At The Hands Of Madness

by Kevin Holton

  “God only knows how much it takes out of her to use those powers.” Without her, our efforts the day before would’ve been for nothing—we might all have been killed—but after, she was so tired that I could feel it. The fact that she’d stayed up well into the night was a testament to her immense willpower.

  Steve wandered into the coffee tent, sniffing the air. “Coffee?” I poured him a mug, his two huge paws making any cup tiny by comparison. “Thanks.”

  “Sure. We were thinking that maybe Medraka’s blood could let our weapons bypass its shielding, like Allessandra’s telekinesis.”

  “Huh.” His words muffled, as his mouth sat deep in his mug. He took careful sips, wincing, likely having burned his tongue anyway. “I think fire works too. Just saying.” We looked at him, Lisa just curious, while I was confused. Looking back at us both, drooping lids almost covering the back-and-forth flicking of his eyes, he said, “Okay, you two were busy yesterday, so maybe you didn’t notice. You were with Allessandra,” he said, pointing at me, “and you,” he gestured to Lisa, “were with Mari, dodging attacks and trying to help Damien. Well, I don’t think you noticed Medraka lifted up a foot, ready to stomp our shit out, let loose one of those shockwaves that smashed the Humvee to pieces. We were smooth about to die, right? Concussive force would’a killed us. Then Grover sent out a flamethrower, right at its foot, and the thing drew back. He kinda doubled over, guess it was doing that mind scream bullshit, but it backed off. He was about to keep fucking it up when you shot out its heart or whatever.”

  Neither of us had any reason to doubt that what he said was true. Given our distance, the angles, and that we were all distracted, it wasn’t unreasonable to think I simply hadn’t noticed this happening. Lisa apparently agreed. “He never mentioned that.”

  Steve shrugged. “Why would he? We didn’t sign on for glory. Like, yeah, okay, we have a good time doing this, kicking Phranna ass and tryin’a kill the kaiju, but it’s not like we’re here for praise. We’re here to get the job done. We just have fun while we’re at it. Plus, you know, coffee,” he said, raising his mug.

  “Coffee?” Grover said from the doorway, still covered in ash from sleeping in the firepit the previous night, his pale skin blackened. Normally, a coating like that would make someone look less muscular, or at least obscure muscle definition, but somehow, it made him look ferocious. Old and vengeful, his bloodshot eyes peering out from his darkness. Steve poured him a mug while I tried to blink these last remnants of dream-like thinking from my brain.

  “Steve was just telling us about how you saved us all yesterday.”

  “Huh?” Grover said, slugging back a massive gulp of boiling hot coffee. I worried for a second, then remembered who I was looking at. “Oh, right. The whole stompy-smashy thing with the big mofo. Got it.”

  “Make all the jokes you want,” Lisa said. “He says you saved us.”

  “Well, I’d been trying to kill it. Guess I failed.” He looked away. “Better luck next time, right? But hey, if there’s anything worth celebrating, it’s this guy.” Cindy pointed a coal-black finger at me. “He and Allessandra found a way to seriously hurt it. Bastard got away, but cheers, folks.” With a dramatic lift of his mug, he added, “To the next time. We know it’s coming, and now, we’ll be ready.”

  The way he avoided praise perturbed me. He evaded even the possibility of taking credit for saving us, and didn’t even make a joke about it. Grover drained his mug, set it down, and left the tent, nodding to someone at his side who I couldn’t see. Steve picked up on the same weird vibe I did, because we exchanged a worried glance. He knew his friend better than I could. Before we could talk about it, Allessandra entered.

  “Looks like everyone’s up early today,” Lisa said.

  Allessandra nodded. “We pretend otherwise, but humans are just animals, and animals always know when a storm approaches.” Her voice still had that far-off esoteric timber, like someone trapped her in an echo chamber.

  Red sky at morning. “So, wasn’t a good night’s sleep for you either?”

  “Eh. As good as ever, so no, but I’m used to it.” The mysticism dropped out of her tone.

  Lisa looked at me. I nodded. “We were wondering,” she said, “if you could help us out with a weapons question.”

