by Wyatt Savage
Doctor Throgmorton smiled. “The protocol is over.”
Agent Pei arched an eyebrow. “The training?”
I had half a mind to tell Agent Pei what I’d found out about the doctor, but then I realized maybe he already knew. Maybe that was the reason they’d brought Throgmorton along. Because he was some kind of genius who was also very good at killing. Two traits that were likely very high in demand during the Melee.
“Completed satisfactorily,” the doctor said of the training.
The others smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “Perfect timing by the way,” Sylvester said. “Our boy’s on the move.”
He pointed and I saw the outline of the Noctem moving out over the dead forest.
“What now?” I asked.
Agent Pei glowered. “Now we go and take the fucker down.”
38
We gathered our weapons, Espinosa hoisted a rucksack, and then we headed into the woods. I was up front with Agent Pei, Dwayne, and Espinosa, while Sarah, who looked absolutely shellshocked from the death of her sister, and Sylvester brought up the rear with Noora, and Doctor Throgmorton. Using hand signals to communicate, we cut through the ash-colored wood stopping only once, near what looked like the fossilized remains of an alien monster.
“Take this,” Agent Pei said, handing me a featureless blue sphere the size of a deck of cards.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
The sphere suddenly opened and suctioned around my hand. I gasped as the sphere reconfigured itself into the shape of a pistol. A massive pistol with a gigantic barrel, what looked like a pair of .45s grafted together.
“Congratulations,” Sue said. “You have acquired a full-load spark-hammer manufactured by the Noctem Metalworx in 2016. The weapon fires energized sabots. You have thirty-seven sabots in the magazine.”
A tendril shot out from the end of the gun and wrapped around my wrist, securing the weapon so that it appeared like an extension of my hand.
“You’re supposed to kill the Noctem with that,” Agent Pei said, showing me how to pull the slide back on the gun.
Agent Pei and Espinosa drew a crude outline in the ash, demonstrating how we were to separate and then move in on the Noctem. The idea is they’d distract the alien while I searched for a way to take it down.
Agent Pei and the others took off into the woods off to the left, but Dwayne stayed behind.
“You know you don’t have to do this,” Dwayne said.
“Actually, they kinda literally just told me I had to do it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Dwayne said with a sheepish smile.
“If something happens to me I want you to have this,” I said, reaching into a pocket, pulling out my lucky baseball.
Dwayne drew back. “But that – that’s your ball.”
“I know.”
“The ball.”
“I know that, Dwayne. I threw the no-no,” I added, using baseball slang for a no-hitter.
He stared at the ball. “You know what this is don’t you, Logan?”
“Yep. Me handing you a ball.”
“Nope, it’s something deeper than that. It’s you letting go of your past.”
“Nah, I’m pretty sure it’s just a goddamn ball, Dwayne.”
“You’re gonna laugh,” Dwayne said. “But there’s this lyric from an old Steely Dan song called Don’t Take Me Alive. It says something like ‘I’m a bookkeeper’s son and I don’t wanna shoot no one,’ which could’ve been written about me. I mean, my old man was an accountant and when this game started I didn’t want to kill anyone.”
“Neither did I.”
“But that’s what it’s come to, Logan. We’re doing what we have to do.”
“I know.”
“Watch your ass out there, but if something happens, I’ll keep going,” he said.
“I’d do the same.”
“Because someone has to win this thing for the good guys.”
He took the ball from me and I hugged him as tightly as I would my brother, because that’s what he was.
We separated.
I took the path straight-ahead, a depression that curved through the dead trees whose bark had the texture of charcoal, the withered branches full of thorns that raked my skin.
“You there, Sue?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the Noctem?”
“Watching you,” she replied.
I ducked behind the trunk of a black tree. Eyes on my HUD, I studied the surrounding areas, searching for the alien.
“Does it know that I’m hunting it?” I asked.
“Unknown.”
“Does it know where I am?”
“Affirmative.”
I poked my head out and a section of the tree vanished in a volcanic explosion. The backblast shunted me sideways. My HUD began blinking and beeping, but I was already up and running.
The air grew warm and I knew the Noctem was gunning for me.
A flurry of energy balls flew down and detonated nearby, casting me up into the air. I smashed into a nearby tree, tore through the thing, and rolled several times into a shallow ravine. My mouth was filled with earth and ash and tears were in my eyes. I made a motion to stand and something clicked in my chest. I didn’t need to examine my HUD to realize I had some broken ribs and had lost two health points.
Struggling upright, I spotted the wraith-like Noctem slashing through the trees. I raised my spark-hammer, my futuristic pistol, but the Noctem was gone.
Hand clutching my chest, I drifted to the right, fighting my way through the dead wood when I spotted it.
Depressions in the ash, maybe a hundred feet out in front of me.
The Noctem was there.
The bastard was somehow invisible, but it was there.
Before I could react, the alien unleashed a metallic shriek and opened fire on me.
Crouching behind my tree, I waited for the fireballs to detonate then ran laterally. I made it twenty steps before a firebomb dropped to the ground like a mortar round and lifted me up into the air.
I did a face-plant and skidded for ten feet before coming to a stop.
