by Jadah McCoy
He turns to me, lips thin beneath the cover of his hood. He reaches a hand out. “Are you all right?”
I jump up, ignoring his hand. “I’m fine.”
Serge is at my side in a heartbeat. “Syl, are you…?”
“I said I’m fine!”
Around us, the craziness hasn’t ceased; it’s multiplied. All the humans… they’re out of the cage and swarming the masks, though it takes five of them to equal the strength of one of the androids.
I hear a familiar noise. Click, click, click, click. I know that sound. It’s the sound of phaser cannons warming up.
“No!” I leap from the stage.
But it’s too late. The plasma shot scatters a group of humans who scream in pain. The mask gets up, no worse for the wear, and begins unloading on all of them. The sounds of fear fill the area, along with the smell of singed flesh as the shots hit the humans. Blood splatters, covering everything in a gory film.
Around the corner and in the distance, flashing lights alert us to the presence of more masks heading our way, ready to do some recon and restore order if I had to guess. Some humans escape. Some aren’t so lucky. I wish there were something, anything, I could do to help them. But no way could we help them without killing ourselves first… or worse, being captured.
We have to get out of here. If we want to survive, we have to leave them.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Lucca walking toward us. He’s not injured at all but is covered in blood from head to toe. Dripping. I am relieved to see that my lifelong friend has survived, but I can’t say I’m elated to be around him again. I can’t stop thinking about how easy, how natural, the idea of killing me was for him. Like he’d been thinking about it for a while. Waiting.
“Come on!” Serge calls to him.
He walks toward us with purpose, dodging plasma blasts. I cover my mouth in horror when he uses another human as a shield against the rain of plasma. Something in his face, in the grit of his bared teeth and the darkness of his eyes, makes unease bubble in the pit of my belly.
He’s a dozen feet away from us when suddenly a figure rises from the ground behind him, its body torn, its face mangled somehow by the attacking humans. The entire jaw is skinless, its metal skeleton shining metallic.
“Lucca!” I cry out, posturing myself to run toward him.
He turns around to glance behind him. Seeing the android, he tenses. But then the blade in the android’s hand enters one side of Lucca’s soft, fleshy throat, off-center due to his movement, and bursts out the other. One clean swipe partially decapitates Lucca.
His head hangs, flopping to one side and revealing the red meat of his jugular. Blood spurts out, but it blends in with the gore already covering his body.
He turns around and collapses, his knees giving out and his whole body twitching with each spurt of blood from his carotid.
It takes a moment for me to realize I’m screaming. The sound is so full of terror that I think it couldn’t possibly be coming from me. It barely registers that Serge is beside me, the same sound of loss and horror leaving his throat.
It’s one thing when an animal, a Cull, kills something, someone, and eats them. That’s instinct, that’s design. But to see a head chopped off, the head of a friend… That’s murder—cold blood.
Sickness wells up in my throat, and faintness fogs my brain, but I push them away. We have to get out. There’s no time for weakness.
Someone turns my face, blocks my view. I expect to see Serge in front of me, but it’s not him.
“Don’t look at that,” Bastion says.
His eyes fill my view, and all I see is electric blue. I want to dive into them, like falling into water. Leave this place and all of this behind. My vision is fading again. Thick cotton steals all sound. My lungs are stones.
No time for weakness.
And then we are running, running through people who are running, too. I bump into them, flailing as I try to keep hold of Serge and Bastion. The world is a blur of sharp colors and sounds, and they swirl around me at dizzying speeds.
After a timeless eternity of running, doors slam behind me, followed by the click of a lock. In the back of my mind, I realize we are back at Michelo’s. There are voices around me, but I can’t…
There’s a thump as Serge collapses against the floor. “Lucca,” he cries. “Lucca.”
My stomach is on fire, and my desperate gasps for breath echo in my ears. My knees give out, and I hit the hardwood floor. I claw at it, digging for oxygen, for relief from the pain, for something, anything… I don’t know.
I hear my name. Hands touch me, and they’re so cool against the burning heat.
Fire in my stomach climbs up my throat, licking the back of my mouth until it bursts forth in a never-ending fountain of red. It tastes like acid; it tastes like death. It reminds me of the bitter smell of melting flesh ready to be sucked up through a proboscis.
Finally, my stomach stops clenching, and I collapse in the puddle of red fluid. Darkness takes me, and I can’t quiet the part of me that hopes this will be the last time.
Syl
t’s not.
I wake up on a makeshift bed comprised of the reception counter and a few blankets. My throat is sore like I’ve been swallowing glass for fun, and when I reach up, my hair is matted and stained red. I wipe dried flakes of the stuff off my chin as I sit up. The blood rushes to my head, and I wobble.
“Sylvia.”
“Serge.” I reach for him, and he’s by my side in an instant, grasping my hand.
“Are you…” He doesn’t finish the question, probably remembering how I yelled the last time he asked it.
“I’m fine.” A white lie.
I am not fine. I am the furthest thing from fine. It’s beginning to sink in that whatever they did to me back in that facility… it’s changing me.
Bastion and Michelo are also in the room, Michelo sitting and Bastion leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. Heaviness in their faces thwarts their attempt to look casually stoic.
