by JK Ellem
3
RED WATER
A road curved away, slick and polished with ice. Beyond it was the oval shape of a snow-covered field. Maybe a sporting field of some kind.
Then Magnolia saw the body, flat in the snow, a javelin spear rising vertically from it, marking the body’s location.
She didn’t stop, preferring to give the already dead a wide berth.
She came off the road and skirted the side of a squat brick building, pressing herself into the shadows and foliage. The ground was skinned with patches of ice, broken glass, split timber, loose bricks, dead frozen birds. She moved across another desolate courtyard that was choked with waist high grass, pale and brittle. On the other side of the courtyard a huge mound of rubble sat from where the side of a building had collapsed outwards. There was a large crater gouged in the earth where something massive had detonated.
Magnolia walked on cautiously, eyes scanning the corners and the vacant windows above, the place ominously silent.
The streetscape had changed. Something had happened in this part of the campus. The entire block of buildings was decimated, insides blown outwards, walls pockmarked and crumbling, telegraph poles uprooted. They lay on the ground in a tangle of cables. Scorch marks blackened what walls remained standing.
It was a war zone.
Magnolia glanced at her wrist-computer.
The pulsing red blip glowed bright, stronger, closer.
She clambered up a mound of rubble and paused to get a better view and orientate her location. No one could shoot her, competitors were only equipped with rudimentary bladed weapons, the Octagon engineers preferring a brutal visual spectacle rather than killing efficiency. But Magnolia knew some of her fellow competitors that she trained with on Exile were equally efficient with sword or trident in their hand as they were with a gun.
Magnolia needed to regroup for a moment. She had time. She saw an open doorway below at the far end of a yard on the other side of the mound. It was at the top of a small flight of stairs, like a utility entrance in the side of a building.
She needed to get away from prying eyes but it meant going in to the buildings. It was a risk she was willing to take if it meant her drone couldn’t follow her.
She reached the doorway, drew her sword and stepped cautiously through the opening.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The air was cold and smelt of wet concrete tinged with the reek of animal urine.
The space was an empty shell, the floor an expanse of rough concrete speckled with animal droppings. No walls, just a cavernous interior that stretched away littered with debris; old desks, broken chairs, piles of moldy old books with pages torn out and scattered. A row of tall windows lined the far wall and there was a large ragged hole in the wall edged with broken bricks that let in light. She made her way across the floor slowly, heading for the open hole on the other side, following the pulsing red blip on her wrist.
Halfway across the floor she heard a sound from above, a metal clang from the floor above like something had been dropped or kicked.
She froze mid-stride and looked up at the high ceiling. It was cracked and covered with blotches of water damage. She held her breath, trying to pinpoint where the sound had come from.
Nothing.
Maybe it was an animal. Maybe a rodent had knocked something over.
She was unsure. Maybe another competitor was using the buildings to move through like her.
She started walking again. Then a huge hole in the ceiling came slowly into view. The floor above had collapsed downwards leaving a pile of plaster, concrete and twisted rebar. Water dripped downwards from the hole.
Magnolia paused just beyond the gaping hole and watched the slow thick drops as they splashed on the rubble below. She took a long step to her right, gripping the handle of her katana a little harder, her eyes fixated on the hole above.
The water from above hit the edge of a section of broken concrete on the ground and was running down the sides of it, leaving streaks of red.
Red.
Red water?
A hideous child-like laugh screeched from above, from the gaping hole and echoed throughout the cavernous space below where Magnolia stood.
Something dark tumbled through the hole.
She leapt back just as a body fell, unfurling a line of electrical cable behind it, then it jerked to sudden stop as the cable went tight, breaking the fall midway between the ceiling and the floor. A gush of innards tumbled out in a wet mass from the gaping hole that had been sliced across the belly of the body and dangled on a length of tubes and intestines below.
The body swung slowly back and forth, the electrical cable twisted around its neck.
“Magnolia!” a child-like voice echoed down into the room from the hole above.
Magnolia looked at the twisted body with the dangling entrails. It was a woman, her face frozen in shock.
She recognized the sickly shrill of the voice. Grappa, a mentally deranged inmate from Exile who had killed numerous families. He would break into their homes, murder them then would treat the home like a giant dolls house, dressing up and rearranging the bodies into various poses in different rooms as though they were still alive.
Magnolia sprinted to the far wall, towards the hole in the wall, towards the outside.
Eleven left.
4
INNOCENT
Magnolia emerged outside and sprinted down a small cobbled alleyway littered with trash. She slipped on the slick flagstones, stumbled then recovered, not wanting to stop, not wanting to look behind. Ahead at the end of the alleyway she could see a road and in the distance was a bridge that stretched across a wide frozen river.
She slowed just for a moment and snatched a look at her wrist-computer. The red blip pulsed stronger.
Ahead.
She needed to get across the bridge but it meant being out in the open. There was a straight road to her right that led all the way to the bridge. She sheathed her katana and took off again, parallel but not on the road, she would hit the road just before the bridge.
