by M. K. Gibson
The gathered crowd talked among themselves, mulling over my words. Burnheim came to stand next to me.
“What do you get out of this?”
“None of your business,” Reynolds said as he lit a cigarette.
“How many towns, strongholds, and settlements have you helped shut down?”
“A lot.”
Burnheim addressed the crowd. “People of Norfolk, we vote as a community. You represent your fellow districts and here we vote, today, whether or not to bow down to Hell. I, and the council, are only advisers. We implement the will of the people. But I will say this: If we have something they want, then we have leverage. Norfolk has stood where others have failed. Because we are strong. Because we hold true to our values. Because—”
“Because you live on a peninsula and have access to the old naval base’s weapons,” Reynolds finished. “Nothing more. Eventually, your bullets will run out. Your time will run out. And they will come for you and take what they want.”
“We can survive,” Burnheim said. “Humans will once again take back this world.”
From the corner of his eyes, Reynolds saw Walker shake his head, then briefly nod ever so slightly.
Well, this is it, Reynolds thought to himself. He dropped his cigarette and snubbed it out with the heel of his expensive shoes. Faster than Burnheim could react, Reynolds reached out and grabbed the council elder by either side of his head. Reynolds twisted, pulling Burnheim to his right then hard to his left, snapping the man’s neck in front of the auditorium.
The guards at the entry to the halls drew their weapons. The cries of fear, anger, and confusion were deafening. All eyes, except Reynolds, were drawn to the stage. A single gunshot rang out, silencing the crowd. Walker stood over Burnheim’s body with a smoking revolver in his hand.
“Give me a reason not to shoot you dead,” Walker said.
Reynolds shrugged and lit another smoke. “Kill me and the demons will descend upon you. This is the end of Norfolk. When I first brought the city’s offer to the council in private, the council decided to have a town hall meeting. Burnheim wanted to march you into death. I offer you a legitimate chance of survival. No more living in fear of when the next attack will come. You won’t have to worry where your next meal will come from. I’ve been in war. There is no beauty, no honor, and no glory in extinction.
“The demons need us. They can’t make new things on their own for some reason. Humans will continue to survive. How that is accomplished is up to you. As paid workers or slaves. Make no mistake, if you resist, you will all die and they will find others to run the locomotive industry. And that will be built on your dead bodies. Nothing you can do will stop that.”
Reynolds ashed his cigarette, then looked at the people. “You can choose to live or die. I don’t fucking care. I get paid either way. You have less than seventy-two hours to contact me and let me know your decision.”
Reynolds jumped down from the stage and walked down the aisle while people booed and cursed him. He ignored them and moved towards the auditorium’s rear door. As he reached the door, one of the guards, a young man in his early twenties, blocked his path. Reynolds inclined his chin at the young man.
“Howdy, RM. Looking good, kid.”
The guard tensed, ready to draw his weapon. Walker called out from the stage. “Let him pass. If we kill him, they’ll come for us no matter what.”
RM seethed with hate. Reynolds waited patiently. A moment passed and RM moved out of the way.
“Smart, kid.”
RM spat in his face. “Fuck you, race traitor.”
Reynolds head butted the boy on the bridge of his nose, breaking it with a spray of blood. RM dropped to the ground, clutching his nose in his hands as blood poured through his fingers.
“You get to live another day, thanks to me. Enjoy your new life, kid,” Reynolds said as he left the town hall and headed back to the docks.
************************
Now . . .
When I came to, my manacles were removed and my pain was surprisingly minimal. The Collective. God bless that AI of mine.
If you ever get the chance to have a sentient artificial intelligence hive of millions of microscopic robots injected into you, do it. Sure, you may live through the apocalypse, outlive your friends, and have to survive in a demon-populated hell on Earth. And yes, you may have to sacrifice your humanity in the process to survive. But when it comes to self-preservation and a Wolverine-level healing factor? Accept no substitute.
