by Ethan Cooper
I don’t want to die.
Finding a big rock to hide under seems like a better way of not dying than attacking an eoa, but what other choice do we have?
With the wirewitches hairstalks exposed, most of the people on the beach obey their survival instincts and keep their distance. A few are foolish, or suicidal. 2-85 and PIIX make quick work of them, leaving them broken, face down in the sand. The majority of the people in our way are just trying to move farther away from the eoa, which is lumbering in our direction.
PIIX steps out in front of us. “Is it just me, or does that thing look like it knows we’re here to kill it?”
“It’s not just you,” I say, because I was thinking the same thing.
The eoa roars, its mouth open wide to reveal a web of seaweed entangled between a jumble of broken teeth.
JACK drops my hand. “Stay here. Kill anybody that gets close.”
The coven surges forward.
They’re on the eoa before it has time to pick up speed, 2-85 and PIIX on either side. JACK goes airborne, right over the eoa’s snapping maw, coming down on its back, deftly avoiding numerous bonespikes. Her arms are elongated pikes, poking deep holes into the eoa’s flesh. Fountains of blood spurt from the wounds, baptizing her body in thick brown goo. 2-85 and PIIX work the sides of the beast simultaneously, slashing with bladed limbs that open up long gashes in the eoa’s legs, severing joints with a surgical precision. The eoa’s legs wobble for a moment, its eyes wide in a primal sort of surprise—where’s this pain coming from?—then with the sound of tearing tendons and breaking bones, it crumples to the sand. Immobile, it’s a hollow terror, but the wirewitches pounce like the predators they are. PIIX jumps over the eoa’s sharp, slashing tusks to land on its head. She rears one arm back, a barbed spike forming where her hand would be. There’s a juicy popping sound as she plunges her arm directly into the eoa’s eye and then deeper inward, into its skull. The eoa’s body spasms, almost throwing her off. She pushes backward, extracting her arm out the way it entered. A thin, milky mucous pours out of the eoa’s ruined eye. Dangling from the barb on the end of her arm is a spongy lump of the eoa’s brain. She shakes her arm, flinging the bloody mass away as she steps down from the eoa’s head.
Realizing I’ve been so entranced with the wirewitches and the eoa that I haven’t maintained awareness of my own situation, I do a quick turn, pulse dagger out and ready. I get lucky; nobody’s close.
“How are you?” I ask JACK as the wirewitches return to me. Her hairstalks are quivering. Eoa blood drips from both of her forearms. “Are you hurt?”
She shakes her head. “I’m not hurt, but I’m not fine.”
“You did what you needed to. Thank you.” Taking a deep breath, I turn to 2-85. “And thank you, for saving me earlier.”
His eyes are twin winter storms. “Always.”
PIIX grunts. “We’re going to get killed if we have to stop and thank each other every time we save each other.”
“The technomancers are going to lose the pier,” JACK says, once again grabbing my hand and pulling me with her.
bzzzzzZZZZt!!!!!
I have the presence of mind to deactivate the pulse dagger before I raise my hands to my head. It hurts like before, but there are hands under my armpits, keeping me from getting a face full of sand.
Something is roaring.
No.
(yes)
Oh no.
Turning, pushing the hands on my body away, I jerk my body around until I’m facing the ocean and what’s crawling out of it.
An eoa.
And next to it, another.
All down the shoreline, eoas are emerging from the water. The surf crashes against their hulking forms. Their roars echo up and down the shore in a monstrous chorus. On the other side of the pier, I can see even more.
There are hundreds.
57/One Shall Fall [T-minus 3]
2195.12.30/Morning
“Fucking eoas,” I mutter, mind blazing with static. I fumble for JACK’s hand without looking, clamping down hard when I finally locate it. We turn away from the ocean, moving toward the pier, but back toward the street, where the core of the maelstrom awaits us. Most of the people up there haven’t seen the eoas yet. They don’t know the hell they’re about to experience.
“This may be more than we can handle,” PIIX says, as if she’s actually considering them a potential threat now. “What do we do?”
