Neysor shook me as he lifted me higher into the air and made me look into his deathly stare, his black eyes in slits while his nostrils flared, “Nothing Prince? That’s right, to a point I suppose. Do you want to know their names? Of course not, no, because all you care about is those few who you think are worthy! That’s why you single-handedly killed my kind and yours!”
His muscles bulged and I knew I was about to be thrown off into the chasm. I wasn’t exactly up for that, even with the guilt that was spilling into my constricting chest.
The second he moved his arms I monkey-gripped his wrists and did my best to pull myself down. I managed it, but not in time to stop myself from going over the railing, the only thing stopping me from falling to my doom was Neysor who got toppled by the unexpected weight which caused him to head-butt the metal rail.
My feet kicked around looking for something to grip involuntarily while the dazed Neysor had started to regain his senses.
“Nope!” I shouted as I pulled myself down again sending a loud metal twang throughout what was clearly a glass sphere. The second blow hadn’t knocked him out as I’d hoped but he definitely wasn’t retaliating any time soon.
At first I tried to climb up him which quickly proved dangerous as he nearly toppled over with me. I was too far from the mesh to grab it safely and if I just let go it was at least a forty foot drop. What I needed to happen was for him to pull me up which, based on our last interaction, was clearly not happening.
Then, as if to answer my silent call for help, someone grabbed the dizzy Neysor and pulled him back far enough for me to get myself over the rail, before throwing him toward the command centre.
As I stood up I expected to see Kate or Wolf or Greg but no it was “Steven! I knew you weren-” His hunger-crazed eyes and snapping jaw as he turned to face the sound of walking long pig proved me wrong.
He started walking toward me with the twitchy stride of a tweeker, “Come on Steve, we’re mates,” I started backing up, “you remember? Eat that guy.”
Turns out reason isn’t really a vamp-zed’s strong suit. He started sprinting toward me and I swung, connecting with his skull and sending a crack throughout the sphere before he collapsed like wet laundry.
I saw the massive depression in the side of his head and figured I’d killed him. I felt like I should stand over my friend’s body as a respect, the guilt was just piling up. I’d killed at least dozens of aliens, basically guaranteed the end of humanity and killed a friend.
In my moment melancholy I noticed something, his head had started to kind of inflate, like his skull was rebuilding itself. Then he chomped and I was certain that was what he was doing.
I got ready to start running and then saw Neysor stomping his way toward me. Before I knew what I was doing I’d grabbed up Steven and shoved him toward the cranky looking commander and ran into the maze of halls again without looking back, though I didn’t have to, to know that Neysor had tossed Steve into the pit of bodies.
Running was starting to get hard, not due to my failing stamina but because it was starting to feel like I was never getting out. I’d only just found my team and I was stuck in the exact same position that I was in a month ago when the monument to all my sins first arrived in its horrific grandeur.
The sounds of my pursuer tearing his way through the ship weren’t exactly helping either. He clearly wasn’t happy.
Right as I’d given up all hope I heard it, a lonesome magpie’s call, not far away either. I got my second wind and within a minute I was hit with an actual blast of wind.
Although I’d only been playing ‘Angry Hide and Seek’ for around twenty minutes it felt like I’d just awoken from a never-ending nightmare. Then I remembered, as I stepped out into the early evening rain, that outside was the zombie apocalypse.
I remembered it was a real never-ending nightmare.
I remembered that I’d been the sole reason for its continuation.
And the worst part?
I knew it was only just getting started.
Reunited
As soon as I’d accepted that I really had escaped I looked around and realised something was missing, and it wasn’t just the bodies.
“Where’s the truck?” I asked the bloody pools.
“Where indeed Prince. It would seem that your friends have abandoned you again.”
I skipped over the disturbing fact that Neysor knew that I’d already been left by them, “Eh, I’m sure they’re around.” I said as confidently as I could while scanning the water sparkled tar for a weapon, knowing that it was futile, that if my group had taken the truck they probably would’ve grabbed the weapons as well.
“All alone then?” He asked with a smile as I turned around to face him.
I started to step back slowly, not in fear, but to set myself up for a fight, “It sure seems like that.” He had me and he knew it, that’s why he let me separate us by a few metres instead of just ripping into me.
He was toying with me.
“Hey, before we get started can I just ask why not just kill me when I had my back to you? Seems a whole lot more efficient than... this.”
Neysor shrugged as he took off his sash and robes to reveal some white armour, mostly on his legs, and an oddly patterned black jumpsuit that seemed to glimmer in spots, “True, but I prefer my opponents to know that they’re about to be destroyed, I’m not an assassin.”
I got into a fighting stance and readied myself for a swift disembowelment, “See, looking at you makes me feel underdressed for the occasion, I mean that leotard of yours is just to die for.”
He decided to skip over another witty retort and started striding toward me. I started desperately trying to analyse him for some sort of weak-spot in the boss-fight, a glowing red neck, flashing yellow joints, anything.
But unfortunately I wasn’t in a video-game.
What I was, in a word, was fucked.
Solidly.
That hadn’t ever stopped me before though.
