Awakening

by Hayden Pearton

  *

  “I’m beginning to think that I have the worst luck…” Kingston mumbled, twenty minutes later, as he watched the pack draw near.

  They had somehow managed to find a large vertical slab of granite and had chosen it as the site of their last stand. In theory, with their flank protected they only had to worry about attacks from the front. In reality, the fifty desert lions facing them would devour them soon regardless of tactical advantages. The beasts were arranged in a rough semi-circle, with the leaders of the pack at its apex and the young and weak splayed out on the edges.

  They were large beasts for such an arid desert, and Kingston theorized that they had travelled very far while finding very little to eat. To them, he would seem like a godsend. Maloch, however, was only worth a momentary contemplation before being forgotten. Until the beasts of the world learnt how to chew through armour and digest metal, the re-mechs were safe.

  “Well, unless one of them happened to get on Alza’s bad side… which might just be her only side, come to think about it…”

  A juvenile, red eyes shining in the dusk light, took a step forward. It was thin, the result of weeks of starvation, but there was an unmistakable bloodlust coming off it in palpable waves. Its bone white teeth -far more than seemed necessary- dripped with saliva. “Well, I should take comfort in the fact that at least they think I’m tasty.” His thoughts were muddled by pain and fatigue, and the apparent hopelessness of the situation.

  Suddenly, a pang of pain resounded from his left shoulder. “Was I bitten without even noticing?” Kingston thought, panic and confusion fighting for dominance in his frayed mind. However, glancing down, he saw that a rock had merely fallen and hit his shoulder.

  “Look at me, they haven’t even attacked and I’m already falling to pieces! But still, I wonder what dislodged the rock in the first place…”

  It was then that Kingston glanced up, and immediately regretted it. A pair of crimson eyes stared back at him, full of hatred and hunger. He had been wrong about the slab. It had never been a tactical advantage, and all he had done was block off his own escape route. A heartbeat later, a muzzle full of ragged teeth entered his world, via an opportunistic young lion. It fell faster than he could react, gravity propelling it towards his unprotected neck.

  What happened next took only seconds, but Kingston experienced it in slow motion. The leaping beast made of dirty flesh met a metal fist coming the other way, and the favourite won out. With a crack the juvenile flew backwards, hitting the slab with a sickening thud. It slid down a moment later, trailing blood. When it reached the sand, it did not rise.

  Maloch stepped back without a word, his blood covered fist immediately becoming the focus of attention for forty-nine lions and one old hermit.

  “Local name: Tau. Scientific name: Panthera Leo. Average length: eleven feet. Average weight: four hundred and fifty pounds. Genetic pollutant saturation: four hundred parts per million. Pride size: fifty. Correction. Forty-nine. Habitat: Solas Infernus Badlands and surrounding areas. Carnivorous. Common hunting tactics: Stalk and ambush.”

  “Any way we’re getting out of this alive?” Kingston asked, eyes still drawn to the re-mech’s fist, which was now staining the sand below it a deep crimson.

  “Chance of surviving encounter: One in two hundred thousand. Calculating best course of action... done. Recommend destruction of pride before attack formation is obtained. Accessing possible weapons configuration. Unlocking R.Hand weapon: Sonic Cannon. Charging wave amplifier. Setting power level to forty-five percent to avoid fragmentation. Preparations complete. Fire when ready.”

  As Maloch had been talking, a strange transformation had taken place. His usual four-fingered hand had seemed to collapse in on itself, revealing a gaping, octagonal hole. Two tubes had appeared from an unseen socket, entwining the arm. A greenish fuel began to run through the hoses, leading into Maloch’s reformed wrist. A low hum began to emanate from the within the aperture, a hum that Kingston had hoped he would never hear again.

  However, before Kingston had a chance to see what Maloch would do, the courageous juvenile from before made its move. Apparently seeing its kin killed in an instant had not been enough to overcome its ravenous hunger. But this time Kingston was ready. As the beast leaped he moved, becoming a blur. His Solar Staff snapped into his hands in a move that he had practiced for decades, and its electricity laden end impacted the unfortunate lion just below the neck. Like its kin, it too flew back, landing heavily on the soft sand. It too, did not rise.

  “Forty-eight,” chimed Maloch, who was apparently keeping a grim tally.