JACK curses. Her hand is slick in mine. There’s eoa blood lubricating our palms. “We survive until the Rusted Whale is working. No matter what happens, we’re getting Syl on that boat. And if something happens to that boat, then we make sure that, between the four of us, she dies last.”
“Let’s get her back on the boat,” 2-85 says. “She’ll be safer there than out here—even if there are Bleed on board.”
I shake my head. “You don’t understand what those things can do.”
“Maybe not, but I do know what that many eoas are capable of. We can’t defend you from that many.”
“The gangway’s gone.”
JACK squeezes my hand. “Leave that to us. We’re getting back on the boat. The eoas can swim, but they have no way to get on the boat. We’ll take our chances with the Bleed. But, we’re not going that way.”
Our direct path to the end of the pier is blocked by eoas now, so we’ll have to get back up to street level first, the cut over toward the entrance, where the technomancers are making their stand.
We vacate the beach along with the rest of the crowd. The eoas are slow to exit the water, so it’s not difficult to distance ourselves from them. 2-85 and PIIX take the lead, clearing our way of anybody who looks like they’re going to challenge our forward progress. We jog up a set of narrow steps.
There’s a woman standing at the top of the steps, her face painted in a multi-colored spiral. She raises her arm, a pistol aimed right at 2-85. There’s a blur of blue, and the woman’s arm spins away, firing wildly as it goes. 2-85 takes her by the throat, flinging her to one side, her body limp as it lands on the sand below, the now-torn flesh at her shoulder pumping out her life’s blood to the beat of her slowing heart.
We crest the stairs, briefly pausing. I take it all in, from the unguided, violent throng to the shore being invaded by lumbering, tusked beasts, from the skyscrapers burning in the distance to the tendrils of smoke and tumbling ash that hangs in the air, from individual knife fights to the crisscross of energy bolts, from the war cry of a father protecting his family to the gurgling, liquid cough of a child with its throat cut.
The world burns.
I have stepped into hell.
There is no escape.
Looking at the shore—where eoas stretch along the beach as far as I can see—there’s a second wave just beginning to rise from the water.
Hundreds of eoas? No, there could be a thousand.
The wirewitches form a perimeter around me that few are willing to challenge. Part of that could be because more and more of them are seeing the death that’s crawling from the ocean.
The ground is shaking with the eoas’ collective thunder, legs of metal and bone slamming down in a thousand muted explosions.
“This way,” JACK says, moving toward the technomancers, who have given ground—they’re now fighting on the pier itself. “We don’t have much time.”
I don’t say it out loud, but it may already be too late. Underneath the pier, flowing around the massive vertical supports like the ocean itself, the eoas swarm. Even from here, I can see the surface of the pier shudder when an eoa collides with a support.
It’s astounding how quickly they’ve progressed. They’re everywhere, ascending the ramps that lead up to the pier, climbing the steps that connect the beach to the street level.
We’re running toward the technomancers, 2-85 and PIIX churning through the crowd, mostly pushing people aside, reserving their harsher tactics for those that resist. I try to keep my head down, keeping as close as poss
ible, maintaining my course on the path they’re creating. The crowd presses close as we approach the technomancer’s position.
The static persists, but it’s at a tolerable level. There’s no pain, and I can still think.
Above us, three ACCUs hover, the engines on the backs of their armor washing us in wind, heat, and noise.
When one of them begins to speak, it sounds like their voice is coming from everywhere at once. “RETURN TO A STATE OF CALM, CITIZENS OF UTOPIA. MORE CONTROL UNITS ARE ON THEIR WAY. ORDER WILL BE RESTORED MOMENTARILY. THIS AREA HAS BEEN REDESIGNATED AS A UTOPIAN RIOT QUARANTINE PERIMETER.”
“Citizens of Utopia?” JACK asks.
I shove an elbow into the solar plexus of a young male that gets a little too close. He grunts, his eyes wide in surprise before falling back into the crowd. “Both of us are citizens. The Nation of Utopia claims everybody on the planet is a citizen of Utopia.” There’s no reason for me to be explaining this to JACK, but I get a little giddy that I retain knowledge like that when I can’t remember anything about myself.
(except for what the sharpened clown)
(gave you remember?)
