Visceral

by Adam Thielen

  “Well, let’s go.”

  “Wait,” he coughed and swallowed. “There’s a mage out there tossing grenades. Wouldn’t be surprised if the shrapnel was silver-laced too.”

  “Can you carry him?” she asked.

  “I can barely carry myself, but yeah, I suppose,” he shrugged. “Why?”

  Tamra set Taq onto Matthias’s shoulder. To him, the weight was negligible.

  “It’s time to show this shit why mages fear us.”

  She went down the stairs and started jogging at the bottom toward the entrance. She pulled out her MESS issued handgun. As she neared the hole in the wall she activated her ethersight optical implant. She saw the blue glow before she exited the building. The mage was behind the bed of a small truck.

  Ritter had been waiting and preparing for the possibility that the next thing that came out of the building would not be friendly. He had a grenade in each hand. Even then, he did not expect a woman to come running out of the building directly at him.

  He threw a grenade at her feet. As soon as it left his hand Tamra opened fire, her shot missing. She felt her polonium warm up as Ritter willed the grenade to explode, but it wouldn’t. Confused, but still focused, he threw a second grenade under the truck as she approached it. He again used his detonation spell but with enough force that it made his head hurt. Again, no detonation occurred.

  Tamra’s polonium was bright now, and hot. She vaulted into the bed of the truck, pointed her gun at Ritter, and fired five shots in quick succession. Each one caused a small ripple in some sort of magical bubble he had surrounded himself with.

  She saw him pull a handgun from a shoulder holster as she jumped down beside him. Tamra reached her hand out toward his. Before he could fire, lightning arced from her polonium and onto Ritter’s arm. His bubble imploded and the arcs jolted randomly onto his torso and head. His body went stiff, and he released a low pitched scream through gritted teeth. When the polonium was depleted, the arc dissipated, the mage’s knees buckled, and he fell to the ground, lifeless. Thin wisps of smoke rose from his body. Tamra shivered as her implanted metal grew instantly cold.

  She was still staring at Ritter’s body when she heard Matthias call out to her. He had managed to get Taq to one of the SUVs that was neither destroyed nor locked down. Matthias looked back at his wrecked Orget as Tamra drove them. He punched in the address of a doctor friendly to his kind. He then closed his eyes and rested his head against the window. It was a twenty minute drive, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to make it there.

  * * *

  Taq sat next to her bed in the local infirmary. He took her hand in his. Somehow he had become unexpectedly vulnerable. Kate had shown no signs of consciousness since passing out. Taq wondered if his body simply lay about while he was absent from the world. Surely not, he thought. He remembered feeling something inside of him, walking with him. Drew.

  “You must go on,” he heard in his mind. “Find him.”

  “I can’t,” Taq replied.

  “Find him.”

  The presence was strong now. Taq could feel it pushing him upward. He looked at Kate and stood up. “Aight, fine.” He leaned down and kissed her forehead before leaving. He found a carriage taxi and directed him toward Tom’s address. The trip gave him a tour of the town. Everything was so spread out and spacious outside of main street shops. The exposed dirt and uncontrolled plant life made him uncomfortable.

  As the carriage neared its destination, Taq saw a man untying a horse. It was Tom Morrison. Before Tom could mount it, Taq called out. “Tom!” The man stopped and stood, holding the reins of his horse in one hand. Once closer, Taq realized it never struck him that he was particularly pale. He wore a black Stetson with a pinched front and a flat brim.

  The carriage rolled to a stop. Tom had not moved an inch. Taq pulled out a small revolver and pointed it directly at Morrison. The man’s eyebrows raised, but he made no other movement in response. Taq stepped out of the carriage. The driver, upon seeing the gun in Taq’s hand, whipped the horses into motion.

  Tom dropped the reins of the horse. “Din’t ‘spect to see you again,” he said with a southern drawl. His head cocked to the side. “Somethin’s diffrent.”

  Taq tried to fire the revolver, but his finger wouldn’t move. “What is this place?” he asked, trying to stall for time.