  Kingston moved away from the rocky wall, his staff humming through the air as he twirled it around with deadly grace. Appearing from every direction, the beasts converged on their location. Running was not an option. All they could do was stand and fight.

  “Acquiring new targets. Establishing friend or foe parameters. Increasing firing speed to one burst per second. Targets acquired. Firing in three, two, one… zero.”

  Maloch raised his arm in a solemn, almost poetically unconcerned manner. Kingston, having once before seen a similar sight, hurriedly took cover behind a nearby boulder, filled with dreadful anticipation of what would come next. The low hum that he had been hearing grew louder, soon rising above the roar of the now cautious Tau. As the pitch built to a crescendo, the octagonal hole began to rotate with alarming speed. Kingston, fingers in his ears, could barely keep his eyes open. Around them, streams of sand began to fly into the air, contorted by the sudden vacuum created by the weapon. The roar of the cannon filled the world, the air within screaming as it was pressurized beyond belief.

  When it seemed like the intense noise would break his eardrums and shatter the world, it suddenly stopped. A blast of pressurized air and sound exploded outwards from the weapon, travelling faster than the eye could see. A cloud of dust and rock radiated outwards from Maloch, tracing the burst. The tau, as if by magic, disappeared, hurled thirty feet into the air at a frightful, yet non-lethal velocity.

  “Target removed. Forty-seven remain. Acquiring new target. Priming firing sequence... complete. Fire when ready.”

  The rest of the pride had recovered from their surprise, the need to eat trumping their new-found fear. Spreading out to avoid the metal arm which spit death, they leapt. Kingston could feel their rage; their single minded desire to consume him until not even his bones remained. Soaring through the air, confident in their shared ability to devour anything that moved, they could not have chosen worse targets to attack.

  Kingston, in a display of practiced efficiency, caught two out of the air, whilst Maloch's strange cannon roared its savage tune, again, and again, and again. The sound of pain filled the air, as every blast from Maloch removed another tau from the vicinity. Kingston, in the heat of battle, was still able to discern a rising flock of birds taking to wing in the distance, no doubt frightened off by the thunderous noise.

  In a slow, precise fashion, Kingston and Maloch began to push the beasts back. Fighting back to back, any tau that escaped Kingston's humming staff was quickly picked off by Maloch's pin-point shots.

  “Twenty-three.” Maloch had kept count since the first, and every time he spoke was a reminder of the senseless deaths they were causing. The pride had merely chosen the wrong targets, their sense of caution eroded from weeks of starvation. Had things gone differently, no doubt they never would have bothered Kingston.

  “No! You can’t think like that!” thought Kingston, as his now-bloodied staff cracked yet another ribcage. “It’s them or us, and we can’t afford to fall here. Remember how it was during the war? Just let your mind go empty, and let your body focus on doing what needs to be done. No matter how much you’ll hate yourself later…”

  However, they could not go on forever, and Kingston's blows soon began to lessen in ferocity, while the sonic cannon began to fire in irregular patterns, a polar opposite to its former, clock-work manner. Eventually, Kingston w
as down on one knee, breathing heavily while barely keeping the staff up. Maloch was in a better condition, but only just, as his arm had begun to droop and the greenish fuel now flowed at a snail's pace. The tau fared no better, with many of their number unconscious or worse, whilst others had slunk back to lick their wounds. Only one remained before them and, judging from its multitude of scars and strong presence, it was the alpha-male.

  Baring its fearsome teeth it let out a low growl. It took a step towards Kingston, but stopped suddenly. It appeared unsure, and it turned its head to look at its fallen brethren more than once. After several tense seconds, it reached a decision, and barked out a short cry to the rest of the pride.

  While the uninjured tau slunk away into the darkness, the alpha locked eyes with Kingston. Although it could not speak, Kingston somehow knew what it had said, “Retreat. It's not worth it.”

  Before it left, it gave another short growl, this one aimed at Kingston. “Be thankful creature, you have been allowed to live another day,” it said, somehow getting its message across wordlessly. Its message received, it loped off into the night, followed soon after by the wounded who could still walk.

  As soon as the last tau left, Kingston fell to his knees, his elderly frame having surpassed its limits during the fight.