The spot where I collapsed is corroded and stained deep red, the surface where my bodily fluids sat eaten away. Machines and trinkets litter the ground around my makeshift bed—like someone took an arm and swiped everything off.
“I’m sorry… about the mess.” I address Michelo. I’m apologizing not only for the scattered objects, but also for my presence in his life. He didn’t ask for this, for me to barrel in and destroy everything like a natural disaster, but he was kind enough to put up with it.
He looks at me and opens his mouth.
“Don’t apologize to that machine.” The amount of hatred dripping from Serge’s words catches me off guard. “Our friend is dead now because of them.”
Lucca. He’s dead. It doesn’t seem real.
“He saved my life.” I glance at Serge. “Him and Bastion.”
Serge snorts, a sneer turning him ugly. “I saved your life.”
I think back to that day, so long ago, lifetimes ago, when he saved me from having my face split open by a Cull pincer.
My brows scrunch together. “And I saved yours. Do you really want to compare life debts? Is this the conversation you want to have right now?”
Serge pinches the bridge of his nose. “No. I’m sorry, Sylvia. I…”
I roll my eyes at his use of my full name.
I push myself off the counter, testing my footing. It’s not good—my legs shake beneath me. Instead of letting them buckle, I slide down the side of the counter, then rest my head against it. My body is exhausted, but my mind is racing.
I catch Bastion’s stare from across the room. His gaze is almost intimidating. He clears his throat and looks away. There’s nothing in his mechanical throat, though. Strange how they imitate human habits so well.
“Where do we even begin?” Serge rubs his hand across his face, scratching the scruff at his jaw.
I let my eyes close. “My thoughts exactly.”
“Let’s start with
you,” Serge says. I open my eyes, and his intense gaze fixes on me. “Since all of this started with you.”
Accusation resonates in his voice, but I choose not to acknowledge it. There are more important things than his hurt feelings. That’s a fight for another day.
I think back to the last time I was in the Sanctuary. I will never be with you. Those were the last words I spoke to Serge before I was taken. The look in his eyes… Oh, that I could go back and right those wrongs.
But I can’t. This is my reality now. My path was chosen the moment I crawled out of the sewer that night.
“After I left the Sanctuary, there was a woman… There was nothing I could do. The Cull got to her. Her legs were melted to nothing.”
“Cull?” Bastion interrupts.
Serge gives him a hate-filled glare. “Yes, Cull. What you asshole robots did to us a hundred years ago.”
Bastion cocks a brow, an amused smirk forming on his face.
Serge bristles at his amusement, his nonchalance.
“Serge, please.” I turn to Bastion. “Our city, Elite, is infested with… bugs. The Cull. They were people, but they’ve been genetically altered. So they turned into… something else. Something not human.”
Bastion’s sculpted brows furrow together. He exchanges a quick glance with Michelo. A look of calculation crosses his face, but he doesn’t ask any more questions.
“She died,” I continue. Sarah. Her name was Sarah. “But she had a kid brother with her. David. He ran. I couldn’t just leave him out there all night. He’s just a kid. So I went after him, but by the time I caught up with him, the sun had set. We were heading back to the Sanctuary, but…”
On the outskirts of my memory, I recall the Super-Cull. I remember the jagged teeth and fetid breath washing over me, the sharp, sentient eyes, the wind from its strong wings blowing the hair around my face. Its presence right on my heels, the air burning in my lungs. One more moment and it would…
I release a shaky breath.
“There was something else… out there. It wasn’t a Cull.”
I meet Serge’s eyes, and they shine with wariness. The two androids watch me, engaged, silent, and still.
“The Cull are dangerous because you don’t see them until it’s too late. But they’re slow. If you know where they are, they can be avoided. But this thing, it was like a Super-Cull. It flew. It chased us. We hid in an aqueduct, and then there were these guys with masks, like those androids at the meat market.”
I gesture to Bastion, who nods. Remembering the too-happy, blank-eyed masks brings a shiver to my spine.
“Yes,” he says. “Those are the PICs—the Persons in Charge.”
“I heard you screaming,” Serge says under his breath, so quietly I’m not sure if he meant for me to hear. His stare is empty, distant. “You were screaming my name, and all the bugs were screaming it too.”
I nod, goosebumps crawling up my arms at the memory.
“Somehow the androids knew where David and I were hiding. They threw something in the water, and it electrocuted us, knocked David out cold. But I was awake. I saw them up close.”
“There were signs of struggle by the aquaduct. The mud was all kicked up,” Serge says. “Lucca and I were able to follow their tracks to the wall outside.”
I’m quiet for a moment, recounting everything, before he looks at me and carefully asks, “And what happened after that?”
The unanswered question hangs in the air, the weight of it pressing down on me. Three sets of eyes wait for my answer. How can I put into words what was done to me, what happened to my body? I could lie. Say I don’t remember. Never have been a good liar, though.
“I…”
Sickness burbles again in the pit of my stomach, but I push the sensation away. My heart beats quickly. It’s just a memory. It can’t hurt me. I breathe out through my nose and let the words tumble from my mouth.
