by Kyle Aho
Chapter XIII
Apate stared in disbelief at the mutant form of her fiancé. His features were misshapen and bloody but his eyes were unmistakable. Looking into them Apate saw the Gideon she knew trapped somewhere inside the mutated monstrosity before her. There was an uncontrolled rage in his eyes that she had never seen before mixed with a look of vague familiarity. Alistair watched as the mutant stared back, struggling with whatever thought process it was going through. Then a look of realization washed over the mutant’s face. He remembered her.
A moment later the look passed and anger replaced it. Apate screamed and retreated as the mutant raised its arm and lunged. Having backed herself into a corner, Apate clutched Raza and tried to anticipate the angle of the strike. If she was lucky she could maybe dodge it on the way down. It reached the apex of its arc and the meat cleaver descended. Alistair rushed the creature and hacked at its leg, cutting through carapace, meat and bone with his flaming blade. The mutant shifted its attention toward Alistair and finished its deadly arc in his direction. He sidestepped and avoided getting hacked in two by a finger’s width.
“Stop!” Apate shouted.
Alistair turned to face her with a look on his face that clearly asked what the blazes she was thinking.
“What if we can cure him?” she pleaded. A long black spear thrust from Gideon’s other hand and impaled Apate through one of her lungs, only narrowly missing Raza’s legs in the process. She coughed blood and instantly lost her strength. With a wet snap the spear retreated back into Gideon’s arm and Apate slumped to the floor and almost dropped Raza.
Alistair hacked at Gideon with his torch sword and severed the meat cleaver arm just above the elbow. Gideon reeled back in pain and anger. Alistair moved to position himself between Apate and Gideon as Gideon raised his mostly human arm and directed his palm toward Alistair to ready another spear strike. Alistair cut that arm off at the wrist before Gideon fully raised it. He then drove his torch sword through Gideon’s stomach and out his back, black ichor sizzling around the wound as he ripped the blade out. Apate looked through the cauterized hole in Gideon’s stomach as he fell to his knees.
Raza cried out and looked around in panicked confusion. Apate clutched her chest and attempted to crawl to safety. She slipped on the blood slick floor and Alistair stooped to help her up. She coughed up a lungful of blood and her hold on Raza faltered. Alistair bent down and to picked Raza up. He looked down at Apate as her eyelids grew heavy. He hoped she would understand. He gave her a nod and left the room with Raza in his arms.
Apate reached out as they left the room, unable to speak from the blood pooling in her lungs. She watched through tear filled eyes as Alistair walked away. Gideon slumped down in front of her. His raised the stump of one hand as if to strike her with it. The damage he had suffered drove him to exhaustion and he simply fell face first into Apate’s lap, looking up at her in a mix of rage and fear.
Right before she slipped into the cold embrace of death, Apate was certain she could see the man she once loved behind those eyes.
Light-years past the point of exhaustion, Alistair made his way down the hall through sheer force of will with Raza screaming in his arms. He rounded a corner and almost ran face first into the mutated drake they had escaped from earlier. Instinct kicked in and he cut the drake’s tail in half as it swooped by. This did not make the creature happy.
It roared and snapped its head back toward Alistair and Raza. Lights shattered and plunged them into darkness as the drake’s wings extended toward the ceiling and the beast struggled to turn its massive body around in the hallway. Harsh shadows crawled along the walls as the orange glow of Alistair’s torch sword illuminated the area. Raza cried into Alistair’s chest and held on tight. Behind the creature at the end of the hall Alistair saw a glowing sign above a door that read ‘Emergency Escape Pod’. The drake clawed into the floor tiles and finished its rotation to face Alistair. With a deep breath the beast inhaled and a pouch under its chin swelled.
“Oh frak,” Alistair said as he ran past the drake and toward the emergency shelter. Heat and light poured over the area as a gout of flames erupted from the drake’s gullet. Alistair disabled his torch sword and held Raza close to his chest as fire licked at his heels and surrounded them. He pushed his body up against the wall and wrapped his coat around Raza. Never had he been as appreciative of his fireproof gear than in that moment. A searing pain scalded his head and he patted out a clump of hair that was on fire.
The drake charged.
“Stay here,” Alistair said as he set Raza on the ground. With a flick of his thumb Alistair ignited his torch sword. He twisted the dial on the hilt and turned the rippling flame into a focused blade. Raza wobbled as he tried to stand up. His legs were too weak from his time in isolation and he fell to his hands and knees. Alistair wanted to stop him as he crawled away toward the emergency escape pod but the drake’s clicking jaws stole his attention.
