by Kevin Holton
Long live the queen.
Her whisper echoed through the city, in our skulls, and throughout eons of war as she swung down, splitting the beast in two. The force of her final blow cracked the street wide open, no doubt registering at least a four on the Richter scale as already-weakened buildings crumbled. Cars fell, alarms blaring, into darkness as the ground opened, swallowing all it could into the endless belly of the earth.
The sword became hands, and the Collective turned to us, lowering toward our roof. This building, thankfully, still stood. The massive gray beast’s head bowed in reverence, allowing Allessandra to walk along its snout and onto our roof, slinking up to me in that same sinister, self-assured gait. The stalk of a jungle cat about to pounce.
“What’s this I hear about a contingency plan?”
Chapter 16
The question hung in the dust-choked air. People below were still screaming, but far less so. These weren’t cries for help, or mercy, or survival. Just cries. The injured, giving voice to their pain. The survivors mourning their dead.
“What contingency plan?” Grover scratched at his nose with one of his blackened fingers.
“The fuck’s a contingency?” Steve shrugged, looking around as if he’d find one.
“Quiet.” Whatever Allessandra believed herself to be, and of all the things she’d ceased to be, she certainly wasn’t patient. “You.” A finger jabbed my chest. “Explain. Now.”
“I’m with them. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I’ve never been a good liar, but there’d never been a better time for a Hail Mary.
Her lip twisted up in a snarl. Though the interface helmet still covered her eyes, the Collective’s head twisted and tilted to match her movements. She could see through it, which meant hearing through it too, and as a beast made of nanobots, it was all ears.
“Should’ve known.” Allessandra choked up, just a little bit, tone unsteady as she balled her fists, backing away. “My whole life I’ve been shunned, and shamed, and pushed aside because people didn’t understand me. They didn’t want to. Didn’t even try.”
She stepped back onto the Collective, whose head flattened to give her an easy gradient to walk up. “I thought I found a home. Not a family, maybe not even friends, but enough that you’d watch out for me. That you’d always have my back, like the night of Damien’s funeral. I thought you, all of you, were different. But it’s always the same story. She’s weird, so she must be crazy. She’s crazy, so she must be dangerous. I guess you only wanted me around as long as I could still be useful. …Fine.”
Spreading her arms, she fell backward into the Collective’s skull, hitting the surface with a faint, wet splat. We three exchanged looks that went far past worry and into the ‘Oh God, no’ territory. Nanites overwhelmed her, the Collective welcoming Allessandra into itself, an entire colony swarming to protect its queen. The beast reared back, tilting its head toward the sky as if breathing fresh air for the first time after a life spent underground.
Then it looked down at us, its empty sockets shining a beam of crimson light down on us.
“You know nothing of this world,” the Collective said, in Allessandra’s voice, its great mouth a whirl of sharp objects and static-distorted echoes. “Humans are beasts of war, and you’re no different. You, who see power greater than yourself and immediately try to kill it.”
Its hands on the rooftop, the collective gnashed its huge teeth less than fifty feet from us. Grover ignited, but it didn’t seem intentional.
“Through my influence, we could rebuild this city, usher in a new age of advancement, and you deny me? I, the only one whose mind can process all this, the only person capable of guiding the Collective, rightful queen of her hive, and you try to burn me at the stake? You sneer and deride, make plans for my execution, a coup against someone who’s barely touched her throne, let alone begun her rule?”
I began backing away. NAFTA followed suit. Cindy stepped in front of us, burning bright, ready to step in to defend and, if necessary, kill. I hoped.
“It’s not like that!” My shout either went unheard, or ignored.
“As one and as many, I could have rebuilt this city in a day. Instead, I will destroy it, and your penance will be watching as your city is torn to the ground. Every death will be on your conscience, and every ounce of blood on your hands!”