“I woke up in a sterile room. And there was… something there. An android, a human, I don’t know. He had skin and bones and wires, too. And his voice…” The hairs on my arms rise. “There was a nameplate in his chest. It said Surgeon General. I was strapped into a chair, and then there was a needle. Mido… Mido-something in it.”
I remember my cut-open abdomen, all the organs inside shiny and wet and undulating with life. The way he hunched over me, spine attached to the ceiling. The tiny electric sounds of his mechanical eye, always watching. My stomach clenches.
“Syl,” Serge urges. “It’s okay.”
I hate the sting building behind my eyes. I hate it.
“He cut me open. All the way. From collarbone to hips.” I touch the middle of my body where there is already scarring thanks to the solution that was in that tube. “I don’t know what he did inside me, but… I feel it.”
Serge’s round eyes shine, and his hands shake at his sides.
“Serge, you saw them, you saw the tubes in that room.”
“I don’t know what I saw in that room,” he says, shaking his head.
“Those people were experiments.” I press a hand against my chest. “I am an experiment.”
“But you’re here right now. You’re okay! There’s got to be something we can do to take it out, reverse it?”
“With what tools? With what help, what resources?” Desolation drowns me.
He splays his arms out, turning and gesturing to our surroundings. “Look where we are! If we can’t find the answer here, then there isn’t an answer to be found.”
I shake my head. I’m tired of talking, tired of being. “Serge…”
“There has to be something!”
“There is nothing!” I ball my fist and hit the floor beside me. “I am going to die!”
Silence rings as the words seep in. Slowly, the Sylvia he knows will waste away and give way to the Cull within. I don’t know how to fix this, how to even begin fixing it.
“I am dying,” I whisper. There’s something freeing about saying the words aloud.
“So you’re going to give up, just like that?” He looks at me. I hate the disappointment in his gaze.
I rub my temples. “What else do you want me to do, Serge?”
“Fight, dammit! The Syl I know wouldn’t just give up.”
“Fuck you. What do you know about me?”
I stand, my legs still shaking beneath me. I step over the items splayed across the ground as I limp into the back room. There’s so much I want to ask him, ask Michelo and Bastion, but I’m tired and angry. Nothing but arguments will come from it.
“What do I know about you?” He stands, grabbing one of the items on the floor and lobbing it in my direction. It hits the wall behind me and shatters. “I know you always run away when things get tough. Every single time.”
I leave him at the mercy of the two androids he already hates so much, but the truth behind his words stings.
Bastion
ell, would you look at the spot of trouble we’re in now,” Michelo grumbles. “That’s not a stray cat you’ve brought home. That’s a ticking time bomb, Bastion!”
I sigh and rub my forehead, both of these actions preprogrammed responses to stress stimuli.
We’re deep below the building in a bunker Michelo built for safety, storage of supplies, artifacts… other things.
“You’ve sheltered Organics before, Michelo. Why are these ones different?” I ask him.
That bed downstairs is not just for times when Michelo needs to power down for a few hours, or when I need to lay low for a while after yet another Glitch killing. Michelo is not only a collector of all things twenty-second century, but part of a small faction of androids who smuggle Organics out of the city.
And that breeder from the meat market who bought the strangely colored Organic, he’s someone I know well. What must have appeared to Syl as a most inhumane act in fact saved that girl’s life. The things they would do, the tests they would run on such a unique-looking creature…
I’ve seen Michelo’s heart
bleed many a time over which Organics stay and which Organics go, for he can’t afford to cast himself in a light of suspicion due to smuggling out too many.
“Have you so quickly forgotten, boy, the way their world ended almost a century ago?” Michelo makes his way through the piles of metal and scrap he’s collected over the last one hundred years—the last remnants of an Organic culture burned away by war.
No, I will never forget that. The tat-tat-tat of automatic guns firing. The explosion of landmines followed by the bloodless cascade of mechanical body parts. The way the whole world seemed to be set ablaze, casting a red glow on everything.
“They fought back the only way they knew how,” Michelo says, “and that was their downfall.”
A plastic square sits on a table in the center of the room. He presses a switch and the wall adjacent to the square lights up. He presses another button, and an image fills the rectangle of light.
It depicts a man standing on a tank with a flag in one hand and a gun in the other.
“Guns. Tanks. Bombs.” Michelo presses the button again. This time a blurry image of a test tube fills the wall. Within the tube is… something not human, as best described by Syl earlier.
My brow furrows at the image, and I look to Michelo. I’ve heard of the Cull before, as well as the malady that creates them.
“We were told that disease took them, but that’s not true.” Michelo plays with the remote in his hand, glancing down at the floor. “Their death was designed—by us.”
He presses the button yet again, and another picture lights the wall. This time it’s an android scientist, dressed in a lab coat and only discernable from an Organic by the information port on the back of her neck, tucked away beneath her red hair. She stands across from a creature, definitely not human this time, separated by a clear wall. It looks like a gigantic bug with a human head.
It is nothing short of horrifying.
Michelo turns off the plastic square, and the wall returns to darkness.
“The Culling,” he says. “The Cull.”