Cypulchre

by Joseph Travers MacKinnon

  Some unseen force splits a seam along the ceiling. Rubble loosed from the upper floors rains onto its invisible form, defining its contours. Its light-redirecting cloak scales back, flickering as it retreats and revealing the destroyer underneath: a Locust drone.

  The Locust drone stands twice as tall as its shadow, which reaches Paul, three metres away. It looks like a bus-sized cricket on steroids.

  Its two forelegs respectively sport a 50-calibre undercarriage, which are fed ammo belts from a chink in its conte-red chassis. Paul can only assume that the brown stumps with frontward-facing holes built into its collar are rocket launchers. Its thorax is complimented by rows of serrated-blades that run down to its owner-interface.

  It looms over Katajima’s corpse, running a quick autopsy with its faux-mandibles. The Locust’s eyes—or rather, its self-illuminated configuration of sensors and radars—narrow and cycle through shades of green.

  “Shit.” Paul quickly surveys the room behind him for a way out.

  The Locust sonar-pings the room, which sounds like a whale song. Its green-hued eyes rotate, the ocular disc spinning them—analyzing the room and all of its variables.

  With nowhere to go but forward, Paul pulls out his revolver, and advances. He ducks behind a fallen pillar, and sneaks a peek at the terror ahead.

  The little Mosquito Paul’d swatted at the front door buzzes through the Locust’s improvised entranceway. It darts over to the Locust and scans it. With a beep, it sails down the hall, and ascends to within feet of the ceiling. It spins wildly firing a red laser.

  Paul’s eyes widen. “Perimeter scan.” Damn.

  Another beep marks the completion of the scan, undoubtedly bad news for Paul. The Mosquito scoots over, indicating and accusing Paul with its laser.

  “God-damn-it,” whispers the accused, barely keeping it together.

  With all six-weaponized legs in agreement, the Locust hammers forward, bowing its head out of the way of its shouldered firepower. Paul peeks over the pillar, and sees the dark blur of the insectoid marauder grow.

  The Locust’s mini-guns start to spin. The metronomic whining sound of accelerating hammer clicks and whooshing barrels underline its intent.

  Paul blind-fires over the pillar, accomplishing nothing but noise.

  “Inago! For the love of God,” a man yells in trebly Japanese, no doubt emulating his former master by using his favorite turn of phrase. “Open fire!”

  “Hey, hold on! Call off the dogs! This is a mistake,” Paul cries into the fleeting vacuum before the barrage.

  The Locust crawls forward. With a thud, the inhibitor releases the guns. A thrashing sound, like nailed-down plastic flapping in a hurricane, fills the room. Paul keels forward as his cover receives the first, fluid volley of large-caliber rounds.

  The air smells like gunpowder and is noticeably hotter. Each subsequent hail chisels more off the pillar, eroding its former illusion of permanence and cutting nearer Paul’s failing reserve.

  RED SEARING PAIN.

  “Gah!” The shock grips him before the pain finishes its circuit. Paul can see a parade of blood mapped out before him. Possible bone fragments—what look like fish scales—are caught in the cuff of his pants. He moans, and sets his head back, forgetting the threat that had him hunched over to begin with.

  More rounds pound his cover, serving as a reminder—some arcing over and chewing up the far wall. Inarticulate worry meets his lips and sounds as vexed murmurs. Paul’s cold fingers probe the wound. His jacket is frayed. His skin, peeled back, no longer hides the torn musculature above his collar bone. He cries out in vain.

  “You—” Haruto declares in shaky English, competing with the volume of the mini-guns, “you killed a great man!”

  The Locust pauses. In this moment of reprieve, Paul can only hear his pulse and the clinking of spent shells. Shaking—stricken with animal panic—he rattles around to see Haruto, standing with his assault rifle slack at his side.

  “Ch-ch-check the surveillance feed,” Paul pleads, burdened with the clarity of a dying man. “I didn’t. I swear to God, I didn’t.”

  “He was more than a great man. He was my friend.”

  Don’t expect a trial, here. Paul resets to his caustic factory setting. “Friends don’t live in guardhouses.”

  Blinding Paul with dust, the guard opens fire on the nearly-decimated pillar and advances between the drone’s legs. He sees Paul’s gore painted on the marble opposite him and smiles.