Cindy raised his hand and fired a blast at the Collective’s skull, but the fireball swirled in a swift orbit and shot right back at us. He slapped it away, not afraid of the attack, but very clearly afraid of her. The blast exploded against a nearby building, singeing brick and metal, otherwise doing no damage.
“I spend a year fighting by your side, and you think I don’t know your little parlor tricks by now? You use fireworks, distracting and bright, a mimicry of real power, designed for those who don’t know the difference between entertainment and danger.” The Collective raised its arms, and debris below floated upward, everything from bricks to cars to corpses caught in her psychic grasp. “You have sown seeds of discord. Now, you’ll reap chaos.”
Chapter 17
The Collective fired debris in every direction, tearing through buildings. Screaming began anew as this new kaiju turned its rampage on human kind, a swarm of smaller Nanites breaking out of the body to wreak havoc on the streets below.
We had to act. Had to. What other choice did we have? We’d been fighting to save this city, and now, we were the cause of its destruction.
A new threat brought with it new challenges. New attacks, new defenses. Some old ones, too. I doubted she copied Medraka’s attacks by accident.
Every grenade NAFTA fired at her was returned, and only narrowly deflected by his kinetic cannon, a risk that almost killed us several times. Cindy charged her, burning as hot as he could, but fire proved useless too. No ranged attack made it past her psychic barrier, and any attempt to get close ended with her picking him up and casually tossing him aside. First she threw him back to us, commanding him to watch. Then she threw him aside, almost to his death, but he became momentarily blinding and drifted slowly to the ground, apparently slowing his descent by superheating the air below him.
“Go get him, I’ll reason with her.” My leadership might’ve been impromptu, but NAFTA didn’t need to be told twice. Still in his exoskeleton, he ran forward, leaping right off the roof. I hoped the suit would actually survive the fall, because none of us knew what it could withstand.
The Collective hadn’t yet moved, preferring to mentally destroy the city with a front-row seat to my reaction. “Allessandra, please! Just… Talk to me, we can work things out.”
“Work things out?” The words came from behind me, in a voice I recognized too well. I spun and saw my son standing on the rooftop behind me. Though more disheveled than I remembered, with an unshaven face and wrinkled, ripped clothing, it had his sandy, tousled hair, his forest green eyes, the same tired droop under his eyes and at the corners of his mouth that he’d had since his tenth birthday party.
“N-no.” I shook my head, knowing this hallucination didn’t stem from my own mind, that she had a way to inflict this upon me, but logic doesn’t stop emotion. “David?”
“Yeah. Me. What’s wrong, Dad? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He took slow, measured steps forward, not unlike Allessandra did, now that she was The Queen.
“Of course I have. You… you died a long time ago.”
“Two months. That’s all. And yet, you never talk about me, never think about me. Have you even been to my grave? Did you stick around to attend the funeral, or were you too busy running off to some new glory?” His pupils blew out to huge, vacuous holes, their darkness drinking in the light. The longer I stared, the more I felt my will to resist draining away.
Still, trying to keep distance, I shuffled my feet away. “These are terrible times we live in. You understand that, I know you do!”
“I ‘understand’ that you thought I’d be safe by your side, that you insisted I sta
y with you instead of sticking with my team, because ‘a father always knows best for his kid.’ And what happened, hm? What happened to me, Dad?”
Instinct told me to block it out, that Allessandra invaded my brain and fed off my thoughts, using them as weapons. I covered my ears and shut my eyes, as if that might help, but really, I just didn’t want to witness what I knew was coming next.
Hallucinations don’t really care if you block out your senses though. I heard him anyway. “Maybe this will sound familiar to you.” A wet squelch sounded as bone imploded, and I shook my head, a sob breaking free of my attempted emotional control. Against my better judgement, I opened my eyes, watching his head getting dragged down, into his chest cavity, as he turned inside out.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, David, I didn’t know! I thought we stood a real chance. That we could kill it, together. None of us had any idea what would happen.”