“ALL NON-COMPLIANT CITIZENS ARE SUBJECT TO DEPORTATION WITHOUT TRIAL. THESE ACTIONS FALL UNDER ARTICLE FIFTY-SIX, DIRECTIVE TEN. COMPLIANCE WITH CONTROL UNITS IS MANDATORY UNDER PENALTY OF DEPORTATION.”
“Since the entire planet is Utopia, there’s nowhere they can deport people,” I say. “So, they just kill you.”
“They’ll have to wait their turn,” JACK says. “There’s a line.”
“I REPEAT. NON-COMPLIANT CITIZENS WILL BE DEPORTED. THERE IS NO NEED TO PANIC. ORDER WILL BE RESTORED MOMENTARILY.”
I hear a rapid-fire popping. Rockets from the ACCUs burst into the air, trailing white contrails like tangled strands of hair behind them. The rockets rain down, slamming into the top of the pier as well as the supports below. I can feel the explosions before I hear them. They’re deafening, drowning out all other sounds of battle. I can hear the groan of metal under strain, and a break in the crowd allows me to see that a large section of the pier—just behind the technomancers—is missing. That’s not good. The technomancers might be able to navigate a gap that large, but no unenhanced human like myself is going to be able to get across.
Those ACCUs just eliminated our only way onto the Rusted Whale.
“That’s a problem,” I say.
“NON-COMPLIANT CITIZENS. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. PREPARE FOR DEPORTATION.”
That they consider eoas citizens of Utopia tells me a lot about them.
Rockets streak into the herd of eoas in an apocalyptic hail of destruction. The ground shakes like there’s an earthquake. There’s dirt and chunks of eoa flesh in the air. JACK spins, takes me in her arms while 2-85 and PIIX cover us with their bodies, debris falling around us like rain. Filtering through the ringing in my ears, I hear screams and roars and the muted thunks of large eoa bits returning to the earth. There’s a young man right next to us that takes a twirling bonespike though the neck. His body is driven to the ground from the force, his head rolling away.
The ground rumbles again, only this time it’s not explosions.
“The eoas,” JACK says, as we stand, “they’re stampeding.”
The crowd surges around us, and it’s all we can do to stay on our feet.
“We’re not gonna survive long enough for the eoas to kill us if we get trampled by the crowd,” I say.
“Don’t fight the flow,” 2-85 says.
I let my body move where JACK guides me. Even with how short I am, I can see eoas on the street level, their bulky forms rising above the panicked throng.
We dart through a break in the crowd.
“What’s our new plan?” PIIX asks.
“Find a place to stand where we won’t die,” I say, coughing. The air is filled with smoke and dust and the ever present sour stink of my own sweat.
Roars. Really close. Two eoas, rampaging through the crowd, their heads low, coming our way. 2-85 is at my side, hairstalk swinging to slap against my thigh. His eyes are hard and aware, his muscles flexing, the flesh at his arms lengthening into twin spikes. Something catches in my throat, seeing him like that, and there’s a flitterwasp flapping in my stomach.
JACK steps up beside me. “Stay behind us, Syl.”
“We can run,” I say.
(to where angel?)
JACK turns over one shoulder. I catch just a hint of one eyeball peering back at me. “No.”
Then the eoas are on us.
PIIX bolts, stepping past the eoa in front, heading for the one right behind it. JACK shoves me to one side, saving my life because the eoa—its foul smell rich and moist in my nose—passes only half a meter from me. 2-85 side-steps as well. He’s on the other side of the eoa from where JACK and I are. The eoa misses all three of us. That’s when JACK moves—faster than I’ve ever seen her move before. She’s a blue blur. Her bladed arms puncture the eoa in a hundred different places, stitching along its side as it passes, and I know that on the other side, 2-85 is doing the same. The eoa roars, a wide wash of brown goo spurting from its side and legs.
