Apocalypstick

by Gregory Carrico

  Ignoring her, I scanned the streets and buildings around us for more thoughts. She must have been there to find the humans, too. If we could find them quickly, we stood a chance at reaching a safer spot out in the country. The only thoughts I found were hers, though, and oddly, they were rather buoyant. Happy, even.

  “Lots of big ones out today,” she continued casually. “Sure are different than they were at first. What was your first like?” Her accent was strong, but pleasant. Probably Texas. Her S’s were soft, and her ‘first’ sounded like ‘firsht’.

  I didn’t answer. I needed to know more about her if I was going to fight at her side again. I attuned to her mind and listened to her thoughts. She had some gall, being happy in this paved graveyard. If she had lost it, and was trying to get killed, she should have done it quietly, so I didn’t have to come try to save her.

  Nothing in her surface thoughts explained what she was doing, or why she was so happy. She wasn’t trying to get killed, though; this was just a normal day for her. When she fought, she went full bore. She was an all-or-nothing sort of person, which meant short-lived for an exterminator. How she had survived this long with that philosophy was a complete mystery, and probably nothing short of a miracle.

  “Well?” she asked. She stood up and faced me, and my heart stopped.

  For a second, wavy blonde hair framed her pretty face, tears poured from her soft, brown eyes, and her curious gaze morphed into a tortured, accusing glare. I blinked, and her bald, tattooed scalp returned. Her cheeks were dry, and a half smile twisted her thin lips. My heart beat again.

  “Looked like a dog,” I lied, trying to recover from the shock of my hallucination. Why was she asking about my first? It was hard enough to keep going on without being reminded of that day. It should have been the best day of my life, but now I wanted nothing more than to forget it ever happened.

  It was my last day of high school; the day I finally kissed Tiffany Hudson. My grandfather had promised to give me his 1970 Shelby Mustang, the 350, for getting a full scholarship to his alma mater. It was the perfect start to a new life.

  But life didn’t agree with my plans. I never drove that mustang, never went to college, and never saw Tiffany Hudson again, not in person, anyway. That was the day I started killing. Xipe called us exterminators, but whatever word you wanted to use, it all amounted to the same thing.

  “It would have killed me if Xipe hadn’t been there,” I added softly, still caught between the memory of that day and the present. My ears still rang from blocking so many offspring, but it was fading with rest.

  “Xipe?” she asked incredulously. It sounded like ‘sheep hay’ in her drawl. Close enough. “Yeah, right,” she continued. “I’m already impressed, pal, you don’t have to drop names.”

  I didn’t blame her for not believing me, but I didn’t care either way. I wanted to find the humans and get out of the city while I still had a chance, but a chill crawling up my spine told me that our rest was over. Another quick scan for thoughts found only the lustful, hungry hatred of another offspring.

  “There’s a big one coming. Over there,” I said, pointing at the shattered post office. “What were you thinking, coming to a city? Anyone who’s lived this long should know better, especially one of us.”

  She didn’t answer. We watched, waiting for the beast to show itself. It knew we were there, of course; I could feel its tendrils of mental energy snaking into my head. The sensation of one of these monsters slipping into my mind was vile, but I didn’t want to block it until it was closer. I wanted it to think I was just another hunk of human meat.

  It walked out of the alley by the post office, and strolled towards us. It was a big one. The new girl gripped her spear and braced to fight.

  “Funny,” she said with a short laugh. “I got a camel.”

  “Clydesdale,” I said. “Where’d you ever see a camel?” I added with a slightly mocking chuckle. The offspring used our memories to make us think they were something else; usually a harmless animal that we remembered fondly. It gave them enough time to close in and kill with surprise.

  “I’ve been places,” she said defensively. “I’ll kill this one, if you don’t mind.” It sounded like a brave offer, but in truth it was an acknowledgement that she was already too weak to block. She had finished off half a dozen offspring before I arrived, and was now too exhausted to do more than kill. Using that much power so quickly would have been a beacon to the offspring, just as it had been to me.

