Mutant Chronicles

by Matt Forbeck

  El Jesus pushed past Mitch to get his hands back on the bomb. Mitch understood. The man had left the payload behind, and now he wanted to make up for it. He knew that El Jesus wouldn’t make the same mistake again—if he lived long enough to have that chance.

  Mitch glanced around. The others had jammed themselves into the cramped pod and had started to strap their bodies into the harnesses that lined the walls. Sunlight shone in through small windows above and below.

  To the top, Mitch could see black smoke trailing out of Constantine’s wrecked airship. Through the window under everyone’s feet, the Earth grew closer by the second.

  Severian shoved the sack into El Jesus’s hands and slipped by him into the pod. The big man put the bomb under his arm like a football and then reached out and slammed the hatch shut.

  “Let’s go!” El Jesus said, spinning the wheel to seal the pod away from the doomed ship. He clambered down into the only free seat, the bomb clutched tight to his chest.

  “Is that everyone?” MacGuire asked.

  “Fuck, yes, it’s everyone!” El Jesus said. The corporal put the bomb on his lap and started to buckle himself in.

  MacGuire nodded at Juba. The Mishiman reached over and opened a little door labeled POD RELEASE. He reached inside the recessed compartment beyond and flipped a switch.

  Nothing happened.

  Juba toggled the switch back and forth, again and again. Still nothing.

  “Circuit’s been cut!”

  Mitch had been afraid something like that might happen. The escape pod was usually the last thing maintenance crews bothered checking. If it didn’t work, who the hell would be alive to complain about it?

  Even if it had been in top condition at the start of the flight, a direct collision like that meant all bets on the integrity of any system on the craft were off. Escape pods usually were used in less catastrophic circumstances than this. Engineers who thought up scenarios like this would have assumed everyone was already dead.

  Without a word, Mitch made his decision and climbed back up toward the hatch. He peered through the glass set in the hatch at the cabin beyond. He spied what he was looking for and began to wrestle with the wheel

  Steiner stood up too. “What are you doing?” the Bauhauser asked.

  Mitch didn’t look down, just concentrated on the task at hand. “Manual release on the other side of the hatch.”

  “You’ll be killed.”

  Mitch kept working at the wheel. “Yeah.”

  Steiner reached up and helped him turn the wheel. Opening it was far slower going than sealing it, but they kept at it, working as a team.

  Mitch felt the locks holding down the hatch click as they finally fell out of place. Before he could shove the hatch open, though, something heavy fell against it.

  Mitch looked up to see Michaels looking down through the window in the hatch, his face a red ruin of glass and blood. After the head-on crash, Mitch had counted the pilot as gone for sure. The man had pulled himself all the way from the shattered cockpit to reach the pod, dying every hard-fought step of the way.

  Michaels looked down at Mitch through the glass, a defiant snarl on his battered face. He snapped off a final salute to Mitch and those below him. Then Michaels reached out and pulled the manual release.

  34

  The escape pod broke free from the airship and zipped off into the sky. It arced away from the ship to find its own path back to Earth. Mitch watched Michaels and his ruined ship shrink almost to nothing in a matter of seconds. As he looked, he tightened the hatch’s wheel once more.

  By the time he’d finished, the plane had fallen out of sight. Mitch gave the pilot a mental salute, then flung himself back into his seat and struggled to strap himself in.

  As an airworthy vehicle, the escape pod made a good brick. Being in it felt like riding a barrel over a never-ending waterfall. Mitch didn’t know if he’d have been able to secure himself in his seat if El Jesus hadn’t used his free hand to hold him down.

  Once he got the final strap down, Mitch looked at the others. They stared at each other wordlessly. He knew that many of them wanted to start screaming in fear, but they impressed him by holding back, at least for now.

  Juba kept his gaze locked on an altimeter embedded in the wall near the nonworking release switch. The big hand on it spun like a roulette wheel, with the smaller one, which ticked off feet by thousands, chasing it hard.

