Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02

by James Crawford

  “Clear,” I replied.

  “Clear,” Chu sent.

  “Yeah, I hear you,” Shawn broadcast.

  I motioned to my companions that I’d pick up the chat with Riley next. Chu gave me an unhappy “after you” gesture, and Shawn tossed a thumbs-up my way.

  “Riley, I am not going to try to appeal to your better nature. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have one to appeal to.”

  “You’re a fine one to judge, Hightower Junior,” she shot back at me.

  “I don’t know why you think I had anything to do with my father’s fucked up decisions, but it really doesn’t matter now. You want to deal?”

  “Oh, you’re so influential you can make our demands reality?” Bitch did not like me.

  “I’ve got my own motivations. That sick fucker you cut a deal with is who I want to kill. Standing here, shooting the shit with you means I’m not out hunting his ass.”

  “Oh, you mean Mr. Buttons then.” She actually laughed. “Did he do something unpleasant after we left?”

  “Can you see me from where you are, Riley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Notice the arm and the eye?”

  “Very Goth of you.”

  “I lost them in the explosion. These are what grew back once we got new nanotech online. That was, as you say, ‘unpleasant’, but what he did to Charlie was worse.”

  “Do tell.” She laughed, and every little chuckle drove another nail into her coffin.

  “He cut her womb out, killing our unborn child, and left her for dead.”

  “My goodness. That was a cold, cold thing to do. You have my condolences, and I hope it teaches you a little about the pain others have suffered thanks to your family.”

  I snapped.

  I started to walk forward, and I was dimly aware of voices in my mind telling me to stop, stand down, hold, and all manner of silly words equaling “cease moving.” I ignored them. Someone behind me, Shawn I believe, peppered the tarmac with bullets in an effort to impede my progress.

  Chunhua fired her side arm, chewing a hole in the concrete off to my left. I didn’t stop. It was too late to stop.

  “Keep coming and I will have Baz kill a hostage. Do you want an innocent man’s death on your conscience?” Riley screamed it in my head, just as the building came into range of my internal sensors.

  She was lying. There weren’t any hostages. The only signals in the building were Bravo Euro.

  The next words to come out of my mouth were broadcast to everyone who could hear me in their minds, too.

  “Liar.” I smiled. It was a bitter expression. “Liars get punished, Miss Riley, you obnoxious sack of shit.”

  “Fucking shoot him,” she screamed to her people, and broadcast to the rest of us. I wonder if she thought it would stop me–too late for that, dearie.

  I kept walking.

  I saw Lance Barker and Paul Fletcher raise their weapons as if I could see through the hangar walls, and calculated the passage of their projectiles without skipping a step. It was as if I could feel them tense to squeeze the triggers, and I propelled myself forward into a roll.

  The projectiles tore through the air where my head had been, collided with one another, and shattered into dust. Me? I stood up and marched forward.

  Chunhua took a shot, and I knew that Lance Barker had become an icky pink mist just beyond the metal wall of the hangar. One down.

  Walk on.

  Dodge another slug.

  Walk on.

  I felt it before I heard it or saw it, just like before, and flattened myself to the ground. This time it wasn’t a whistling shriek and pop. It was a noise that ought to accompany the end of the world. My ears bled from it.

  I rolled over, and saw the thing I hoped I wouldn’t: a larger Progeny craft. This one was as wide as the tarmac, hovering thirty feet in the air. The manta-ray shape of the thing blotted out the sun, throwing everything under it into shadows.

  A moment later it belched a beam of sizzling energy at our ride, the V-22 Osprey. Unlike White and the guards at home, the aircraft didn’t burn to carbon. It exploded and fused into a molten lump with the equally molten concrete. The heat was so intense I could feel it 75 yards away.

  Three Predator drones swept in from various directions, firing missiles at will. I couldn’t tell if any of those shots did any damage, being underneath the craft, but I hoped they did.

  The drones didn’t get an opportunity to make a second pass. With three quick bursts, the Progeny shot them down, adding more molten lumps to the landscape.

  Someone off to my right shot at the huge black thing with one of our rail guns. I could see where the slug hit, cracking the shell and spilling thick blue juice on the ground. I wanted to cheer, but the noise died in my throat as the hull knit back together.