He side-stepped a chomp from the drake that could have cut him in half if the smacking sound its jaws made were any judge. The torch sword growled as it sucked up oxygen on its way through the air in response to the drake’s chomp but the large creature was surprisingly agile and pulled away just out of range. One of its black wings flew toward him like a quick jab from a boxer. Alistair ducked and rolled as the spiked appendage cracked the wall and shards of cement fell to the floor.
As he stood from his roll he swiped his weapon in a figure eight, advancing on the drake. It hopped back with its powerful haunches and landed hard enough to cause some ceiling tiles to fall. Once again it jabbed with the pollex of its wing. The drake’s wing connected hard into his gut. Alistair flew through the air, hit the wall and crumbled to the floor. It felt like he’d been hit with a sledgehammer and his lungs struggled feed to him air. He felt sharp claws wrap around his calf before he skidded along the floor.
The drake pulled him across the hall and lifted a claw to pin his chest to the ground. It looked down on him with its beady black eyes and snarled. Thick hot saliva dripped onto his face. Its breath smelled like burnt meat. It opened its jaws and Alistair was positive it could eat him whole if it chose to. He was also positive that he’d angered it enough to not be given that mercy. The drake twisted its head and Alistair’s world darkened as he entered the creature’s mouth.
A flash of light illuminated the inside of the drake’s mouth as his torch sword passed in front of his face an decapitated the creature in one swipe. Its teeth were still wrapped around him as the beast collapsed and the grip on his chest loosened. Black blood and saliva poured over his upper body. He turned off his weapon immediately to avoid igniting the flammable fluid somewhere in the creature’s gullet. It was a miracle he hadn’t ignited it in the first place. The drake’s head flopped to the side as Alistair pushed it and crawled out from under the twitching corpse. He looked down the hall and saw Raza at the emergency escape pod door, pounding on it, and crying. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the terror that poor child was going through but he was determined to stop it.
A choir of screams rippled down the hallway behind him. It sounded like every creature in the facility was on its way to his location. He sprinted with every iota of his remaining strength to the end of the hall. He picked Raza up and opened the door to pass through a security tunnel that led to the emergency shelter. Once inside, he set Raza down and rushed over to a panel on the wall, praying to everything holy that the shelter had an independent power supply. He glanced down the hall and saw no less than a dozen mutated monstrosities running toward them and more were arriving every second. With a quick jab he shattered the glass to the emergency panel and started pressing the buttons to make the screen come to life. To his relief it lit up and he was able to initiate the escape protocols without much effort. A two-minute countdown began. He didn’t have thirty seconds before the horde tore them to shreds.
With a sigh of resignation, Alistair pulled the antidote from his grenade pouch and
placed it in the terrified and confused child’s lap. He pushed open the door and closed it behind him, locking it from the outside. He peered through a small window on the door and watched the confused child for a moment. He hoped the boy would be safe on his own. He then ran back down the security tunnel and locked that door behind him as well, effectively locking himself in with the horde of bloodthirsty mutants.
A swarm of smaller mutated animals arrived first, which he proceeded to stomp, punch, and slice away at mercilessly. All hope had abandoned him at this point, which made fear nonexistent. He was going to die, but he was damn sure not going down without a fight. He hacked, slashed, and ripped his way down the hallway with a ferocity that rivaled the creatures he was busy dismembering. He used every last bit of strength and endurance left to let these monsters know he wasn’t going to just sit down and take it. He saw the molten metal scarred four-armed mutant from earlier bearing down on him at the end of the hallway with another humanoid mutant not far behind.
“C’mon y’frakkers!”
Alistair pulled his last grenade from its pouch and considered doing a suicide run with it. He didn’t want to take the coward’s way out. He pulled the pin and lobbed it down the hall and into the drake corpse. He shielded his eyes with his forearm as the grenade exploded and simultaneously ignited the flammable liquid in the drake’s gullet. A massive explosion tore apart the facility in a glorious display of pyrotechnic destruction. Fire burst down the hall in both directions and metal shrieked as the ceiling was torn asunder. The sheer volume of the resulting explosion muffled the death screams of everything in the immediate area.
Crushed against the wall by the shockwave, Alistair was certain he broke something. He tried to get up and realized he broke multiple somethings. He coughed and peered through the smoke as shafts of light came from above. The explosion was so large it poked a hole out of the ground to the air outside. Alistair rubbed his eyes and tried to stand but his legs wouldn’t allow it. It was at that point he realized he was on fire. All the money he had spent on fire retardant gear didn’t do much good if it was torn to shreds and hanging in scraps from his body. He patted the fire out and slumped against the wall, peering through the smoke and simply waiting for something to come kill him, and mercifully end this incessant battle.
A massive shape filled the hallway. It moved slowly through the smoke toward him. It looked roughly human, one of the humanoid mutants most likely. He wasn’t sure how anything could have survived that blast but obviously he had underestimated their resilience. Alistair watched impassively as the massive figure trudged through the smoke and debris. He wiped blood from his lips and simply waited for his demise.
