Floor 21- Dark Angel

by Jason Luthor

  To protect her children, she defended us with her life.

  My mother was among the last standing when the Creep closed on our destroyed vehicles. My brother and I, alongside my mother and a few soldiers, were trapped together. We were given sidearms, pistols we had been trained with since we were only a few years old, and told to fight for as long as possible. Still, when the Creep swept upon us though, there was no possible way to stop it. It came like a wave, a festering explosion of muscle and tissue. We were all carried in its tendrils, doing everything we could to free ourselves. To free each other.

  It felt as if it came for me first. What I remember most is my mother looking my way as one of those vicious tendrils flailed at me, and me on the verge of being carried away. Then I remember my brother, leaping to protect me, his arm held out to defend against what was coming. That’s why it latched onto him first, a long, slithering thing with teeth that slid out from between layers of muscle and tissue. I grabbed onto him, and my mother grabbed onto me. Then, there we were, the three of us in the maw of the Creep, holding onto one another.

  My mother faced the worst of it, putting her back to a fresh onslaught of the disease as it broke through the wall behind her. It ate into her back, ripping muscle from bone, but she never flinched. She simply kept herself between it and her children. I remember the feeling of her holding tightly to mine even as she was being torn apart, bravely, quietly facing her fate. Perhaps it was to comfort me in what she thought was our last minutes. With my hand, I held onto Yousef as the Creep ripped his arm from him. It crushed his legs between its tendrils and blinded him with its claws. Still, the entire time, my mother kept staring at us, somehow keeping a brave face through her pain. Then she looked up, past us, with one final light in her eyes, and her face turned to pure joy. In that last second of her life, she was happy. A moment later, when gunfire tore into the Creep and flames burned it back, I understood why. My father and the Suliman Vanguard had arrived, too late for my mother, but not too late for my brother and I.

  We were freed within moments and taken to a Vertwing as quickly as possible, my father remaining brave for his two children despite us being near death. The body of my mother was carried by some of his men into a separate aircraft along with the bodies of all those who had died. They left no man or woman behind. And then, we were gone, back to Fort Silence, doctors struggling the entire way to keep me and my brother alive.

  When we arrived, my father used the same intellect he had always possessed to develop the means by which to save Yousef and I. Drawing upon all the technology he had been developing, all of his knowledge of Apeiron’s inventions, he went to work saving us. My brother’s arm and legs could never be recovered, but my father was able to attach the neurological and muscular implants necessary to install Yousef’s robotic appendages. However, they required a significant power source, and so my father also implanted the Advanced Reaction Core system into him. The Pocket Space generator implanted in his back acted as the power source, and Yousef’s missing eye was replaced with the implant he has today, the same that grants him his ability to read an opponent and adapt to them.

  My brother, on the surface, was in far worse condition than I, but only on the surface. It was beneath the surface, in the blood, where the Creep did its worst damage to me. Infection by the Creep through wounds is almost unheard of, and yet it had chosen me for a host. I was infected, doomed to a fate worse than death. Untreated, the Creep would have grown uncontrollably within me, until I became one of the mindless beasts that wandered the Deadlands.

  But my father had other plans. Into me, he injected a prototype nanostream. These were microscopic robots meant to do only one thing: keep the Creep inside of me from taking over me entirely. It was the greatest risk he could have taken. We still don’t understand how the Creep is so powerful, and there was a risk that it would possess me completely one day. Yet, I lived, and my brother alongside me. After weeks of constant supervision and rehabilitation, we finally left the medical facility. Then, and only then, did we visit my mother’s grave.

  I remember clearly standing there, on a hill overlooking the coast, where my mother was laid to rest. At that moment, I truly believed with all of my heart that, somehow, my family would survive. And, for a time, it did. What I could not have known was the hatred festering in my brother’s heart. It was the same hatred that would tear my family apart and lead to the war that he and I have now fought for a decade.