I was in a partial lean-and-squat in the tiny tomb. I tentatively reached down and felt my shinbone sticking out of my leg. A sharp pain shot through me and I almost retched. Compound fractures are no joke. If you’ve never had one, let me explain.
They suck.
Let me explain further. When normal person breaks a bone, it’s usually a just fracture. Like a spider’s web crack along glass. Hurts like hell, but treatable. In time, when held immobile, that bone will heal due to self-fusion. Throw on a splint, keep weight off it for six weeks, and you are pretty much good to go.
But a compound fracture is a different animal altogether. A compound fracture is an actual break where the splintered bone has torn through the skin. And the real suck of it is, it cannot heal. That is, not until it is put back in place. And since there was no doctor, that meant I had to do it.
Oh hell. This was going to suck.
With absolutely no light, the night vision mode of my cybernetic eyes would be useless. But I still had my thermal vision. I switched my eyes to see my own body heat in the darkness. I needed some kind of vision for what I had to do next.
Collective
//ONLINE HOST//
How close do you need this bone to start healing?
//COLLECTIVE REQUIRES HOST’S TIBIA TO BE PLACED AS CLOSE TO ORIGINAL SETTING AS POSSIBLE TO BEGIN HEALING AND AVOID PERMANENT LIMP - CAUTION: BONE MARROW POISONING IMMINENT//
Ahh shit. Noted. Any chance you can pump some extra adrenaline and reduce my pain receptors?
//NEGATIVE HOST - COLLECTIVE CURRENTLY TAXED TO LIMITS WITHIN LONG-TERM SURVIVAL PROTOCOL//
Gotcha. I’m tracking.
Something I had set up a while back with the Collective. In the event of a capture scenario where food and other resources were potentially scarce, the Collective would have to triage my systems on a highest survival priority list. Wounds like this took highest priority, but things like my adrenaline overclock, where all pain is basically ignored and my mind races like a jet while the world slows down, is off limits unless one hundred percent necessary. The dampening of the pain while I passed out was the Collective’s version of throwing me a bone.
But the protocol was clear: I was not allowed any resources in this type of situation unless absolutely necessary. And the Collective was the judge.
The short of it was, I was going to have to bear down, put my shin bone back into place, scream, and try not to pass out again.
With my thermal vision I could see my leg and the bone in swirling reds, yellows, and oranges against the backdrop of cold blues and blacks of the stone walls. I placed my left palm on my right shin with my thumb as a guide and my right hand over the protruding bone.
I took five deep breaths to clear my mind. I took a sixth deep breath and held it, breathing it out in ‘tssst’ like bursts. Old fashioned Lamaze breathing. My mind was clear, my pulse was steady. One last deep breath and I just jumped into the deep end.
Quickly, and with all abandon to sanity, I just pushed my bone hard and fast back through the skin and close to the original position. Bone grated against bone and sent cold, concentric ripples of puncture-wound-like pain up and down my body.
I screamed and screamed, but I did not stop. When I felt the fragmented bone grate against the bone in my leg below my knee, I found a new throat-tearing decibel level to my anguish.
Translation: I screamed until my throat bled.
But I did. Not. Stop.
With gritted teeth a
nd eyes nearly shut, and everything blurred from the tears and pain, I reached out to the Collective.
Close e-e-nough?
//YES HOST - REST AS WELL AS POSSIBLE - FORCE SHIELD SPLINT ALONG WOUND WILL BE ENACTED//
The Collective threw up a force shield around my leg from knee to ankle. But I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t rest. I just squatted in my dark hole and shook with pain. The Collective was numbing it slightly, just enough to take the edge off, but the protocol was clear: no extraneous activity to conserve resources. The Collective would heal me and prevent infection.
All I could do was wait, naked cold and alone in the dark. Wonder what they would do to me next.