‘Tell him to stand still.’ A soothing female voice in my head told me.
“Wait!” I yelled as I threw my hands up into the air and Neysor froze, with a shocked expression while I silently hoped that the voice was some kind of premonition and not a sign of impending schizophrenia.
“What?” Neysor growled.
“Umm… Are you familiar with the term ‘hugging it out’?”
He started walking toward me again, “Yes. Glad that’s sorted, now I’m going to kill yo-” The sound of a large vehicle changing gears and tearing through a nearby fence silenced him less than five feet from me.
Well that, and the truck that ploughed into his right side and sent him flying.
A hairier Greg opened the driver’s side door and bellowed, “Get in the back!”
It didn’t seem like an appropriate time to start a big mushy get together moment but I was just a tiny bit completely devastated that that was our reunion.
I shoved those feelings down and ran around and managed to mostly climb onto the back of the truck by the time Greg started driving again. I spent a few seconds dangling off the back of the truck, watching the ship shrink away while I waited to be pursued by either Steven or Neysor.
“Wha’ are yeh doing John? Get in yer doomarse.” Said Marcus in a very Irish accent over the billowing sheets.
“Alright alright, I’m coming.” I said before taking one last breath of exhaustion infused air and accepted that I was alive.
Interior wise the truck was exactly what I’d expected, a row of seats on either side and a few bags of weapons tucked into the seats where the soldiers had previously sat.
The first face I noticed out of the three as I ducked into the truck was the unfamiliar female.
She was lightly built and had a red-dyed messy concave bob haircut that was barely hidden under her incredibly over-sized grey hoodie that went over the top of her relax fit blue jeans.
I went to introduce myself and then I saw headphones that lea
d from a laptop that sat precariously on her jittering knees and figured it’d be rude to interrupt.
I was thrown down onto a seat beside Harry on the opposite side to her by Greg’s driving, “Fancy seeing you here dead-man!” Harry said after shouldering me.
“Heh, yeah… Wait, what?” I was clearly shaken by the moniker.
“Oh yeah, you missed that. Karen and William in front were convinced that either Steve or that tall angry bloke without the nose had got you. But the rest of us were having none of it!”
It was only then that I noticed the shuffling mass in the corner closest to the cabin, “Pair o’ fookin pansies if yer aks me.” The mass took a swig from the mostly empty bottle of scotch and burped.
“Shut up Mark. Sorry John. The second we got out and ran into Clara, who turned out to have a full bottle of piss, he’s been drinking.”
I went to ask more about Clara but was interrupted by the standing and swaying Mark.
“It ain’t piss yer knob!” He was actually kind of menacing until we hit a bump and he fell backward, smashing his head on the cabin which knocked him out cold.
“Not exactly a nice drunk, is he Har?”
Harry shook his head, “Not really, but at least he’s a bit more… Boisterous. Doesn’t beat around the bush at all.”
I shared laugh before looking back over to Clara who continued to type away on her laptop, “So what’s her story?”
Harry shrugged, “Not all that sure, when we met her she was coming out of that house where we hid with the truck, she was about to stuff that bottle into her bag. Turns out Mark was a bit jittery about our plan of ‘smash and grab’. Anyway he ran over to her and snatched the bottle before I could explain who we were and what we were doing. From there she pulled out a laptop and offered to help and that’s what got us here.”
Feeling like I’d missed a step, the only sound I could manage was a grunting ‘huh’.
“Oh, the laptop thing?”
‘Sure, that’s a good start’ is what I wanted to say but I just politely nodded and waited.
“Well, because your whole network thing is down we had no way to reach you until she sort of… hacked you.”
“What!?” I shouted loud enough to rouse Mark.
“Nothing bad! It was just like a… um… a walkie-talkie!.. maybe a bit of guidance as well.”
I was more than a little offended, “Ok, so I’ll just skip over the fact that today you have suggested I am both a dog and a walkie-talkie and get to the fact that YOU HACKED ME!”
“It was only your ears... and some of your brain.” He said like a scolded child.
“Friend’s don’t hack each other!”
“She isn’t your friend!”
“Well you are, and part of your job as friend is to not let people hack me!”
“May I say something?” Came the calming voice from my brief scare with schizophrenia. I went to say something witty but before I could she’d already assumed my answer, “I’m trying to write my fan-fiction over here and you guys are making it really difficult.”
“Pard-?”
“Thanks.” She put her headphones back in and went back to her laptop.
I looked over to Harry who had a silly grin planted on his face as he stared at Clara, “I… I… What?”
Without looking at me he nodded, “She’s pretty cool, huh?”
“That’s not what I meant. We’ve been living in the apocalypse for a month and she looks like she just walked out of the local coffee shop. Charged laptop, freshly dyed and cut hair? Doesn’t strike you as odd?”
Harry shrugged, “Apparently she cuts her hair herself and charges her laptop when she can. Has a couple of batteries in her pack as well.”
I gave up on him after that. Apparently he’d found a friend and was mostly useless, which meant that I was forced to brood on the fact that Steven was dead and the planet was doomed.
Both of which were my fault.
