Floor 21- Dark Angel

by Jason Luthor

  I can’t see her face beneath the mask, but she must think I’m crazy. “The post apocalypse?”

  “Yeah. Not much Creep here. Just concrete and steel. It kind of makes me think about how inventive people were, once. Just look at all these buildings.”

  “It is impressive. We don’t build a lot of things these days.”

  “That’s probably what impressed me the most about that guy, Gabriel Branagh. The one who was running Central.”

  “Oh yeah? What impressed you.”

  “He was just so focused on the future, on building something new instead of just doing the same thing we’ve been doing for the last few centuries.”

  “Did you buy into his whole shtick about making peace with the raiders?”

  “A few weeks ago? No. Today? With what the general’s done? Or at least with what we think he’s done.”

  “You’re wondering if we’re the bad guys. If we were the bad guys, I mean.”

  “I think nothing’s really that clear when it comes to war and fighting. Obviously, not all the raiders are good. I don’t regret killing a single one of them that murdered some innocent family or slaughtered some Deadlands colony. My code name means I’m the goddess of destruction, not the goddess of letting murderers go free.”

  “But you have some regrets.”

  Even through the digital vocalizer in my helmet, she must hear me sigh. “If Fort Silence isn’t as good as we wanted it to be, the raiders couldn’t have been as bad as we’d imagined. Plus, once the general finds out what we’re doing, it’s hard not to think that he’ll talk about us as being just as bad as the raiders, even if that’s not true. All I’m saying is maybe that Branagh guy was right and we need to stop seeing everything as being so cut and dry. Fort Silence is going to start talking about us like we’re some corrupt force for evil that wants to destroy the purity.”

  “Which we obviously aren’t. We just want to protect more innocent people from dying. Yeah, I get it.”

  “What happened, Torres? When did everything start feeling like it was more complicated than it used to be?”

  “Well, we’re not teenagers anymore. This is the first time we’ve ever actually had to question the general. It all started when we touched down in Central.”

  That gets a chuckle out of me. “You’re right. Funny how just getting a little more experience changes your mind about things.”

  “And now here we are, wishing we’d stopped talking about hunting down raiders for a second and listened to a dead man who wanted to be more diplomatic about everything.”

  “Pretty much. I mean, Fort Silence talks a lot about saving humanity, but what did we do except kill and put up walls between us and everything else? What did we actually build? That’s the thing about Central. It’s tried to make alliances with the raiders, with us. They’ve tried to build colonies out in the Deadlands . . . They’re committed to something. It’s a whole different way of running things. I just want to give something different a chance for once. Put down our guns for once.”

  “That can leave you dead.”

  “Or it can leave you stronger because you’ve got more allies. Think about that girl, Cynthia. She’d take a slug to the chest if it meant to save someone. She’d probably do that for a raider. That sort of stuff wins loyalty eventually. I mean, what would you say our philosophy is at Fort Silence?”

  “Scour the Deadlands. Worry about alliances later.”

  “And look where that’s gotten the general. Every raider clan out here hates him, and the people of Central want him gone. He can’t keep the fort running for long when that many people hate him, right?”

  Last Testament of Ishara Suliman 04

  My brother and I grew up. Every so often, his limbs needed replacing, but the modular system my father designed made it easy to replace the arms and legs he had lost. Yousef enjoyed the upgrades so much that he volunteered to have his left arm replaced as well. It was . . . strange, but nobody thought much about it. The surgery was straightforward enough, and soon Yousef was stronger than he had ever been.

  I needed more attention in the long run. My father cared for me every night, making sure I did not succumb to the Creep. The nanostream in my blood did its job, but the continual regulation of Creep cells in my blood made me sick. I needed additional supplements, in the form of a weekly injection, to keep me healthy. It was inconvenient, but as long as I adhered to my injections, I felt perfectly fine.