  “Silk should pop at five thousand,” Juba said. He had to shout over the wind noise but kept his tone calm and measured. “Here we go—”

  A huge jolt shook the escape pod, and Mitch wondered if everyone in the place had sustained a concussion. He shook his head to clear his vision, then looked straight down. The ground seemed to be zipping up at them as fast as before.

  “We’re still falling,” MacGuire said. For the first time, Mitch noticed a note of true panic in the man’s voice.

  “We’re too heavy,” said Steiner. The Cog shook his head in a way that shouted, Shoddy Imperial workmanship. “We blew the chute.”

  MacGuire scowled and reached out with his hand, pointing at a toggle switch over El Jesus’s seat. “The backup,” he said. “Hit the backup!”

  El Jesus reached for the toggle with his free hand. He’d held on to the bomb like a vise throughout the fall and the jolt from the first chute. Keeping the bomb under his arm made the reach a little too long for him, but he stretched his fingers as far as they could go.

  “No!” Juba shouted, finally ready to panic.

  El Jesus’s hand froze just as it touched the switch over Juba’s head. The big man gaped at the Mishiman. “No? Fuck no! Yes, motherfucker!”

  Mad and scared as he was, El Jesus didn’t hit the switch quite yet.

  “We pop it now, we’ll shred it like the first! We open low, it’ll slow us down before we hit, before the silk rips apart!”

  El Jesus stared at the man as if he’d just told him to get out and sprinkle fairy dust on the outside of the pod. When Juba moved to put his own hand on the switch, though, El Jesus let his drop.

  Mitch looked to MacGuire. The Imperial stared at Juba and bit his lip.

  What the Mishiman had said made sense. It gave them a choice between a hard landing and a fatal one. The only trick was it would require perfect timing and nerves of steel to pull it off.

  The altimeter passed two thousand feet and kept dropping. No matter what happened, they wouldn’t have to wait long for the results.

  “Do it,” MacGuire said.

  Juba ignored him and kept his eyes on the altimeter. Mitch wondered if MacGuire would pull his pistol on the Mishiman and order him to hit the switch. Of course, the threat of death wasn’t much use in a situation like this.

  “Fifteen hundred.”

  Juba sounded as if he’d just hit his personal best. He narrowed his eyes as he waited for the exact right moment. MacGuire put his hand on his sidearm. Mitch shot him an angry look to make him stay put. Did he think he was going to shoot the switch instead?

  “Okay, here we go!” Juba shouted. “Here we go!”

  Brother Samuel began to pray loudly. The rest of them clung to their straps. Mitch glanced over at the altimeter, which was spinning like a racecar’s wheel.

  Through the windows below, Mitch could see nothing, just clouds. Then the escape pod broke through.

  Below, Mitch spied a rain-soaked city that had the black, wet look of a doused campfire. No lights burned in the dank, abandoned buildings, not even in the burned-out skyscraper at which the escape pod hurtled.

  “We’re gonna crash!” he shouted at Juba. “You better pull that fucking chute!”

  “Juba’s right,” Duval said. That didn’t comfort Mitch in the least.

  El Jesus wrapped himself around the bomb and closed his eyes. A hard enough impact might set the thing off, Mitch guessed, even without the trigger. At least they’d make a big crater then.

  “You’d better be right about this!” Mitch said to Juba.
“You’d better be right, you son of a bitch!”

  Juba reached up to pull the switch that would release the chute. Before he could do it, though, the escape pod smashed into one side of the skyscraper’s top, which seemed to reach up to snatch it from the sky.

  Mitch felt like the jolt might jerk his bones right out of his skin. He almost passed out from that alone.

  Bits of the skyscraper shot through the sides of the escape pod like bullets. Blood exploded from somewhere, and someone screamed in pain.

  The steel shell smashed through wall after wall and floor after floor so fast that Mitch couldn’t count them. Then the pod burst free from the building’s sleeve, into the open sky, and careened toward the open ground below.

  The chute popped open then. It slowed them down, but not by much. Would it be enough?

  Mitch bent his head down and braced himself as he stared at the ground zooming up at him. Even at the last moment, he couldn’t bring himself to pray.

