by R H Nolan
“…Dad?” Trox said, his voice despairing.
Max felt the kid’s pain in that one word as deeply as if it had cut him.
One of the scientists froze, his eyes wide. It had to be Trox’s dad—the resemblance was undeniable.
“Trox?! You shouldn’t be here,” the man said, his voice alarmed.
“What about you?” Trox stepped forward and flung an arm out toward the cages all around them. “Is this what you’ve been doing down here?”
“You’re all coming with me,” the man with the long gloves shouted as he stepped towards them.
Herk stepped in front of the group and glared down at the man who stood almost a whole foot shorter than him.
“Hold on a minute, Grice,” Dr. Pell said, finally moving toward the kids.
Max found himself incredibly wary about what was about to happen. He would have stepped beside one of the cages, just for access to something if he had to disintegrate, but the reaching arms and scrabbling, snarling Sandwalkers closest to him kept him from moving at all.
“I’ve told you my work is highly classified and still unfinished,” Trox’s father said.
“It’s inhumane is what it is!” Trox shouted, his fists balled tightly at his sides. “I don’t care if it’s your job! You can’t do this to people!”
“They’re not people, Trox.” Dr. Pell stopped in front of his son and reached out a hand.
“Not people?” Max spat. “Maybe the Sandwalkers aren’t human anymore, but that doesn’t make this anything less than torture. And those people”—he pointed toward the woman who’d screamed at him—“those are my people. I knew them!”
And then a new voice filled the air.
“Funny… I don’t see anything but rats in cages.”
The voice blasted them from every direction, drowning out the screams and insane gibberish coming from both Sandwalkers and mutated Peacewinds alike.
Every single creature fell to their knees at the sound, cowering in the corners of their cages, as if their fiercest predator had just found them.
“Who was that?” Max asked, turning toward Ayla.
The shock-white pain on her face made him want to reach out and ask if she was okay, but all he had to do was follow her gaze.
The other scientists had turned as well to look up at the control booth on the far side of the lab, completely encased in glass and steel at the top of a narrow staircase.
“Governor Saris,” Herk growled.
Ayla’s uncle.
The man stepped forward toward the glass of the control booth, half his mouth twisted into a vicious sneer. The other half of his mouth—almost half of his entire face—was metal.
Two different steel surfaces had been surgically embedded, one covering the top of his skull and curving over his left eyebrow, the other running over his eye, past his nose, and forming the entire length and width of the left side of his jaw. This last piece was hinged at the jaw itself, and Max wondered if the man had met some awful accident or if the radiation had done this to him instead.
An ocular implant glowed red from within the left side of his prosthetic face. Above his head, Max saw the green stats of the governor’s Health at 99%.
“How many times do I have to tell you, Ayla?” Governor Saris asked, staring down at his niece. His voice still boomed through the sound system all over the lab. “Associating with the wrong people will only drag you down with them.”
“How could you do this?” Ayla said, her voice weak and trembling.
Whether or not her uncle heard her didn’t matter. The man continued as if addressing an auditorium of people come to witness his latest masterpiece of insanity.
“The whole thing is very simple, really,” he said, his voice blaring all around them. “I was fortunate enough to come across an energy source left by the disgusting race that scourged our planet. With enough testing, it revealed itself as a unequivocally advanced catalyst for genetic mutation. Evolution and… well, something else.”
Saris raised a gloved hand to gesture toward his victims in the cages.
“A few of our initial tests were incredibly successful. Others were highly unsatisfactory. But even what seems a failure at first glance has its uses for further research. Like these rats, for example.”
Max felt his blood boiling at the words—that anyone would take it upon themselves to kidnap someone, torture them, mutate them, and then have the audacity to call them rats?
He’d thought the Wastelands were the worst thing he’d ever seen in his life, but this governor had just admitted to something even more vile.
Earth’s irradiation had been an accident; all of this was an intentional experiment.
“They’re everywhere in the Wastelands, really,” Saris continued. “The Scavengers are only slightly more intelligent than the fully mutated specimens, but Scavengers are apparently… slower to adapt to the treatments. But a new question arose when I realized this advanced evolution was only successful in the fittest of our species. Those within the city walls. It is truly amazing how easy it is to change the very nature of an inferior species. The mutants, of course, had this built into them already over the last half-century. But the Scavengers… they fought it every step of the way until they just couldn’t anymore. When it came down to survival, which is all these base creatures know, Scavengers will turn on their own, much like the Sandwalkers. These ones have developed a taste for the flesh of their own kind, and it is the only thing driving them now.”
“Trox, let’s go,” Dr. Pell said as he beckoned to his son.
Trox shrank away from the man’s outstretched hand.
“Son, you need to come with me right now.”
“Get off me!” Trox shouted.
Max felt the kid step up behind him, though Max himself couldn’t stop glaring up at Governor Saris, filled with rage.
“You know, I always knew there was something wrong with you,” Herk shouted up at the control booth, though it probably wasn’t necessary. “Didn’t realize you were a psychopath, though.”