  “Inago, for the love of God, hold fire and position. Suspend surveillance uplink for five minutes,” Haruto commands the steel beast in Japanese. “This is off the record.”

  Stooping as a sign of recognition, the Locust aligns itself with the hall, and laser-marks the pockmarked pillar.

  “Listen, will yah?” Paul’s right arm slumps over, fingers twitching on their own accord. He seizes the revolver with his left, and wrenches the hammer back with his thumb. He gestures to stand.

  Incoming bullets nip the motion.

  “For God’s sake. I didn’t kill Katajima.”

  “You’ll have to excuse my disbelief…and my intended cruelty.” The guard plinks a few more rounds over the pillar as a sign of control.

  Paul, covered in chalk, blood, and marble dust, glimpses another fallen pillar on the other side of the hallway, within reach of a shattered window. C’mon, you son of a bitch. Get up. The courage fails him, but so does the mental message coursing through his body to stop. He bolts towards the pillar, but the Locust severs his trajectory with a rocket.

  FEAR.

  Paul’s skin is warm and blistered and pimpled with shrapnel wounds. He can’t feel his right arm. He hatches his bloodshot eyes, and sees the guard, face eclipsed by the barrel of his rifle.

  The whoosh of Inago’s mini-guns picks back up.

  “Inago, for the love of God, hold your fire,” bellows Haruto. “Paul Sheffield, is it? So-called friend of the late, great Dr. Katajima.” He crouches, and jabs Paul’s massacred shoulder with the hot muzzle of his gun. “Even if I let you go, the depleted uranium nested in your chest will render you blind and dumb by week’s end. You’re already dead.”

  Paul’s fading. I’ve failed the girls; failed myself.

  “You die without a shred of honour.”

  Paul’s revolver didn’t make it over with him. It’s jammed in a groove of destruction in the line of fire. The briefcase with the fragmentor and Katajima’s deck, on the other hand, is within reach. Paul paws the cold marble for its handle.

  Haruto tilts his gaze and connects the dots to Paul’s prize. He steps on Paul’s grasping hand, looks at the case, and distorts his face with a knowing smile.

  “Inago!” Haruto yells in Japanese. The Locust’s eyes turn green and widen. “For the love of God, keep an eye on the target. Continue to hold your fire.”

  The guard gets up, and walks over to the briefcase. He slams it down on a bullet-ridden pedestal, and clicks it open.

  Paul nods his head and prays. He prays that it won’t hurt. He prays that the Anomaly or whatever evil genius controlling the CLOUD wished him dead will have mercy on his family. He prays that his soul will survive his body…for the love of God.

  The Locust’s eye-plate stops spinning, and the lenses revert to red, framing Paul.

  “Inago, for the love of God, break a rib or two,” Haruto says, laughing and shuffling forward.

  Paul reacts to the order, and attempts to roll over, out of the way. Inago catches him mid-movement. Its pincers puncture his sides. Inago holds Paul upside down before its ocular disk, and scrutinizes every last detail.

  “For the love of God, Inago, send him over here!”

  Inago whips Paul past the guard. Paul crunches against the marble floor and slides near Katajima’s gnarled corpse, tracking blood along the way.

  The guard turns Katajima’s deck and shakes his head. “Is this really worth dying for? Worth killing for?”

  “I didn’t…” Paul babbles.
r />   The guard tip-toes over Paul, reviewing his file via Monocle. “Says here, you speak Japanese.” He turns to Paul with an inquisitive look. “Is that true?” he says in his native tongue.

  Paul sits up into a fog of pre-death. “A-a-after the war, I spent some time in Fukuoka,” Paul replies, manufacturing an accent. “Picked up what I could. What I needed.” He half-slumps over. His faculties are failing him.

  The guard smiles, and looks up at Inago, glaring red over Paul. “Life is a lamp flame before a wind.” He ejects his spent magazine from his print, and paws his belt for another. “Understand?”

  “Sure,” Paul grunts, thinking on the importance of Katajima’s favorite turn of phrase.

  “Inago and I are the wind.”

  Paul interrupts, sitting up. “Inago? For the love of God…”

  With attentive eyes-turned-green, the Locust skews its head sideways. Haruto looks to Inago, and then to Paul with a marked look of confusion and panic.

  It’s a command prompt.

  “No!” yells Haruto.