  Allessandra looked over at me, then back at her, incredulous. “Me? What could I possibly do to help either of you? You know more about…” she trailed off, head cocked, then shook hard. “Know more about weapons, both of you, either of you, you know more than I ever could. Guns are… not my thing.”

  Then we explained what we’d discussed about Medraka’s blood, and how there was a possibility of using it against the beast itself, if it retained the same psychic makeup as Medraka. Any weapon calibrated by the blood would theoretically be able to hurt it, just as she had, and just as Steve had, accidentally. We also mentioned, briefly, that extreme heat seemed to work too, but that wasn’t her department, so we let that be a footnote in our conversation.

  After a few minutes of Lisa explaining the weapon specs and scientific ideas behind why this should work, Allessandra waved her hand. “Okay, look, I trust you, you’re the expert, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. Just… what do you want me to do?”

  Slightly red in the face—no longer from dawn, at this point, as the sun had risen enough to let the sky edge toward blue—Lisa held up her arm cannon. “I’ve already incorporated some blood into this. Could you see if it’s still psychic?”

  Another brief wave of her hand yielded a smile, and, “Yes, you’re all set. Fire away.”

  Lisa looked at her cannon. “Really? It took you, what, two seconds to confirm?”

  “It’s like… moving your hand through water while the rest of you is on dry land. The air shifts, molecules swimming around you, like electrons don’t spin the same. A sense of something different, something… changed. It’s the same as when you know you’re being stared at, even when you’re not looking. Even when your eyes are shut, you feel it there.”

  Her eyes were so frequently unfocused these days, I couldn’t help wonder what she was seeing. I’d only known her for two months, the full extent of her abilities a mystery to me—and her as well, I suspected. Could she see the future? Read minds? Or had the stress of Medraka’s imminent arrival pushed her to a point where it simply couldn’t hold itself together like she used to? That possibility remained, that chance always existed, that her eyes couldn’t focus on our world because she was lost in her own.

  Lisa thanked her and walked off to make last-minute adjustments. Steve mentioned calibrating a music system as a side project, with wearable speakers for battle soundtracks, so he and Allessandra began chatting about their favorite bands—Slipknot, Bullet for my Valentine, and Taylor Swift for him, while she was more a fan of Icon for Hire and Pvris—so I slipped away too. It would’ve been nice to stick around and have such a mundane conversation, but my instincts told me there wasn’t a single second to waste. If a single well-placed round to its other heart held the key to killing Medraka, I, in particular, needed to be prepared. Allessandra just needed to be alert and calm, so letting her ease into the day counted as preparations. After catching up with Lisa, I asked if she felt the same way, as though we had very little time left. She did, and that, as before, was a very bad sign.

  The camp was relatively quiet. Though I prayed otherwise, it had a calm-before-the-storm vibe, doubled on top of a calm-in-the-aftermath-of-disaster feeling. This post-Damien world felt raw. Trauma has a way of hollowing people out, scraping them raw, leaving their veins scratched open from inside, internal wounds bleeding where they can harbor that pain in secret. Everyone clearly felt this, and no one wanted to discuss it. We had a mission to carry out. Completing it is all Damien would’ve asked, had he known he was going to die.

  Granted, yes, we’d lost more than a few lower-ranking people, handfuls of younger, newer recruits, but as much as I hated to admit it, we expected such losses. They wer
e predictable casualties. To lose someone so integral to our operations only confirmed what we’d already known for ages: Medraka had turned our entire world inside out, and would not rest until not simply our lives, but our ways of life, were destroyed.

  It was easy to pretend this wasn’t happening. Days could pass with no sign of it or the Phranna. The radio crew would report only the boring news we’d heard on loop for years now. Another Beatles cover band was on tour. A Catholicism-based hate group blamed Medraka on gay marriage. The vice-president, now president, took his family on vacation, this time to Norway, to take a break from Virginia’s summer heat. Squiggly-poofs, the latest inane snack food being listed as a ‘health product,’ found itself the target of a class-action suit claiming that the ‘health product’ label was misleading, because no one realized that eight hundred calories per bag and no vitamins or minerals meant they’d actually be bad for you.