“You’re entitled to your opinion,” Saris replied, gazing down at the lab. “I’ll allow it… since it’s the last opinion you’ll ever have.”
The governor reached down and typed a short series of commands on the console in front of him.
“Trox, you don’t understand,” Dr. Pell whispered. This time, the authority in the man’s voice had disappeared, replaced by terror. “The governor doesn’t—”
A loud, jarring click echoed throughout the entire lab.
The sudden silence made Max’s skin prickle with goosebumps, because he realized the low electric hum he’d felt and heard radiating off the cages in the room was now entirely gone.
Then the doors to every steel prison swung open at the same time.
“Uncle, NO!” Ayla screamed, but there was no answer from the control booth.
20
The second the doors opened, Max dropped into a squat.
“Get under the control booth!” he shouted as he disintegrated the flooring with both hands.
Ayla, Trox, Herk, and Lyra were quick enough to do what he said, all of them taking off past Max.
The scientists weren’t so lucky.
Screams ripped through the air as the two genetically enhanced Sandwalkers leapt from their cages at the scientist with the thick gloves on his forearms. One of them grabbed his shoulders, the other wrapped its arms and vicious hands around his legs, and the man was quickly pulled apart.
It didn’t stop his screams, but two more Sandwalkers scrabbled toward the blood and entrails splattered across the floor between the others. Another scientist screamed somewhere, which was quickly cut off by a sickening crunch.
The man with the gray hair Trox’s dad had called Grice made it as far as the lab’s entrance doors. These had apparently been locked shut by whatever mechanism Saris controlled from the booth overhead. The man pounded frantically at the door. One of the tortured, clearly insane Peacewin
ds walked toward Grice with a grimace of pleasure, chuckling deep in his throat and licking his lips.
Max hated that he had to do this—that he was faced now not only with the necessity of killing another person, but now one of his own people. But he did it anyway.
He fired both energy blasts at the Scavenger going after Grice. The demented Peacewind’s may have been altered in some way, but he took the same amount of hits as every other human Max had been forced to kill in self-defense.
The Scavenger went down and released his gray orbs of spirit energy.
SOUL POINTS: 175
The Peacewinds might have been tortured and experimented on against their will, and they might have completely lost their minds, but they still brought Max 50 Soul Points.
Part of him was relieved; the other part of him wanted to be sick.
“Dad!” Trox’s shout rang out over the chaos, distracting Max from Grice.
Just then a giant Sandwalker barreled across the lab to tackle the gray-haired scientist to the ground. Grice screamed in agony as the thing began to feed on him.
Max briefly considered trying to save him, but with one bite from the Sandwalker, he was too far gone.
Besides, Dr. Pell was the higher priority.
Trox’s dad braced himself behind one of the cages, holding a long metal rod in both hands that sparked with electricity at the tip.
A female Scavenger lurked on one side of him and tried to inch her way closer to Dr. Pell while a brutish Sandwalker stalked toward the man from the other direction.
Trox’s dad swung the electric rod back and forth, trying to keep them away.
Max disintegrated again and fired both shots at the Peacewind Scavenger. She fell with a cry of surprise and lay still. Dr. Pell glanced at her prone form, then turned toward Max.
“Watch out!” Max screamed.
Dr. Pell whirled and lunged with the rod, catching the charging Sandwalker in the chest.
The mutant went rigid from the electrical shock, then collapsed to its knees.
Max sent two more energy blasts into the Sandwalker—one in the chest and the other grazing the side of the things’ face. The charred flesh there made Max think of Governor Saris and his metallic face, but he doubted the governor could do what the Sandwalker did next.
Still on its knees, it turned its head toward Max and snarled while the grazed, bloody side of its face actually mended itself into mottled, purple-gray flesh again.
Max’s attacks had taken the thing’s 97% Health down to 69%, but in the next few seconds, that jumped back up again to 73%. The damage on the Sandwalker’s chest was healing itself quickly, too.
Max swallowed hard. Saris’s experiments had given the mutant the ability to regenerate much faster than normal.
This was going to be a lot harder than he’d originally thought.
Max grabbed the steel bars of the closest cage and disintegrated, taking as much time as he could to draw as much energy as possible into himself. He’d never quite had the time or the desperation to stretch his powers to their max at Level 4, but he took that chance now. The Sandwalker was going to take a lot more damage to bring down.
When he removed his hands after just a few seconds longer than normal, his entire forearms now crackled and popped with yellow energy, just like his hands.
Max fired off both energy blasts, which roared through the air almost fifty-percent larger than they’d ever been.
They hit the mutant simultaneously, but only took the thing’s Health down to 13%.
With a grunt of frustration, Max disintegrated again.
The Sandwalker struggled to its feet, glancing between Dr. Pell with the electric rod and Max.
The fourth scientist in the room, wherever he was, cried out in agony, followed by the delirious laughter of whatever Peacewinds had finally caught him. Blood splattered the floor and walls, and human screams died as inhuman shrieks rose everywhere.
Max unleashed two more energy blasts. The Sandwalker had regenerated to 32% Health by this point, but those last two attacks took it out completely.
