At The Hands Of Madness

by Kevin Holton

  Our drivers wove around the coming mass, circling the beast’s feet as a tank rolled over a nearby hill, aiming high. A massive blast rocked us as the army fired at one of its torsos, doing absolutely nothing. In response, one of Medraka’s many-jointed arms wove in the air. The hand twisted, and the tank’s barrel pulled away, ripping clean off the body to float over their heads, then fired down, blowing the vehicle and its occupants to pieces.

  “Holy hell!” Steve shouted.

  “Someone call for me?” Grover patched in on the comms.

  “Did you see that shit?”

  “Yeah! Hey, geniuses,” Cindy called, which usually referred to me, Damien, or Lisa. “What do we do now?”

  My rounds did nothing. Explosives did nothing. If Allessandra could do anything, she was too entranced by the damn thing. “Unless we’re gonna attach that thing to a rocket and launch it into the sun, we need to find a way to hurt its insides! Damien, use your death ray!”

  “Death ray?” His mic picked up a screechy, static interference, presumably from the helmet. Another kink we’d have to work out later.

  “The eye beams, I don’t know what you call them!”

  The mech turned its head, a blood-red beam shooting from its eyes and into Medraka’s leg. A scream of pain echoed in my head—in everyone’s head, judging from how our crew screamed back, our cars swerving. With no mouth, it couldn’t make a verbal yell, but its psychic prowess channeled its suffering right back into us.

  Another screech drew my attention as the red beam vanished. Damien’s mech had been hoisted into the air, its head twisted clean off its shoulders and flung into the distance, where it crushed several foot soldiers from some other group. They probably screamed, but the sound of metal shredding apart was far louder. The machine was ripped into hundreds, maybe thousands, of spear-like shards, its wiring, engine, and other major components cast aside as the metal spun in the air.

  Those hundreds, maybe thousands, of improvised spears turned, spiraling tight and fast like drills, aiming straight for us.

  “Oh fucking shit, move!” I screamed.

  Our drivers didn’t need to be told twice. Tires screeching, they peeled off in separate directions, knowing without speaking that they’d have to split up to give us all the best chance of survival. Or, more accurately, to give the other car a chance. The first few spikes buried themselves in the dirt just shy of our tires, so Grover floored it, intentionally fishtailing, as I ducked back into the cabin. Between the imminent danger and strong chance of whiplash, I wasn’t about to go hanging around outside.

  A hard bounce sent Allessandra crashing into me, car pulling hard to the left as Damien ripped off his helmet, groaning something about sensory feedback, hands over his eyes. Even if he hadn’t, Damien wasn’t exactly helpful now. While strong, and definitely capable of fighting a human being, he didn’t have any sort of combat skill that would allow him to fight the Phranna, let alone Medraka itself.

  Staring out the window at the headless kaiju, I had to fight the urge to turn on Damien. A primal rage stirred in my gut, hot and loud, wanting me to grab that bastard, throw him to the ground, smash him to pieces, but Allessandra put a hand against my chest. I hadn’t realized my heart was pounding, that my breathing had gotten heavy, until she said it wasn’t really me, that it would pass, and I wondered if she felt the same way. The realization that someone as powerful as her might be filled with such aggression quickly turned my anger to fear. I relaxed my fist, which had curled tight on my rifle’s grip, finger almost on the trigger.

  Dirt exploded up around us as wild shots slammed into the ground, carving up the landscape. There hadn’t been much here besides dry earth and a scattering of grass, but the downed trees on more than half the perimeter limited our escape possibilities. They’d also serve as good weapons for Medraka, assuming it needed more. It didn’t.

  Another feeling overwhelmed me, this one not from our monstrous aggressor. We’d come hoping to injure the damn thing, distract it maybe, so it wouldn’t wipe out another city, but what had we done? Absolutely nothing. Damien managed to slightly annoy it with a burn to one leg, and now, we were going to die. If we were lucky, maybe we’d just be maimed, or go insane. The other militias weren’t even sticking around to help out. Realizing how pointless the fight was, and how doomed we were, they were pulling back, the other cars speeding off into the woods, or across plains, desperate to escape while there was still a ghost of a chance so they didn’t wind up as ghosts themselves.

