by Adam Thielen
“What did you get me involved in?” she demanded.
Taq could only reply, “What?”
“What are you trying to pull, Taq? You don’t want to lie to me.”
“I..,” Taq’s gears were grinding, trying to pull some sort of sense out of her words. “I reported that mage, Paul Winter.”
“Oh, I know you did,” she pointed at his chest. “And then almost as soon as the file is entered into the database, I’m assigned to it. But instead of putting together a MESS team, I’m ordered to report to a Noxcorp agent… with you.”
“I want nothing to do with Winter!” Taq shouted. “I quit already, because Matthias wouldn’t get help.” And then it clicked. Everything is corporate controlled. “Shit!”
“You are going with me, and I’ve already had some friends start looking into these orders from Chicago and headquarters. Whoever is screwing with me is done.” She studied Taq for a moment. “You didn’t request to have me assigned?”
“I know you are just doing your job, Tammy—”
“Tamra.”
“Tamra,” he repeated. “But you are ruining my life. I’m not going anywhere.”
A blue glow emanated from under Tamra’s uniform blouse. “Taq?” She looked at his hands, which were motionless, then at his eyes which were staring at something behind her. Before Tamra could react, she felt her body hurl forward. A massive shockwave threw them both in different directions. Taq flew to a corner of the room; Tamra hit a large glasteel pane window. A millimeter thin, it cracked from the impact. The shockwave pushed the room’s furniture around and knocked the display off the wall.
At the door stood an ashen-colored man. His skin was blemished with discolorations and boils, and his face was gaunt. The man’s clothes were in tatters. He let out a congested hiss. After looking at Taq and then Tamra, the fiend leapt toward Tamra. She was stunned from the throw and still shaking off the confusion.
In mid leap, a small ball of refracted light, resembling a perfect sphere of water the size of a baseball, hit the fiend on the ribcage and expanded explosively while fading out of existence. The monster flew backward against the hallway foamcrete and two more spheres followed him, battering his body. Taq rested on his knees, panting heavily. His face was flushed and he was sweating from the sudden exertion.
The fiend got up and ran at Taq. Tamra had her handgun drawn and released a lightning fast series of shots. The fiend was once again staggered and changed course for Tamra. It grabbed the barrel with one hand and swung its claws with the other. Tamra flinched backward, dodging the swipe but releasing the hold on her weapon. The blue glow underneath her shirt was fading.
The fiend tried to grab her with both hands. She spun around, ducking away from the fiend and kicked backward. The blow landed on the creature’s pelvis, sending it stumbling away. It left a trail a blood as it traveled. Tamra eyed her pistol, but her path was blocked.
Taq let out a grunt, his arms pointed at the fiend with both hands clenched. Visible steam wafted from his hair. The fiend grabbed his head in agony and let out a shrill scream. Two seconds later, he fell on his face. The body lay motionless for several seconds.
Tamra grabbed her pistol and pointed it at the creature’s head. BANG. BANG. It didn’t move. Taq slumped down against the wall, panting. “I think…” he wheezed. “We need silver to kill it.” Taq tried to stand back up, but fell to his knees. Tamra holstered her gun and helped him up.
“What is that thing?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Matthias called it a fiend,” he answered. “Some sort of vampire mage.”
“A vampire?” she asked. “It’s still light outside! Is this Winter?”
“It didn’t look like Winter.”
Tamra handed Taq her gun and knelt down next to the body. She carefully rolled it over onto its back. Taq shook his head. “That’s not him,” he said. “I don’t know who that is…was.”
“There’s more than one of these things?” she mumbled as she studied the strange blue veins partially enveloping the man’s face. On his neck were two small round wounds. “Vampires? What have you gotten me into?”
“I don’t know, Tamra,” he said earnestly. “Same thing I got dragged into last night I guess.”
Footsteps clomped down the hallway and then inside Taq’s demolished dorm room. Three MESS officers ran in with guns drawn, two of them with assault rifles. Tamra recounted the events to the officers, who took the body away with instructions to securely house it and silver-poison it as a precaution.