One massive gray orb rose from the corpse—which apparently was still only visible to Max—and barreled toward him. His stats flashed once in his vision.
SOUL POINTS: 305
Max blinked in amazement. His Soul Points had gone up by eighty after the enhanced Sandwalker!
Shaking off his surprise, he turned toward the two Scavengers running straight for Dr. Pell. Trox’s dad still wielded the electric rod, but it could only shock one person—or thing—at a time. As soon as the other monsters in this place quit feeding and fighting each other over the three dead scientists, they would turn on the rest of them—Max, his friends, and Dr. Pell.
Max disintegrated as much as he could in two seconds and shot an energy blast at the first Scavenger, alternating hands now. They were within twenty feet, so he knew he would make the shots.
The first Scavenger went down under two blasts, and he blasted the second Scavenger once—
But he ran out of energy before he could fire another shot.
Dr. Pell lunged again with his rod and thrust it into the Scavenger’s neck.
The man shuddered with the electric shock and toppled to the ground, but he clearly wasn’t dead at 6%.
Trox’s dad was smart enough to take the opportunity to run, though.
“Over here!” Trox shouted frantically.
Dr. Pell was fast and only slipped once a puddle of another scientist’s blood on the floor.
Max blasted the fallen Scavenger one more time just to put the man out of his misery.
No one saw the hulking Sandwalker until it was too late—the one who had looked at Max with such intelligence in its eyes.
The mutant streaked across the lab and caught Trox’s dad by the throat. It lifted the man off the ground and slammed him against the far wall. The man’s energy rod flew from his hand and clattered onto the floor, sliding all the way toward Max and the group behind him.
“Dad!” Trox screamed.
The horror in his voice brought back the pain of Max losing his own dad.
He disintegrated and blasted over and over again, as quickly as he could, moving to the next bar on the cage because he’d eaten a hole through the first.
Every single shot hit the Sandwalker in the back, but this one’s Health had started at 99%. It was still at 67%.
Max used his powers desperately and as fast as he could, even as he saw the blue tinge spreading from the Sandwalker’s hands and across Dr. Pell’s throat.
The scientist choked, not necessarily fighting for air but because he was shivering now in the monster’s grasp. His lips turned blue.
Max sent two more energy blasts into the mutant.
Dr. Pell’s already dark skin had now become almost bluish-purple, his mouth frozen open in shock and pain.
Max blasted the Sandwalker again—down to 45%.
The thing reared back, opened its mouth, and buried its teeth into the muscle of Dr. Pell’s shoulder and neck.
Another energy blast took the thing to 33%, and it staggered away from Dr. Pell as Trox screamed.
The mutant turned and headed toward Max now, who found himself moving towards the thing just because he wanted to make absolutely sure he didn’t miss.
Dr. Pell clamped a hand down on his wounded shoulder, the blood pumping out of him in waves.
Max disintegrated the next cage’s bars in front of him and blasted the Sandwalker twice more before the thing finally reached him. Its enormous hands shot out, struck him right in the chest, and lifted Max off his feet.
He flew back across the lab and landed on his back, not quite sure which hurt more—the hard landing onto the hard metal floor or the surge of bitter cold that had momentarily gripped him even through the chest piece.
HEALTH: 1256/1300 (96%)
ARMOR: 150/200 (75%)
Chest 65/100 (65%)
Back 85/100 (85%)
The himirini had taken m
ost of the damage, but Max shuddered at the thought of facing down the Sandwalker’s freezing ability.
The mutant lumbered toward him.
Max disintegrated the ground and pushed himself to his feet.
The Sandwalker slapped his hands together with Max’s body between them, and biting cold shot through Max again from front to back. It became harder to move. He felt sluggish beneath the pain.
Still, he lifted one glowing hand toward the thing’s head and fired right into its eye.
The Sandwalker released him immediately and collapsed at Max’s feet, purple-gray flesh smoking from what remained of its skull.
His armor remained untouched from the Sandwalker’s freezing powers, but his Health had taken a minor hit.
HEALTH: 1210/1300 (93%)
The massive sphere of spirit energy that floated up from the mutant brought Max’s Soul Points up to 475—seventy for this Sandwalker alone.
Catching his breath, Max glanced around the lab to see a massive huddle of blood-stained Sandwalkers slowly rising from the floor. The picked-over remains of one of the scientists became visible behind them.
Across the lab, other groups of mutants were still feeding with wet, crunching sounds as blood pooled out across the floor.
Max sucked in his breath in horror. The scientist had been doing the unimaginable and unforgiveable down here, yes, but they hadn’t deserved to die like that.
Then Max remembered Dr. Pell.
He whirled around to look at the kids behind him, hoping the man had made it to them.
Ayla met his gaze with wide eyes.
Lyra trembled as she took in the obscene and gruesome nightmare playing out in front of them.
Herk stood back, both hands gripping his own head as he struggled to accept what was happening.
And Trox swayed on his feet as he stared across the lab in horror.
But Dr. Pell wasn’t with them.