  This day was no different. Today’s news reports blared about Congress delaying yet another vote on whether or not transgendered people could use whatever bathrooms they prefer, as if this was an issue to debate over. A more naïve person might’ve assumed they were trying to avoid thinking about the obvious—a giant headless monster that might crush them or cast them into oblivion at any moment with no provocation—but I’d been around too long to think our politicians would spend their time making good decisions.

  I nodded to the radio crew, checking in to make sure they were ready. Anyone could sit around checking news reports, so most doubled up their time by also exercising or competing at games that wouldn’t require too much attention. Anything to stay sharp, really. It felt odd not having TVs out there, but no cable provider had been willing to offer the militias free television in order to stay up-to-date, and we couldn’t exactly stream the day’s news over Netflix. It worked out, though. Keeping people on radio news was enough of a shift from daily life that they never got lazy. No one on the radio crew ever forgot why they were out there.

  With everyone awake, already preparing for whatever might happen in the post-dawn light, it was easy to see the cogs at work in our little machine. Everything kept moving, business as usual, with Grover firing off shots along the battlefield, trying to improve his finger guns’ distance, Steve working on his armaments, and me, double checking my own weaponry. Lisa had vanished, the one errant gear threatening to gum up the works, but she tended to work alone anyway. Between her quiet stoicism and military experience, she was the clear next-in-line for our leadership, not that we’d stopped to take a vote. It felt a little too disrespectful to hold such a meeting yesterday, and today, there simply wasn’t time. Besides, she’d probably just rise to the occasion, as many do. From what I understood, that’s how Damien wound up leading Hyperion company.

  Allessandra and Mari were off with the Nanites, talking to Akila about integrating Medraka’s blood into various Nanite technology. Once they relayed Lisa’s idea, the Nanites formed all sorts of plans, pretty much simultaneously, about what they could do with such a discovery, since we now knew pretty much any weapon could harm the beast once slathered in its blood.

  “You, however, were the ones to draw such blood. We already took what we needed for the sensors, so we’ll take no more than what you offer. The spoils of that battle are yours to give.” Akila spoke with a sense of authority over her fellow Nanites. Three of her group, the same emissaries who’d arrived after fighting the Phranna a few days earlier, were hard at work calibrating the first sensor.

  Allessandra and Mari turned to me. While part of our group, Mari was new, and knew she didn’t have much influence here. Oddly enough, they both deferred to my judgement, though I, too, was new. Far newer than Allessandra, at any rate. “I believe Lisa went off to collect more blood specifically for this purpose. It will have likely dried by now, but perhaps we can mix it with… water, or a polymer, or something, to create a dye of some kind. It can color our weapons and, I suppose, be used sort of like make-up, or a temporary tattoo, for all of you.”

  “What is it with men and war paint?” Mari asked, a hint of teasing in her expression.

  “War paint was used for thousands of years as a means of symbolizing battle readiness. This will just be continuing such a long and colorful tradition.”

  “Colorful, literally as well as metaphorically.” Allessandra nodded.

  “Thank you for your generosity.” Akila bowed her head in thanks. “I would have understood if you wanted to honor Damien’s memory by keeping us at arm’s length. It’s reassuring, if not to say inspiring, to see us working past such differences.”

  My mind drifted to my child dying in battle, and how Damien pushed his child away. I didn’t want to tell her the real reason behind my encouraging this cooperation: to spite the man who’d thrown away what I’d lost. Even if I pitied him for his problems, and understood his reactions, I couldn’t forgive his final decisions.

  Mari broke that barrier for me. “His son died in the same battle as my husband. Call me crazy, but I don’t think ole’ Heartbreaker here liked learning Damien cut you two out of his life.”

  Turning away, Akila shut her eyes, a hand rising to cover her heart. “I couldn’t imagine losing my child. My apologies. I didn’t know.”

  “That’s alright. I mean, it would’ve been weird if you did know.”