  Two spears pierced the roof, one directly through where I’d been. There’d be no getting out, no going up above to shoot at it, even if we found a way to hurt it. There was no “I’m lucky to be alive” moment here, no Hollywood moment of relief. Moving into the cabin might’ve extended my lifespan, but only by a minute or two.

  Lisa’s car wasn’t targeted nearly as much, but a heavy PWOOM rocked the air as Steve blew some of the metal away with his sonic cannon. He hadn’t been kidding about the recoil. Every time he fired, the truck shook, forcing her to compensate. Steve laughed maniacally, blasting away, and Medraka seemed annoyed enough at missing that it directed extra attacks their way. I had a strong suspicion that Lisa didn’t tell him to knock it off because the swerving made them harder to hit.

  Metal screamed in agony as a spear lanced into our trunk, straight through to dig along the ground, slowing us down. Allessandra forced it back out, but we’d lost too much ground in that brief instant. Another shot blew out our rear left tire. We spun, flipped, kept turning in the air as the roof ripped clear off, the engine and other guts pulled out and tossed away, vehicle unraveling like an old quilt. Only then did Medraka let gravity take effect, the bottom of our car hitting the ground hard with us all still on board.

  I didn’t have a seatbelt on and was thrown about a hundred feet clear of the vehicle, my rifle bouncing even further away, vision seething red from the pain of impact. The beast wasn’t too concerned with me, but still sent a few spears my way to keep me busy. Twisting to the right, I managed to avoid getting impaled, then doubled back, then rolled back into a handspring to dodge the one aiming for my groin. The crash knocked out my equilibrium though, so I stumbled, falling again, turning and throwing myself into a somersault to avoid the last one, and raced toward my rifle. It wouldn’t help, but it made me feel slightly less helpless.

  Once I had it, I turned toward the rest of us. Lisa had yanked the car back in our direction and was racing over, with Allessandra and Damien struggling out of their seats. He clutched at his head, stumbling from disorientation, while Allessandra’s right leg appeared to have been wounded in the crash. Grover had melted his seat, and now had a shield of sorts up, equal parts wall and flamethrower, melting the metal that came hurtling their way. I raced over to help Allessandra up, but she flicked her wrist and levitated unsteadily, making her legs irrelevant. I raced over to Damien.

  “Do something, Heartbreaker!” Grover didn’t spare a glance my way, too busy targeting the blades hurtling at us.

  “I’m trying!”

  Lisa had to pull away, another barrage keeping her part of our crew from assisting. Steve took aim and BWOMF blasted the attack away.

  One errant spear hurtled through the air and impaled Medraka. It made another horrible screech inside our minds, yet recoiled away from the attack. This was probably no more than a splinter to such a huge creature, but pain was pain. It was bleeding.

  For the first time in history, it was bleeding.

  “What the hell did he do?” Damien groaned.

  “Frequency!” Allessandra said, floating over, landing gingerly. “It’s… It’s not of our world, so it operates on a different frequency. The same field that protects can be bypassed if you use something attuned to the same energy!”

  “So we can only kill it with its own attacks?” I didn’t know whether to be hopeful or furious that our little glimmer of relief was probably next to useless.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe anyth
ing it touches?” She looked over at one of the discarded metal shards. Gesturing, she telekinetically lifted it, spinning it as Medraka had, took aim, and launched it.

  True to her theory, it drilled right into Medraka, eliciting another stumble. This time, the other hundred or so spears fell, giving Lisa a chance to spin back around and regroup. “You actually hurt it!” Warrior shouted.

  “Anything it touches, it alters!” Mindcrusher said back. “I could feel it on the way up, the field, the way energy shifts around it, and that’s how it stays safe. Whatever it alters, we can use as a weapon!”

  “Nice!” Steve aimed his cannon, using a ‘grab’ function to yank several of the spears out of the ground while Medraka was still stunned. He fired. They shattered harmlessly against its legs. “Fuck!”

  Allessandra stared. “Maybe it’s temporary?”