She tore across another street then ducked across another small courtyard. The buildings fell away and she found herself out in the open near the bank of the river. The bridge loomed on her right, all arches and concrete. The river was crusted with ice at the edges, but a slow slurry of broken ice drifted in the middle.
A small road ran along the river that was lined with spindly trees. There was a large timber building with a ramp that led down to the river’s edge. Magnolia angled right and ran in an arc towards the mouth of the bridge.
A figure appeared, another competitor, orange octagonal armorskin. Another woman, long raven black hair trailing behind her. She carried no weapons.
Magnolia angled towards her, an easy kill. One less competitor to worry about.
The woman hadn’t seen Magnolia closing in on her from her blind spot, she was focused on reaching the bridge, intent on crossing it. Their paths would insect at the start of the bridge.
Magnolia accelerated, determined to kill the woman before she reached the bridge.
Thirty feet. Two following drones swooped down to record the encounter.
Reaching behind her neck without stopping Magnolia drew her sword. The sun burst through a gap in the clouds, bathing the bridge in brilliant light that glinted off the katana as she ran.
The woman with black hair then turned, sensing someone else. Her eyes saw Magnolia closing on her, cutting off her run, horror mixed with desperation on her face. She stopped completely, bent over and dry retched, hands on her knees, chest heaving, her breath ragged.
Magnolia pulled up short but kept a safe distance and regarded the woman.
“Please,” the woman stuttered. She held up her hands defensively. “You don’t understand. Please don’t kill me.”
Magnolia hesitated for a moment, the blade of her katana raised ready to strike. The two following drones bobbed and weaved above, jostling for the best posi
tion to record the kill.
Octagon engineers miles away leaned forward in their chairs in anticipation, absorbed by the moment.
The woman retched again, then stood upright, wiping away the sour residue on her sleeve.
“I have a daughter, please,” the woman begged, tears now streaming down her face. “I need to win.”
The woman was definitely unarmed, but Magnolia didn’t care. Magnolia hadn’t recognized her from the training camp on Exile but she could have been from another batch of inmates. She was on death row just like her. Why else was she here then?
“I need to kill you so I can win, not you.” Magnolia felt no remorse in her words.
The woman had recovered her breath. “But I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not like you. I’m not a criminal,” she replied.
Magnolia rolled her eyes. Sure you’re not. And I’m the Virgin Mary. She stepped forward and lowered her sword, reversing the angle, the blade point low and aimed at the woman’s breast. She would make it quick, just a short thrust to the woman’s heart instead of taking her head off as she had originally intended.
“We’re all criminals here. Some worse than others,” Magnolia hissed, thinking back to the hanging body in the basement, recognizing instantly the trademark kill, the “calling-card” of another Exile inmate she had crossed paths with.
“But you don’t understand,” the woman pleaded.
Magnolia could see fear in the woman’s eyes, not of her but of something else.
The woman stepped forward. “I’m an engineer, I’m an Octagon engineer. You’re never meant to—”
Two things happened at once.
A third following drone swooped in low, then a length of sharp steel punched out from the woman’s chest in a spurt of blood.
The woman looked down at the thin shaft of steel that protruded from the middle of her chest, her brain not understanding what her eyes were seeing. Blood dripped in long thick strands from it. Her blood.
The woman looked up at Magnolia with pleading eyes. Her mouth gaped wide, blood oozed and ran down her chin. No words came.
The woman keeled over into the ground at Magnolia’s feet.
Magnolia looked beyond where the woman had stood and saw a man, another competitor, yellow armorskin.
Madigan. Serial killer. Posed as a homosexual just to meet other men in the bars and hovels of Precinct 13 and then kill them. Murdered two officials from the Bureau of Public Order when they knocked on his door. He stood a hundred yards away but he looked huge. He was carrying another javelin like the one he had thrown at the woman.
Magnolia raised her sword. She needed to close the distance fast, give him no opportunity to throw again.
She ran at him.
Madigan shifted slightly, hunkered down and brought up his javelin, holding it like a trident spear, not wanting to let loose the last weapon he had in case he missed.
Magnolia reached him in a blur, rising off the ground at the very last moment, delivering a vertical downwards blow with all her strength, determined to cut him from head to toe with one strike. Madigan reversed his javelin, bringing it up horizontally across his head and blocked the strike easily.
Magnolia switched to autopilot, thinking was replaced by relentless training, allowing the hundreds of hours spent on Exile practicing on wooden torsos to guide her movements.
The blade of her katana sang, cutting the air in beautiful sweeping patterns, pushing Madigan back, giving him no time to recover. Shock and awe.
Typical of a big man, he was slow and cumbersome, his muscular arms offering an easy target.
Steel on steel then steel on flesh.
His left hand came off first, then his right. The javelin fell to the ground, misshapen and scoured, two severed hands curled on the metal shaft at each end.
The man looked down in disbelief at the two bloody stumps where his hands had been then looked up at Magnolia just in time to see her plunge her sword through the front of his throat and out the back of his neck.
She withdrew the blade in one wet sucking motion while at the same time delivering a front kick to his chest, pushing him off the blade.
