Chemicaust (Mad Element Saga)

by Daniel Moore

desert. His throat was still dry, and he choked on the dusty air but recovered quickly and reinserted the chem-vial. A smile lit his face. The only injury that wouldn’t fully heal was his eye. His sight was permanently damaged. There was a slight blur when he closed his right eye, and his left only saw in black and white, not a single shade of grey. When the two images captured by right and left eyes merged in his mind it created a photo with too much colour saturation, too much contrast. Luke closed his eyes. His sight was one more thing that would take adjusting to, but now all he need do was walk. He needed to find industry, and with it, chem.

  Luke headed north. The compass of his memory was shattered and the decision was based purely on instinct. For the first time in days Luke’s mind wandered from pure survival and focused on a change he had noticed, but ignored earlier. His thoughts were free, and he was free of the voice and the commands which haunted him. He retained the memory of the soldier, but was no longer bound to the army fate. For the first time in Luke’s life the neural control exerted by the corps was gone, and he hadn’t shattered, not like the rat who had attempted his life. That was a shattering, the reversion to animal instinct which his fellow soldier had experienced. It was preached by the army that all of those freed from the neural synapse were shattered, but either this was untrue or Luke was incredibly blessed. It was rare for an individual to gain the title of soldier for the corps and then regain thought-freedom. Luke was a precedent. Time flickered forward again and Luke stepped from the desert into what remained of the woods. It was no longer raining, but the forest was lush and wet. The birds were immediately soothing in contrast with the silence he had left behind; sound was always more calming then silence.

  Luke’s mind fled to thoughts but his pace didn’t slack as he crossed the border between sand and dirt. He was thought-free, but he fled the realization. Especially he fled from choices, understandings of right and wrong. Possibilities assaulted him and freedom was not the haven he had expected, not the blessing he had been lead to believe, by the radicals and by the old ones in the small cities, and by the children who chased him in the streets. Like a rodent under the eyes of a predator, Luke’s mind froze, paralyzed with possibilities, but his body kept moving. The forest stretched on in front of him, the desert a haven behind. His mind was empty and lonely, there was no voice whispering where to go. The surety of action, the clear understanding of the next course that had been assured him as a soldier, was gone.

  It was spring, movement filled the forest, and the sun beat down on what remained of a tattered lieutenant’s uniform. It wasn’t black, or crisp, nor was vibrant and ragged like the street gangs the corps fought to keep down. It was red, bright and clean, and had once been a resplendent dress-shirt and suit-jacket. Now strips of dyed silk hung in tatters and left an already badly burnt back dangerously exposed. The burn brought with it a harsh pain, but Luke’s will held at bay the drive’s compulsion to repair the damaged tissue. Instead water blisters formed and as Luke unthawed his mind and stepped forward bits of skin were torn wetly away by clawing trees.

  Bird-sounds were not all that chased him through the forest, the crunch of his boots on fallen branches, the healthy snap of wood, and in the distance the sorrowful howling of gibbons, each of these contrasted painfully with the silence in Luke’s mind. He got lost in the forest, turned around and disorientated. It was a new experience, and he sat for a moment to clear his thoughts, to understand where the city had gone, where the floating map in his mind had erred. It was a painful recognition, a loss of faculties once taken for granted. When it grew dark again, his bad eye increased the contrast so that barely-flickers of moonlight became bright streaks of sun and everything in the shadows turned solid black. Luke dare not move in the darkness, the forest now a labyrinth, no compass and every direction as likely as the other to lead to civilization.

  As he stand quiet and still, sharpness clawed at Luke. Hunger pains, which Luke understood, but from which the corps had previously protected him. He had felt hunger before, had gone days without nourishment, the corps refusing him time to eat, but he had never understood the feeling of hunger. The pain was easily ignored, all physical pain was easily ignored for a soldier and the pain in his gut was no different, but as he sit with his back against a tree, wet from burst blisters, his red silk dress-pants smeared with healthy black dirt, the hunger spread through him, not as pain, but as an imperative to feed. Always before the imperative had been supressed mechanically, but outside of corps influence his body worked against him and Luke lost the fight to remain still. It felt good to be brought out of contemplation by an imperative. Starvation bore many similarities to corps control – it brooked no resistance and manifested as a desire rather than physical coercion. Hunger was as much a trick of the mind as thought-slavery, and in his despair, his grasping for a purpose that had been robbed of him, Luke rose and began to move.