  Medraka had turned and was fully facing us now, its two torsos rippling angrily. It no longer spawned Phranna. The air trembled, every molecule knowing the creature was so furious, it wouldn’t settle for anything less than killing us itself.

  Lifting one mighty foot, it stomped down, sending out a shockwave that blew all of us backward. Cries of pain echoed from all around, but I focused on watching the ground so I could avoid snapping my neck on impact. Rolling hard, I sprang back up to my feet, turning back in time to watch Allessandra float casually to the ground. She turned to me, frantic, relaxed slightly, and saw the spears Medraka had tried to kill me with earlier.

  Steve yelled something, and a piece of metal gouged Grover’s arm mid-flight, but he just glared at the wound as it hissed, searing itself closed. Lisa laid still, unconscious, with Mari kneeling over her, checking her vitals. Damien wasn’t there.

  “OPR?” I called into my mic. “Damien, where are you?” Then I saw him, still up close to the kaiju, suspended in the air, fighting bonds no one could see, while the improvised spears of his destroyed mech all aimed at him. All our eyes turned to him for one brief second, all of us wondering what we could do, if anything, as adrenaline slowed that moment to an eternity. Sweat dripped from my nose. Wind rushed through the field, spraying us with dirt and blood. A heat mirage danced over Grover’s head. The fading sunlight glinted off Steve’s smashed weapon.

  Then the shards raced into their target, one by one, not a simultaneous assault to end his life quickly, but a methodical piercing designed to draw out his suffering. He never screamed. There’s a chance he couldn’t, but there’s a chance he stayed silent so that, in this last moment, we wouldn’t lose more morale than we had to. None of us would ever really know, but I try to believe he made that a choice.

  Roaring, Grover sprinted forward, bursting completely into flame, steps exploding out behind to propel him faster. Steve yelled in frustration, grabbing exploded chunks of rock and dirt so he could fire at Medraka, not that it did anything. Allessandra yanked the remaining metal from the ground around us, aiming high at its right torso and lancing it. Like her shots before, these effortlessly pierced its mottled flesh, eliciting a spray of viscera as it stumbled.

  “What the god damn hell? What are the rules for this thing?” My shout carried a mix of anger and anguish as I tried not to look at Damien. Allessandra didn’t reply. She just stared at her hands, as confused as I was.

  Then, a thought occurred to me, and I wasn’t so confused.

  The fact that its skin had finally been pierced gave me an idea. Or, more accurately, an opportunity. Kneeling down, I leveled my rifle’s sights at the wound in its right torso, took note of the heat signatures, then bolted toward it, needing a better angle. When I was sure I had it, I aimed into the wound and fired.

  Nothing. No reaction. On a hunch, I yelled for Allessandra, even as Grover, Steve, and Mari tried to free Damien. She’d left Lisa’s side, but there were no Phranna left to hurt her, so with Medraka distracted, Warrior wasn’t in danger.

  Allessandra arrived at my side. “Mindcrusher, put your hand on the barrel, or your brain, or whatever. Just… interact with my gun psychically.”

  She knelt with me, one hand on my shoulder, the other on the grip, her fingers curling over mine. “Okay. Clear,” she said. I aimed for what I hoped was the heart and pulled the trigger.

  Medraka’s right torso shuddered, arms spasming, the sound of glass shattering and minds splintering blasting outward. It started to go limp, but the left torso swung around, grabbing it and pulling the two sides tight together. If not for the extra arms and zero heads, it might’ve looked relatively human. The way it clutched at its side, compensating for a wound.

  Then, as suddenly as it ever appeared, Medraka disappeared. The air compressed, shimmered, twisted, and there was no more monstrosity left to torment us. Gasping, I turned, hugging Allessandra tight, letting out a sound that was half-laughter, half-cheer.

  It was a mixed feeling, of course. We’d finally found a weakness, but after the initial shock of succeeding wore off, I remembered that there was one less person with us to celebrate. Looking over to the bloody abstract art that had become Damien’s corpse, pierced through over a dozen times with huge steel spikes, my laughter faded.

