by Greg Ramsay
“Mama?” Tory said, sounding fearful and confused.
“Hi baby!” Lia exclaimed joyfully, trying not to cry. Tory reached out to embrace her, but didn’t.
“What’s wrong?” Lia asked. Her hybrid instincts screamed, but she remained calm outwardly.
“Nothing,” Tory said somewhat playfully as both her arms instantly converted into blades.
Thanks to her current posture, the best Lia could do was let her legs launch her backward, but that wasn’t enough to avoid sustaining deep gashes in both sides. She cried out in agony. James was already heading to stop Tory. Instead he found himself being torn apart by Lia’s squad-mates. A desperate suppressive battle ensued in the relatively confined lab space. Both James and Lia kept sustaining injuries all over with no real means of retaliation.
“What do we do?!” James asked with fear in his voice.
Lia knew why, he was a civilian hired by the military; he had almost no fighting experience beside what she taught him. Even worse, he was up against her top-class Spec Ops family gone hybrid with no way out. Sure, she knew his power would help, but they shared a simple dilemma.
“I DON’T KNOW!” Lia yelled through the pain as she was struck on all sides with lethal blades much like her own. “We can’t kill them! Can we incapacitate them with tendrils?” she suggested.
“Worth a shot,” he replied, quickly dodging a strike that cut right through an array of computer hardware like butter.
Lia and James managed to corral their attacks together by coming close to one another, their backs to the wall. With astonishing speed they loosed countless tendrils from their chests, snaring everything around them. For a time the confined nature of their environment ensured the tactic was unavoidable.
“They seemed to understand us, they’ve even retained their fighting prowess...what the hell is going on?!” Lia asked.
James’ reply was lost in a unified roar not unlike the Leader’s in Lia’s PsychoLife world. The proximity of their roar alone was beyond deafening, yet Lia could still feel the agony of her friends trapped within the monsters. Cracks appeared in anything made of glass; dust rose off the ground. Desperately putting all her remaining strength into restraining them, Lia could only watch fearfully. James quickly solved the roaring by carefully ensnaring their necks, mindful not to let his razor-sharp tendrils decapitate them. Dark ooze seeped from the gaping wounds unabated as he also blocked their own healing tendrils from succeeding.
“James!” Lia exclaimed horrified, then she noticed he was fading fast. His armour, like hers, was cut open all over his body, but he didn’t seem to be healing correctly.
“It was that or contend with the possibility of a horde from above,” he managed to say calmly, trying not to worry her further, given her expression. For a few seconds, things seemed to calm. Much of the lab space looked like a hurricane of oversized and overly sharp razor blades had whipped through... twice. Everything around them was either in disarray or utterly destroyed. Lia didn’t care; she was too fixated on Tory, desperately hoping she’d recover. To her dismay, the screams were replaced with a violent gurgling sound. Tory’s eyes went from black a void to crimson red like the run of Lia’s katana. Lia stood there shocked. She knew it was her own power reverberating behind those eyes which stared at her like lasers waiting to fire.
“Please guys, please... Remember who you are!” she pleaded with weakness becoming increasingly apparent in her voice. She looked hopelessly at James, noticing he’d healed but wasn’t going to last through another round of fighting. His mask had just finished melding over the last of his strictly-styled blond hair. Lia could feel she was repaired as well. Despite that bit of good luck, her pleas fell on deaf ears. Her tendrils suddenly became insanely strained. She struggled to maintain her hold, but the gurgling became roaring. She could clearly see the energy she provided them was not only outdoing her tendrils, but was also beginning to warp them further.
With devastating suddenness, their once humanoid looking former allies exploded violently with power. Reverberating energy fed the hybrid substance, vastly expanding its production. Lia could only observe in horror as the bodies of those she loved expanded into grotesque heavily armed human-alpha hybrids. They had human shaped heads on arms and their humanoid anatomy melded into shifted bodies. In the mere seconds it took to begin, both Lia and James were violently beaten away like pests by grotesque massive alphas. They were both slammed violently into the already damaged concrete support wall. The sheer force of impact turned their bodies into wrecking balls before they came to rest breathless in the chamber beyond. James was practically incapacitated. Lia wasn’t much better, but she knew she had to do something. Her weakened state was a result of her effort to revive those now trying to kill them. Whereas James was weakened from keeping her alive.