  “I mind,” I said, anger starting to boil back to the surface. “If you’re already this wiped out, you’ll only be in my way. There are humans nearby. Go see if you can find them while I keep it distracted, but stay in sight. We’ll have to get out of here soon if we want to live, and it gets dark early here.”

  I didn’t need to read her thoughts to know she thought I was an ass, her expression said it very clearly. Even so, she knew I was right. She jogged to the subway tunnel across the street, and knelt in the shadows of the descending stairs.

  The offspring picked up its pace and trotted towards me, ignoring the girl. Its mental energy strengthened, building for the crippling blast it would deliver when it got a few paces closer. Ignoring my ringing ears, I slammed a razor thin wall of energy between us, severing its links to my mind. The illusory Clydesdale skin vanished, revealing the beast’s true, horrifying form as it lunged to attack.

  Thick, corded muscles bulged beneath vibrant blue skin on a body that looked part gorilla, and part bulldog. Its short, but powerful hind legs and longer, thicker forelimbs faded to yellow hands and feet with wicked blue claws.

  Fleshy knobs resembling ears, a nose, and lips dangled grotesquely from its chin, with empty eye sockets on either side; a vulgar remnant of its heritage. Where a face should have been, twisted bony ridges, resembling an exposed brain, sparked with alien power.

  At fifteen paces, the brainy ridges shivered, and it blasted me with a wave of mental energy. No doubt, this attack would have been sufficient to stun or incapacitate other victims, but its only effect on me was more ringing in my ears as it shattered against my wall. It attacked twice more with its mind before closing in to use its claws. My ears rang, my head throbbed, and a little more of my strength had been sapped by each attack.

  It leapt high into the air to attack with the shark-like jaws in its chest. If it got lucky, or if I messed up, it could bite me in half. Fortunately, offspring were nothing, if not predictable: get close with an illusion, stun with a mental attack, and then eat the defenseless prey.

  I ducked beneath it, knife humming as I slashed, and rolled back to my feet. Black and blue sludge oozed from its wounded belly as it spun around to face me again. I silently thanked Xipe for the knife. It generated a frequency that disrupted the offspring’s nanites and kept them from regenerating. More importantly, it let me kill without using more of my own power than was absolutely necessary.

  Instead, I used a tiny bit of power to boost my speed and reaction time. I slashed again as it lunged, barely avoiding its claws. Predictability didn’t make them less dangerous. My own nanites could repair most wounds with enough time and heat, but a strong hit from those claws or teeth might do too much damage too quickly for me to survive. The new girl must have been worried about this, too, since she was running towards me with a lit propane torch.

  By the time she reached me, I had landed a few more stabs and slashes, and the fight was over. The offspring had collapsed into a pool of sludgy flesh and goo.

  “You ok?” she asked, offering the torch.

  “Thanks, but I can’t do that anymore,” I replied.

  “Oh,” she replied. Her expression went from concern to sorrow, and she looked at her feet. “I’m so sorry.”

  Since the nanites used thermal energy to replicate, we could burn a bad wound to kick them into overdrive. The damaged living tissue would be scorched away, painfully, I might add, and replaced with nanites. When the nanites reached a certain percentage of o
ur mass, they would require more heat than our living tissue could produce, and… game over. I was somewhere very near that critical ratio, and didn’t want to push it.

  “How many is that, now?” she asked, looking at the carnage around us.

  “Can’t tell,” I said. The gelatinous corpses from our previous battle had pooled together, making it impossible to count how many we had killed. I had kept count, of course, but Xipe used to say that it didn’t matter how many we killed, only how many were left. He was right, and there could be anywhere from a thousand to a million just in Manhattan.

  “I’ve never seen anyone move like you. It was like you were in three places at once; stabbing, slashing, and parrying all at the same time. Who are you?”