Officers escorted the both of them to the infirmary inside the MESS building. Outside of a few contusions and bruises, neither had been injured seriously. Even so, the doctors talked them into staying for full exams and some minor treatments for the soreness. Taq had a fever that quickly passed, normal for strenuous casting. He became paranoid that somehow the tests would reveal his ingestion of foreign blood.
Tamra took Taq to the MESS building to acquisition a much larger gun, along with other gear. They went inside the armory, and she gave substantial thought as to what to bring. She settled on an HAR-30 hybrid. It was a high velocity assault rifle with both powder based projectiles and a small pressurized cartridge for a backup. It had a scope and neural aim assist. Tamra opened a locker and pulled out a bullet-proof vest.
“What was that blue glow?” Taq asked.
Tamra stopped and closed her eyes. “Polonium. Do you know what that is?”
“Plutonium? Why was it glowing?”
“Polonium, it’s a metal that acts as a kind of dampener for magic effects. Breaches in the Ether, whatever it’s made out of, flood into this world. Polonium acts like a kind of sponge.” she strolled down the display of weapons and other assault gear.
“So you wear some anti-magic suit. That explains a lot,” Taq smiled.
“Well, we don’t exactly wear it.”
“It’s inside you?” asked Taq.
“These are trade secrets Taq, let’s get going.”
The polonium was inside her. Lines of metal bonded to the inside of her skin, laid out almost like a series of circuits. Thin ones ran along the underside of her forearms and continued to her shoulders, branching down her chest and back forming much a much thicker ‘V’ shape. It went lower and branched again to meet the outside of her hips and continued this pattern of converging and separating down her legs.
Tamra led him to the security office on campus and motioned for him to sit on a bench just outside. She sat beside him. “You did good back there; it’s true what I had heard.”
Taq grinned. “You talk about me?”
“It’s our job to know everything about our mages. We even have daily meetings to discuss developments,” Tamra sighed. “I’m really not sure it’s a good idea to know as much as we do. I think it makes us complacent.”
“If you want to stop a mage that’s a real threat to the world, you’ve got your chance now.”
“You’re right, and I don’t think you are a threat,” she admitted. “But I need to know what happened last night and what that thing was.”
Taq recounted the events and explained the concept of a fiend. “I’m surprised mage enforcement doesn’t know about them.”
“I’ve always been told that mages didn’t turn, they simply died,” said Tamra. “I need to make a call. If the HQ has information that’s useful, I will get it from them.”
Tamra stood up. “Something else, Taq. You are the expert, but respect your limits. You wouldn’t be the first mage to burn out. Certainly not the first to lose your abilities or go crazy from brain damage. I’ll be back in a minute.” Taq watched as she entered the building, turned a corner, and was gone.
* * *
Tamra sat frustrated at her desk. She sat staring at the words, “No Information.” No records or articles in MESS’s database matched the word ‘vampire’. She tried ‘fiend’. Once again, no results were displayed. Tamra sighed. She brought up the com system and wrote a short message. “V
ampires. I need to know everything. Not kidding. Everything.” She encrypted it and sent it to a single address.
As she left the building again, Taq was getting into the backseat of a small sedan. Kate sat at the wheel. Tamra walked up to the window. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“MESS?” Kate leaned forward to look at her.
“Tamra,” she corrected. “Hey, I know you. You’re the girl.”
“That’s right, I’m the girl,” she replied. “I’m also Kate, your ride.”
“Okay, so where are we going, then?” Tamra asked.
“In a couple hours, Matthias is going to meet up with us, to kill the fiend.”
“A couple hours?”
“As soon as the sun goes down,” Kate affirmed.
“Then we should wait until then,” Tamra asserted.
“Well,” started Kate. “We aren’t exactly sure where he is. We can’t wait, because we have to find him. If he’s hiding from the sun, then we could lose him forever at dusk. Winter could move and have a full night to lose us.”
