by Alana Melos
These weren’t.
There was an indefinable difference between the living and the dead and these eyes had no shine to it. They might as well have been the beaded yellow eyes of a stuffed bear. One of them had filled with blood and the other had a milky substance over it which looked to be some kind of cataract or rot. From this distance, it was impossible to tell. At least that explained why I didn’t sense any thoughts: the dead had no thoughts.
“Out the front,” I said. The Siren and I moved as one, her running as I strode backwards, keeping my weapon between me and the monster. Rebekah jerked open the door, but stopped. She backed up and when I glanced at her, I saw her normally pale face white as the snow falling outside.
I looked further behind me to see a middle aged man dressed in an Axis uniform, complete with the slanted swastika. The uniform was black, which told me he was likely an officer, and the insignia he wore above the breast pocket matched Rebekah’s. His rank was oberst, or colonel. His thin lips and nose coupled with his darker hair told me he had some Italian blood in him more than likely. Otherwise, he was completely unassuming. Nothing else stood out about him, but when he smiled and his thin lips parted, dread coiled around my heart. He reminded me of someone….
“Nacht Sirene,” he said, looking at Rebekah as he spoke in German. “We have come to take you home.”
“I’m not going home,” she said, switching easily to her native tongue. “I already am home. Go back, there’s nothing for you here.”
He stepped further into the room, but he wasn’t alone. Behind him other dead creatures came shuffling in. They were all men, or used to be, but the appendages which were fastened to them cause bile to rise in my throat. One of them hand drills for hands which whirred sporadically. Another had a cannon barrel embedded in its chest. Another had a spiked mace dangling off the end of its wrist instead of a hand. One was a woman and two were men… but I couldn’t call them people. They had no thoughts. They were reanimated corpses… zombies for lack of a better word. Mechanical ones. All of them were dressed in semblances of the Axis uniforms, but the clothing had rotted away so that it hung off of their dead flesh. When the smell hit me, I wanted to cover my nose but the mask was in the way. The stench reeked. I’d never smelled anything like it before, not even after disemboweling someone. Thick and heavy, it crept through the room like a malevolent invisible fog. When I inhaled through my mouth, I tasted it and gagged.
“Yes you are, Siren,” the oberst said. His eyes cut over to me, “And this must be the off worlder who helped you. Where is Regulus?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I snarled, reaching for his mind. When I pushed, I sensed his thoughts there, but they were blocked. Some instinct told me not to push harder.
“I would, very much,” he replied in a clinical manner. “Come with me now, Siren, and I will make sure you are not punished too harshly.”
Rebekah shook her head back and forth deliberately, as if to emphasize her feelings on the matter. “She’s not going with you,” I said. Including the spider zombie thing, there were four other zombie-mechs with him I saw and a narrow doorway. We weren’t getting out the front. I glanced behind me to the spider zombie thing. We could probably get out that way, but I didn’t know if I had enough juice to fly myself, much less both of us.
“She is, and you are too,” he said, making a gesture with his gloved hand. The smoothness and delicacy of the gesture reminded me of Alistair when he was doing one of his spells. “There’s a lovely eloquence to your structure. I think you would make a wonderful test subject.”
I shuddered looking at his other ‘experiments’ and spit out, “Try it and see.”
He sighed, as if bored. “If you like.” The Axis oberst gestured towards us and the four zombies surged ahead, moving faster than I would have thought for being dead.
Sirene dodged around the turned over furniture, using it as cover to keep her distance from the creatures. I moved forward and slashed out at the one with drills for hands. With a vicious chop, I severed one of its hands as it attacked. The other drill hit my coat on the upper arm and tore up the leather, clanging on the metal panel inside. When I jerked away, ribbons of red leather swung from the drill. When it sent the drill spinning again, the ribbons flew out like some sort of macabre flower. Dark blood leaked slowly from its severed limb, but it hadn’t given any indication of pain, nor of slowing down.