************************
As it turned out, the next thing to happen to me was nothing. Not a thing. For what I could only guess was about a day or two. I had no sense of time in the small, pitch black cell. This was another classic torture that stood the test of time. Because it works.
Place a subject in a small cramped cell with no way to stand, sit, or lie down. Deprive said subject of contact, light, food, and water. After that, you just wait. Over time things start to happen. Dehydration was the first and most dangerous. Before you go all loony tunes and scratch at the walls like in the movies, you simply start suffering from the lack of water.
The signs are simple. First, you are simply thirsty. Very thirsty. Then sleepy. Then you stop pissing. Which in my case was a benefit. Not to get graphic, but this tiny cell didn’t have much in the way of bathroom facilities.
And after that, it gets even better. A fuck-all headache sets in. It’s pounding and debilitating and all you want to do is cry, but you are out of fluid for the tears.
And that’s just the precursor to the onset of delirium. And that, dear friends, is when the wall-scratching you see in the movies sets in. You begin to hallucinate and black out. Then you wait for death. Which is still a couple days away. A real shitty way to go.
Yup, dehydration will kill you long before you starve to death.
I wasn’t that bad yet, but I knew it was coming. They say an average person can make it three to five days without water. A very fit person could make it a day or two past that. Even with my advanced technology, I could only make it about ten days. Twelve if I was lucky. The Collective would squeeze all the water from my reserves to keep me alive and shut down, or slow, less necessary functions. Like the living computer it was, the Collective would prioritize my functions and allocate the resources to keep the machine, as a whole, going.
I didn’t know why they wanted us in that state. Wounded and possibly maimed with mid-to-severe dehydration. Sick kicks? Experiments, perhaps? Demon versus human versus cyborg levels of resistance and resilience to torture?
Who the fuck knows.
All I did know was that we hung on a hook for a night and a day, were kept in a cell for another day or so, suffered broken bones, and then were kept in our torture cells for another few days. Four? Five days now? There was a good chance the human captives may be dead.
So far, my time at Flotsam was making my nine days of torture at the hands of Father Grimm seem like a pleasant holiday. At least his torture of me had a purpose. It was meant for me to let go of all the bullshit in my life and focus on the things I truly wanted, the things I truly needed. This? This was cruelty.
What came next was worse.
The golems returned on what I guessed was the middle of the fourth or fifth day of indoctrination. The cell doors were opened and we were all pulled out and left on the floor of the stone hallway. I smelled blood and offal.
The golems were not doing more than standing over us, awaiting orders. My guess was they had some sort of transmitter in their heads where they received their silent commands. If they, or their master, was offering us a moment of peace, I’d take it.
I slowly stretched out my legs, inch by inch. I knew if I pushed too hard, they would cramp up or I might tear a tendon after days of being locked in the cell. The same with my back, neck, and arms. Fuck, my whole body.
From flat on my back, I reached down gingerly and felt my right shin. The Collective had done an amazing job. It didn’t feel much worse than a sprain or a stress fracture. And thanks to T and the Collective’s new bio-energy transfer, I wasn’t starved to the point of emaciation. I was by no means good, but I was in better shape than they wanted me in.
All around me the other prisoners were also doing their own version of personal triage. From the flickering firelight, I got a look at one of the humans who was with me in the airdrop and pool. The male. He looked horrible. His leg bone was visible and he just lay on the floor breathing in short gasps. I had to assume the human female was about the same. This world was rough, and vanilla humans just had a harder time. I didn’t know what kind, if any, medical treatment was available here. Poor bastards.
I saw the lavender Lust demon whose cell was across from mine. She too had pushed her own fractured bone back into place, and her demonic physiology had her on the mend. Not as well as my own, but she looked stable. Demon physiology was remarkable. They no longer had access to the power of human souls, but they did have benefits no human had since becoming flesh and blood.
The average topside-born demon aged more slowly, living on average fifty years longer than a human. Along with their size advantage, their speed advantage and their ability to heal at near-superhuman levels made them the apex predator in this new world. The fact that they had little to no moral hindrance secured their top spot on the food chain.