  And that’s how life continued for us. For a few years, I truly believed my family had recovered from the loss. Yet the death of our mother made Yousef harder. He stopped performing on stage, even though he continued to read the stories and plays from centuries ago. Yousef seemed completely distant. He ate with father and I each night, before my treatments. He and I continued to train. To learn how to lead.

  Still, there was something that changed. It was something that my father saw as well. A . . . harshness in Yousef. Once, father mentioned it, as we worked in the lab. He told me it was something he recognized, because, as a young man, father had once been the same way. It was a cruelty passed through the Suliman bloodline. Blood begets blood, and my father’s cruelty begat cruelty. I was no stranger to it. I felt the same harshness, the same desire to crush the Deadlands while seeking vengeance for my mother. However, my mother’s lessons never left me either. I never forgot the kind example she set. Yousef, as much as he missed her, forgot those lessons.

  I’m not sure when my father decided he couldn’t entrust his secrets to my brother, but he must have seen the growing cruelty in him. One day, father took me aside. Took me to see the grand project that he and Nikola Dravic had once worked on together. That project was designed to unlock the many military caches that Apeiron had once built across the Deadlands. Created to counter domestic threats that grew more and more numerous as the August War threatened to break out, the cache system was Apeiron’s answer to any violence that might erupt. Those caches held more firepower than most countries of the day could muster. The caches held more than just guns and ammunition, but tanks and power armor. The strongest ground forces that Apeiron had available, placed at critical locations throughout the city and designed to allow the company’s Security branch to quickly battle against the violence that grew by the day.

  But, the greatest weapons in the company’s arsenal were the Panzers. Father knew from information he found in the many databases and computers spread throughout the cache system that one of those caches could track the location of any remaining active Panzer. Even just one of those machines would be enough to make a difference against the Creep. Father’s desires had changed from his days with Dravic. Once, he’d hoped to use the Panzers to enforce order around Central Freedom. Now, he hoped to use it against the Creep, only to deactivate the weapon once he was done. He did not believe a force like the Panzers should be in the hands of any one person.

  He trusted me with the knowledge of this system as well as knowledge of the cache network, which he hoped I would access should either Fort Silence or Central Freedom be threatened by some outside force. He did not tell my brother, or even mention it to him. Father wanted to wait until he was sure Yousef could be trusted.

  Despite not being told about the cache system, somehow . . . somehow Yousef knew. Knew that father had told me something important, some great secret. I should have recognized the anger then. Seen his bitterness. But he was my brother. It’s easy to forgive and overlook the flaws of the people you love most, even when those flaws may lead to tragedy.

  Overlooking my brother’s flaws is why my father died.

  Jackie’s Recording 30

  I take a deep breath as I’m standing in the lab, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. It’s dark. He likes it that way whenever we talk alone. “Judge,” I ask into the darkness. “Are you there?” It takes a long second before I start to see a silhouette forming in the darkness, just this huge, caped figure. He doesn’t have that young face anymore, not like the last time I saw h
im. No, it’s the face that I saw when we fought back in the Tower, that wide skull with just a thin layer of skin and those blank eyes staring from underneath the cowl.

  “I’m always here,” he says as he steps just a little into the light. “You’re the person who’s still in the land of the living.”

  “True. I was just being polite.”

  “It is appreciated, and unnecessary.”

  “You’re so different when you’re not around your sister.”

  There’s a low, deep laughter that fills the room as his shoulders bounce a little. “Together, we tame each other’s feral nature. Apart from one another . . .” His gloved hand gestures down his body. “This is my form of choice.”

  “Well, I needed to ask you something. Something I knew Sally wouldn’t like to hear.”

  “Ah.” He walks at the edges of the light shining down from the ceiling, his cape just dragging on the floor as he moves up to the edge of the desk. Those vacant eyes look up at me from the edge of his hood as his fingertips rest on the desk. “Then this is about the Creep. The source of your strength.”

  “Yeah. I was . . .” I shake my head. “You remember when we fought, right?”

  “You killed me, Jackie. How could I forget?”