  35

  Mitch had been sure he was dead. No one could survive a fall from forty thousand feet and walk away from it. But the two chutes had slowed the escape pod, as had the multiple floors of the skyscraper they’d shot straight through like a massive bullet.

  Mitch felt like hell, but he hadn’t ended up pancaked on the floor of the pod, his flattened remains mixed in with those of the others. They’d left the monastery with sixteen people: ten soldiers, Samuel, Severian, Hodge, Michaels, and the two stokers above. Only eight of them had made it into the pod.

  From the distinct smell of blood, he doubted if all of them would make it out.

  Mitch undid his straps and spilled out of his seat. He seemed to be the first to free himself, but he could tell by the groans all around him that he wasn’t the only survivor.

  A weak light filtered in through the window in the pod’s hatch, although Mitch couldn’t see anything through the haze that seemed to cover it. He reached up and felt the wheel still there. Gritting his teeth against the pain he felt in every joint and muscle, he started to turn it.

  Before long, Steiner got to his feet and lent Mitch a hand. Between the two of them, they made fast work of it, and soon the locks on the hatch clicked open.

  The thing didn’t want to open, but Mitch and Steiner got their hands on it and shoved upward. The metal around the opening had bent, crimping the hatch on tight.

  “Put your back into it,” Steiner said.

  Mitch resisted the urge to put his fist into the Cog. Instead, he channeled his irritation into shoving upward with all his might. Steiner did the same.

  With a high-pitched groan of twisted metal, the hatch finally gave way. It moved slowly at first, then pitched upward and over. It fell off its broken hinges and tumbled away. Mitch heard a soft splash as it smacked into the rain-soaked ground.

  Mitch pulled himself out of the pod first and slid down the still-steaming metal to the land in mud up to his knees. It had been one more bit of luck that they’d landed on such soft ground. Hitting a slab of concrete might have killed them all.

  Steiner landed right next to Mitch, splashing him with even more mud. He was beyond caring about such things.

  A groan from inside the pod made him look back. He saw El Jesus squeezing his way out, carrying a black bag with him. He stomped back to the pod and helped the big man down.

  El Jesus must have found a bag of supplies in the pod and repurposed it. From the shape and weight of the bag, Mitch knew it contained the bomb.

  Juba slipped out of the pod next. Duval followed him, and the Mishiman turned around to help the woman down. She ignored him and landed like a dancer in the mud, which barely seemed to touch her.

  “Captain’s fucked,” El Jesus said in a flat, quiet voice.

  Mitch hauled himself back up the side of the capsule and slipped inside, feet first. Severian sat there at one side of the Imperial while Samuel knelt next to him on the other side and prayed over him.

  Blood soaked MacGuire’s pants and had pooled in the bottom of the pod. Mitch saw where a strut had separated from the side of the capsule’s frame and gone straight through the captain’s leg from the seat below him, pinning him there.

  Mitch’s breath caught in his chest. The man didn’t have much of a chance. Maybe in a place where there were doctors and hospitals, he might have been fine, but as it was, he was fucked.

  Even if they could get him free and bind his wound, he wouldn’t be walking anywhere. He’d hold back the entire team, or at least as many as decided to stay behind to take care of him. Either way, Mitch didn’t plan on leaving him there, so it was time to get to work.

  “We’ll cut you loose,” he said, peering more closely at the injury.

  MacGuire shook his head and spoke through gritted teeth. “It hit the artery. You pull it out, I’m gone.”

  Mitch had seen enough wounded soldiers to know the man was right. Much as it pained him to admit it, there was nothing they could do but leave him there, probably to die.

  Brother Samuel finished his prayer and made the sign of the Brotherhood on MacGuire’s forehead. He’d been giving the man his last rites.

  “Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam, John Patrick MacGuire. Amen.”

  “Amen.” MacGuire said the word as strongly as he could, but his voice still cracked.

  Samuel lay his hands on MacGuire’s head for a moment and offered a silent petition. Then he turned and climbed out of the escape pod without another word. Severian followed him, offering not even a salute to the man.

  Mitch squatted down next to MacGuire. He had no words for the captain, but they didn’t need any. They both knew there was no good way out of this, and there was no need to emphasize that with pointless complaints.