  “All the speed in the world doesn’t matter if there are too many enemies to track in a fight. One hit from the one you didn’t see is all it takes. That one was stronger than most offspring I’ve fought, but that’s why I stay out of cities, and that’s why we need get out of this one. Did you find the humans?”

  “I didn’t look for them. I was watching you,” she replied. “I’m Diane. I’m real glad you showed up when you did.” She stuck her arm out to shake my hand.

  “Crane,” I said, reluctantly. I pretended to clean my knife, though it was already spotless. Nanites slid off of its blade like water off a hot skillet.

  “Crane?” she repeated. She stared at me with Tiffany’s eyes again, weighing what she had seen, and deciding whether or not to believe me. “As in… Crane? Did you pick his name out of respect, or to try and pass as him?”

  I guessed she made up her mind. “I took the name my parents gave me,” I said with an unblinking stare. I forcefully turned my thoughts away from my family.

  “Huh. I’ve been fighting side by side with a legend. Wait ‘til my friends find out.”

  Her sarcasm took me off guard, and I almost laughed aloud, but this was no time or place to let my guard down.

  “Look, we need to find the humans and get them back to wherever they’ve been hiding. If we stay here we’ll bring hell down on this place, then you can die side by side with the legend.”

  She stared at me again, reconsidering. She wanted to ask if it was true. I could hear her thoughts as easily I could her words. She desperately wanted to believe it.

  “Is it true?” It was almost a whisper. She was scared to believe. “They say Xipe knew how to stop it. I never really thought he was real. If he was, or is real, and he did know how to kill them all, he would have done it, right? If you are really Crane, then you know Xipe. Are you really him?”

  “In the flesh,” I said. I didn’t want to have this discussion with her, but her eyes held such hope and desperation that I had to answer her.

  “Speaking of flesh…” she began. She pointed down the deserted street behind me towards a single man walking casually towards us. “Maybe it’s human.”

  I could tell right away that it wasn’t. Its mind was so incredibly powerful that I could sense it without trying, even from this distance. I had faced hosts before, and they were deadly. Where an offspring relied on claws and teeth to kill before consuming its victim’s flesh, a host leached away its victim’s memories, emotions, and thoughts. Before you even knew what was happening, you were an extra in a George Romero film.

  “Let’s get out of sight,” she said. “Please? I hate killing these things. It’s just so sad. I don’t understand how some of us become like you and me, while others end up like… like that. I can barely recall what it was like when we were all just people.”

  “That thing is not just people anymore, and it won’t ever be a person again. We are exterminators, and it needs to die. Now, put your blocks up, and let’s get it before it gets us.”

  “You were human, once, Crane. There are people in this city; scientists and doctors, and they’re close to a cure. I don’t want to kill the hosts if there is a chance we can save them.”

  “Then let me ease your mind. They can’t be saved. Their minds are alien, their souls are shredded, and their humanity is gone. There’s no coming back from that. Death is the last dignity we can give them.”

  “What about us? What are we, then?” She was on the verge of a moral crisis, and was silently pleading with me to tell her there was still hope. There was, but not in the way she wanted to hear.

  “We are the only ones who can do it. We kill them: hosts, offspring, husks, all of them. You are a killer, Diane. Get used to it. You are the first exterminator I’ve seen in six months. We are losing this fight because we forget what we are, and that’s when we die. I know you are looking for hope. Well, look in the mirror. If there is any hope left for humanity, we are it.”

  She bowed her head. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She needed someone to lean on, but for people like us, there was no one. We had only ourselves. The host was about a block away, and the hoard of husks that followed it was coming out of the buildings and alleys. Offspring started showing up, too.

  “Time to go,” I said. I grabbed her arm and pulled her into the subway tunnel. “I sense two humans in here. Be careful.”

  “I know, Crane. They are sentries. There’s an entrance to the prison from the sewers, about two blocks from here. That’s where the humans are hiding. It’s fortified, and there are other exterminators defending it. We have doctors, Crane, and… and a baby. Two hundred fourteen of us live here. No, two fifteen, now.”