  She gave a smile that was only half pity. “Hate has, historically, been as powerful a motivator as love. If this good,” she gestured to the sensors, “comes from anger, then so be it. But I hope, for your sake, that you don’t steep yourself too greatly in feeling this way about a deceased man. Death rarely offers closure.”

  I crinkled my nose, a small part of me annoyed at her matronly way of speaking, like we were all children to her, but I thanked her anyway. A headless kaiju monstrosity and the fact that humanity had split into several different species was no excuse for bad manners.

  On-cue, Steve and Grover walked up, joining our conversation, which shifted slightly toward gene splicing. Mari asked, and Akila was then greatly curious about finding out, if Grover even could become a Nanite, given his gene splicing. The nanobot swarms were designed to work with someone’s DNA, but they were also only built to withstand temperatures within the human body’s typical range. With a general max of one-hundred-and-ten Fahrenheit, there was no way to know if our little Firestarter, who usually ran at anywhere between fifty and five hundred degrees hotter, would simply melt himself. His flesh might’ve been heatproof, but generally speaking, machinery could be irreparably harmed by overheating.

  Before we got to really explore this idea, the Nanites working nearby announced that the sensor was calibrated and ready for activation, switching it on. It immediately began to beep, sending out a harsh, shrill whine.

  “What the balls on rye?” Steve yelled, covering his ears.

  “Is it broken?” Mari said.

  “I think my ears are!” Grover replied.

  Akila’s eyes darted back and forth, reading data from a HUD. Then, though her skin couldn’t actually pale, I still watched her face drop in horror. Turning to her fellows, she silenced the alarm. “Are you sure this is correct?”

  The others affirmed. I cut in with, “What’s going on? We already assumed it’d be coming back here, and sooner rather than later. That’s why we’re all up early, getting ready for battle.”

  “Well, Hennessy, I hope you’ve been working fast, because if everything here’s correct, you’ve got about fifteen minutes.”

  Chapter 10

  Three flares burned bright in the sky, waking any who might’ve still been asleep. I pitied those who’d kept watch all night only to be jarred awake by the sudden and extreme amount of light flooding our camp, but what choice was there? We could either wake them up or, likely, let them die. Given Medraka’s nature, it remained possible that the beast would pass by the sleepers entirely, but it remained just as likely that it would telekinetically pull their intestines out through their eye sockets. Three flares was hard
ly a rude awakening compared to something like that.

  Grover wasted no time getting himself ready, insofar as that he grabbed a bagel as we sprinted through the center concourse. I asked why he decided now was a good time to eat, and he claimed he needed fuel before running off to find Steve. Allessandra, Mari, and Akila were all ready because, like the rest of us, they didn’t need to actually do anything.

  I ran to my tent, grabbing the Widow X, and strapping a modified ammo belt of my own design around my torso. It held pre-loaded cartridges and several other scopes, not to mention hypodermic needles full of morphine just in case something went wrong, but not so terribly that we’d need Grover to clean up. Pretty much everyone had medical training, I was just the only one who tended to carry medical supplies on him. Grover would likely melt them immediately, Allessandra was generally too busy doing her dance of death against the Phranna to worry about healing, and if Steve were to reach for medicine and grab the wrong pouch, he might de-pin a grenade and kill us all.

  That thought drew me to another. Assembling my gun at record speed, I raced back out, looking for Steve. I found him in the scrapyard, thankfully, because that was precisely what I wanted to ask him about.

  His huge form was checking out our one functional Humvee, which, at the moment, didn’t have enough seats to carry all those in the core group, should the worst happen and we need to flee. There were enough grenades, plastic explosives, and other types of ordinance strapped to him to supply a decently sized military unit, so he’d probably have half his supply left even if we fought until sundown. “NAFTA! How’s this running? Is it gassed up, ready to go?”

  Turning, an unlit cigar in his mouth, he gestured to the rear of the vehicle. “Yeah, just looking at the seating. Don’t want anyone chasing their own ass tryin’a get on if we gotta jet the hell out of this camp.”

  Cindy ran up. “Dude, the fuck you doing?”

  “I’m fuckin’ doin’ this shit here makin’ the car have seats and all that, you asshole!”