As the inverting flesh reached his arms, wrenching them in like two support beams jutting out of a sinkhole, his head exploded out of his anus. This time, instead of simply being dead, his mouth kept moving, despite the cracked, empty skull revealing no brain for him to use. “Bullshit! You knew damn well, but you were arrogant! You led me to my death!”
He turned fully inside out, organs dropping out onto the ground as he stomped forward, all sinew and muscle and exposed, broken bone. “The funny thing is, you really did manage to kill Medraka, but you only did it once you lost everything you had to live for. And even then, it still didn’t die. How does that make you feel, to know how completely useless you are? How you not only failed to kill it, but tried to kill the only person who could?”
“I never tried to kill her. I was just…”
David grinned, all thirty-two of his teeth curling into a disgusting grin. “Say it.”
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t admit I’d been scared of her, because some rational part of my brain clung to what I knew of reality: Allessandra orchestrated this nightmare to torture me, using my son’s death against my sanity, and wanted me to give up control to her. Admitting fear meant giving her power.
I kept backing up. My foot hit a ledge.
“Say it!” David barked.
A second option presented itself.
Spreading my arms, I shook my head. “No.” I let myself fall backward off the roof.
Wind rushed up as I fell fast, faster, then stopped, ensnared by icy wires. They turned me to face the Collective, which glared down at me. I’d been tangled up, each finger of its hand splitting into a dozen long marionette strings that bound my arms and legs. A copy of her face formed in front of me in its palm.
“I’m not done with you yet. Death is an escape I refuse to allow you.”
She lowered me to the ground, saying nothing more, but the wires split from the main body and became two Nanites. Their arms molded around mine, making it impossible to break free. Rather than the original bodies, these now looked like gray clones of Allessandra. I looked around at the chaos unfolding throughout the city and found that they all did.
Screaming for them to release me, I kicked and pulled, trying to escape, but got nowhere. They pulled me along the cracked pavement, hips and tailbone crying out as I bounced along the road. This didn’t last long. A massive bang resounded from just in front of us, and their arms, as well as the rest of their bodies, were smashed to little liquid bits. The blast knocked out my hearing, too, so I scrambled to my feet, terrified of whatever bomb or car or whatever now posed the latest threat to my life, but was hoisted into the air by NAFTA.
“Did you throw a concussion grenade?” I’d probably screamed it, but couldn’t hear anything over my sudden onset tinnitus and likely perforated eardrums. He nodded with a goofy smile, which faded as he glanced back toward Allessandra. Holding me tight, he raced away toward Cindy, who was more or less paving a clear path through the city by melting whatever obstructed us.
Something that might’ve been yelling sounded off near my head, and Cindy looked back, jumping into the air. NAFTA caught him with the other arm, putting him on his shoulders, where he could shoot as many flame jets and fireballs as needed to clear our escape.
Since Steve held me overhead, Grover leaned over, tapping my shoulder. His mouth moved, but I couldn’t quite hear him, so I did my best with lip reading.
“No, I’ve got no weapons.”
We charged over an array of disabled vehicles, the fissure running down Main Street widening, swallowing even more debris. Steve leaped over it, bounding down an alley, out of a direct path of destruction. Grover used finger blasts to seal some debris to buildings, keeping it from falling on us. His mouth moved again.
“I don’t know how we stop her, no. She’s psychic, nanobot-powered, and familiar with all our strategies.” My heart pounded as my stomach sank. We’d worked so hard to kill Medraka, and she’d pulverized it. Literally beat the monster into the ground and tore it to pieces. Maybe she’d die of age or illness, but if her enhanced abilities kept her body functioning the way Medraka’s had, she might never die.
A car slammed through a building behind us, thrown from up high, bricks and body parts raining down. None came close to hurting us, a clearly intentional move. We burst out onto another main road, where she’d clearly lived up to her callsign.
Durham Avenue became a full-scale riot. One man tore a stop sign from the ground and impaled himself, then ran, laughing, through the crowd, the metal bobbing and weaving with each step. A woman tore her own arm off and beat her child to death with it. Two young lovers were sewing their lips together.