-1 Health Points!
Dammit. I was down three health points, nursing some broken ribs, and having trouble catching my wind. I had seconds to act, maybe less before the alien finished me off.
Crawling on my belly, I took cover behind a trunk and searched for the Noctem and then a voice came to me, a male voice that whispered, “Nothing lives long except the earth and the mountains. Give yourself up and your journey will come to a peaceful end.”
“Never,” I replied, realizing the Noctem had invaded my mind.
“Then all will be killed,” the alien voice said. “Big and little as nits make lice.”
“Fuck you.”
The Noctem opened fire again, raining hellfire down on my position until I was surrounded by an ocean of flames. I crawled under the trunk, fighting for air, choking on the acrid smoke.
That’s when it came to me.
The smoke!
I could use it to my advantage.
Looking out from my hiding spot, I used my HUD to focus on the ground where the depressions were. The alien had taken up a position in a clearing, maybe a hundred and twenty feet away. The thing was just standing there, trying to smoke me out.
Sucking in a breath, I aimed the spark-hammer with two hands and fired a shot. The recoil was substantial, nearly knocking me over, but the sabot shrieked through the air and punched into a tree near those depressions, sending the thing up in flames.
Smoke from the fire billowed, silhouetting the Noctem.
The alien’s twisted, eyeless face came into view and I braved the flames, crawling out from under the trunk and plunging through the fire.
-1 Health Points!
I was wounded, but I didn’t stop.
I couldn’t.
The Noctem reacted to me and to something else.
The sound of gunfire coming from the opp
osite direction.
Agent Pei, Dwayne, and the others were coming.
The alien hesitated and in the thing’s moment of indecision, the spark-hammer rose and I fired a sabot.
There was a look of complete and utter bafflement on the alien’s ugly fucking face. A kind of ‘I can’t believe this puny little human just kicked my ass,’ kind of look.
I half expected my head to explode from firing directly on the alien, but it didn’t happen. The respawning trick had actually worked. The sabot from my weapon slammed into an area on the alien where its breast-bone should’ve been and kept on going.
Green blood and pulp filled the air.
The blast doubled over the Noctem, who lurched back, unsteady, crying in pain.
I fired again and again, but the alien had recovered.
I’d simultaneously wounded and pissed the thing off.
In one powerful movement, it alighted into the top of a tree. The air wavered around its head, which changed, its face morphing from an alien into that of my brother Sean. The air was suddenly stilled, but my mind was racing.
“You…you’re not real,” I said.
Sean raised his hands. “What are you doing, brother?”
I didn’t respond, standing as straight as a match stick. “I’m fighting.”
“Against impossible odds,” Sean said.
“I’m doing it for Dad and Mom…for you and your family.”
Sean dredged up a smile. “We’re already on the other side, Logan.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Sean took a deep breath as I kneaded the spark-hammer, my palms flecked with sweat. “The place we’re in now? You can’t even believe how beautiful it is. We’re there waiting for you.”
“You’re lying,” I said.
“All you have to do is one thing. Just…one thing.”
“What?”
“Put your weapon down,” Sean said.
I noticed a tic at the corner of Sean’s mouth. An uncontrollable twitch. Squinting, I noticed the twitch was caused by an errant flap of flesh, a fold at Sean’s neck that was slowly peeling back, as if to reveal that the alien was wearing a mask of my brother’s face.
Before I could get off a shot, Sean’s face vanished and the alien reappeared. It unleashed a barrage of fireballs at me. That’s when my training took over.
Much as I had when battling the monsters summoned by Doctor Throgmorton, I evaded the fireballs, realizing this fight was real. There were no do-overs here, no chances at respawning or resurrection. I had to kill the Noctem or reach my journey’s end.
The ground shook and caught fire as I veered to the left, running through the trees that exploded like a thunderclap.
Wood shrapnel filled the air as I covered my head with my hands.
Looking back over my shoulder, I saw a fireball coming directly toward me and fired at it.
The sabot jackhammered into the fireball, creating a fiery shockwave that smothered the Noctem.
The alien dropped out of the sky like a bird with a broken wing.
The creature tried to rise, but I was already on it.
I fired a shot that struck the Noctem in the chest, making a sound like a gong being struck. The spark-hammer felt good in my hands as I continued to will shots into the alien. Each sabot tore hunks of meat from the thing’s chest and then I advanced, took aim, ready to finish it off when the alien flicked its wrist, spawning a bolt of what looked like lightning that thumped me hard in the abdomen.
-2 Health Points!
I crashed back, the impact dislodging the spark-hammer.
The Noctem rose on unsteady feet, wobbling, bloody, angry as hell.
The thing plodded forward, grinning, realizing I was defenseless.
It kicked the spark-hammer aside and grabbed me by the neck. Its breath was hot and smelled of blood and burned meat. It said something in its own language that I couldn’t make out. Then it opened its mouth to take a bite out of me and I felt it.
The five-inch knife that Espinosa had given me.
In one movement, I grabbed the knife and plunged it into the Noctem’s neck.
There was a geyser of arterial blood as the thing reached out and grabbed me with one arm, taking me up into its terrible embrace.