When I struck next, I went for the neck. My sword sank easily into the putrid flesh, but it stopped at around the middle. It hit some sort of metal pole or reinforcement within the neck, and I jerked my blade out, swearing.
Rebekah didn’t try to attack them. I couldn’t see her eyes, but her stance remained defensive instead of offensive. “Call them off, Richter!” she said.
“My pets? Oh, never, not unless you give yourself up,” he chuckled, looking smarmy.
Longing to wipe that satisfied look off his face, I kicked one of the zombie-mechs on me in the knee, popping it. Without support, the zombie went down while the other one lunged at me with its long finger-knives. Had the creature had real skill, it might have cut me. As it was, I dodged out of the way with relative ease. The knives sliced up the back of my jacket as I went straight for Richter. Again, the armor I’d had put inside my jacket saved me from some nasty wounds. All in all, if I took nothing else from this cluster fuck of a night, the jacket was a success.
I vaulted over the massive toppled couch and thrust straight at Richter’s midsection. My blade stopped a foot before him. No matter how hard I tried to drive it forward, it wouldn’t move. “Tsk, tsk,” he said as I withdrew and thrust again. “So much fire inside. I’ll have fun seeing what makes you tick, darling.”
The word liebling used in such mockery towards me filled my vision with red for the second time today. I attacked him savagely. None of my blows came close as they bounced off of some invisible shield. Just as I drew back for another attack, the one handed drill zombie slammed its one good drill into my back. Sparks flew as it chewed through the leather and skidded off the flexible metal plate until it hit an unarmored part on the top of my shoulder. It shredded the jacket and shirt beneath it in no time, hitting my flesh. I grunted and moved out of the way before it got too deep. The wound snapped me out of my haze of anger and I turned to check on Rebekah.
She still fought the other two, nimbly dodging out of the way. When one hit her, it didn’t penetrate her magically enhanced clothing. “Lucky,” I muttered to myself, turning back to Oberst Richter. There had to be a way around his shield.
I’d only split my attention for a second, but in that second I saw the oberst’s face pull back in a rictus, just on this side of sane. His hands glowed and cast a diseased red light in the immediate area. The oberst expelled a blast of sickly crimson light from his hands. It caught me off guard; I moved, but too slowly. It hit my side and sent me flying across the room. I hit the spider mech zombie thing hard and cushioned the floor beneath me with my teke for the fall. The landing still shook me even with the padding. This attack on top of the cop’s attack had taxed me too much.
Being almost underneath the spider zombie mech, it couldn’t get a clean shot at me. I rolled one way then the other as the wickedly curved and sharp legs came down with force, driving themselves into the carpet and hardwood floor underneath before ripping themselves out and trying again.
“Won’t be long now, sweetheart,” he said, his eager tone one I recognized well. He sounded like me right before I got to work on someone for fun and relaxation. At least it was for me, not so much the ones I worked on. “And you, Siren, watch and learn what we do to enemies of the Reich.”
“Give it a rest,” I muttered, looking for a way out. The speed of the spider-zombie seemed incongruent with its size. The metal parts appeared to speed it up some compared to the others and I couldn’t find a way to get to my feet safely. None of any other of the mechanical dead things could get me, at least for this second. I stabbed upwards, but my sword
couldn’t pierce the rusted metal shell. Goop from the rotting inside seeped through the cracks of the haphazardly welded together pieces of metal and dripped down to spatter on me and the floor around me. I pressed my lips shut as I didn’t want any of that shit to get in my mouth.
“I’m not going back,” I heard Rebekah say. I looked over as I scooted back towards the broken window of the balcony. Oberst Richter closed in on her. His hands continued to glow, but the red had turned down and the orange up, as if he were holding coals from a blacksmith’s forge. “I’d die first.”
“It won’t come to that, kitten,” he said, his grin wide with savage, perverted glee. “But you will obey. This time, I will make sure you obey.”