  Flickering from his hand rose a fire of the same type which had banished the rat. All about him trees were thrown into saturated detail. The first fireball flickered momentarily and then shot off into the woods, singeing branches and leaves where it flew too close. It moved like an insect, though with more purpose and more intelligence. It darted through the overgrowth, out of Luke’s sight, and careened into a grazing doe. There was no physical impact, no momentum behind the fireball, and though startled by the light initially the deer felt no pain, and dashing away, returned to grazing only a few yards further on.

  Luke followed the scent of the fireball, the mental understanding of the fire’s whereabouts. Long before he arrived where the doe had been grazing he saw smoke drift into the air, picked out by the light of an enormous flame. A few seconds after it had returned to grazing the doe had felt a warmth in its chest as of blood pooling in a bruise or hands warmed at a fire. Its eyes widened momentarily, but there was no way of fleeing from the sensation, and the same as hands thrust into fire on a cold night, for a brief second the warmth was golden and appreciated. The nights were cool, and magically the doe had found warmth. Then there was pain and the animal froze. Sprouting from the heart of the creature came fire, flowing through the network of veins like the warmth of blood it pooled in the animals legs, in its arteries, and behind its eyes. The animal’s nerves tingled, the pain subsided and then returned like the lapping of water and still the doe didn’t move. Finally fire erupted from the animal, worming like a snake out of the creatures eyes and bursting from its hide in patches. The smell of burnt fur filled the air and then the doe was completely obscured by flame. When Luke arrived the fire had done its work. The animal would have looked terrified had its eyes remained to dart about in fear, but all that was left after the fire was steaming meat and organs, perfectly cooked through and still clinging to an intact skeleton.

  Hunger sated, and stomach bloated, the deer’s corpse collapsed a few feet away, Luke sat to wait the morning, the darkness wrapped around him comfortably. For the first time in his life, he slept without being willed to do so. When he woke, there was no imperative to make it to the city, no orders and no hunger. He ate anyways, more deer flesh, and conjured a flickering blue flame to remove what remained of the corpse. Bones, organs and grinning, flat, white teeth destroyed. Liberty was still a new sensation, but Luke was better equipped to deal with it now. It certainly wasn’t a necessity, rather it seemed more of a delicacy. Not a luxury, which everyone desires, but a delicacy only appreciated by the few. Decision fell on Luke and he decided to return to the corps. He would submit himself to their punishment.

  Conjuring air currents to support his ascent, Luke leapt with wind beneath him, high above the tops of the trees. After finding the city in the distance he landed gracefully, leaves fleeing his feet as they would the descent of a helicopter’s whirring blades. It wasn’t a long walk, but is seemed that way in the silence, with no crackling radio calls, no neural encouragement, no sound in his mind, only the furious chirruping of birds in the forest. The sun shone strong above him, the scar tissue which s
triped his back wasn’t yet burned and made white stripes across the red and black of tortured skin and dried blood.

  The city was one known to Luke, though the name and the map of these familiar strees so easily conjured before was lost. He still felt comfortable. It only took a moment for his comfort to fade. Half-torn posters littered the streets blowing up against the cast-iron fence which pretended to bar his way. It stood no more than five feet high and hours ago Luke had leapt ten or higher. He should have been able to measure the exact height in his head, but that was lost to him too. The gate was wide enough if opened fully, to admit a single vehicle. The posts were iron half an inch thick and cemented into the ground, rusted and old. A sound kick would have thrown the gate from its hinges, already it hung heavy, but Luke resisted the temptation to flex his muscles.

  Frustrated by the need to restrain himself and attempting a semblance of proper appearance, Luke tore away the defaced upper-half of his uniform as he approached the gate. His boots crunched on stones, let-loose from