She could just make out the golden glint of their kynaris. To get to hers she’d have to evade the approaching alphas which blocked her pathway, dislodge it from under a pile of debris, and hope she still had the strength to use it. Without a moment’s hesitation, she focused all her strength into her legs. To her amazement, her speed was unreal. She was face to face with an alpha before she’d had time to blink. Changing her focus to her right arm, she treated its face like she’d treated James’ door, with similar results. Lia’s punch was so strong the alpha was forced backward mid-charge, clearing her a brief opening between it and its disoriented ally directly behind.
She jumped through the gap, landing in a diving somersault which got her back on her feet and right on target. Just as she pulled her kynari from the rubble, she was blindsided by a brutal strike to the side of her head. James watched her drop, still obstinately seizing her weapon as the alpha with Tory’s head pinned her down. Luckily she had the reflex to point a tip away from herself despite the inherent risk of it’s double-sided tips potentially resulting in self-puncture. She saw Tory’s head, like a disturbingly small pimple on the monstrosity she’d become, and hesitated, a mistake which resulted in all but one of the alphas dog-piling on top of her, brutally tearing into each other for a piece of her.
For the briefest of seconds she saw the remaining alpha stalking James like a cat, it’s body tense, poised to strike. Then her vision was obscured by the darkness of an black exoskeleton and all she heard were screams. Lia’s growing weakness was pushed aside by sudden extreme rage. She held her kynari in a death grip. “RELEASE!” she screamed reflexively. Her crimson willpower exploded from the kynari like a laser with an effective radius akin to a shotgun blast. In a single shot she blew a hole right through all the alphas, straight through the ceiling of the underground lab, and all the way to topsoil hundreds of feet above.
No longer concerned with restraint Lia quickly focused her tip into an energy blade, sped over, and violently decapitated the alpha that was gradually dismembering and consuming James, while he lay contorted in pain unable to scream anymore. Wordlessly she grabbed the body still searching for its head before dragging it mercilessly to the others. Each alpha had been brutally dismembered to the point their bodies were too focused on healing to stand. Or so she thought. A portion of the energy she released must’ve been metabolized by their bodies. The very same energy that gave them life bolstered their healing enough for them to ignore their injuries entirely. Lia’s beleaguered mind barely noticed they’d recovered so quickly, but didn’t care.
Almost instantly, she converted her kynari to its katana form allowing the force of its sudden conversion to repulse them slightly. In that same instant she set about chopping them up similar to what they did to James, leaving their bodies quadriplegic and thoroughly desecrated. In spite of all that, their tendrils still tried to heal them, mashing parts from any bodies in the pile together as long as they had limbs. Disgusted more than enraged, Lia prepared to repeat her attack. Instead one of her legs gave out; the other soon followed. Her vision was beginning to blur. The feeling inside her was like something she’d never felt before. It was much worse th
an anything a simulation could emulate, a ravenous hunger beyond all reason competing with the familiar sensation of near-death. The next few minutes passed like a living nightmare. Her body exploded in tendrils with no regard for the state of her armour. Everything from what remained of the armour to the still thriving mutilated alphas before her was torn into violently. Every bit of the monsters her loved ones had become were assimilated as part of her like so many nameless shifted before.
Her survival instinct sated, Lia found herself on her knees in a state of shock, fully alive but numb. She remained that way for a while, unmoving. Lia felt detached like nothing she knew existed anymore, a weirdly familiar, yet eerily comforting emptiness. In her mind’s eye, she clenched her hands tight, desperately trying to hold on to that state. Desperation gave way to dismay as the silence became a flood. Her memories surged through her once more. She could see vividly the policeman at their front door saying their daughter Janey had been killed in a terrorist attack. Shock, denial, acceptance, and misery raged through her at blinding speed to be replaced with rage; rage that compelled her to join the Canadian Special Operations 107th Prowler division. Her sole purpose was to defend freedom from Terrorism. Or at least that’s what Captain Steele always preached during the years of grueling training, let alone the brutally depressing missions.
