Darkness & Light

by Murray, Dean

  Rather than jumping out of bed and rushing off to meet our supposed 'savior', I swallowed twice the suggested dose of my normal drug cocktail and then slowly pulled myself vertical. The biology dweebs supposedly whipped the meds up specially for my condition, but I still spent the first twenty minutes of my day in extreme pain as I tried to work some mobility back into the joints.

  Dressing was simple, fashion following function and all that. Leather cleans up the best and short equates to greater freedom of movement when things get dicey. The fact that most guys lose their higher brain functions when skirts shrink past a certain point is just a bonus. Of course then you have to deal with the alpha female sluts who think you're trying to muscle in on their territory, but most of them would think that regardless of what I wore.

  It wasn't strictly cold enough to really justify the black, thigh-length overcoat I chose to match the skirt and top, but it was the only way to hide the 9mm and mags that were the most crucial part of any outfit. Sure I could kill most people just as fast with my bare hands, but sometimes I was up against things that weren't strictly speaking human and guns are still the great equalizer.

  When I left my apartment fifteen minutes later, a casual observer wouldn't have guessed that I was armed; or that the nondescript, black briefcase I was carrying held, among other things, enough money to cause most people to commit all kinds of illegal acts.

  It took less than fifteen minutes to get from my hotel to the university campus. Some people might have taken the ease of my commute as a favorable omen. Of course those are the same people that go in for that faith healing crap.

  The complete lack of stoplights was actually due to the fact that I've got a baby super computer parked just above my right lung. My chip interfaced with the car's electronic suite and hacked whatever it needed to hack in order to give me green lights the entire way.

  It's the same thing police cars do, just better because I can tweak it on the fly. It's also highly illegal, but I haven't worried about little stuff like that since before I defected.

  The Company had actually tried to park the chips inside peoples' heads back in the day, but quickly scrapped the practice. Apparently there's too much that can go wrong when you start using up the volume behind your eyes with things that give off electrical charge. Of course for the computer to do anything truly useful you still have to wire it into quite a bit of that gray matter. Still, the simplest option is to place the bulkier pieces in the relatively accessible chest cavity and then run a line of fiber optics up along your spinal cord.

  It's a dominatrix when it comes to everyday life, but that chip has saved my life more times than I can remember. There are certain benefits to being Company, or Ex-company as it were. It still didn't compensate for the damn pain or the fact that my chip was also busy downloading everything I heard and saw for later review by some pencil-necked geek tasked with making sure I wasn't some kind of double agent.

  Find the doubters. Put them on the path to belief. Trust the honest soul. What is it with messiahs and all of the vague, mysterious guidance? This target happened to have the quaint charm of not knowing he was going to possibly rock the inhabitants of this sorry world. Really though, it wasn't much when weighed against all of the aggravation of having a head case like Croaker send me halfway across the country with nothing more than a few worthless references about turning points and a character description.

  The library was one of those open, spacious units with plenty of natural light. All of which mattered only because it gave me an excuse to leave my sunglasses on.

  Of course I still attracted too much attention. The tall, blond guy by the reference desk was eyeing me within seconds. He probably would have been a problem if not for the girl next to him. They looked like they belonged in some fashion magazine. You know the type, guys with bodies that obviously spent time in the gym, girls with pants all but painted on them, and tops that risked displaying all kinds of assets if the wearer ventured into any kind of vigorous activity.

  Speaking of vigorous activity, she all but grafted herself onto him when he directed a rather winning smile my way. Got to hate it when actual competition arrives on scene and screws up a done deal. She waited until he was distracted with some question or other, and then looked me up and down.

  Stupid slut, I half wanted to backhand her into a wall. Then again I might have missed seeing Owens if I hadn't been returning her glare when he walked between the stacks. It was just a glimpse, but I didn't need to replay the video to be sure. The baby-killing bastard was unmistakable.

  Thanks to my chip and its domineering ways I was up and moving before I'd made a conscious decision to act. Moving a little too fast judging by the expression of the slut. Sometimes it's a damn pain trying to blend in with normal people.

  Owens being here was bad no matter how you looked at it. He claimed to be some kind of partial. The Company Suits had given him his head, so the eggheads must have verified his claim with tests of some sort. He'd mostly spent his time wandering around schools. Every so often some kid would disappear and he'd defend the action by saying they'd have grown up to be a threat.

  Most of the resistance just chalked it up to some kind of sick psychopathic urge to kill children. Despite being on opposite sides, I'd agreed with them for quite a while. Then he'd managed to escape death at my hands again and again over the years since I'd defected.

  He had some kind of ability, I just wasn't positive he could really sense the shape of things to come like he claimed. Then again if he could, it meant that Croaker hadn't sent me into a trap. That Croaker wasn't just a precog like we'd known for years, but that he really was on our side. Not that he was around enough to make him much of an asset, even so. Of course, the more likely scenario revolved around Croaker having finally figured out how to send me eagerly running to my death. I couldn't pass up a chance like this though, so it didn't really matter which it was.