  Tommy’s Recording 35

  “Why do you hate her so much?” I ask Yousef as he’s kneeling beside me, staring as I try to pull myself off the ground. “Is this really all about ‘the purity’ you’re always talking about?”

  “I don’t hate her any more than I hate the Creep. You don’t hate a disease. You simply get rid of it. Your remove it from the body and let the body heal.”

  “She’s not a disease.”

  “She’s a growing tumor, and such tumors eventually consume the body. It’s happening, already, throughout the Deadlands. You heard what that monster, the one who looked like Ishara, said? That this was an arms race?” He smiles. “She wasn’t wrong. I’ve seen it, since I was a boy. There are so many people trying to reclaim the old technology that belonged to Carthage and Apeiron. They’re all intent on repeating the same mistakes and trying to become stronger than the Creep. The faster the raiders are dealt with, the faster I can turn my attention to these people trying to play God. By now, they’ve all heard about the Angel. They all know what she can do, and they’ll be trying to experiment, to repeat what she is capable of.”

  He sighs as he looks at the ground. “That monster that looked like Ishara. You saw how strong it was. Most people who experiment with the Creep don’t get that strong, but there are more and more people experimenting. One of them will find a way of weaponizing the Creep at some point. We’ve already met weapon out there who’ve given themselves powers. Most of them only manage to give themselves hallucinations, thanks to the Creep’s unusual properties. Others . . .”

  His fists clench and he goes quiet. I have to lean in a little to get him to notice I’m even still there. “The others . . . what?”

  “They adapt. They gain powers, like Mike, or Ishara and Jackie. They become hosts.”

  It makes me sit back in the chair. “So, you’re telling me there are lots of other people out there who’re just like David Marshall?”

  “The . . . scientist, you all fought in your Tower.” He shakes his head and smiles. “You know what a threat people like him are, and yet you still won’t help me in my fight.”

  “I won’t help you kill innocent people.”

  “I’m trying to save them!” he barks as he gets back onto his feet. “What you don’t realize is what the Creep really does to people.”

  “I don’t realize it? I lived through it. I lived in the Tower. People altered their minds with it, or had their minds wiped out completely. You think people like David Marshall are bad? I fought monsters, like Judge, you couldn’t even imagine.”

  “I can’t imagine? Jackie is one of those monsters. She may not be now, she may not be tomorrow, but she is feral. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen her bare her claws and fangs. Are you going to tell me you haven’t?” When he says it, it takes me back to that day in her room, when she got angry and broke a chair on me. When her eyes went red and she pulled her claws out. When Yousef sees me hesitate, he just smiles and slowly shakes his head. “You have seen it, then.”

  “She wouldn’t . . . she wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “You’re right. She wouldn’t. Not any time soon, at any rate. But eventually, in her own time. She has the Creep in her, and the Creep gets the best of everyone in the end.” He turns to the door, which lets in a flood of light as it slides open. “You’re either stupid or naïve if you think she won’t completely turn feral eventually. A person possessed by the Creep cannot be trusted. They will betray you, in the end.”

  Highpoint Waystation Log 182,514

 
; I can’t stop myself from thinking it’s a bad idea as Jackie sits there in her chair, her eyes on the screen floating in front of her and her breath coming hard and fast. “You sure you want to do this, kid?”

  “Yeah.” Her breathing starts to calm down a little, much to my relief. “Yes. It’s something we need to do.”

  “Alright. You tell me if you need anything.”

  “I’ll be okay,” she tells me, even if she knows I don’t believe her. “I’m starting the video.”

  “Right behind you. Literally,” I tell her as I stand over her shoulder.

  “Let’s do it,” she says as her finger hits at the controls of her desk, the video starting up.