  “Hmm,” Tom lowered his hand down to his own pistol and tapped the grip, studying Taq.

  “Don’t,” commanded Taq, still unable to shoot.

  Tom grinned. “How ‘bouts I ask you something first. Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Drew, you shot me, remember?”

  “Come on,” Morrison replied. “Let’s just cut the shit.”

  “I’m not from this place.”

  “Oklahoma?”

  “This world, or this time, or ‘evs.”

  Morrison gripped the handle of his gun, still in its holster. Taq tried again to squeeze the trigger.

  “This world?” Tom asked through gritted teeth. “How did you get here?”

  “First answer my question.”

  “You must not know.” He relaxed his hand. “Sometimes I forget. Sometimes for long stretches. Strange that you are here. But not as strange as the fact that you are not alone. Are you trapped like me?” He paused. “Right I still haven’t answered yer question.”

  “You are trapped here.”

  “This is my prison. Our prison really. But sometimes I dream the other world. Have been a lot lately. I think whatever the others did to us is starting to unravel.”

  “Who were you? What others?” Taq asked.

  Tom walked up to the barrel of Taq’s gun. “This is my world.” He reached his hand up to Taq’s face. “Ah,” he said softly. “You are a sorcerer.” He caressed Taq’s cheek. Taq tried to jerk away, but he was frozen motionless. “It’s temptin’ to possess you, but you aren’t fit. Besides, I have a train to catch.”

  Taq struggled, but managed to speak. “You’re a fiend.”

  “No,” he said. “I am a god.”

  Taq felt Morrison’s control over him diminish and the presence of Drew strengthen. He cast telekinesis to pull the trigger. Morrison was too quick to react, pushing the gun to the side as it went off. Taq dropped to his knees from the strain. Morrison drew his gun and pointed it at Taq.

  “How’d you get here, goddammit?” Tom asked as he pulled the lever back.

  Suddenly the gun exploded. It dropped to the ground and Tom grabbed his hand. Part of his fingers and back of his hand were scorched. Taq had cast again, a spell so small and precise, that it stunned Tom more than the explosion itself. Taq had ignited a single bullet in Tom’s revolver. He fell onto his side as he felt consciousness start to fade. He turned his head to watch Morrison gallop away.

  * * *

  Taq’s eyelids fluttered and his chest lifted upward as he gasped for air. “Taq!” he heard a female voice say. Darkness gave way to dim surroundings. He was in a vehicle. He didn’t notice the rumbling or motion, but saw light flash by the windows rhythmically.

  “Taq, you okay?” It was Tamra. Her deep voice becoming clearer as the fog in Taq’s brain lifted.

  “What did you do to me? My whole body hurts,” he asked.

  “We are headed to a doctor, just hold on.”

  Taq groaned as he tried to adjust in the backseat. He saw Matthias’s head against the passenger window. A smell crept into his nostrils. He started to remember how the evening started.

  “I fucked up,” he muttered. “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re good, probably,” she glanced at Matthias.

  “I didn’t think. I didn’t prepare myself. I saw Kate.”

  “What?”

  “While I was out,” he explained. “When I sleep, I go to another place. It’s been happening ever since we hunted the fiend. She was there. We have to save her.”

  “You dreamt about her.”

  “Not just a dream.”

  Tamra sighed
. “The university was just attacked by men willing to kill us all. What have you gotten us into, Taq?”

  “Kate—” he was interrupted by a voice over Tamra’s com.

  “Tamra, this is Noxcorp security dispatch, do you copy?”

  “Yes, I copy.”

  “Matthias is not answering his com, can you provide a sitrep?” the tinny male voice asked.

  “Matthias… is unconscious. We are alive. Whoever attacked the university was well trained and armed,” Tamra replied.

  “Did you see any ghouls?”

  “What?” she demanded.

  “We have several reports of ghouls in random attacks in the city.”

  Tamra looked at Taq, who managed a small shrug.

  “What is a ghoul?” she asked.