“I thought you could find him through projection,” she said to Taq.
“I can, but that thing tried to kill me last time.”
“So we are going to track it and wait, right?” questioned Tamra.
“Affirmative,” Kate answered.
* * *
Once the destination was selected, she put the car into drive assist and turned to Tamra, “That was a good idea encrypting the message, but I hope you can trust her.”
“What? How do you know?”
“I’m monitoring all MESS communications, and I’m probably not the only one,” she replied.
“What the hell is this, Taq?” Tamra asked, looking back at him.
“I don’t know. She’s a neuro. It’s what she does,” he replied.
“I’m an officer of the law; I can’t be involved in data theft.”
Kate snorted. “You are an officer of made up rules. More of a security guard, really.”
Tamra’s jaw dropped and her cheeks became flushed with anger. Kate’s smirk disappeared and she stared ahead at the road.
“Tamra, we need information. We can’t get it any other way. You saw what we are up against,” Taq interjected.
“Fine,” Tamra replied. “How much of this is actually sanctioned by the board?”
“In a way, all of it,” Kate started, her voice now quieter. “There’s a mage on the loose in a region governed by Noxcorp. This gives jurisdiction to Noxcorp with authority to enlist mage enforcement. How we deal with it is something of a gray area, but I’ve been assured that Noxcorp will protect us.”
“Well that’s a load off,” Tamra said sarcastically.
“Wait, Tamra has seen Winter?” Kate asked.
“Not exactly,” answered Taq, recounting the attack at the dorm.
* * *
Matthias looked at the time readout on the display. “Four hours,” he said to himself. His t-shirt and boxers were uniformly soaked. As he sat up on the bench of the resistance machine, it automatically moved into position to start a new round. The counter on the display indicated that he had done this routine thirty-two times already. Instead of starting the thirty-third set, he leaned against one of the support bars.
Matthias thumbed one of the display tabs, a line graph animated on the screen to show his progress with markers for each round. It shot up showing fast improvement early on, then curved to the right and was nearly flat for the last three rounds. He swapped from one workout to the next, and each graph showed the same behavior. Matthias was plateauing. He found a few strength indicators that were not as flat as the rest and decided to focus on those for a few more rounds. The readout told him that his strength had increased approximately 280 percent.
The room was littered with wrappers and empty bottles. Security had visited the fitness room twice to see why so much blood was leaving its receptacle. Matthias could not recall the last time that he drank unflavored water, but he felt an old kind of thirst that demanded it.
Matthias lay down on the floor intending only to rest his body. He soon fell asleep and, to his dismay, found himself on the moon again. He looked around, afraid that he would be subject to another mind probe. Matthias saw no ghouls and no fiends. Acting from a dreamer’s instinct, he crouched down and scooped up a handful of moon dirt. It fell through his fingers as he rubbed it between thumb and forefinger.
Looking up, he didn’t see the Earth, so he moved around until it was in view. Matthias studied it, looking for significance or signs of the fiend. Several green dots, almost pinpoint sized lights, began to emerge from the globe. All of the dots were clustered together, with one speck particularly bright. Matthias did not want to approach the bright one. However, he was curious about the others. He envisioned moving toward Earth, and it happened. He entered the atmosphere and flew toward the ground.
Matthias landed relatively close to one of the green lights on the left edge of their cluster. Up close, the light became a wisp, and Matthias found himself in the middle of a wheat field. The wisp flittered about, descending from view amongst the grains and then back up. It seemed to sense Matthias and flew over to him. It danced about, circling Matthias, casting a green glow upon his pale skin.
He felt compelled to reach toward it. His fingers brushed against short tendrils that extended from the green globe. Images flashed in Matthias’s mind. He saw industrial equipment and a poor neighborhood he recognized immediately. Then he saw the parking garage that he had fled to, but not from his eyes, but from someone else’s. Matthias was doing the probing this time. He also gleaned the fiend’s intentions and shook himself awake.