Once the figure came out of the smoke, Alistair smiled. Dante waved his hand in front of his face to clear the air as he coughed. His face was a pulpy mess and he limped along using his shotgun as a cane.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Alistair said.
“You the one causing all this ruckus?” Dante coughed. He opened his arms and smiled, wincing as his muscles protested the movement. The ground shook as the emergency shelter ejected into orbit. It ascended through the hole in the ceiling and they watched as it turned into a speck against the evening sun.
“What happened t’you?” Alistair asked, horrified by the flaps of skin hanging from Dante’s face.
“The bastard shot me,” Dante said.
“Bren?”
Dante nodded, “With my own gun too. Then he ran off with the hard drive. He was gone when I woke up otherwise I would have turned his face into pudding.”
“How are y’still alive? Not that I’m disappointed.”
“I’ve got a few enhancements.”
“Seems like y’have more than a few. I’ve seen y’rip off blast doors, tackle a mutant gorilla and survive a shotgun blast t’the face. Are you even human?”
“Mostly,” Dante said with a shrug, “you guys find the kid? Where’s Apate?”
“She didn’t make it. I put th’boy on that escape pod,” Alistair said, pointing to the sky.
“Where’s it going?”
“Away from here, I don’t know. I’m sure th’company funding this operation will retrieve it before long and th’boy will be fine. At least I hope.”
“Me too. Let’s get out of here,” Dante said as he extended his arm to Alistair.
Alistair took it and groaned as he got up. They helped each other climb out of the crater made by Alistair’s final grenade and limped to a nearby communications tower to relay for help. Dante took a moment to set up a quick CivOp contract of his own with a payout high enough to get instant results. A MediSyn shuttle descended next to the communications relay and a small team of medics accompanied by armed guards helped both Dante and Alistair into their transport. They climbed in and watched the ground disappear beneath them. A separate medic tended to each of them as a man wielding a holo-pad barraged them with questions about what they had seen and accomplished.
Before they had even left the atmosphere, a series of explosions peppered the area. Someone was carpet-bombing the facility, destroying any last vestiges of the project and the nightmares within.
Dante waited in the glossy waiting lobby of his father’s office. Both he and Alistair were given a dose of the antidote before they were allowed back into society. It had been less than a week since Dante had gotten planet side and his father had already summoned him for a meeting. That wasn’t good. His entire head was wrapped in pink stained gauze after several hundred stitches put his face back together. It hurt like hell, even with the cocktail of painkillers he was taking.
Sia, the android that acted as Sirus Opulen’s secretary, walked over swaying her hips with suggestive elegance. She held a plate of refreshments. Dante stared into her glowing purples eyes with his good eye but didn’t respond. She stood there for a moment, bent at the waist slightly, before her programming deemed it a polite enough amount of time and she returned to her charging station that doubled as a desk. Dante stared at the holo-screen in front of him, taking in the drama of current politics and the latest celebrity scandals. It all seemed pretty mundane compared to the life-threatening ordeal he’d just survived. He wondered to himself why people got sucked into such rubbish. Then he remembered he was usually a part of that rubbish.
The office door slid open and Sirus Opulen gestured for Dante to enter. Dante picked himself up, every muscle in his body protesting, and limped his way into the office. He moved over to a chair and began to sit down but Sirus hissed and shooed him away from it. “I don’t want you bleeding on my furniture,” he said.
Dante stood up and leaned against his massive crutch.
Sirus went back to looking at something on his desk, as if unaware of Dante’s presence. Dante waited. The phone rang and Sirus activated a glyph on his desk to answer. Although short, the conversation still irritated Dante beyond words. After a moment, Sirus hung up and looked up from his desk, finally paying attention to Dante.
“Well, I have to admit I’m not entirely disappointed with your performance,” he said. Dante was speechless at what, compared to Sirus’ usual scathing remarks, was a compliment. Dante held his breath and waited for some sort of insult to follow.
“You preserved the integrity of the project and hid my secrets for me. It would look very bad for us both if anyone knew what was going on. Using my own employees as test subjects wouldn’t help much either but you got me the antidote and helped destroy the facility. You got one member of your team killed and another went AWOL. Even though he escaped with the files I wanted, I don’t have to pay him or the dead one so I’ll consider it an acceptable loss. I’ve already put out a bounty on the hard drive so if he tries to sell it anywhere I will know. This is, of course, assuming he survived the cleansing run,” he said, referring to the carpet-bombing.
“So, since I don’t have to pay you anyways, I managed to get almost everything I wanted for one third of the cost. I would thank you but that is only a small part of what you
owe me,” he said, looking Dante in his one good eye. Dante fought the rising bile in his throat. They stared at each other for a moment.