  “They are being described as violent monsters,” the man explained. “The description of the eyes, skin, and nails is similar to that given in Matthias’s report of the final encounter with Winter.”

  “No, nothing like that,” she answered.

  The voice asked her several questions about Matthias and the men, and Tamra was forced to give him bad news.

  “I have to assume they are still after us. Matthias can give you a full report later. Going dark.” She gestured in the air, turning off her com.

  Taq looked at her through the rearview.

  “I don’t know those people.” Her eyes turned back toward the road. “Matthias was poisoned by bullets that shouldn’t have been there, and as far as I’m concerned those men were there for you. We need to find a place to lay low.”

  “My anklet.”

  “Shit,” she realized. Tamra turned on the drive assist and swiped through various menus on the vehicles control screen. “Here we go.” She pressed a button that said ‘RF Shield’. As soon as she pressed it, a quiet hum filled the cabin.

  She turned and leaned between the seats, grabbing Taq’s ankle and lifting it up. The warden pressed her thumb against the anklet and waited. Several seconds passed, then a loud buzz emitted from the device. Tamra scrunched her face up, continuing to press on the device, her eyes moving to Taq’s face, then back to his ankle. Finally, the buzzing ceased and the anklet clicked open. Tamra sighed in relief, lowering Taq’s leg and tossing the anklet to the floor.

  The SUV rolled to a stop in front of a small house on a crowded block. The walls of one house were shared with the homes on each side of it, but the edges were painted with a reflective coating for an illusion of separation. This was a middle class neighborhood.

  “We’re here,” Tamra announced.

  Episode 7: Betrayal

  Kate gasped as light flooded her eyes. She saw only bright white, then simply white, then finally settling on off-white as her pupils shrunk. The data thief once again found herself in a sterile-looking room, this time with a servo arm pulling a needle from her chest.

  In front of her was a large mirror; likely one-way. To her left she heard grinding of metal. Kate could not turn her head.

  “Finally,” a man’s voice said.

  * * *

  Dreben discovered at a young age he enjoyed the infliction of pain on others. It bestowed a sense of calm gratification that he could not obtain from any other activity. His safest opportunities for outlet came in sexual form, luring both men and women to bed. Plied with drugs and patiently groomed, he convinced them to try something ‘edgy and interesting’. He was a salesman of masochism, but he rarely had repeat customers.

  From corporate secondary school, where he trained in traditional vocations of accounting and management, he went on to intern with two different corporations before being poached by Grapeseed. They found subtle clues in his psych evals that they felt warranted a special interview. There he admitted, under influence of sedatives, his long kept secret. The recruiters made him an offer he could not refuse. It was not as easy as they had made it sound. Dreben had many setbacks, and the training required was more arduous than he ever could imagine. But after sixteen years, he had earned a reputation as a breaker of wills. An obnoxious guard that worked in the lower floor kept calling him “glass man” until it stuck. “Because they all break,” he had to explain over and over. It wasn’t clever, but it rolled off the tongue.

  It was early in the morning when Dreben received the alert on his com. Someone had broken into Grapeseed and stolen sensitive information, but had been caught. An open and shut case, except the board wanted all information extracted from this individual and they wanted it yesterday. Much to his surprise, he found a female restrained on the table before him. Not that he had quibbles or preferences, but it had been years since he had interrogated one of the opposite gender.

  He found her presence intimidating, but that was common enough that he had learned to perfectly control his demeanor. The woman on the table was young, and she was beautiful. Further, she was bold for daring to physically infiltrate arguably the most powerful corporation on a planet ruled by corporations. He shuddered with excitement. Dreben turned to his tool racks. Then tension crept in as he remembered the board’s expectations of a quick interrogation.

  Dreben grabbed the hammer. May as well skip a step or two. Her screams were exquisite. It only took three strikes before she gave up who she had messaged. He sighed in relief. Now that the important part was done he could relax and take his time, letting the machines do most of the work. They were far more precise and disciplined than he was. He wrote their algorithms and routines while he was in a calm state, to ensure consistent results when the time came to extract information from the unwilling.