  Owens was still wandering around the stacks, his eyes half closed as he tried to listen to whatever sick voices drove him.

  Firearms were out. Oh, I could kill him and then disappear before any official response put in an appearance, but that would completely screw any chance of finding Croaker's 'fulcrum'. If I couldn't find him now, odds were I'd never have the proof I needed and we'd have missed a major opportunity.

  I guess I'm just a do-things-the-hard-way kind of girl. The little chip in my chest received its instruction set, and flooded my system with adrenaline as the synthetic fiber in my muscles launched me into a sprint. It should have been the most glorious feeling ever. I mean who doesn't want to move faster than a striking snake, the world slowing down to stillness around you? Did I forget to mention it feels like your bones are tearing themselves apart the whole time?

  Synthetic muscle fibers hadn't been easy to invent, even for the company egg heads who'd had unlimited funding for at least the last three centuries, but that was child's play in comparison to skeletal reinforcement.

  In theory they could have put enough artificial muscle inside me to life a bulldozer, but human bones aren't designed for that kind of stress. Instead they'd implanted a few Samson fibers in each of the long muscles in my body, and then run all kinds of tests to establish exactly how much force they could exert. The idea being to set the governors at a level that would stop them from shattering bones and whipping the fragments through my flesh in a gory explosion.

  Owens turned with blinding quickness, pulling out a Glock as I tickled whatever spidey sense had kept him alive for so long. I knocked the handgun away with the briefcase, smiling as the titanium hidden under the black leather transmitted a jolt into his right hand. With any luck I'd fractured a few bones.

  The pain wouldn't stop him from using his hand, not with the level of artificial adrenaline currently flooding his system, but it would mean that in a grappling situation he'd be unable to apply the normal level of bone crushing force our kind usually enjoyed. My hand razors slid out as my smile turned into a
full-fledged grin.

  His counter, a jab to my throat a split second after the gun and briefcase went cartwheeling away from us, was so fast it was all I could do to brush it away to the empty space next to my left ear. Damn he was fast. That was the other thing I'd always hated about Owens. Not only was he a damn potential, he also got mods. Apparently they'd made some upgrades since I'd left, upgrades that meant I was over matched yet again.

  A quick kick towards his knee got deflected by his closer leg, and then I was fully on the defensive. He was just that quick.

  All the crap turned out by Hollywood doesn't even begin to approach what a fight between two superhuman combatants actually looks like. There aren't any strikes to the head for one thing. An attack like that is just asking to have yourself messed up for months while the docs try to put your hand or foot together. Sure you kill the other guy, but with the amount of force applied to the rather delicate bones involved on your side, you generally end up a cripple as a result.

  No thank you. Soft targets are the way to go. The neck, stomach, kidneys, or joints. You still ended up smarting after blowing out your opponent's knee, but at least you tended not to shatter any of your parts in the process.

  Also, there was no endless exchange of blows as first one or the other of us got the upper hand. There would be exactly one more blow landed in this fight, and it would spell death for one of us. Sadly enough, it was starting to look like I'd be on the receiving end.

  Owens' hand and feet licked out with speed that was almost impossible for even me to follow. They'd either found a way to spread the stresses out over more of each anchor point, or strengthen the individual bones. Whatever it was, only the fact that he was down a hand was keeping me in the hunt.

  I slid out of the way of another neck shot, and then saw my chance. As his arm recoiled back to ready position I got my arm up to where I could slide my fingers along it as it moved past. As you may recall my fingers are tipped with half-inch long razorblades.

  That doesn't sound like much to most people, but you'd be amazed at just how many fairly significant veins and arteries there are just half an inch or so from the surface of your skin. I guess there is one exception to that one strike rule. One that oh-so-many of the operatives forget about. If I can bleed you out, then you die even if I never manage to land a really solid blow. I don't put up with half an hour of agony every day for nothing.

  Owens' eyes suddenly got really big. I hadn't managed to open up anything really important, but he was worried now. He launched a flurry of attacks, one of which brushed the outside of my thigh hard enough to leave a very spectacular bruise, and then he let my wonderful razors get just a little too close to the side of his neck and it was all over.

  Even though we'd been fairly quiet as such things go, it would be a lost cause trying to hide the massive pool of blood already spreading out from his corpse.

  So much for finding Croaker's chosen one. Even in the out-of-the-way little corner where I'd ambushed him, it was only a matter of time before someone stumbled upon the body.

  I collected the briefcase and his gun, and then made a quick trip to the bathroom to put my appearance back to rights. Like I said, blood wipes right off of leather.

  I was on my way towards the back entrance when I saw them. Actually I heard them first. My damn ears are only second generation and sometimes they buzz until I reset them, but I can still pick out a single conversation from more than forty feet away.

  At first glance neither of them were really all that remarkable. They were both slender, the taller, dark-haired one slightly more muscled than the blond, but neither of them were in the same class as the wannabe magazine model from earlier. Still, their discussion was something else. It suddenly made the vague hints start to click into place.

  “I'm telling you man, there's nothing out there. Nothing. Science can explain away every phenomenon there is."

