Mutant Chronicles

by Matt Forbeck

  Relieved of worrying about his wounds, Mitch renewed his struggles against his bonds, but they held fast. As he thrashed about, a robotic, spike-tipped cannula snaked down and moved over his body, scanning him with a strange light emanating from its electric eye. Where the light touched his flesh, his skin became translucent, revealing his muscles and veins. Soon enough, the cannula found what it was looking for, the big vein in the crook of his arm, and stabbed into him, burying its sharpened end in that vessel.

  Black slime flowed through the cannula tube and into Mitch’s blood. He screamed both in pain and at the burning violation.

  The cannula yanked back. The veins of Mitch’s arm started to turn black, radiating out from the site of the injection. He wanted to grab his arm and squeeze it until the poison ran back out, but he couldn’t even touch it.

  As Mitch watched, his hand on that side began to mutate. The third and fourth fingers started to grow together and become longer. He recognized the pattern. They were starting to form a boneblade.

  Another cannula dropped down and moved over Mitch’s head, looking for the right spot in his skull. He jerked his head away, but the damn thing followed him like it was alive. He moved his head again, and still it came after him, coiled like a cobra ready to strike.

  This gave Mitch an idea. Most of the people tossed down onto this wheel were either dead or near it. He felt like hell, but he had to have been one of the Machine’s healthiest subjects.

  He craned his head as far as he could toward his left arm. He watched, forcing himself to be patient, as the tip of the cannula homed in on his exposed temple. Then, just as it struck, he whipped his head out of the way.

  The sharp end of the cannula slammed into the binding on his arm and tore it. The rip wasn’t much, but it was enough. Mitch wrenched his arm free, pulling himself off the awful spike that ran through it too, and the cannula went haywire, flinging itself all about.

  Mitch drew his sidearm and used the butt of it to smash the strap on his right arm. He sat up and reached down to free his legs. As he did, the wheel brought him within range of another cannula. He tore his leg free and kicked the damned thing to pieces.

  53

  Duval hated everything about this, but she clearly didn’t have a choice. They only had a single rope left among them, and they’d lost all their winches and clips in the battles before. It was either trust the men to hold them both or let them lower her into the Machine by herself.

  She clung to Severian as if the woman were her daughter. Something about Severian reminded her of her little girl, a clean innocence that few adults had. Even though she’d seen Severian dismember mutant after mutant with her blades, Duval felt a need to protect her from the evils to come.

  As they began their descent into the hole, Duval stared down and realized that she’d be lucky to save herself, much less anyone else.

  Two massive wheels spun beneath them. One carried the larger, healthier victims, while the other ferried the weaker corpses to their ultimate doom.

  Each wheel stood vertically, mounted on an axle like a gigantic Ferris wheel. As a body was tossed through the hole on the top, it caught on one of the hundreds of vicious spikes that stabbed out of the wheel’s outer ring. Then the movement of the wheels brought the bodies around to various stations at which unspeakable things were done to them.

  Duval got a good view of the first of these horrors as she and Severian slowly descended to the gore-caked floor below. As they got closer, the horrible smells of spilled bodily fluids and worse got to her, and she struggled to keep down the contents of her stomach. She didn’t want to puke on Severian if she could help it.

  Duval had angled the rope so that they would come down just to the inside of the wheel nearest them. As they came level with the top of the wheels, they started to fall. Something had happened to Mitch or Max or the rope or all damned three, and now she was going to die in this mute woman’s arms. Despite herself, she let out a little scream.

  As the floor rushed up at them, the rope started to catch. Someone above was trying to save them. She only hoped he would manage it in time.

  The world jerked to a stop, and Duval let out a short howl of pain. Between the rope biting into her waist and Severian clutching her so tightly, she thought she might be cut in two.

  “Thank God,” Severian said in a voice raspy and low.

  Duval nearly jumped out of the rope. “You can talk?”

  Severian nodded.

  Duval looked down at bits of the Machine spinning beneath them. A control station sat atop the axis that connected the two wheels. Over the axis stood a piecework bridge that seemed to transport fuel throughout the system. Most of the time the pieces formed a line, but at regular intervals they would spin about to the perpendicular instead. Gouts of flame burst from holes in the pieces, too, burning off waste gasses.

  Below that, razor-sharp steel blades spun on a central driveshaft beneath the control station. Their tips fitted into the wheels’ spokes and kept them moving along. If they fell onto those, it would all be over.

  It looked insane, and Duval somehow couldn’t think of a good enough reason for her to be here. Then Constance and Jack’s faces sprang to her mind, and the memory of their laughter calmed her down.

  Just then, a horrible explosion sounded overhead, and the rope gave way again. Duval screamed, but they didn’t have far to fall. They ended up on their knees on one of the bridge sections that ran over the wheels’ axis. She almost cheered to find herself alive.

  Duval and Severian scrambled to their feet and unwound the slack rope from around them. Neither of them seemed to have been hurt in the fall, but their surroundings were too astonishing for them to celebrate that at the moment.