  That gets just the smallest smile out of me. “You’ve got a really dark sense of humor.”

  “It seems appropriate, given my current purgatory.”

  “Right. Anyway, I was watching video of the day I first went feral. The first time I became like you two. So, I wanted to ask if you knew anything about why I was creating Pocket Space windows. I don’t know. I just thought, you’ve been doing this for five hundred years. I figured if anyone knew why that was happening, it’d be you.”

  He looks away for a second before looking back at me. “The Creep manifests different strengths in different individuals. Your physical strength is incredible. You’re stronger than Sally and at least as strong as I was. Perhaps more so. On the other hand, you lack the ability to control the Creep. How could you? You never possessed psionic powers, not like your friend Mike, and those powers become wildly magnified by anyone who bonds with the Creep like we have. But opening Pocket Space windows . . .” Judge shakes his head. “I’m afraid I have no answer.”

  “I was afraid of that. Like I said, I just thought I should ask.”

  “Was there anything else? Not that I am in a rush. This is preferable to drifting in the Creep’s collective consciousness.”

  “I did want to know if you had any . . . I don’t know. Tips? Strategies? I can’t beat Yousef, not the way I am right now. The only thing I could think of is maybe I could beat him if I went almost feral, because then I’d be stronger and faster. But when I’m feral, I can’t control myself. I’m too wild, and Yousef can pick me apart.”

  “What are you asking me? Is there a way for you to be as strong and fast as your feral form without becoming feral?”

  “Yeah, it sounded like a pretty stupid question when I asked.”

  “I’m afraid this is an enemy that I cannot help you with. You may not be able to defeat him one on one, unless you do learn how to take advantage of your feral nature while remaining yourself. I just can’t tell you how to achieve that.” He stops for a second. “Is the fact that you’re considering going feral the reason why you didn’t want Sally here?”

  “Pretty much. She hates the idea.”

  “She won’t stop you if you decide that’s your only choice. She simply won’t like it.”

  “I know. I’m going to try and avoid doing anything like that though. I just needed to talk it out for a second.” I shake my head. “Alright. Uh, you don’t have to go, if you don’t want. I’m just going to be here, working on these cell lines and trying to figure out some way of tapping into them without having to go past the Alexander Limit.”

  If Judge can smile without looking completely terrifying, he comes as close to it as possible as he looks at me. “Before I was bound to the Creep, I studied to be an engineer. I may still enjoy a little science. Feel free to use me as your sounding board. It’s a welcome gift to hear someone’s voice other than my sister’s from time to time.”

  Last Testament of Ishara Suliman 05

  I still remember the final night, before father died. As always, we went to the lab to monitor how the nanobots in my bloodstream were doing. We both saw the data, agreed that my readings looked safe. Then he told me he loved me and gave me a hug goodnight, letting me go to my room while he stayed behind.

  And then, the next day . . . I woke up to news that he was dead. Natural causes, they said. Doctors had quickly done an autopsy and concluded that it was a stroke. By the time I was awake, the body was already wrapped in white linen. That was the custom in our family dating back centuries. Religion had never played a strong role in my family, but my mother had been more religious from father. I’d taken after her a little, mostly in her care for the needy. She had spent most of her free time caring for those less fortunate, expanding the work that Fort Silence did caring for those living around it. Fasting, sometimes, and always one month every year. My mother used it as a time to remind us that we all have needs that must be fulfilled, and we should remember the less fortunate during our fasting.

  But Yousef only cared about the prayers. How we sulked about the prayers. To him, they were useless. When I think about them, I wonder just how much I believed in it myself. I never mocked it though. Yousef never did either, not out loud, not in words. Still, I could see it in his eyes, the disgust he felt about it. How little he thought it helped. I’d noticed it in him from a young age. When mother died, I continued the prayers, partly as a way of remembering her. He never joined me.