The eoa falters, almost rolling onto its side as it stops and turns in place. JACK and 2-85 are ready, both crouched and tense when something explodes above us, a small shockwave blasting the air around us. I look up to see an ACCU plummeting. Directly toward us. Even with the battle haze, I can see the brilliant red and gold markings on its Triadium armor suit. But the red on the suit is a little too brilliant, and I realize that the ACCU’s armor is glowing, superheated. It’s going to burn a hole in the ground. I dodge to one side, away from the eoa that just passed us. I don’t see it, but the ACCU crashes hard. A roar. Heat. Then the roar stops. I whirl, pulse dagger ready. JACK and 2-85 are still standing, though they’re a lot closer to me now. Smoke—it’s everywhere, billowing just in front of the wirewitches. I peer through the smoke as it clears, and I can see…
…oh…God…oh…
…a mountain of gore. It’s the eoa. And the ACCU is buried in its corpse. The ACCU’s helmet is split down the middle, one half falling away, the other half angry with heat and melting into skin, fusing metal and flesh. I see razor-shaved hair, but soft features. Her face is decaying before me, flowing in rivers from the heat. Is this what it’s like to become a technomancer? Metal melting flesh? She’s twitching, but she’s dead already. Her armor didn’t save her. Skewered on a bonespike when she landed on the eoa. It didn’t penetrate through the front of her chest armor, but it’s pressing upward against the underside of her chest plate. One armored arm is severed—embedded in the eoa’s head, poking through that massive neck and then out through one of its eye sockets. The eoa is expelling blood in a thick, bubbling fountain. Together, the ACCU and the eoa are a composite sculpture, cast in blood and heat. The ACCU’s red and gold armor juts from the eoa—a bleeding, mountainous lump split like a moist nightfly egg. I turn away.
“There are a million ways to die on this island,” I say. “I didn’t know that was one of them.”
I hear three swishes—swish swish swish—and I know that three projectiles just missed my head.
“Keep your head down!” 2-85 says, pushing me to my knees, then he’s off, charging the ACCU that just landed next to their fallen comrade.
PIIX returns, her body speckled with blood. A quick glance confirms that she took care of the other eoa by herself. It’s over there thrashing on the ground, blood coming out of it in great big pulses.
I don’t see the ACCU that almost killed me anymore, but when 2-85 rejoins us, his hairstalk has been dipped in red. His eyes are still. His hairstalk sways.
A quick survey confirms that the eoas have consumed this area, devastating anything in their path. Even as ACCUs in the air thin their numbers, there are simply too many to control with the few ACCUs on the field of battle.
The pandemonium around us ebbs and flows. A brief opening in the chaos reveals a lone technomancer facing off against four eoas. T
he technomancer is 7 and cradled in the arm that isn’t a cannon is a young girl. Her head is tucked tight into 7’s body. I don’t see the other technomancers, so I can only assume that their original plan went much like ours did.
Overhead, I see metal wings gleaming in the fires of battle. Aran, pulsing and crackling with that energy—that white blue aura—soars in an arc. Countless ACCU’s pursuing, each one disturbing the air with the whine of their armor through smoke-darkened air, hurling death at his winged form.
He was powerful enough to create a mountain of dirt from the ground, can’t he just do something like that again?
Above, ACCU’s plummet from the sky, their armored bodies engulfed in flames, falling into the crowd, exploding on impact, their hulking forms ripped apart. Screams resound. Aran soars, alone in the sky. For a moment.
Down here, 7 has felled two of the eoas, but he’s missing his pulse cannon arm. One of the remaining eoas holds it in its horrible mouth, shaking its head, a frenzied attempt to dislodge it from between its teeth. The child is still alive in the crook of 7’s arm, but it’s crying and holding its head to one side, as if moving it the other way would hurt.
A child in peril. An ache from within shoots a bolt at my heart. Body is telling me I need to somehow put myself between the danger and child. An irrational thought. Suicidal even. But it’s there—an unfamiliar instinct—and it’s strong. Thoughts stray to the life within my belly.
Explosions spew debris, cratering the already scorched earth around us, pulling my mind back to my own peril.
Over there, up above the pier, Aran is once again surrounded by flying ACCUs. His body flares like a supernova of blue, an energy wave expanding in a sphere. All ACCU’s within close proximity go end over end into the ocean.
BLINK.
Bio-mechanical children with long, drooping antennae sprouting from their foreheads, secreting slime in their wake, chase after a wounded, limping eoa. Gooblyns.