  Whoever took the shot didn’t get an opportunity to take another. The craft spat a wide stream of crackling energy and played it across the probable location of the shooter. Four flashes signaled the end of four lives.

  The next target to get some love was Bravo Euro’s hangar. One shot reduced the right side of the structure to a series of glowing pools. Riley’s scream of rage drowned out everything else in my head–her ill-gotten pod of nanotech and supplies had been stacked there.

  I giggled at her frustration, silently thanking the alien invaders for saving me the trouble of ruining her little plans.

  Seconds after half the hangar melted, the Progeny vessel revved up, and tore the air asunder with the noise of its departure. My freshly healed eardrums ruptured, and I rolled around on the ground, howling until the pain went away.

  When I stood up, I saw Chunhua and Shawn huddled together about fifty feet away to my right. Their ears were bleeding, but all the other vital signs were within the normal range for seriously freaked out human beings. They’d heal.

  “Status report!” Major Kenney shouted in my head, clearly not a victim of the enemy’s surgical strike.

  He got what he asked for. I chimed in, along with Shawn and Chu. I stopped listening when Group Alpha reported their losses. I had more pressing matters.

  A quick tap inside my skull gave me the names of Bravo Euro’s members who were now part of the metal cooling on the ground. James Frost. Paul Fletcher. Andrew MacGillivray.

  Only three of them bought the farm–more for me then.

  Who am I to complain when I can legitimately vent my rage?

  I snapped the blade of the Man Scythe open, and checked how it felt in my left hand as I walked towards the half-a-hangar. Smiling, I decided I could live with using my old favorite in my off hand. The new right hand had other things it could be doing, and I was not about to let that opportunity pass me by.

  Shawn and Chunhua caught up with me as I hopped around the melted corner of the building. We stalked in side-by-side, weapons of choice free in our hands. For just a split second before the surviving members of Bravo Euro started shooting I swear the three of us had theme music... nasty, bass-pounding, phallic, industrial theme music–complete with angry Teutonic men spitting on the audience. Fuck! It was a fantastic split second!

  We split up, our moment of Hollywood splendor spoiled by incoming hyper-velocity slugs at close range.

  Shawn dodged like Baryshnikov dances. I caught a glimpse of his artistry as I scrambled, and wondered how someone so solid could flow like water.

  Chunhua took out Peter Lewis in his position atop the staircase, creating a unique Jackson Pollock-style mural across the flat gray wall. The effect was only slightly altered by the whirlpool shape of twisted metal made by the slug passing through the wall. Truth be told, it was a gorgeous meditation on peace through superior firepower.

  Hashim El Baz got the drop on me, but I was too close for him to raise his weapon, so he lashed out with a kick that would have killed a normal human several times over. I couldn’t block the kick, so I took a short trip through the air, spraying blood as I flew. The landing knocked the Man Scythe out of my hand,
and more blood out of my lungs.

  He closed the distance as I tried to sit up, looking to take my head clean off with another kick. As he cocked his leg for another impressive strike, I learned something about my right eye: it doesn’t need to be pointed at you to see. My peripheral vision is perfectly acute on that side. I saw him coming and had time to react.

  I leaned back and reached to the sky with my right arm as his kick came around. His foot never connected with my head, but an impressive spray of blood did. The foot in question, severed by my right arm, continued across the hangar floor. El Baz howled, and dropped, clutching at his leg.

  When I looked over at him, all I could think was how sad his leg was already healing. He saw me watching him, and went pale when I smiled.

  “I take a very dim view of people fucking us over when we’ve been hospitable, Mr. El Baz. I am not keen on folks trying to kill a friend of mine. Nope. Not at all.”

  Talking to him was a calculated risk on my part, designed to do one thing: lure Siobhan Riley out of hiding. It worked. Before I could twitch, she had the barrel of a rail gun against my temple.

  “Cocky fucker. You think you’ve won just because the Progeny helped you out?” She ground the metal against my head. “You’re our hostage now. I could kill you where you sit.”

  “Bitch, please.” I rolled my eyes at her. “You’re surrounded.”

  “No! You’re the God-forsaken golden boy! They won’t move an inch as long as we have you!”