  The two women avoided the gouts of fire and waited for the piece they were on to align with the others next to it. Then they moved toward the center platform. As they did, jets of flame spurted out of exhausts situated on the pieces. Severian saw them coming and hauled Duval back just before she would have been cooked.

  When they reached the central platform, Duval was at a loss as to what to do. She reached into the black bag and withdrew the velvet sack in which the parts of the bomb were stored.

  She pulled out the main part of the bomb. It looked like a metallic circle engraved with alien designs. The triggering mechanism was a steely ball with similar markings.

  She had no idea what to do with them.

  She looked to Severian, but the woman was staring at something coming toward them on the bridge pieces over the axis.

  It was Mitch, or at least it had once been.

  His skin had been cut and seared, then stitched up with staples. His hair had been scorched off the side of his head so that he looked like a walking burn victim. The veins on his arm and chest had turned black, and the gunk slowly spread up toward his neck as she watched.

  Mitch had his knife in his hand, poised, ready to strike. She saw then that he had become the latest victim of the Machine, and she grabbed Severian and prepared to race away from him. She knew she might have to, but she couldn’t bear the thought of trying to kill him unless it was absolutely necessary.

  Gouts of flame spouted from the axle again, blocking Duval and Severian’s retreat. They turned to face Mitch, their swords raised before them. Duval didn’t want to hurt him, but it seemed they had no choice.

  Mitch staggered over toward them, struggling with balancing on the rotating axle, and drove the knife straight into his arm. He jabbed the tip into the spot where the cannula had injected him with its poison, and he dug deep. Then he pulled the blade out and squeezed the wound. Thick black gel oozed out like pus from an old cut.

  “Hunter?” Duval asked, her voice uncertain. She still wasn’t sure it was really Mitch in there.

  Mitch raised the new cut to his mouth and sucked at it as hard as he could. He nearly choked on the black gunk but managed to spit it out on the floor. He looked up at them still holding their swords at the ready and sai
d, “Get those pigstickers out of my face.”

  “Are you…?” Duval started. She couldn’t finish the thought.

  Mitch gave her a look that curled her toes. “What do you think? Give me that bomb. Give me that fucking bomb!”

  Duval paused, unsure that she could trust him with the device while that junk ran through his veins. He pointed over her shoulder then, and she spun around to a horde of warrior mutants standing on the other side of the axle, waiting for the bridge on that side of the platform to come around again. She looked down and saw more warriors coming up to intercept them from the other side as well.

  “Give me the fucking bomb!” Mitch said.

  Hoping she wouldn’t regret it, Duval handed him the bomb in its battered duffel bag. Severian tossed him the detonator. He caught it in his free hand and grinned.

  54

  Mitch strode forward with the bomb and detonator, ready to get the job done at last. As he reached the central platform, though, warrior mutants appeared on either side of them, walking toward them through the hollow spot over the wheels’ axis.

  Duval rushed to greet one group of mutants with her sword, and Severian charged across the platform to cut off the other. Duval was a soldier, no expert in the sword. She held the blade before her and swung it like a club. It didn’t look pretty, but it killed any mutant that came within her range.

  Severian, on the other side, swung her blade in an intricate pattern—a kata—weaving an impassable wall of steel. The warriors that came at her fell to the distant floor in large, wet pieces.

  Sweat beaded on Mitch’s face as he lurched toward the control panel situated on the central platform. He reached up to wipe the sweat from his face, and his fingers came away black.

  He didn’t understand how to work the Machine at all, but he didn’t have to. He just had to figure out how to blow it up.

  He looked at the great circle in the center of the platform. A broad band of metal stretched across it, with a smaller circle of metal at each end. Mitch gave the circle nearest him a test push, and it gave.

  He leaned down and put his back into it. Slowly but surely, the band of metal spun on an axis in the center of the larger circle. This exposed a large empty circle under one of the metal strip’s ends. It was the perfect size for the bomb.

  Mitch pulled the bomb from the bag and held it over the hole. He hesitated for a moment. Would this work, or had the old monk been crazy? At this point, Mitch barely saw the difference.

  “Anytime!” Duval said as she knocked another warrior to its doom.

  Mitch gritted his teeth. This had to work. He didn’t see any other way. The bomb might go off as soon as he inserted it, but he figured that his life was a small price to pay for bringing the damned Machine down.

  In one swift move, he slammed the bomb home.

  Nothing happened.

  Mitch waited for a moment. Had they gotten this all wrong? Should he grab the bomb and try something else? Maybe there was a place for it in the Machine’s base.

  A small hole opened up in the area directly across from the bomb, on the other side of the console. Mitch held up the detonator and saw that the hole was the right shape. He moved around and made to slam the detonator home when another hole popped open next to the first on the console, then another and another and another.

  The platform was covered with several holes, each of them looking the exact right size for the detonator. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” Mitch said.

  “Just put it in the hole!” Duval said, shouting at Mitch over her shoulder.

  “Which hole?”

  “Any hole!”

  Mitch shoved the detonator into a hole right in front of him. It seemed that the device was just a hair too big. He twisted it, pounded on it, smashed it, but it made no difference. The hole was the wrong size.

  “Piece of shit!” Mitch said. “It doesn’t fit!”