Then, of course, there were those who rose with Hell, bringing their reserve of soul power with them. As long as that power was in them, they were near immortal.
This particular female looked like a topsider. But she also looked almost familiar. Not in her face, per se, but in her coloration and her build. Unlike a lot of Lust demons, who had human legs, hers were reverse-jointed. And there were now speckles in her coloring of orange and black. She was a mutt. Her father must have been a Wrath demon.
“What are you looking at?” she hissed at me, her voice feral.
Well, so much for the moment we shared.
None of the other prisoners I could see had their manacles on either. I guess whoever was directing this freak show wanted to see who would play doctor on themselves. Who had the guts to reset their legs and who would fall short of the task.
I rolled over to my stomach and pushed myself up, getting a knee under me. Slowly and with steady determination, I stood. Like freaking Lazarus I rose up, reborn. I looked at the golems with contempt and stood proud. I was naked, wounded, and vulnerable, but I presented myself like I was ten feet tall and bulletproof.
Inside though, I was three-foot-three and made of tissue paper. The golem closest to me socked me in the gut, doubling me over.
Yup, definitely tissue paper.
Before I hit the ground, the golem caught me and slung me over its massive shoulder and began walking down the long stone hallway. Bouncing along the creature’s back, I saw the other golems carrying or dragging the remaining prisoners.
After what seemed like forever, I heard the unmistakable sound of a roaring crowd. The golems walked through a gigantic set of steel doors into what I could only describe as a coliseum killing floor, soaked in blood and death. We were dropped into the sand and dirt. All around us, in every direction, behind inferium razor-wire, were Flotsam Prison’s inmates. Killers, psychos, demons, and worse. There was only one reason we were brought here. In a fighting pit with everyone watching.
We were about to fight to the death.
Hell, with everything I’ve done . . . it wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Chapter Twenty-One
A Decision to Make
A fight to the death.
Those words carry weight. More than you think. The expression itself is cliché. But if you’ve never been in one, then you have no goddamn idea what it truly means. And every time it is fucking terrifying.
I’ve taken life. One at a tim
e. Or a hundred thousand at once. My hands would never be clean from the amount of blood on them. But I have never taken the act lightly.
The open air of the small coliseum was sobering, and thanks to the fights Vidar made me go through, familiar. The roaring crowd of the inmates was deafening. They were in a frenzy as they frothed and screamed. A frenzy for the spectacle of blood and death.
The flesh golems left the pit the way they came in, through the giant steel double doors in silent precision. There was the pronounced clang of a metal crossbar being dropped into place. We were locked in. I picked myself up off the dirt and sand and stood in the center of the pit, looking around.
It was nighttime, and there was a light rainy mist mixed with snow flurries coming down. Giant floodlights cast harsh intense light on everything and gave me the chance to take it all in. The coliseum was slightly oval-shaped, about the size and dimension of an old-world football field. Rather than being a place where the greatest game the planet has ever seen was played, this one was designed as a place where the spectators were inmates who watched people die.
So it was exactly like the Oakland Raiders stadium.
The pit was surrounded by a concrete retaining wall about twelve to fifteen feet high. Steel barrier rails canted inwards and were strung like an evil guitar with razor wire and inferium barbs. The stadium-style bleacher seats began there and cascaded upwards to the top row, where a spider web of chain covered the complex. The entire thing reminded me of an eighties-movie version of a post-apocalyptic world. I guess it was fitting as well as accurate.
The inmates in the bleachers were screaming for blood. My blood, the other new prisoners’ blood, it didn’t matter. We were the entertainment that evening.
I simply stood there naked, crossed my arms, and took it all in. I didn’t know if the other prisoners knew it or not, but we were being judged right now. Body language, actions, race, size. All being judged. We were either potential allies or potential prey.