  Mitch waited with the Imperial for a while, until he was ready. Despite his initial dislike of the man, he’d come to respect him as a good and decent leader. Outside of Nathan, Mitch had seen damn little of that in battle, on either side. He deserved to exit on his own terms.

  “Sergeant Hunter,” MacGuire said, his voice raw but controlled, “can I ask the borrow of a grenade, please.”

  Mitch reached into his pack and pulled out a grenade. He handed it to MacGuire, who clutched it to him like a talisman that could keep the shadows away, at least for a little while.

  “Thank you. Good luck, Sergeant.”

  Mitch squeezed the man’s shoulder.

  MacGuire nodded at him. “Yeah,” he said through teeth gritting in pain.

  Mitch climbed up and out through the hatch. Outside, in the gray light of the overcast day, the others worked at cleaning their weapons off the best they could. Steiner rinsed the barrels of his guns in a deep puddle of murky water. Juba held his weapons up in the rain, twisting them in awkward ways to help the weather remove the mud.

  Off to the side, El Jesus pissed on his shotgun. It was crude, but it worked.

  Duval and Juba unlimbered their rifles and kept them at the ready. The way they carried them, with the straps off their shoulders and wound around their forearms, Mitch knew they were ready to roll.

  In his free hand, Juba held a map as he surveyed the land around them. “Off by four leagues,” he said. “North by southwest.”

  The Mishiman looked down at the map. “Gotta go through the city like the old monk said.”

  Mitch pulled out a cigarette and flicked open his lighter. As he brought it to the cigarette in his mouth, a loud WHUMP sounded from inside the escape pod behind him. He paused for the barest moment, then went back to lighting his cigarette. He never looked back.

  El Jesus picked up his shotgun and started thumbing shells bearing yellow and red stripes into it.

  “White phosphorus?” Juba asked in an uncertain tone. He knew what the shells were. He just wasn’t sure anyone should be using them.

  El Jesus grinned and pumped the gun to chamber the first rounds into each of the barrels. “Conchita here, she’s a real spitfire.”

  Steiner grunted as he rigged the duffel bag around
the bomb into a sling and shrugged it onto his back. “Just make sure you’re not near me when that thing blows up.”

  The Cog readied a pair of Hellblazer machine pistols and stuffed them into a tanker rig that hung them high across his chest. He nodded at Mitch, as prepared as he was ever going to be.

  Severian and Samuel carried only their swords. Mitch might have questioned the wisdom of that—he preferred to do his killing from a distance—but he chose not to argue. He’d seen what Severian could do with her blades and knew she’d be fine. At least you never had to worry about running out of ammunition with a sword.

  As for Samuel, Mitch wasn’t sure the brother would be able to handle his blade without cutting himself. He might have been a hard-ass at one point in his life, but a decade or two of monastery life would take the edge off anyone—except a bodyguard like Severian, of course. The best Mitch could say about Samuel’s choice of weapon was that he wouldn’t have to worry about the man accidentally shooting him.

  Mitch hoisted his M50 in his hands, slid off the safety, and put his finger over the trigger guard. The pod still smoking behind them, they started off toward their ultimate goal.

  36

  Canaan turned out to be a dirty slice of hell. The buildings had been burned out and abandoned for decades, if not centuries. Mitch couldn’t tell how far the destruction extended around them, but his eye hadn’t seen an undamaged structure since they’d come crashing down.

  It seemed as if it had been raining here since just after the buildings had burned. Mud caked everything and in some-places ran in rivers down the cracked and broken streets. Mitch felt a chill that had nothing to do with the shitty weather.

  Mitch had taken the point as they moved out. He dashed from cover to cover, careful to avoid wide fields of fire or places for an easy ambush. The others followed him at a distance, each giving the others plenty of space. If they were spotted, a sniper or a joker with a rocket launcher might be able to take out one or two of them but not the whole group at once.

  Mitch stopped at the corner of a mostly whole building and waited for the others to catch up. When a few of them did, he took a deep breath and prepared to move out once more. Before he could, though, Juba grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him back.