  We tried to be happy—we really did—but a cold, coppery wind blew around us, saturating our lives in the scent of death, and I wasn’t sure if we’d ever get away from it.

  Chapter 7

  We sat in a circle around Damien’s body—the core members of our team, the grunts we could spare from guard and radio duty, and even some members of other militias. We didn’t know them, but we’d helped attend to their dead. They thought it right to attend to ours. It would’ve been too messy to transport him back to camp though. His chest and abdomen had been torn open, held together only by the spears piercing those soft tissues, so we chose to have the funeral on the battlefield. It’s what he would’ve wanted anyway: bringing a corpse back to camp would’ve posed an unnecessary health risk.

  If we were a real military, this would’ve been heralded as an absolute success. We drove off Medraka and only suffered one casualty. Command might not have ever known his name, but they would’ve seen that day’s operation as one of unparalleled victory. In a group like ours, where there was no higher up, no administration, we only had each other, and Damien might’ve been aloof, but his presence had been a stabilizing factor, on the battlefield, off the field, in training, hell, even around the campfire.

  I stood next to Mari and Lisa, who, like any two people at a funeral, were discussing anything but the deceased to keep their minds off him. “No, please, I’m not suggesting you become a Nanite, Lisa, I’m just saying it’s an interesting principle, and nanobot augmentation could, theoretically, allow you to adapt the weapon on the fly, adjusting the recoil, focusing the sights, implementing tracking, and all sorts of things.”

  “Right, but I’m worried about the stability. It’s one thing to use an electric current to restructure your nano-cells into arm blades, but another thing entirely to form your arm into a cannon. The kinetic version alone has enough force to potentially destabilize or disintegrate the bonds keeping those cells together, and what if I were to try using an energy blast of some kind, and not simply momentum storage and redirection? If I were to, say, try electricity, if we were fighting other machines, I might short myself out, or stop my own heart if I seriously screw up the calibration, and superheated plasma, while effective against a lot of creatures, maybe even Medraka, would likely melt my arm, and me.”

  “Okay, one, you’re not gonna need a plasma beam as long as you have Mister Inferno on your side,” Mari said, gesturing to Grover, who’d had the grunts bring over several tables and most of our coffee makers, “and two, we don’t have to fight robots, so cool it with the lightning talk, Thor.”

  Lisa laughed. “You see my point though, right?”

  “I do, but you’re smart, and you clearly know weapons pretty well, and Nanites adapt to the user even if you are part of The Collective, so you’d figure things out pretty quick. There’s one person I know who can r
eshape his arm into a grappling hook. A woman I met early on could literally shoot her fingers, modifying the Nanites in it to paralyze, rather than assimilate, so if something was pissing her off, blam, it’s on the ground wondering what just happened, and she just took the Nanites back when she was done… well, doing whatever. If she ran out of fingers, she’d borrow cells from other locations.”

  “So, she’d just run around without, say, toes?”

  “Well, Nanites adapt to your original body, and she had a good bit to spare up top.”

  “I can’t imagine it was easy to find a bra that would adapt that way. Unless she only wore a sports, which would make life a bit simpler.”

  “Nanites shapeshift, remember? They don’t need bras.”

  They passed a second of awed silence before Lisa replied, “And you didn’t want to go full Nanite why?”

  “That whole ‘Collective’ business bothers me. Like it bothered Damien, I guess. Like, I get it, community and all, but it feels like… I dunno, a cult? Maybe it’s different for a machine—sorry, an Autonomous—since they’re not exactly human, but I couldn’t get over it. That’s why they gave me a modified version with a replication kill code linked to my psyche. The nanobots only did what I wanted, then stopped. They’ll still repair if, say, I get my arms blown off again, though.”

  “You’d have to be really unlucky to get your arms blown off twice.”

  Neither spoke. I didn’t have to look over to know they were looking at Damien, suspended in the air on spears coated in his dried blood. “Yeah. Unlucky.”

  Migrating aimlessly, I walked the circle around Damien, finding Allessandra, Steve, and the leaders of the other militias in conversation.

  “So… what the hell you do, exactly?” one leader, a man with a full beard and dull eyes, said to Allessandra.