He collapsed backwards into the snow, clawing at his throat with invisible hands, muscle memory, blood gurgled and pumped into the white earth, the life seeping out of him.
He convulsed once then went still.
Magnolia walked back to where the woman lay and looked at the body for a moment, thinking about what the woman had said just before she was killed. Placing her foot on the body, Magnolia pulled out the javelin, drove it into the ground beside her then rolled the woman onto her back.
Dead open eyes looked back at Magnolia, pain and fear frozen in them. She knelt down beside the woman, reached out her hand and with her fingertips brushed the eyelids closed. She folded the woman’s arms across her chest then stood and looked at her one last time.
Nine left.
5
COLD
One hour. That’s all she had left. One hour to live or sixty minutes to get killed.
Leaving the body of the woman behind, Magnolia made her way across the bridge. She reached the crest and stopped.
To her left was another arch bridge, smaller than the one she now stood on. On the other side of the bank, more buildings spread out like a campus, in the same architectural style and layout of the buildings at her back. Symmetrical patterns, grid formations, redbrick facades with ornate columns and moldings, weathered and stained from years of neglect, hot summers and hash winters.
To the right loomed a horseshoe shaped stadium.
It felt strange, standing in the middle of the bridge, out in the open. But Magnolia felt the safest she had ever felt since entering the Dominion.
The narrow streets and courtyards she had crossed were claustrophobic, she felt almost trapped. But out in the open she felt she had more options to escape, to run if she needed to. And she would be able to see other competitors coming in the distance rather than be ambushed by them in the maze of alleyways, and small courtyards.
She rested her hands on the stone ledge of the bridge and looked down. A slurry of ice and debris slowly drifted beneath, in a narrow channel where the water hadn’t frozen in the middle of the river. On each side a sheet of solid ice spread back towards the banks.
She turned her head and looked back in the direction she had come.
She saw no one.
She turned and looked down the curve of the bridge to where she had to go.
The streets were silent, mournful, empty.
There was no one coming after her. Maybe she was the last competitor left. Maybe the rest were dead.
No. That would be hoping for too much. There was one competitor she knew was still alive, almost like he was taunting her.
She looked at her wrist-computer. The red blip pulsed in the direction of the stadium. The Orb had to be there. How appropriate.
She turned away from the edge just as the explosion hit the ledge, shattering it in to an expanding sphere of tiny concrete pieces and displaced air.
Magnolia was thrown over the side of the bridge and into the frozen ice-flow below.
THE ARMORSKIN SUIT Magnolia wore was a first generation prototype. It was designed to protect the wearer from normal environmental exposure that they would typically encounter during the Dominion. Heat, cold, wind, and rain. It could absorb a moderate blunt force, even a small dagger blade, but not the focused penetrating force of a sword or javelin. As such its tolerance threshold was low. The Octagon engineers were as much interested in the initial performance of the suit as they were in the entertainment value of the Dominion itself.
In time, improvements would be made to the armorskin, but Magnolia didn’t have time. If she wore the generation of the suit that existed ten years from now, it would have inflated and given her buoyancy within one second of her hitting the sub-zero water. It would have automatically sealed off at her wrists, ankles and around her neck, thereby stopping the f
rigid water entering her suit at the extremities and then attacking her core temperature.
But she didn’t have that suit on. With the armorskin she wore she only had ten minutes not three hours to get out of the water before hypothermia would start and only another twenty minutes before her body cooled sufficiently to bring on full cardiac arrest.
Magnolia gasped at the initial shock as she plunged into the frigid water. It was like hitting cement. Her head went under and numbing coldness closed in around her.
She sank amongst a shower of concrete fragments that rained down around her. Below the icy darkness stretched out to embrace her.
She kicked hard, trying to reach the surface but a strong current pulled her sideways and under the ice pack, away from the broken surface were the ice slurry flowed.
She didn’t panic. Panic would give her the urge to hyperventilate, and that meant opening her mouth to breath water into her lungs and she would drown under the ice, in a cold watery tomb.
She relaxed and let the current take her. She kept what air she had in her lungs giving her neutral buoyancy just a few feet below the ice. She needed to conserve her energy and allow herself to naturally drift.
Ice above her head slid by like a glass ceiling, brighter in some areas, more obscured in others, rough and jagged in places.
She straightened her body, arms out in front and rode the current. She guessed where the bank of the river would be, and curved her profile so the current pushed her towards the other side. She knew the ice would be thicker there, near the edge where the land met the water, but she had no choice. If she fought the current she would exhaust her oxygen in seconds and drown.
The water darkened, the ice overhead became thicker, letting in less light. She looked down and could see the muddy bottom rise up. She kicked her legs as she angled herself closer to the bank.
She spotted a bright patch in the ceiling of ice in the distance, not an actual break in the ice but an oval section where light shone down in a funnel to the muddy bottom. She kicked towards it, using her arms and legs to pull her closer. Her lungs started to burn, her air almost depleted. She fought back the urge to just give up and let the numbing cold embrace her. She felt sleepy but swam on towards the light.