  To be honest, I remember it all. Too well. I was there, watching it, when it all happened. Video feeds of Jackie from inside the dorm got me an up close and personal view of the first time she turned. We both get a view of it the second time around, watching it there in the lab. It’s . . . a pretty hard watch. There’s the second she finds the bodies. The little girl, Samantha, dead on the floor. Poor girl never had a chance. It’s painful seeing it again, watching Jackie hit the ground and her hands burying into the floor. Literally burying, the gal’s hands pushing down with enough force to dig into concrete. It’s even harder for me to hear her screaming again, her face touching the floor as she’s crying. It doesn’t come up much, but Jackie’s got a scream that puts the fear of God in people’s bones. I don’t even have bones, and I still feel nervous when she does it, like there’s something otherworldly vibrating in her voice.

  The screaming’s bad but what happens next is worse. At that moment, when the raiders go charging into the room, things start to go downhill in a hurry. There’s a half dozen of them that come in with their guns already drawn, screaming at Jackie for her to get up off the ground. When she doesn’t, one of them takes a boot right into her gut. Guess the dumb fool must not have realized it’d be like kicking concrete. Still, they’re all about a half second from firing when Jackie’s head finally shoots up.

  It’s right then, when she looks up, that she first gets that look in her eyes, the one she carries all the time now. The fire. It burns red in her eyes as she screams with so much force that it bounces off the walls like some ship’s horn bellowing in a cave. It’s all just a lead in though, just some sick prelude to the main story. I’m talking about the one where Jackie loses it for the first time. For lack of better words, it’s gruesome. To watch that pretty face of hers break, her jaw detaching into some nightmarish maw. The bones erupting along her arms and the claws forming on her fingertips.

  It all happens in an instant, that monstrous transformation, right before she launches at the raider nearest to her. First guy finds himself with his throat missing, blood decorating the wall next to him. Best you can say is that at least the poor guy doesn’t suffer. He’s pretty much dead inside of a second. There isn’t a person around him that last much longer. Between the whirlwind of claws that Jackie becomes, every one of them ends up lifeless on the floor inside of a minute. It’s what’s left behind that’s hard to stomach, just a crimson painting of torn muscles and guts plastered around the room. The walls are a few deeper shades of red than when the raiders first got there.

  Jackie has her fingertips pressed to her temples as we’re watching this, her hands cupping her eyes as she forces herself to keep looking. Still can’t help but feel worried about her. “You doing alright there?”

  “I haven’t seen this since . . .”

  “I know,” I tell her as I put a hand on her shoulder. “Since that day, more than a year ago.”

  “I slaughtered them, John.”

  “We don’t have to keep watching. It, well, it gets worse before it gets better.”

  “I know. But this is important.”

  I squeeze her shoulder and feel as she reaches back to touch my fingers. It’s just for a second, but it’s enough to remind me of why I’ve stuck with her for so long. The kid’s got heart. That’s why I’m more than happy to be her emotional support as we watch what comes next. How the Battle of Highpoint Waystation came to its fateful end. It’s all Jackie at that point, cameras tracking her as she’s running across the courtyard. She moves as fast as a vehicle and leaps high enough into the air to sail over lines of troops. It’s just her, claws out, tearing raiders apart, one piece by bloody piece.

  It’s not pretty. There’s no way to sanitize it or cover it up. What she does, in those long minutes after she changes, is a grim sight. It’s not easy to see limbs tossed along the ground and blood soaking into the dirt. It’s also the first time Jackie ever really tapped into her physical strength, and she ends up throwing around those raider transports like toys. When they come falling back to earth, they come down with fire and blood. That’s a good description of how the Dark Angel was born that day.

  What bothers me most is the screaming, and not the screaming she’s doing. When Jackie starts charging into those crowds, with all the chaos she leaves behind her, it’s like listening to a choir shouting in terror. It’s almost otherworldly to see crowds of armed and armored raiders acting like scared kids, all of them begging for mercy or shouting for help that just isn’t going to come. We watch what’s literally a small army suddenly turning tail at the sight of one person.