  Paul cracks a smile. “Kill Master Haruto before he utters one more word.”

  Inago’s ocular-disc spins, this time framing the guard.

  The wings on Haruto’s moustache veer down, “No! Inag—”

  The Locust slings one half-dozen high-calibre rounds into Haruto, cutting him in half.

  Sliming backward, Haruto whispers, “For the love of God…”

  The last of the hot casings clinks behind Paul. Trained on the bodies, similarly gutted, Paul gulps. He falls over, the smell of iron misting around him.

  “Monocle, medical status report,” he rasps.

  Paul’s Monocle flits-on, blurry and mired with digital artifacts. “Critical condition. Seek immediate medical attention.”

  “No shit.”

  SIRENS AIR on the breeze threading through the divot in the wall. Like a bedside alarm, they wake Paul from his painful stupor. Fight the temptation…

  “Inago,” he yells through prison bars of spittle. “For the love of God, slow down any units dispatched to this residence.”

  Inago’s steel musculature flexes behind its red shielding.

  “I prefer you use non-lethal force,” says Paul, leaning against the pillar, issuing more blood than syllables.

  The Locust, domineering and terrifying, pounds the floor, and bounds out through the void, trailing dust and debris.

  Inago’s new commander closes his eyes. Holy shit. Deluding himself into thinking it’d all been an episode, he reopens them, hoping for something to evidence his insanity. No such luck.

  Doubled-over his broken ribs and charred flesh, Paul snatches-up his revolver and the briefcase, and stumbles down the hall to the front foyer.

  Venerating the Tesla coil with a wince, Paul looks over at the photograph of the Shef-Ajima launch-party, and takes pause. “I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.”

  Falling concrete and sparks in the hallway break the image’s spell on Paul. He presses out the front door.

  His getaway vehicle is now a bullet-ridden pretzel of metal and broken glass, sinking on melted tires. Again, Paul’s not even the slightest bit surprised. He walks up to it, just out of reach of the tongues of flame licking the corners of the hood. Paul admires Inago’s handy-work, and stops.

  “The Empty Thought!” He bolts around the wreckage, and peers into the flatbed. “Ah Jeeze!”

  The heavplast container with all of his gear from the retreat is fire-licked, but hasn’t yielded to the heat.

  “Ah, god-damn-it” yells Paul.

  Paul places the briefcase down on the cobbled-driveway, and wrings his left hand through the cuffs of his shirt. I’m going to regret this. Paul throws his barely-protected hand into the trunk, and throttles the container loose of the molten flatbed. The slick of melted plastic burns through his cuff and eats away at the top-layer of skin around his finger nails. He bellows, hand knotted into a yellow and red ball.

  “Shit!” Paul yanks the container over the side, and drops it, fighting to free himself of his blood-soused shirt.

  An alarm sounds from Shouta’s compound. His personal cypulchre quickly buckles under armoured plates. The halo of exotic birds above the compound stop dead in flight, and fall down en masse—ended by an anti-air force field.

  Wincing through the pain still charging along his charred digits and high-caliber graze, Paul mumbles, “If I don’t hurry up, I’m going to get sealed in Pharaoh’s tomb.” He flicks his wrist, sending globules of blood flying. Monocle flits on. “Open transmission to Gibson.”

  “SUBJECT NOT RESPONDING…”

  “Gibson, I don’t know if you’ll get this…” He coughs, probing the black cavern in his shoulder with a marred hand. “I’m in a bad way. Going to try to head to the RIM…to the coordinates you sent.” Paul tilts his head to look past the truck’s sinking wheel for threats, and notices, instead, Shouta’s garage, tucked to the side of the driveway. “You wanted me to find you, but you’re going to have to meet me half-way. RIM. Somewhere near the Foothills Partition. I have the solution for our problem. Find me.”

  Paul picks himself up, leaving damp genetic impressions on the cobbled way. He grabs the briefcase—its cold steel handle tricking his nerves into thinking they’re taking continued damage—and stows it in the heavplast container. Bunching the fabric from his torn-shirt around the container’s melted handle, he hooks-in with protected fingers and drags it over to Katajima’s heavy-metal garage doors. Paul takes a knee before the security panel at the side of the garage.

  “For the love of God, please open this bloody door.”