  Yet, when father died, he immediately had the body wrapped because of the religious custom. He said it was to honor my faith, to do for father what he thought mother and I would want. In our faith, it is normal to bury the body within 24 hours of the death. By the time I was awake and finding out about what happened, Yousef was already ready to bury him, the second I gave my approval. Maybe I was in shock, because I didn’t think twice. I simply said yes, bury him. It’s what father and mother would have wanted.

  It was the wrong choice. I know now that I should have waited. Perhaps I should have had someone else look at the body. I don’t know. All I know is that Yousef somehow had my father killed. Of course, I didn’t suspect him at the time. I had no reason to. It wasn’t until the weeks continued rolling by, eventually turning into another year, that I started to doubt my brother. He was constantly pushing us to be more aggressive. With father’s passing, his more agitated nature started to show more and more. Never toward me, but he was . . . angry. Angry at the Creep, more than anything, but also angry at the raiders. He felt as if they were stopping him from taking his revenge, distracting him from focusing on ridding the world of the Creep and all the people trying to abuse the technology from the Old World.

  During the same time, he started to hint that he knew something, that he was aware of some sort of plan father had. I know now he was referring to the cache system. More than that, he was referring to the Panzers. I never told him a thing. Father hadn’t trusted him with the knowledge, and the more aggressive he became with the generals, constantly insisting on deeper pushes into the Deadlands, the more I feared that father was right. I began to wonder if my brother was the war monger that my father had once been.

  I still so clearly recall that day between us, sitting in father’s room. Yousef’s room, I mean. I’d deferred the title of supreme general to him, along with the office my father once used. I had no desire for it. In truth, I’d never needed it. I had the respect of the troops and several of the most influential officers of the fort. I did not have the title, but I held power. It was something that bothered Yousef, festered in him over the entire year from the time my father died. He became more agitated with me in private. For perhaps six months, he was able to keep up a façade. That brilliant actor he had once been took center stage
. He would tell stories of how much he wanted to be a good leader, to honor our father’s memory. He quoted me poetic lines about responsibility and his duties to his soldiers.

  But I suppose that a year is too long, even for a man like Yousef. There came a day when I once again opposed him in discussions with the generals, making it known that I didn’t want to needlessly throw away the lives of our soldiers on useless campaigns against the Creep. Secretly, I hoped to gather enough support that I could safely unlock the caches and better prepare our people to secure the Deadlands. Regardless, Yousef exploded that evening when we were in father’s office. The façade came crumbling down. He insisted that he knew I was keeping secrets from him. He was right, of course.

  He told me how much it hurt him that I would keep such secrets. He told me how much it hurt that father had never trusted him the way he had trusted me. I still loved my brother, of course, and . . . I felt terrible. However, I still did not tell him about the location of the caches. Instead, I lied. A small lie. I told him that father had suspected there were significant weapons stores throughout the Deadlands but hadn’t known the location.

  Three days later, Yousef asked that I lead a search into the Deadlands for one of those caches. He sent a group I felt comfortable with. Several of my most trusted officers were included, as were several men and women close to Yousef. Our mission was simply to find the cache in an area where Yousef suspected one could be found. I knew the location. I also knew Yousef was wrong. Still, to keep up my lie, I agreed to lead the mission into that part of the city. Yousef said it was appropriate for me to lead, since the weapons necessary for fighting the Creep were necessary to avenge our dead parents.

  What I remember most about that day is the first gunshot. The first bullet, when it passed through my stomach. I remember pressing a hand to my body and feeling the warm, red fluid seeping into my skin. I remember turning around, as the skull of one of my officers exploded apart. Then another bullet, close to my shoulder that shattered my collar bone. After that, another and another of my officers falling dead to the ground, staining it red. And then I was stumbling back as more bullets were fired into me, and I watched as the men Yousef had assigned to our team killed off the last of the officers who were loyal to me. I watched as the barrels were raised and fired into me. For years after, I still felt the burning. The pain, as my bones shattered apart. The feeling of darkness closing around me as my blood spilled to the floor.