  Daria, Taq, and Abriham sat at a table in the small cafe located down the block from the Cepheid plaza. Jones used his old-style com to project a map of the corporate campus onto the table, including a circle in a blank area purported to be the site of the launch tube.

  “Sai said it was open,” said Daria. “So I will rappel down, have it disabled in no time, then drop our little package down by its thrusters just in case.”

  Taq had preferred they sneak in without detection and infiltrate the building’s lower levels, but he had to admit to himself that the direct approach had the best odds of success. He nodded. “There’s a lot of space between the building and the missile, and anyone within a hundred meters of that silo will be roasted if it were to launch.”

  “It’s not gonna launch.”

  “What if the inside is locked down and you can’t get back up before it blows?”

  “Curtains!” she said. “But I’ll be fine, don’t you worry.”

  “Can I worry?” asked Abe, sipping at a latte.

  “No,” she answered.

  “Coms will be down soon,” said Taq. “We should get into position. But let me say one last thing. Whatever you, either of you, thinks we are walking into, forget it. Expect things to go wrong, expect to improvise, and most importantly, remember what our goal is—stopping that missile at all costs.”

  The trio stepped out of the cafe and moved from building to building, closing in on the corporate grounds while minimizing line of sight from cameras, in hopes of avoiding being detected by automated security.

  Once obscured by a row of storage units across the road from the main tower, with its sloping balconies almost resembling the peeling bark of a tall palm tree, they huddled together. Taq closed his eyes and threw his hands outward, then balled his fists, and the three vanished from sight.

  A lone security guard stood outside the tower, and a fence surrounded a six-meter-wide hole in the ground. A two-legged wide-body mini-behemoth with various weapons systems stood next to it, ever vigilant. A flock of small drones soaked in the sunlight and flew their seemingly random paths around the campus, reporting any strange motion to the security hub where two analysts were paid solely to sit in a cramped room and watch data feeds for anomalies.

  The three shrouded intruders stepped off the public sidewalk and onto the Cepheid’s turfgrass. Daria and Abe awed at the guard who continued facing straight ahead as they moved toward the missile silo and its chain-link barrier.

  Halfway there, a siren filled the air and the line of concrete next to the sidewalk rose three meters into the air, creating a wall around that section of the compound, trapping the three invaders inside with the silo, tower, mech, and guard. The mini-drones flying through the air sprinkled small gray bearings onto the turf, and as one of them landed on the reality-bending hemisphere Jones used to hide himself and his companions, sparks flew and Taq strained to feed Ether into the spell to compensate.

  When a second bead contacted its surface, the spell collapsed, and all three became visible. The guard aimed his rifle and the mech went from a crouched resting position to standing. Then its miniguns spun up, ready to tear the intruders apart.

  “Unauthorized intruders,” said the mech, its voice matching that of the SUV that had chased Daria and Cho days earlier.

  The three poised for action, with Taq pushing his palm forward to create a shield between himself and the mech, shaping it to be flat so that falling polonium pellets wouldn’t touch its surface.

  “I can make it,” said Daria.

  “Wait,” said Taq. “That mech will tear you up first.”

  Anne’s voice blared from a PA system. “Nice to see you again, Taq.”

  * * *

  Matt’s days are monotonous and repetitive. He asks the next woman in line if she’d like a giant burrito, nachos, or three tacos. From there, things get interesting as the customer must decide what meat they’d like, and then they must ponder what toppings go best with the two previous choices. It can be tricky, deciding if the chicken is best paired with black or pinto beans. Trent is careful not to rush them. He gets paid by the hour.

  During his break, he fixes himself a burrito. As he piles on the pork, he tells himself it is the last time he eats meat, just as he told himself the day prior. He takes the burrito to the back, where Shonda frets over next week’s work schedule.

  “Not giving me my fucking hours,” she tells him.

  “I don’t do the scheduling,” he says, proceeding to tear into his meal.

  “I swear,” she says, sitting next to Matt at the break table. “Hey, that looks good.”

  “It’s not,” he says. “I’ve eaten this food too many times. I need to start leaving for lunch.”

  “We should go somewhere,” she suggests.

  “Totes.”

  “Alright, fine,” she says. “I’m going to punch in.”

  “See ya.”

  After his meal, he steps back out into the front line, as it is called, and his eyes are drawn to a raven-haired woman leaving with a bag of food. He stares blankly as the door closes behind her and she walks past the glass window.

  Matt suddenly remembers the day he woke up on the gravel and decided to leave everything behind, but the thoughts that were so clear then are murky now, and as they fade he panics and runs out from behind the counter and through the door, but it’s too late. The woman’s car exits the parking lot. He squints at the license plate, but it has an obnoxious curved protector around it and he can’t read the first two characters.

  He runs along the road, his feet pounding the grass as hard as they can in order to chase her down. But the traffic lights allow her to pass without stopping, and Matt’s lungs begin to burn. She turns left, and her pursuer is blocked by the busy street. Matt doubles o
ver, wheezing. He feels the familiarity slip away and falls to his knees in despair.

  I know you, he believes. Who are you?

  He yanks at his hair as if to pull memories from the depths of his skull but nothing comes. Maybe the psych is right, he thinks. He said there would be episodes. Matt hangs his head in defeat, feeling as lost as the day he arrived in town.

  * * *

  The vampire Matthias Trent rolled onto his stomach, then onto his side, then to his stomach again, unable to find a comfortable position in which to sulk and slumber. The real problem wasn’t the unrest of his body, but that of his mind, as it refused to quiet. He felt betrayed on all sides, and he wondered which of those sides Andrei, the Dracul himself, was on.

  Trent recalled one of their many conversations about the fate of the nocturnal. Matthias had asked him whether he thought vampires as a people would ever be accepted by the world.

  “Humanity should be more concerned with whether or not they will be accepted by vampires,” Andrei had replied.

  Matthias rose from his bed and opened his narrow wardrobe. He plucked out an old blue-striped button-down and his weathered black longcoat he hadn’t worn since arriving in the city, and headed to the information security offices. He could hear the crowds gathered in the arena as the fight for third place was underway. Soon, Tsenka would enter the ring again.

  Two vampires in armored vests stood outside the infosec entrance. Matthias waited as they scanned his retinas. They let him pass, and he approached the front desk.

  “I’m here to see the manager, Rogers,” said Matthias.

  The desk attendant, a wiry man with almost pinkish skin, looked up at Trent, moving his head the minimal amount while rolling his eyes up as far as they would go. “It’s after hours, sir. He will be in tomorrow evening.”

  “It’s an emergency,” he replied. “Someone may have tampered with my room’s terminal.”

  “Sir—”

  “Page him, please.”

  The attendant’s eyes rolled down to another security officer standing in the room, then back to Matthias. “Very well. It may be a few minutes before he gets here.”