  Mitch glanced over at Duval. She was getting tired. A boneblade worked past her defenses and laid open her shoulder.

  In retaliation, she shoved her blade into the warrior’s chest, stabbing it straight through. The mutant fell to the side, but her sword got jammed, and she couldn’t pull it out in time. As the mutant fell from the bridge piece, it took the blade with it.

  Another warrior stepped onto the bridge to confront her. As it did, the bridge section finally spun perpendicular again, tossing the warrior to the ground and cutting off the central platform from the giant wheels.

  Severian fell back too. She turned to join the others for their brief respite. Behind her, a warrior leaped across the gap formed by the missing bridge section.

  Mitch started to shout a warning to her but knew that it would be too late. Flame spouted from the axle at that point, though, and incinerated the mutant as it landed. It plummeted into the abyss below like a falling star.

  Mitch glanced around. They had no guns and just one sword left. The bomb didn’t work. Even if he could fit the detonator in, he didn’t have any idea where to find the key to turn it. And they had about thirty seconds before the bridges locked back into place and let the mutants swarm over them in final battle.

  “It’s not working,” he said to the women.

  They stared at him, exhausted and just as scared as he. Mitch pounded his head and stared at the holes in the panels. There had to be a way to make this damned thing work. He looked at the panel again and realized that there was something familiar about it—or at least the pattern of the holes in it.

  “Give me the pages,” he said.

  “What?” Severian said.

  “From the book!” He shoved his hand out at her, demanding the sheets of paper.

  Severian reached into her robes and pulled out the tattered pages of the Chronicles, which she’d stuffed next to her heart for safekeeping. Mitch snatched the pages from her and shuffled through them until he found what he was looking for: the final page of the book, the one that looked like a charcoal rubbing. He found it and shoved the other papers at Severian. Then he held it up to the panel in front of him.

  “What are you doing?” Duval asked.

  Mitch pointed at the pattern of circles. “It’s a rubbing of this thing, and it shows where—”

  “The detonator,” Duval said, finally catching on.

  Mitch nodded. He wondered where the Brotherhood had found this device they’d lugged here. Had they gone into the Machine and stolen it, or had the mutants somehow left it someplace?

  Was it really a bomb? Some sort of self-destruct mechanism? And if so, why hadn’t they used it before now?

  He stared up at the wheels on either side of him. He couldn’t see their outer faces from here, but he knew they were coated with mutants being manufactured from the dead. Why someone had installed such a mechanism wasn’t vital now. Destroying the Machine was the only thing important, no matter how it might be done.

  The bridge pieces on either side of the platform spat fire again. Soon they would line up with the platform, and the mutants would come streaming at them.

  “I lost my sword,” Duval said.

  Without looking at her, Mitch tossed her his knife. She caught it, looked at how small it was compared to her sword, and rolled her eyes.

  Severian spun her blades, flinging off the accumulated blood and gore. The women took up their positions at either side of the control platform. The bridges clanked into place, and the warriors advanced.

  Duval leaped forward, using her speed and experience to her advantage. She was a virtuoso with a knife, but its short blade put her in reach of the mutants’ boneblades in a way the sword hadn’t.

  On the other side, Severian tirelessly took out one mutant after another. She seemed like she’d been born for this role.

  The trouble, Mitch knew, wasn’t that the women weren’t good. It was that they would eventually tire, while the mutants could keep coming until they killed them all.

  Mitch moved the paper all about the panels, hunting for the pattern shown there.
After a few long moments, he found it. The rubbings on the page and the surface of the bomb lined up perfectly. The hole in the page revealed just where the detonator ought to go.

  Mitch took a deep breath, then slid the detonator into the hole. He heard a satisfying click.

  He tried to turn it but couldn’t. The thing was too smooth, and he couldn’t get any leverage. However, it was split by a central groove.

  Mitch stared for a while at the slit. The monk back at the monastery had mentioned a key. He’d claimed it would be somewhere in the Machine.

  Mitch looked all around. The Machine was huge. It could be anywhere in the chamber housing it. They were doomed. They’d never find it.

  Mitch turned to Severian just as she sliced a mutant in two with a single powerful stroke. The corpse fell apart, and from behind it walked up the next mutant in line. This one, though, was horribly familiar, and Severian stood there stunned by the sight of it.

  “Samuel,” she said.

  The monk had lost his hair, and his skin looked warped and slick from the strange black fluids snaking underneath it. His eyes were filled with shiny black from rim to rim, and his teeth looked like those of a starving animal. Steel staples held together what must have once been a gaping wound in his chest, visible through the torn tunic, which hung unrepaired.

  The creature who had once been Brother Samuel stepped forward and raised his single boneblade at Severian. To Mitch, it seemed that he saluted his former charge right before he prepared to kill her.

  The mutant monk opened his mouth and shouted a single word. “Legion!”

  55

  Mitch raced to the edge of the platform. He couldn’t get around Severian, and without a weapon he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  “Severian, no!” he shouted. “That’s not Samuel!”

  Severian raised her blade at the ready. Mitch had seen such combat positions before in a duel between samurai.