  “I'm afraid I have to disagree with you yet again. Science can explain many things, but not all. Otherwise you'd preclude the possibility of miracles. I'm not saying that I believe in the supernatural, far from it in fact, but I think you've established yourself far too firmly in the secular with this particular position."

  I let my hips sway a little more as I changed my course and approached them.

  Whether or not I'd found Croaker's turning point, the world's salvation, still remained to be seen. Either way I was sure in the end they'd accept the bet, and in so doing eventually find themselves in a world that bore little resemblance to the one in which they thought they lived.

  Author's Note:

  "Backlash" was my first attempt to really explore the technology in my 'Serial Story' world. I'd spent a little time developing a bit of an overall story arc, and I'd decided I was going to have super-human operatives, working both for and against The Company, but I hadn't really settled on the form that technology would take.

  At the same time, I'd just finished spending a huge amount of time writing Broken, and was gearing up for Torn. I loved--still love--both of those books, but was in the mood to write something much grittier. I could have, and nearly did, turned to a Dark Reflections piece to fill that need, but I really wanted to branch out, so "Backlash" began to evolve.

  Jerome may be the kind of bit villain that nobody expects to remember after the final page, but he sure was fun to write.

  Sadly, "Backlash" is the final story in Darkness and Light, but before I leave you to the business of reading it I wanted to take just a moment and thank you again for your support. Hopefully if you've made it this far, something in at least one of the stories resonated with you. If you did enjoy one or more of the stories please help spread the word. Forums, reviews-either on the big sites like Amazon and Barnes and Noble or just on your blog, all help. The question of how many of the stories currently rattling around in my head get written in the next few years depends in no small part on my fans and the way in which they spread the word about my writing.

  So once again, thanks-I can't wait to sit down again with everyone so I can tell you what happens next.

  Backlash

  Jerome pulled the clutch in with two fingers of his left hand, and goosed the throttle as he dropped a gear. The gleaming black bullet bike shot forward with a surge as though trying to buck him off. The yellow four-door coupe that'd been loitering in the fast lane disappeared behind him with gratifying speed.

  The assignments from the idiots at Central usually ended up being nothing more than a wild goose chase. Still, the assignments did get him briefly away from the shrinks running observation duty and back onto his bike.

  Of course the knowledge that those same armchair dweebs would be analyzing everything he heard or saw while out on assignment did tend to suck most of the fun out of even his brief moments of freedom.

  The needle on the speedometer crept up towards 110 and Jerome felt a grimace pull at the corners of his mouth as he started to run out of open freeway. Up ahead some idiot cut off a semi, and the physics module in the chip located just behind his right collarbone went into overdrive. The results surged out on scores of fiber optic lines, and he shot towards a transient gap between the semi and a minivan, accelerating all the way.

  His normal, unaided gray matter was screaming that there wasn't enough space to permit the bike safe passage, but at these speeds his chip was ramped up all the way to combat mode, and it hadn't ever been wrong before.

  A split second later the difference in relative velocities of the two vehicles opened up the space just enough to permit a one in a thousand chance of survival. The slipstreams of the two vehicles hammered at him with a fury the bike's windshield wasn't able to fully redirect and then he was clear.

  He was getting soft. Too much time stuck away from the action, too many fruitless missions. There'd been a moment there where he'd felt his muscles starting to tighten up, to fight the synthetic fibers lacing his being.

  Those computer-controlled artificial muscles could've ripped his skel
eton apart, but that tended to be rather hard on the operatives in whom they were installed. Standard procedure was for the eggheads to ensure the governors stepped things down to something that wouldn't over stress normal bones.

  Of course that introduced other complications, like interference from the human host whose genetically wired reflexes didn't understand that survival lay in not jostling the elbow of the cybernetic henchman trying to keep him from being wrapped around the back corner of some soccer mom's urban limo.

  The psycho babblers would take him to task later for having unnecessarily risked an important asset, but they didn't understand. The only way to be sure you could still ride the edge was by testing it. If you didn't test it, then you never knew you'd fallen off until after you found yourself up against a flesh beast some staffer puke had been confident was still weeks away from degeneration.

  Loss to degenerate form containment was the number one explanation given anytime he or one of the others asked after a missing face among their brethren. The potentials were generally much less dangerous when they were still walking around and talking like normal people. Of course even then they weren't really normal members of the monkey family, but at least they usually couldn't rip you in half or freeze you into a block of ice. Once they lost it and gave into the animal inside, all bets were off.

  At least most of them chose to succumb to the hunger rather than the thirst. A slavering monster that could kill two operatives before most people could blink wasn't anyone's idea of something you'd want to bring back to your bed for a little romp and cuddle, but it was far better than some of the alternatives.

  The current target was probably going to go that way eventually. The video they'd downloaded to him had shown a man that was plenty fat even before there'd been any reports of unusual activity. At some point Jason Roberts was going to give into the hunger that'd become his constant companion. Once that happened, someone like Jerome would be called in to help dispose of the corpse.