With a wordless shriek, she leapt out of his grasp. Tentacles made of that sunset energy snaked out, seeking her blindly. She rolled as she hit the main floor of the living room and slid underneath the spider zombie with me. Without stopping, she used her momentum to roll onto me, grab me, and roll me over with her. The spider zombie’s legs crashed down as it backed up, splitting the cement of the balcony in twain. It followed us out, savagely piercing the concrete as it walked. I heard an awful sound then: rebar bending below us.
The balcony lurched down, pulled by the weight of the mechanical zombie. The spider thing lost its footing for a second, tumbling backwards to slam against the rail of the balcony while Rebekah and I moved out of the way, her to the left and I to the right. I crawled to my feet when the balcony lurched again, more viciously this time. Had I not been holding onto the railing, I would have been thrown out of the crescent shaped balcony. As it was, my chest pressed against the railing uncomfortably as I saw the whole of the upper east laid out like a multi-colored map. Hell, from here I could pick out Carnegie Hall.
I scrambled to get to the apartment. My fingers clawed through snow and bits of rubble trying to find purchase to pull myself up. The spider zombie thrashed while trying to do the same, causing the whole thing to shake. The building gave one last heavy groan and the screech of metal shearing on metal cut off abruptly as the balcony gave out. All three of us fell and I spread my arms out, trying to slow my descent. The Siren--quick as ever--did the same and the air resistance helped to slow us incrementally so the spider zombie fell ahead of us by a foot, maybe two.
With one hand holding onto her hat, the Nacht Sirene reached for me. I reached out with my sword, trying to nudge myself towards her with my teke but got nothing. She grasped the blade gingerly so as not to cut herself and used it to pull herself to me.
“Fly! Fly!” she screamed, the wind trying to steal her words as it whipped by us.
“I can’t!” I yelled back at her. As we fell, I tried to push off of the building with my telekinesis, to push into the air, or just to hover there. I could feel my powers stir, but I was too weak, too wounded, and too rattled by the sequence of events. I pushed distractions out of my mind as the Siren grabbed hold of me. We turned in midair and the tail of my coat whipped up, blinding me. The armor plate in it smacked me in the side of the head. The pain only added to my adrenalin rush I forced it away with my empty hand. Rebekah urged me loudly to hurry, hurry up, shouting in my ear. I couldn’t lift us both. I doubted I could lift myself alone.
Instead, I worked on trying to slow us down. I imagined a parachute overhead, something thin, but attached to me which would halt our descent. As the ground rushed up at me--and let me tell you, you haven’t seen your life flash before your eyes until you watch the ground rush up at you--my mental parachute kicked in. A slight jerk told me it worked, but our descent slowed in inches, feet. The mechanical zombie fell further away, but not far enough. I put all of my concentration into just keeping that image alive, burning it into my brain. As it gained weight, our descent slowed more and more. When I risked a look at the ground, it didn’t seem like it would be enough.
The spider zombie crashed on a car, setting off the car alarm. Its fleshy parts splatted all over the street, covering the street in a wide arc of dark gore. A few people screamed and I caught the sight of the red and blue flashing lights of the cops. I turned all my attention to the telekinetic parachute, and willed it to veer to the right, away from the crash.
“We’re gonna hit hard,” I yelled. Rebekah clung to me tighter. I tried to keep hold of my sword. I didn’t want to lose it if I did survive the fall. The rate of our fall seemed slower… it seemed survivable….
When we hit the top of a car, the impact knocked the wind out of me. I whooped and struggled for breath, but everything else seemed intact if bruised bloody. The Siren started checking herself, then turned to me. I waved her away as I tried to breathe. When the tightness eased I heaved a big sigh of relief.
“We did it!” she exclaimed, grinning madly at me. She grasped hold of my arm and half sat up on the roof of the ruined car, bouncing in place. “We did it! We rock! We’re the best!”
“What do you mean ‘we’?” I asked her, but I couldn’t help but to grin back, sharing her temporary insanity. Surviving that had been awesome. I clapped her on the shoulder and squeezed, glad to be alive and glad to have someone to share this exhilarating high with.