  “A baby? You have uninfected humans? How many?”

  I didn’t wait for her answer. Offspring were what happened when infected humans had babies. It was no wonder there were so many of them here. Instead of scanning her thoughts, I delved into her memories and saw everything. Even though they were all infected, every able woman among them was pregnant or trying to get that way. The doctors and scientists carefully monitored every stage of the process.

  They had solar and wind power plants on the roof, and diesel generators for backup, while the fuel lasted. They were still surviving on salvaged food, and with careful rationing, could eat for another eight months.

  I was disturbed by what they were doing here, but with dozens of baddies closing in around us, the time for discussion was over. With our minds connected by my delve, she knew that I was in her head. It wasn’t likely that she could use the connection as I did, but we certainly knew each other’s surface thoughts.

  We can’t stay together, I thought. Just like we can sense them in greater numbers, they can sense us; together we are a magnet. I’ll lead them away while you get the humans back to safety.

  I was already running before I finished the thought.

  Crane, no! Come with me. We will be safe at the prison, she thought.

  I dropped the delve, and burned some power to cover more ground. Each stride became a soaring leap, carrying me ten paces or more. It worked, too. I was like a rabbit in the open, running from a pack of wolves. I put up my blocks to keep the host out of my head, and kept going towards the river.

  Six offspring loped down the street after me, all about the size of great danes. I looked up and saw three more leaping from rooftop to rooftop, easily keeping pace with me. I stopped a block from the river, and waited in the middle of the street to make my stand.

  The host was still several blocks away, but it would start its assault on my mental barriers soon. More husks appeared from doorways and around corners, some shambling, others running towards me. The offspring ate or trampled any that got in their way. They reached me first.

  I could have picked them off from a distance, but I let them get closer to conserve my strength. As came into striking distance, I hit each of them with a quick jab of mental energy, disrupting their brains and dropping them like sacks of meat.

  I used a lot more energy to kill them this way, and it was like a beacon to any mutant that didn’t already know I was there. By the time the first wave of offspring reached me, twice as many were on their way. I just needed to keep them busy until Diane could get her humans to saf
ety.

  I slashed with Xipe’s sonic knife as the beasts attacked. I was already completely deafened by the ringing in my ears from their mind blasts, and the stabbing pain of each wave sapped my strength and distracted me. I would be able to hold out for a while, but it was starting to look like Diane had gotten me killed after all.

  I pushed more power into the knife, killing an offspring with each blow, but it wasn’t enough.

  They were all around me now, and the first wave of husks was getting close. An offspring dropped from above, and almost landed on me. I barely got out of its way, and melted it with a single slash. It was getting a bit snug, even in the middle of the street.

  I wanted to have more of them closer before I threw my nuke, as I thought of it, but three offspring were rushing me together. I knelt down on a knee, harnessing all of the power I could muster. When they were almost on top of me, I pushed a burst of energy away from me in a rolling ring. For two blocks, every one of them fell into a pool of blue sludge.

  It left me with almost no power, but hopefully, it bought me enough time to recover and get away. My hearing was completely useless, and even my vision had blurred from the mental exertion. I focused on the vibrations of Xipe’s knife, and did a quick meditation exercise to focus my mind.

  Instead of relying on my faulty senses, I scanned for thoughts. I was just in time to dodge an offspring that had been on a rooftop above the radius of my burst. It landed next to me, showering me with chunks of shattered pavement. The one I didn’t notice landed on my right calf.

  I rolled over, and amazingly pulled away from the beast, but when I couldn’t stand up, I realized that my crushed leg was still pinned beneath its clawed feet from the knee down. The other offspring hit me from behind, sinking its teeth into my right shoulder.

  Time slowed to a crawl as rocked forward and bit my arm off. My body tried to repair itself, but every drop of blood I lost, and every ounce of flesh was replaced by replicating nanites. At any moment, the balance would shift, and my living flesh would no longer sustain the nanites with its warmth.