“I think you should give the other two thirds of the payout to the remaining operative, Alistair Preest,” Dante said.
“I don’t care what you think,” Sirus riposted, “and it would only be one third, your stowaway was never in the original contract.”
Dante raised an eyebrow.
Sirus grinned, “I’m not sure how she did it but your friend Apate managed to find out about the mission and sneak herself onto the transport vessel. Very resourceful, that one. Too bad she died. I will mention that I am disappointed you neglected to give me the child. You gave me a sample of his blood but not the child himself. Why is that?”
Dante cleared his throat. “That poor kid has gone through enough, I wasn’t about to let you ruin his life any more. Use the blood to get what you need but leave him alone.”
“I wasn’t aware that it was your decision. Do you understand the kind of destruction that child can bring? He is a carrier of a very volatile parasite-”
“He is immune, we don’t even know if-”
“I wasn’t finished,” Sirus said, piercing Dante with a look that made his throat clench shut. “Which, if I didn’t own the antidote, would be a very bad business decision.”
Dante remained silent.
“That being said, I still need to keep track of him. Where is he?”
Dante remained silent.
They glared at each other for a long moment.
“Your facial reconstruction will begin downstairs in an hour,” Sirus said at length, before going back to looking at something on his desk.
“Why did you do it?” Dante asked. Sirus looked up. “Why did you allow that parasite to live even after you saw what it was doing?”
“Don’t be stupid Dante. Because things like that make a lot of money. Do you have any idea how many organizations are willing to pay for biological warfare? More importantly, do you have any idea how many organizations are willing to pay for the cure to biological warfare?
“Armed with a weapon that I could control would allow me to usher in the rise and fall of entire countries, entire planets even. A simple bank transfer could exterminate an entire race, while another transfer could prevent it. I would literally be a god. Entire solar systems would be at the mercy of someone’s bank account. The possibilities would have been staggering. They still might be if I can retrieve that hard drive.”
“What about the rest of the planet? You’re just going to let them die as the parasite keeps spreading from the mines?”
“Of course not, I’m no fool. I’ll sell them the antidote. We’ll simply instate new laws regarding safety in the mines and treat cases as they occur. If people wish to be proactive and get vaccinated early, that is their decision.”
Dante continued to fight the rising bile in his throat. He was ashamed to be a part of the same lineage as this man.
“Your clone has been prepped for the face transplant, Sia can show you the way,” Sirus finished.
Dante walked from his father’s office and took the elevator to the sixty-third floor. While waiting for his facial reconstruction to begin, Dante pulled out his holo-pad and sent a gift to a good friend.
Alistair Preest watched the boy play by himself in the corner and wondered if he would ever become well-adjusted after the atrocities he had been subjected to. It was much too early to tell, of course, but the thought still burdened him. He rolled himself around his dilapidated orphanage in a wheelchair and started to plan what renovations he was going to make with the money he earned from the job.
He had already bought a nice supply of food and even managed to get his hand on some things that weren’t genehanced, a treat for his kids. He bought some projectors and a bunch of Dante’s older holo flicks. They were cheesy and violent but the kids loved them. He felt they deserved it. Some of them were rough around the edges but they were products of their environment and were good at heart. Alistair liked to think he would help them stay that way.
A group of kids were imitating Rex Hammar as he shot aliens around their projection area. They made gun noises and other sound effects as they ran around killing holograms with their favorite action hero. Rex cradled a woman in his arms and jumped through a window just in time for an explosion to go off behind him. He landed a conveniently safe distance away from the destruction and chewed on a cigar as he squinted into the sunlight.
“Oh Rex!” the damsel said in a husky tone. Several children parroted her and gave their most dramatic swoon as she did the same. Rex nodded and spit out his cigar.
“Who loves you baby?” Rex said before they embraced in a passionate kiss.
Alistair’s lap buzzed and he looked down to see a new message from a proxy account of some kind. He opened the message and saw a deposit had been made to his bank account from a private account for ten million credits.
He shrugged and deleted the message. It was probably a scam. He glanced up and saw another child, Gayle, trying to play with Raza but he was shy and reluctant. She eventually took his hand and led him to a group of other children who did their best to welcome him into their social circle. Alistair smiled.
His lap buzzed again. He opened this message and realized that the first one was not a scam. His heart skipped a beat as he read the words and reality hit him like a nova grenade. The simple four-word message warmed him and made all the pain go away as ideas flooded into his head for his and his orphans’ future. The message read:
“Who loves you baby?”
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to Patrick for putting up with me.
Thank you to my family and friends for support.
Thank you to my teachers for all your wisdom and guidance.
Thank you to my fans for their appreciation. Seriously, you guys are frakking great.