I looked over at the decimated remains of the zombie and saw the pile of goop it'd become twitch. I shuddered watching it. Even now, it still tried to get up, to come after us. Rebekah wrenched me from the sight of the destroyed thing and she pulled me into a hug. I struggled for a moment, then just let her do what she wanted. It didn’t feel awful to be embraced here after surviving a fall which would have killed lesser people. It would have killed Regulus--he didn’t have the finesse with his telekinesis I did.
“You’re under arrest!” I heard for the second time tonight.
Rebekah and I let go of one another and looked up at the cops who surrounded us. With a glance to each other, we looked back at the officers as one. “We give up,” she said, raising her hands.
“Just get us somewhere away from that crazy mage,” I added. It’d been his fault we went over the edge. It gave me just one more reason to hate magic all the more.
Chapter Seven
I sat in an interrogation room at the nearest cop shop able to take a metahuman crook. Most of them could, but a few were behind in upgrading their equipment. Like the bracelet on Rebekah’s wrist, the machinery hidden in the walls of this tiny grey room had been designed to suppress powers. My body ached from the fall, but that wasn’t my only injury. The myriad of smaller scrapes and bruises caught up to me, making even the smallest move painful. My head throbbed from the exertion I’d put it through. I knew I’d have a helluva bruise along my side because of the rifle butt I’d taken earlier, another black as night one on my thigh thanks to Bluecoat, and my shoulder had been flayed open… though thankfully not deep.
The cops had gotten a medic to look me over and bandage the worst of my wounds, but she had refused to give me any medicine, not even an aspirin. There I sat, my head pounding in discordant time with my body. I wanted food and rest. What I got was being fingerprinted and booked.
I’d never actually been caught by the cops before. They knew my handle and I’d made a couple most wanted lists, but some other big bad had always knocked me off eventually, just the way I wanted it. It was good to be wanted… but really fucking bad to be the most wanted.
Now they finally had my fingerprints and genescan. That sucked. Maybe I could hire a hacker or something to get them out of the system. It was hard, but not impossible. They wouldn’t be able to link me to too many more crimes than they already knew about, but that wasn’t why I was paranoid about my info being taken. I didn’t want any connections at all to my family and I knew my dad’s genescan was in the system. He was a career criminal and had been incarcerated so many times I think he lost count. Hell, he’d been incarcerated before genescans had become widely used. That might be enough to identify me and once it was out, it’d be out. There would be no more trading on my own reputation. Instead, the expectations for me would be beyond belief.
It wasn’t good to have extremely successful parents. It was too much to live up to. I rattled my cuffs and kicked the table leg thinking about it, pissed I was shut up here instead of holing up in a safe place. Once I got my birthright out of my head, then it wouldn’t matter anymore. Once I had the power….
The door opened, interrupting my thoughts. A pleasant looking woman in a white blouse and dark dress slacks walked in with a pad, a clipboard, and a pen. Her blond hair was done up in a bun and she smiled tightly at me. “Well, good evening, Capricious Whim,” she said, then checked the clipboard. “Or should I call you Caprice?”
“I don’t care,” I replied. I tested the cuffs again and swore in frustration.
The lady cop sat down opposite me and laid the paperwork she had out on the table. “It would be a lot easier if you confessed… and are you sure you don’t want a lawyer?”
I thought it over, then shook my head. “When I want one, I’ll tell you.” I didn’t plan on staying here, nor telling them anything, so it didn’t matter. I would use a lawyer as a stall tactic if I had to, before they moved me into lock up.
“Very well,” the cop said as she shuffled paper and pictures around. I barely glanced at them, but the severed heads of that security guard’s family I recognized, as well as a couple of dismemberments from earlier on in my career. What was conspicuously missing was the most recent death, that of the schmuck in the Underground. Oh, well, they’d get to it soon enough. “You’re wanted for fourteen counts of murder,” she said. “Fourteen. That’s an impressive number.”
I smiled thinly at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, officer.” My father had told me never to admit to anything if I was ever being interrogated, not unless I wanted them to know.