  Clanking gears and a drilling sound forerun the reveal. Jet bikes. Motorcycles. Cars. Maglev transports. The works. Paul chuckles, happy to have known Katajima well-enough to rob his grave.

  The closest vehicle, and ostensibly the Cadillac of this car show, is Katajima’s lancer jet, the Titan VI.

  “This will do.”

  The driver’s door on the Titan VI locks behind him. Paul flicks on his Monocle and sends the coordinates Gibson gave him to the Titan’s GPS system. The engine hypes and the vertical jumpers glow. Paul slouches back into darkness.

  Chapter 19: RAINBOW’S END

  RAIN, RAIN and gaudy lights. A decrepit T-Block carpeted in faded laundry leans overhead, dripping wet ash. Paul’s made it to the RIM; a field hospital, by the looks of it.

  Sunken cheeks on the misshapen faces on either side of Paul do little to hide the skeletal frames secreted underneath. Between the gurneys and the monitors, bags inflate and deflate, sustaining the other medical patients’ weak grips on their even weaker bodies.

  A frayed and weathered canvas flaps, enclosing the sickly space. The medical tent’s ceiling—torn off by sand, wind, and shrapnel—has been replaced by the RIM’s cognac-coloured sky. LA’s downtown skyline jags up and down along the medical tent’s ragged edges, like a haywire cardiogram. The RIM or Purgatory.

  A blurry, raven-haired nymph leans over Paul. “Not much honey left in the hive, eh?”

  Paul coughs a bloody retort, shaking free the rain pooling under his eyes.

  “In any event, welcome to Camp Mud.”

  Oni Matsui.

  THE MORPHINE DRIP, or whatever approximate Oni’s used to dull Paul’s pain, has sent him tumbling into the annexed archives aback his mind; scary, irrational places, full of repressed memories and fractured ideas. And so much unbridled, paranoid fantasy.

  Niles Winchester III.

  If he wasn’t after Paul in the name of Outland expansion, then what did he send his merry band of assassins to accomplish, apart from killing a lowly tech dealer, a pair of dogs, and an Outland Exec? The Anomaly? Could he have mistaken Paul for the rogue saboteur? Did he think Shouta was in cahoots?

  This paranoid streak doesn’t ripple Paul’s façade. On the outside—the only thing that counts in the RIM—Paul’s soused in sweat and rainwater, strapped with rough, brown leather bands to an elevated cot.


  A rotund brown-haired woman, vice-gripped into medical garb, barrels from one of the pallid patients siphoning plasma nearby over to Paul. She immediately synchs her tablet to Paul’s case file, and plots the tablet at his side. She yanks two latex gloves out of a drawer beneath the cot, and snaps them on. Finding the ends of the finger portals, she analyzes both Paul’s exposed shoulder and the tablet’s MEDBOT conclusions.

  “Dr. Sheffield, this might hurt a bit,” she says, out of habit, smirking at Paul’s lack of reaction—trapped behind still, burnt flesh.

  The large woman peels back the glue-tack applied to Paul’s chest, shoulder, sides, and arm wounds, and scans the micro-diagnostic plates to make sure the mechcrophages have repaired the veins and capillaries Inago had handily obliterated. Satisfied with the little devices’ progress, indicated by a promising green-status bar on the tablet, the woman turns to consult the full-scale holographic replica of Paul’s insides, vertically oriented and slowly spinning at his feet.

  Paul, lurking somewhere in the viscous dark between consciousness and nightmare, feels the pressure spike down his forearm. His eyelids flutter, and he feels the agency pipe up his spinal column. Still unable to see, he reaches out. His fingers find warm flesh.

  The large woman spins around and motions to smack Paul’s arm, but remembers her oath. She seizes Paul’s hand, and folds it over his chest.

  “Now, Dr. Sheffield,” she says—her voice sweet, calming music to Paul’s ringing ears. “We are trying very hard to take care of you. That might prove to be quite difficult if you keep-on in this manner.”

  Paul mumbles something, and one of his eyes opens independent of the other.

  “Try to get some sleep. Should be easier now that the rain’s stopped. Father Ed will be around to close your wound, and make sure that your ruptured—ah,” she checks the hologram, “well. He’ll make sure your shoulder and sides are back to where they ought to be, and that everything’s doing what it should…”

  “Appreciate it…” Paul says in a quavering voice, now cosy in his stupor.