Gasping, Matthias sat up and hit his head against a pull-down bar on the resistance machine. The entire room was engulfed in a soft red glow emanating from an emergency light flush with the ceiling tiles. A steady beeping noise indicated that an alarm had been triggered inside the safe house.
“Time,” he mumbled. His com projected focused light directly into his pupil, fabricating a virtual display in front of his face that said ‘5:20’; it was still daytime.
Matthias stood up, his clothing still sticking to his body… and then fell, completely exhausted. He crawled to the blood dispenser and started sucking down the red liquid. He stopped and took a breath. “Call Frank, emergency,” he ordered his com. Matthias stood up, his legs shaking, and picked the com up from the chair where he had left it.
A shrill scream rang through the hallway and into the fitness room, then was choked silent. Matthias slowly wobbled down the corridor toward the front desk. He wondered how many others occupied the building. As he approached the entrance to the lobby he saw three ghoulish figures, not unlike the fiend, crouched over Violet’s body. They tore into her with claws and teeth like a pack of lions to a fresh kill.
Gotta get to the armory, thought Matthias. He then realized it was a secured room down a hall on the opposite side of the lobby. “Shit.” He turned around and walked back to the pantry room. He closed the door and his com vibrated. Frank was finally on the line.
“What’s the situation?” he asked.
“Frank, there’s fiends or ghouls or something here,” Matthias whispered.
“Plural?”
“Plural.”
“The sun is still out, are you sure?”
“Just saw them tear apart the desk clerk,” answered Matthias.
“Fuck me,” swore Frank. “Get the hell out of there then.”
“Exit is blocked. Things killed Violet. Can you open the armory from there? My gun is in another room, if it would even help.” Matthias’s thirst and hunger were insatiable. He dumped a bottle of juice into his mouth, letting most of it run down his face and neck.
“One kicked your ass, Matty, just get out of there,” Frank urged.
“Open the fucking door, Frank.”
“Fine, I’m putting through the request. It could take a minute.”
“Also,” Matthias paused. H
e found it hard to push out the words. “Lock this place down. If I die, at least-.”
“You aren’t going to die. A security team is coming,” interrupted Frank. “Good luck. And Matt, don’t swear. You sound ridiculous.”
“Thanks, Frank,” he closed the connection and started sucking peanut butter out of a tube. He sat for a minute, taking deep breaths, then stood on sturdy legs.
Matthias entered the hallway again and caught sight of one of the ghouls. It stood a dozen meters away, facing him. The monster was motionless, as if waiting. Upon seeing Matthias, it released a loud coughing noise, almost like a dog’s bark. Matthias walked a few steps toward it and then went into a full sprint. The creature charged toward him at a similar pace. They met at the entrance to the lobby.
The ghoul dove at Matthias. Matthias slid underneath him. The ghoul landed on his hands and feet unharmed and undeterred. Matthias pressed his foot into the tile floor, letting inertia lift him back onto his feet. He raced for the other side of the lobby, with the first ghoul chasing behind. Out of the corner of his left eye, Matthias saw another of the ghouls running toward him. It intercepted him at the lobby’s exit, swiping at his face. Matthias ducked and stepped toward the ghoul, punching it in the chest. The ghoul flew backward at the force of the blow.
Matthias reached the armory room’s door. He hurried inside and slid the heavy metal door shut just as the first ghoul reached it. Matthias swung the manual lever, locking himself inside. He felt claws sink into his back, then yelled in pain, spinning around with his arm outstretched. Matthias’s forearm hit the creature in the face, sending it reeling. It stumbled, but remained standing. Behind the ghoul was a wall with a large selection of firearms, munitions, and melee weapons mounted to it.
The ghoul did not make another charge and instead threw its hand outward in Matthias’s direction. The room went from dull red to bright white as a bolt of electricity arced from the ghoul’s hand to Matthias’s chest. He slumped down onto his side, paralyzed from the shock. The ghoul stood in place, breathing heavily. It made the strange barking noise and leapt onto Matthias.