  “Hey, Ginger Cunt!” Shawn yelled from somewhere behind me, giving me a case of the giggles. “Let Frank go. I got your pal Rebecca Howard-Spence right here.”

  Inside my head I could tell he wasn’t bluffing, because the heads-up display confirmed their locations. I decided to take the chance, and looked in that direction.

  Sure enough, Shawn had her in a painful-looking arm lock with his sidearm under her chin. Her face was wet with tears, and I had no idea if it was the hold inspiring the moisture or some internal conflict. Not that it really mattered. I was waiting for something else.

  The thing I was waiting for arrived in the form of Hashim El Baz turning into an unhappy splatter, thanks to a tidy shot from Chunhua Yan.

  Riley moved the gun away from me for an instant, attention drawn away from me by the untimely explosion of her teammate. I only needed an instant to come up off the floor, punctured lungs repaired, and take her gun arm out of commission.

  Her arm was locked into my armpit when I dropped onto my knees, shifting my left arm around hers just enough to shatter her elbow when I hit the ground. She screamed bloody murder, and it was celestial symphonies to my ears. I stuck my right index and middle fingers up her nostrils, much like the first time she and I had words.

  She tried to bat my hand down, just like before. She kicked around, just like before, too. It didn’t do any good, if anything it re-broke her elbow as it tried to heal.

  “I think I told you that if you fucked with me or my people I’d hunt you down and kill you myself. Didn’t I?” I stared down into her eyes.

  “I can’t die now, fucker,” she spat back at me.

  “No?”

  “We’re immortal! I’ll keep coming back. I’ll save the world!”

  I was impressed. The woman was thoroughly crazy–bonkers–special, funky, bat-shit crazy. I nodded at her, and decided to give her theory a little try.

  “Tell you what, Red, I’ll make you a bet.” I removed my fingers from her nose. “If you don’t die, I’ll let you go. If you die, well, it won’t matter to you at all. Shall we have a go?”

  “Let’s go, you son of a genocidal maniac!” Oh, how she smiled at me!

  “Let’s!”

  My right hand slipped into the shape of a double-edged blade, and I cut her head off with a single stroke. I stood up, dropped her body, and kicked her head across the floor with surprising gentleness. Her eyes blinked at me, and her mouth tried to form words.

  “You. Fucker. I. Will. Live.” Those were the words I caught as her mouth moved.

  “Let’s see, Siobhan. Let’s see.” I held up my left hand, and someone tossed me an Arlington Super Secret Standard Sidearm. “Here we go, honey lamb!” I took aim, right between her bulging eyes and pulled the trigger.

  I won the bet.

  Exhaling every pent-up breath I held inside, I turned around. Major Kenney and the surviving members of Group Alpha stood around us like high-tech black chessmen. Shawn had a hold on Rebecca Howard-Spence. Chunhua holstered her weapon and cracked her knuckles.

  For just a few moments I enjoyed the silence.

  “We’re done here, Major. Burn the rest of this shit and get us a ride home. Shawn? Bring your friend along–I think she might have a redeeming quality or two. Kill her if I’m wrong.”

  “I hear you, bro.”

  I nodded at him–pleased we were on the same page–before I took one last look around at the carnage. There was blood everywhere, burnt to black on molten metal, now cooling. Parts of bodies were strewn about, and I didn’t give a shit. They weren’t my anatomical accessories, didn’t belong to anyone I cared about.

  Story of my life.

  “Right. We’re done here. Let’s go home. There are things that need doing.”

  About the Author

  James Crawford is an artist, graphic designer, amateur bladesmith and subversive suburbanite when no one else is looking. He lives in the Washington, DC area with his wife, pursues hobbies that pay off in cuts, burns, tendonitis, full sketchbooks, and the occasional freaky idea. Once in a while, those freaky ideas refuse to die and shamble off to create lives of their own.

  The author would like to thank friends and family for their support as this project evolved over time. In particular he would like to thank Rachael Fink for her editing, commentary, and extensive understanding of the Southern female psyche.

  To you: if you like Blood Soaked and Contagious, recommend it to your friends via your favorite social media outlets and in person.

  Credit for the cover image design goes to Karen Fletcher at Karen Fletcher Design.

  Connect with me online:

  My blog: http://www.bloodsoakedandwriting.com

  Twitter: Crawford4033