She fought and fought, failing to make a dent in terrorism. Lia was barely able to assuage her guilt for not being able to save the assaulted, broken civilians she was supposedly there to help. Meanwhile, enough time passed for pollution-based super cancers to become a problem even the military cared about. James left his cushy CDC position and signed up to help with that, or so he thought. Instead he was tasked with weapons applications. Even through the waves of emotion Lia could remember his chagrin for his erroneous posting. After enough convincing, she agreed to have Tory while she was on leave, just to have some joy in their lives. After that, James used his connections to get the position heading up MiraiCorp, eventually securing military and government contractual monopoly. Not long after that, the first alien incursions started. Lia’s mind suddenly went blank. Her psychotic recap gave way to the faces of her friends and finally her daughter.
She could see herself sitting in some dusty army base in China, desperately trying to raise Tory via a webcam. The few times she was home, she spent pushing her on a tire swing, singing songs, reading stories, poking fun at James’ obsession with hygiene and boy bands, and letting seven-year-old Tory steer the car on back roads while her pet beagle Bruiser barked at everything angrily. Lia’s heart filled with regret; their memories were so few. As parents, both she and James were too busy being successful or patriotic to be home. Tory kept having to switch schools, so she didn’t really have friends. Around the time she was ten the super cancer nicknamed Grey Death by internet forums - after the smog clouds initially blamed for its inception – infected her. Lia remembered desperately begging to be allowed leave or a discharge, anything to get home.
By that time, alien incursions were getting harder to cover up. The government had been claiming crashed alien pods were just failed satellites safely crashing back to Earth. However, increasing undeniable evidence started to surface of people being changed in horrible ways. Riots kicked up around institutions like MiraiCorp which were initially tasked to investigate alien material for useful applications and report to the military, until hacktivists exposed them as being in collusion with government officials to hide a cure. People were getting increasingly violent in their desperation for a safe solution. That was when Lia’s unit was tasked with guarding MiraiCorp and covertly securing alien technology.
Not long before that Lia remembered aggressively trying to convince Steele to lobby for their anti-terrorism unit to be posted in Utah, but to no avail. She knew James was there and could be in danger, but couldn’t do anything from a country away. Eventually officials realized the link between guerrilla alien tactics and Middle Eastern terrorism. They also knew Lia’s unit was one of the best worldwide, so they formed a joint task force with United States military and police, all sides hiding covert operations from each other. Despite all the political maneuvering, covert operations, and countless hours on her part spent repelling civilian attacks, MiraiCorp didn’t have a cure yet. In what felt like seconds, Lia’s mind raced through finding the alien pod, bringing her findings to James, the creation of the L strain, Tory’s miraculous recovery which eventually spawned worldwide recovery, and her eventual succumbence to a horror much worse. All James’ efforts brought Tory enough time to inadvertently become a figurehead of human ruin. Finally, all the rush of memories concluded with her once more giving her child life, only for her to turn again.
Lia sat there in shock, more aware, but no less numb.
“Lia...” James called out sadly with a hoarseness to his voice.
Lia saw the pain in his eyes as he looked at her. He sounded as if he’d called her many times. She wasn’t sure if it was guilt or just misery, but his look snapped her back enough to realize what she’d done... killed and consumed their child. Lia’s mask fell away, leaving her face exposed in an expression of shocked agony as tears streamed freely down her cheeks. Eventually she slowly turned to look at James with a hollow look in her eyes.
“At least this time she didn’t recover long enough to have hope for a future just for it to be snapped away,” Lia said, compulsively laughing with increasing urgency until she sounded maniacal. Suddenly she sensed shifted through the tunnel her kynari accidentally dug to surface level.
“Emilia...” James whispered; his voice sounded depressed and weak, unsure what else to say.