The world expects monsters. Allessandra’s whisper rippled through our minds, and the crowd let loose varying cries of terror and ecstasy. Let’s all be monsters.
The carnage ramped up ten-fold, people surging like a wave toward us. Some fell and were trampled under the feet of those storming up from behind. One man, one single man, with horrified eyes that screamed of his consciousness being well-aware of his total loss of control, lifted a small car overhead and smashed it down on some of the other rioters.
As Steve ran and took a huge jump onto the roof of a three-story building, we stared at the screaming, writhing masses for an entranced second. It stretched out to infinity and back. I couldn’t decide if Allessandra showed us mercy by not messing with our heads, or if witnessing this was cruelty, to be some of the few sane people left in a mad city.
“Do you hear that?” Grover said to Steve, but the ringing in my ears began to fade. I heard it too. Some people below were singing. Others, praising Allessandra. They didn’t act as one, didn’t speak in unison.
“They… they’re not being controlled, are they? Some of them actually think she’s a god.” I didn’t want to say it, but it needed to be said.
Grover looked over at me and nodded slowly, eyes dark, his usually jovial face sad and cynical. “So many people lost their minds from Medraka. Now, to think one of us could be more powerful, kill it, and still want to kill us? Begging for mercy might be their only option.”
In the distance, the ‘skinless’ cow skull of the Collective grinned, a horrible twisting of would-be bone. I got the feeling she’d been listening.
“Well, it sure as hell won’t be ours. If she wants to stop, we’ll stop. If she’ll listen to reason, we’ll talk with her. But if she wants to kill… so be it.”
I looked the Collective in its hollow eyes, meeting its gaze, refusing to back down. Its twisted smile fell. Then it broke apart. Even at our distance, I could see it dispersing into hundreds of Nanites, more than the number that had assembled it, as it absorbed fallen wire, steel, and other components, endlessly creating more members for its horde.
Steve told us to hold on and sprinted full tilt in the other direction. We didn’t argue, or need clarification. Allessandra didn’t intend to fight us. We weren’t her targets.
Nanites descended on the people below, tearing through buildings, finding every last person they could, and painted the whole city red.
Chapter 18
Sources reporting the total destruction of the city of Great Bend by a new threat. Witnesses claim a metal kaiju with Nanite properties fought and killed Medraka, only to lay waste to the city.
Click. Wheelchair Kid changed the station.
Full-scale riot in Great Bend after a daikaiju some have tentatively dubbed Hivemind killed Medraka. Hivemind appears to be comprised of nanotech, controlled by a single user, and is able to inflict devastating psychic—
Click.
Nanite leaders across the globe urging people to avoid violence against their kind, stating the Great Bend Beast is not one of them, likely rogue and out of control from faulty coding. They are currently meeting to discuss deactivation, while flesh-and-blood humans discuss ways to quarantine the Nanites, should more of them ‘go rogue.’
Click.
Reports of people torn limb from limb by unseen forces, rioting in the streets, driven insane by the wrath of the Metal Mother—
Click.
--worshipping the new daikaiju, calling it the Steel Savior, claiming it only attacked the humans because they attacked first. The First Church of Cold Judgement feels the creature that ravaged Great Bend is merely misunderstood, and ought to have been celebrated for slaying Medraka, not viewed as a new threat. Others—
“Turn it off.” I wasn’t going to ask once, let alone twice.
The kid gulped and turned it off.
Our numbers were few, our options limited, our resources next to empty. Some of the survivors made it back to our camp and, upon our return, celebrated us. They hadn’t yet heard about the new threat. A few tried to thank us, and one woman even fell to her knees in front of Grover, calling him an angel, sent from on high to save humans from the monsters, but he brushed her aside. It reminded me of that morning after I shot out its first heart. He didn’t want credit for saving anyone because, to him, he hadn’t succeeded.