I’ve stopped seeing it that way and I guess that’s just the power of time. You know how it is, zombie apocalypse, dead friends while you get to live on, you start blaming yourself.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t go through the stage of self-forgiveness for a long time. At that point I was sad and angry and I knew just who I could blame.
“S…”
“What was that?” the barely present Harry mumbled.
“Nothing, nothing, you wait here. I’m going to check on Greg and the others.”
I stood and made my way shakily to the cabin without waiting for his response which I figured I wouldn’t have gotten anyway.
Once I finally made it, after nearly tripping a half dozen times and almost slipping in a puddle by Mark’s feet which I really hoped was just rain water, I banged hard on the glass and waited for it to slide open.
The scent of fresh puke and expensive liquor clung to Marcus with a foul tenacity as both slowly soaked into his clothes. It was difficult seeing him like that. He was a brilliant scientist and had lived through so much, but the world had finally chewed him up and crapped him out.
I banged twice on the window and before I could do it a third time it slid open and a set of familiar eyes met mine.
She seemed angry at first, probably was about to yell at Mark again before she realised who it was that was banging. “John?”
“I think so, though it’s been a while since I’ve been able to look in a mirror.”
Kate smiled her adorable smile, “I can see that. Look at you, you scruffy looking ner-”
“Is that John!?” It was weird hearing Wolf that excited to hear my voice, especially to Kate’s relatively calm one.
I smiled as Kate playfully rolled her eyes, “Yeah, it’s me mate. How you been?”
“Better now! You? I heard a lot from that civie in back, what’s his name, Barry? Henry? Harry! That’s right! He told us about burning buildings, running up walls and exploding ships, that one we actually saw from all the way out here!” His excited tone and minor babbling was enough to lift my mood.
For a second.
“I’m glad you’re well, really I am, and I assure you that there are plenty more stories for me to tell, but for now we have to go somewhere.” I felt like I was being too cold, like I was turning into my father, abrupt and military.
Luckily the scene of my return seemed to mask that with Greg, “Alright then, where is it that we are going?” His Russian accent had faded a bit since we’d last been together, his voice was softer, broken is the best way to describe it.
I grit my teeth at the thought of returning to the place of tortured people and madmen. I thought about just telling Greg to drive us somewhere far away.
And then I remembered how S had betrayed us and who I’d lost because of him.
That’s when I realised what I was going to do to the son of a bitch when I got my hands on him and turned my grimace into a dark smile.
“We’re going to camp.”
Broken
As Neysor laid in a broken heap on the harsh gravel he felt nothing but cheated. Cheated out of a new home. Cheated out of his ship. And perhaps the most painful of all was how he had just been cheated out of retribution for it all.
In hindsight it seemed that telling his remaining crew to wait behind while he went to complete his revenge by himself was idiotic. It just didn’t feel right to bring the still bleeding Shenim into a recently crashed ship.
Neysor was cold and felt like something was crawling toward him as his body parts started to tingle before losing all feeling. It was like shock but at the same time completely different. His brain didn’t seem to be shutting off parts so he’d be able to cope with the pain, the feeling was more like he was losing those parts.
‘Not shut off,’ a whisper said in his mind, ‘amputated.’
In the past he’d read about these feelings and he knew what they meant.
Death.
He wasn’t scared of the prospect, he was more disappointed. Disappointed in himself for
not seeing the attack coming, disappointed in his healing factor for not working as it should’ve, and, more than anything, disappointed in his mostly useless body.
He wanted to do more than just lie on the ground in the pools of shared blood, he wanted to hunt down the hybrid filth that had ruined everything, including his once perfectly good spine.
He wanted Shenim.
Yet it seemed that he wasn’t going to get any of his wants, that he was doomed to watch the blue and red liquids slowly form into a deep purple under his body. At first it disgusted him, the sight of his pure blood mixing with his failed experiment, but the scent was overwhelmingly delicious.
‘May as well have one last drink.’ He thought to himself before sighing as well as he could with what was left of his face, and took a long, slurping sip of the mixed blood.
The aroma had not been misleading at all, in fact it was the single most delicious thing Neysor had ever tasted. Salty and sweet at the same time, it was like the drinks he used to have when he was a child if he behaved himself.
Then something started to happen, at first it felt as if his face was melting into the ground then it changed. His body started to resound with cracks and clicks while his skin seemed to start to rebuild itself. Suddenly his arms and legs snapped to less contorted angles.
It was painfully amazing, like an early morning stretch but in every part of his body.
Neysor started to stand and felt his left foot crack back into place as his did. He took his time with the process, making sure that if he were to suddenly collapse he didn’t fall down onto his face. But the further he got the clearer that it was that that wasn’t going to happen.
His body continued to click and pop as he straightened his back and rolled his neck and shoulders. He felt more alive than ever.
“Neysor?” The still shaky voice of Lai called from behind him.
He turned to face the lone brown lab-coat wearing woman, “I thought I told everyone to stay behind.”
“Y-yes,” she stammered, “but I heard the truck and… I assumed the worst.”
The Mulligan Planet 2 (The Mulligan Planet Trilogy) Page 2