Suddenly she let out a pained scream before armouring up. With astonishing force she jumped from the already broken concrete floor, through her tunnel, to emerge in an explosion of dirt right in front of a wandering shifted horde. Lia didn’t even bother with her mask, even letting the tendrils that formed a helmet-like guard under her hair recede. She simply formed her katana then let the shifted, creations her own daughter was used to unknowingly spread, draw near. With every alpha shifted she dismembered, two lesser shifted died. For every alpha that roared, more would come. The more that arrived, the more she mercilessly sliced to pieces. All she could see was the grotesque warped faces of her loved ones contorted in fear and agony
.
She roared as she fought, cursing herself and cursing what she’d done. “YOU DID THIS!” she screamed at them, lining them up with quick maneuvers before blasting them apart with her katana’s wave release wordlessly. She didn’t need to tell it to release, sometimes it just felt cathartic, as a means of venting rage.
Chapter 3 – Irony
All around her the dusty ground was covered in black ooze; paved pathways between departments were obliterated, trees scorched, and sand burned to glass. Despite her pain, Lia momentarily felt a sick satisfaction from allowing her dark side to simply destroy. She took a series of deep ragged breaths, then forced her blade to revert. In one violent motion she slammed her kynari’s black tip directly into her side above her hip, forcing it deep within herself. She could’ve had her mutated body simply absorb it but she wanted to hurt for what she’d done. After a while of crying all alone, she remembered James was still wounded. She grabbed a bunch of desecrated shifted bodies and threw them down her tunnel. Many landed with a sickening squelch while others landed like steel on cement – armour first. She smoothly jumped down, landing properly, as she was trained, on top of her pile of corpses.
James watched the scene unfold, judging himself for immediately thinking of her as some sort of brutish conqueror. “Lia,” James said plaintively, trying to judge her mental state. Wordlessly, Lia grabbed bodies, heaving them up effortlessly before throwing them violently into him. James’ armour immediately set about assimilating them while simultaneously healing him.
In response to his shocked pained expression she said, “You’re welcome” then strode away angrily with no destination in mind. After a short
time, James found her sitting alone in a corner crying. He sat beside her silently, gently taking her hand, as he’d done so many times before to show he’d be there when she was ready.
“I forced this end,” she practically whispered, still choked up with tears. This time James had no response. “I told you all my fighting accomplished nothing, and now I’ve killed our daughter to prove it...”
“Lia I ...” James started to say, but she cut him off.
“Once again I only saved us. All that for Tory, just so the ... monster I’ve become could cut her down and EAT her.”
“She was already gone, they were all, already gone.” James said with pained certainty.
“They. Weren’t. GONE!” Lia screamed, emphasizing each word with her fist into his armoured gut.
“You did nothing wrong; we both had to fight!”
Lia looked at him with pure shock and misery. “How can you say that? You created this apocalypse with a drug meant to save her, and I, your Prime Subject used its disturbing power to try and rebirth her without any sense of irony! You even fucking said this wouldn’t go well, and I still had to interfere with their lives for my own selfish feelings.”
James looked at her with pity. “I don’t blame you for trying,” he said.
“Of course you don’t,” Lia said sarcastically, her anger muddled with sadness. “You and I both are self-righteous pricks that would do anything to get what we want, to hell with the consequences!”
“That’s not fair,” James said calmly. “Do you seriously want me to hate you; is that it? You know I won’t. So you go ahead and hate yourself for surviving all you want. Like I said before, you’re not a monster. All you’ve ever done, all I’ve ever done is everything we could do to ensure our loved ones survived!” he said seriously, his voice quivering with anger and pain.
Lia stood over him abruptly, letting her armour recede over her side so he could watch as her kynari emerged on tendrils from within the black abyss of her innards. Where the skin parted, it bled a familiar red, like a bad joke. “IS THAT HUMAN TO YOU?” she screamed as her body instantly healed. Her tendrils seamlessly sewed the gap, replacing it with skin. “I am this monster you made. I am this horror made for her benefit. I am this murderous joke... I KILLED OUR FUCKING DAUGHTER!” Lia yelled, her thoughts disjointed by too much devastation.