  A myth had been propagated in the old world that torture did not work. This claim was revised to “didn’t usually” work, to “didn’t often”, and later “unreliable”. Anyone ever caught in a headlock or threatened with the belt from their father knew the power of fear and pain. But power alone is in fact unreliable. It requires direction, skill, intelligence. If you want to get the truth out of someone, you have to possess a shard of it yourself, to compare with any larger picture provided by your adversary. When they provide the puzzle pieces, does it look like something recognizable? Does it look like the picture on the box?

  Dreben already knew she had sent a message. It had been encrypted and sent through several non-corporate nodes. Despite that, analysts knew it had to be a very short message, so nothing horribly damaging. It could have been an decryption key. That would have been the most dangerous data that could leave the confines of corporate HQ. The message also could have been a set of coordinates or a couple of names that had meaning only to the recipient. The analysts assured him that the message would not contain any of these things. Dreben suspected that they knew exactly what secrets the hacker was after. So when she admitted that she sent a message for help to a mage that existed in the corporate registries, a mage she had worked with recently, Dreben was all but sure it was the truth. Torture does work.

  After her initial confession, the machines began applying various horrifying sensations across her physical senses to slowly, methodically, break her. Without warning, the woman began to convulse and her heart stopped. Instinctively Dreben turned the machines off, then removed the cerebral clamps and commanded them to administer oxygen and sodium nitrate, among other chemicals. He had seen this before, but not for a long time. He recognized it as cyanide poisoning. Very clever, he thought, admiring her ability to hide it from scans and integrate her neural implants so deep into her biomatter.

  For several hours she was treated with no guarantee that she would live, let alone retain higher brain function. When she finally awoke, Dreben was alerted and made his way back down to the lower levels of the building. There he was reunited with the woman named Kate. Her clothing completely removed and her body restrained on the slab, Dreben could begin again. Finally, nothing to get in our way, he thought gleefully.

  Kate’s eyes continued to adjust. The blurry figure coming into focus as it leaned toward her tilted body. She recognized him and remembered the hammer. Kate still felt
the agony in her hand, or so she was convinced. She desperately tried to move, to wrest herself free of the shackles both neurological and physical. It was futile. She saw him smile and it terrified her. She cried a guttural cry. Half a yelp and half a sob. She knew that his goal was not to extract information but simply to make her suffer.

  Behind him, a section of wall flipped vertically exposing various hand-tools far less crude than the hammer he used during their introduction. He gingerly plucked two of the instruments from the rack. Thin chrome tubes that resembled metallic pencils, pointed on one end. Dreben twirled the one in his right hand around through his fingers like a baton.

  Kate recognized the tools. She screamed and her body convulsed against the restraints. “No, no, no,” she kept repeating as Dreben leaned toward her. He brought the tip of one of the pencils to rest against her head behind her left ear, caressing the spot mockingly. Below the skin rested components of her neural interface, the device that had displaced a part of her humanity. The device that was now one of her defining features.

  “This actually would not be my first choice,” he stated calmly. “The execs think you’ve been a bad girl.” He smiled as if joking with an acquaintance. “I just hope your spirit isn’t broken after I remove them.”

  “Please, no, please,” Kate begged. She was ashamed of herself. Her words spoken by someone she didn’t know and didn’t want to. She thought she was stronger than this. Realization at how vulnerable she was fueled her fear. Her body had become glistening with sweat. Kate’s chest felt like it was being repeatedly and rhythmically punched. Black spots began to appear in her vision and the room started spinning. Dreben leaned closer, bringing the second tip to the same spot as the first.

  Kate felt a sudden sense of tranquility wash over her as her vision went red. At first she thought perhaps her eyes had exploded, but it wasn’t her. It was Dreben. Half of his head was gone and the other half had flopped over to rest against his shoulder. His body fell against her and then slid off onto the ground. Behind him was Tamra, holding a high-caliber pistol outstretched. She wore an armored vest and had another handgun at her waist and an assault rifle on her back.