The alien’s blood spritzed my face. It was warm, sticky like honey, and smelled of turpentine. The back of my neck rose in pinpricks as the alien clawed at the knife. It was able to yank the blade free as a band of multi-colored light wreathed us.
The alien opened its mouth and a whining note echoed from it. I was terrified that my ears were going to burst and then the ground simply fell away beneath us. All was dark and without definition, as if we were in deepest space. And then a grid of some sort appeared below us, scribed in silver. It looked like a blueprint, a cross-section of the universe, something that instinct told me was too complex for my mind to comprehend.
Next, I saw what looked like a million different doorways of various shapes and sizes within the grid and then the alien moaned and one of them opened. The alien’s vice-like grip released and I felt myself jettisoned forward by a blast of air. I fell straight down, as if I’d stepped off the edge of a skyscraper.
Air rushed past me as I corkscrewed down into the opening before coming to a stop on what looked like a colossal plain, a broad field of darkness illuminated by what appeared to be spokes of lightning.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“The center of everything,” a ghostly voice answered.
“Sue?”
“Yes.”
“What’s happening?”
“You are seeing the secrets of the universe. Things only the Noctem are privy to.”
A red ring with a darkened interior exploded out in the distance, birthing a rope of fire that swirled past me.
“What’s happening?!” I screamed.
“The past is being peeled back in loops,” Sue replied.
The ground opened under me once more and I was sucked into a black hole. Everything unfolded, the fibers of time collapsing, the past unfurled. My eyes followed ill-defined forms toiling down in the gloominess, flickering, like an old movie projector beamed against a darkened wall. Distorted images flowed past me, ghost-like apparitions, sinuating, giving off a strange, eerie wind chime sound as they fluttered by.
I heard the echoes of combat next, the thwack! of stone and wood against bone. The ill-defined forms took on the visages of fighters from a time before memory. Archaic humans, pre-Homo Sapiens, doing great violence to each other and a menagerie of beasts, dinosaurs, and alien constructs, in a broad field of tawny grass. The very first Melee? I couldn’t be sure, but it certainly looked like it.
The images changed to scenes of a more recent origin, great armies fighting across Earth and other, distant planets, using strangely shaped tanks, planes, helicopters, precision-guided munitions. I saw men, women, alien creatures, monsters, and deformed monstrosities engaged in combat that was close, brutal, visceral. Blood was spilled and points were gained and then a great, rending wall of flames devoured the warriors, sweeping across everything, leaving a limitless expanse of gray dust. Nothing stirred for several seconds and then things rose up from the dust.
People, cities, the Noctem.
The sun and moon then shot through the sky, strobe-like, flashing day and night, as the scenery switched to warriors battling in alien stadiums, mazes, towers and skyscrapers, even in the air, and across great blood-colored seas. There were always humans involved in the fighting, men, women, some of them looking like me, others that were decidedly biomechanical, including several with robotic appendages and others wrapped in mechanical fighting suits. Warriors grappled with swords, axes, lasers, guns, and their nails and teeth. There was little glory in any of it. It was simply kill or be killed. Out of the boiling mass of combatants rose a man with a metal arm and an obsidian monocle that shielded his right eye. Against a chorus of battle cries he climbed a mountain of bodies and raised up a
sword as the sky ripped open.
BOOM!
A fireball burst and I covered my eyes and cried out. When I opened them, I was back on the ground, heart banging against my ribs.
“Sue?”
No response.
What the hell had happened? Had the alien allowed me into its mind? Permitted me to glimpse things that only the Noctem knew about? All the secrets of the universe, including scenes from the Melee? My mind reeled, full of wonder and dread.
I blinked and looked down. The alien was lying below me. It rolled over and choked out a few breaths as I moved over and grabbed the spark-hammer. I aimed at its head, but it had already stopped moving.
The shouts of the others grew louder as I tiptoed forward, worried that the alien might rise up at any moment like a monster from one of those old slasher movies.
The Noctem didn’t move and I angled a boot out and kicked something that was lying near its twisted, metallic hand.
A silver object in the shape of a frisbee that glowed red and yellow.
“Don’t touch it!” someone shouted.
I looked back to see Agent Pei and the others.
“It’s dead,” I said.
“I can see that,” the agent said. “Good work.”
I clutched my chest, grimacing. Espinosa reached into his rucksack and handed me a health drink that I downed to regain my full strength.
I reached for the alien object and Agent Pei snatched it up before I could get my fingers on it. Then he moved over and sawed off the end of one of the alien’s hands with a large combat knife. He used the tip of the blade to pry out the grotesque second mouth in the middle of the hand, careful not to damage the end of the alien’s fingers.
“Doctor Throgmorton needs to get this,” he said of the hand with a wink and a warm, comradely look. “He’ll be so proud of you.”
Dwayne put a hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”
I shook my head. “Hell no, I’m not.”
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I think, maybe I have.”
“Ex Nihilo,” Doctor Throgmorton said, holding the alien’s device up for all to see.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“From nothing,” he answered. “It means that whoever possesses this device has the power to create something from nothing.”