  That person, of course, is running with the speed of a transport and crashing into people with enough force to break bones on impact. That person’s got claws out the size of a man’s arm and enough physical strength to tear armor to shreds, not to mention tear apart the people inside that armor. That person’s also soaking up bullets and healing faster than anyone can mow her down. It’s the sort of thing that would put the fear of death in anyone, and that’s why they’re screaming. If you think about it, it’s like trying to get away from a natural disaster. It’s every man and woman for themselves, and Jackie is the hurricane, chasing them down and tearing them apart before they can get outside the gates.

  At some point in all of it, Jackie hits the pause button and looks down. Not for the first time, I wonder if it’s getting to her. “How you holding up? Want me to get you something to drink?’

  “No, it’s . . .” Her voice is shaking, but she’s working on something. She shakes her head as another screen pops into existence. It’s full of numbers and frequency graphs. “Look at that.”

  “Energy readouts.”

  “Not just any energy.”

  “No. It’s Pocket Space energy. What’s the big deal here?”

  She looks at me. “It’s not just Pocket Space energy. These aren’t micro streams like the ones used to power weapons, vehicles, or armor. These are tunnel frequencies, the kind we use to pop open windows.”

  “I’m not following you, kid.”

  “John, what’s opening the windows? My armor wasn’t upgraded back then. I couldn’t pop in weapons like I can today. This is all before I spent time up here researching my armor upgrades.”

  I can’t help but scrunch my face up a little as I’m pondering it. “Could be from anywhere on the base, couldn’t it?”

  “Maybe. You know what we’ve never done?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Looked at these videos using the multispectral camera.”

  “You want to see what kind of energy’s being used on the battlefield?”

  “Exactly,” she says as she taps at the computer once more time. It only takes a second for another screen to flash to life. When it does, we’re left staring at a familiar sight. Energy patterns. In a fight, you get all sorts of energy readouts. Heat shows up as infrared waves. Light carries ultraviolet waves. Radiation shows up in the form of X-rays and gamma rays. It’s the same technology that’s in Jackie’s helmet, the same technology that lets her switch between different filters, like night vision and infrared vision. Jackie taps at the computer and switches through the filters, clearing out all the filters until we’re left looking at just one type of energy on the battlefield. It’s the energy that Pocket Space gives of
f. When the image comes up, I can’t help myself. I lean into the screen, bracing myself on Jackie’s shoulder. “What are we looking at here, kid?”

  “You tell me, John.”

  The truth of the matter is that Pocket Space is always surging. Normally, no one notices it. The only time people care is when they can see it with their own two eyes. Before those open though, cameras like the ones around Highpoint can capture windows that are opening but not exactly visible to the naked eye just yet. It usually doesn’t happen, or not naturally in any case. It takes a power source, like a Pocket Space generator. What I see on that screen gets me shaking my head. “Well, if you’re asking me, then it looks like dozens of Pocket Space windows are getting ready to open.”

  “Do you see what’s creating them?”

  “I’m willfully ignorant, not blind,” I tell her as I lean back. My eyes follow the energy trails to their source, to the engine that’s ripping apart reality and on the verge of opening up windows into Pocket Space. “It’s you.”

  “Yeah.” She zooms in on the screen, and soon we’re staring at thin wisps of energy, kind of like power cords drifting in the wind. They’re all attached between her and those windows. “I’m acting like some kind of Pocket Space generator out there. I’m tapping into Pocket Space without needing any kind of tech to do it for me.”

  “You think this was a one-time thing?”

  “There’s only one way to tell,” she says as she takes a deep breath. “Let’s load up some more videos.”

  Personal Recording of Devleena Kumar 07

  We’re marching through the center of the Deadlands, ten-foot tall armored giants making our way through the ruins of the Old World. Ahead of us, we can see the decaying buildings and towers that shrink smaller and smaller the further we get from Central, rare beams of sunlight cutting in between them. I motion to Torres and point down the road. “It’s kind of beautiful, when you look at it.”