Future Unleashed

by Daniel Pierce

  I slid to the left side of the gates, pressed hard against the rough wood and hidden from view by the lingering shadows. There were people running along the walls, their shouts giving away positions but also revealing the damage they were taking from the remaining Daymares, who fired, moved, and fired again, even sending knives flickering up to slash at exposed shooters leaning over the wall. A Kassos soldier fell screaming, a knife sticking from his eye like a gruesome horn. His life ended when he landed five meters away, legs splayed at an unnatural angle.

  I waved two of the Daymares toward me, covering them along with ferocious automatic fire from the rest of the team. Splinters of wood howled away into the dawn as our rounds chewed at the top lip of the doors and wall, keeping the defenders well back as the demo team attached two charges to the metallic center rib covering the gap between each panel. The closest Daymare—Kirby—held up five fingers. I turned and ran to the left, leaving the charges behind.

  They exploded with a concussion that knocked me to one knee and left me swooning despite my mouth being open and ears covered. Pieces of door began to rain back to earth, causing even more destruction, but there was no time to admire the job. I streaked to the opening, firing at chest height as I passed the hole and pressed myself back against the right side of the wall.

  Kassos responded to our incursion with force. A deluge of soldiers began boiling out of the breach, rifles up and ready for contact, but they never made it past the shattered frame of the enormous gate. Three of my team began their killing work with single shots from their new rifles, their rounds tearing body parts cleanly away and causing a pileup of corpses that blocked the door in less than a minute. Kirby came back, lofted another charge through the breach, and dropped to one knee, turning away as the blast tore through the oncoming defenders like an avenging angel.

  “Clear!” came the call from fifty meters away. I looked out and saw a Daymare lift her eye from a scope and give me the thumbs up; in seconds I was barreling through the breach with my shotgun in one hand and a blade in the other. Before I’d gone three steps, I cut the head of a massive soldier cleanly off, leaving his neck stump pumping crimson into the stinking air. The Daymares were right behind me, firing with lethal effectiveness as Kassos’ finest went down in sprays of blood and gore, the hypersonic bullets shredding their bodies like paper lanterns.

  We advanced, killed, and pushed on some more, reaching a hastily built blockade that confirmed Kassos had known were coming. On the other side of the debris there were guns, and behind them, another defensive structure made from rusted farm implements and massive logs. I heard the telltale whine of a Vampire and hit the ground as a row of darts stitched across the next defenders, opening their bodies up with a savagery that made me look away. The screams began before the Vampire had gone all the way overhead, but two of the enemy had the presence to snap off rounds at my flyer.

  “I’m hit,” came the voice over my comm. “Leg. Bad. Gotta land or bleed out. One more pass and—”

  He never finished his sentence. On a nearby rooftop, a trio of shooters rose up and ventilated his body with rifle fire, sending the Vampire arcing into the side of a three-story stone building. There was no flame, nor sound, and no glory, just a crunching of tubes, the fabric folding, and the pilot’s body dropping limply to the ground, wrapped in cables and netting.

  The shooters lifted their guns to celebrate, and two of them fell in silence as Daymare rounds removed most of their skulls. All of my team were inside the wall now, and we were advancing to contact inside a city street that stank of blood and shit and dust. The walls curved away, but the streets were straight, making it easy to see all the way to up the broadway to another fight.

  “Calvary,” I said to Kirby and his fire team partner, a woman named Lenza. Her eyes were hard blue crescents as she fired once, killed a defender, and then looked to the east.

  “They made it in, but it’s a mess,” Kirby said.

  I touched my comm as we took cover behind the first barricades, now empty of defenders. “Tegan. How many inside? Can you see us?”

  “Too many. They’re pushing us back to a massive ditch filled with spikes. We’re—” An explosion shattered the air, coming through our connection and my own hearing at once as destruction in stereo. “They’re using rockets to hem us in, but we’re past the first barrier. It’s open ground for fifty meters, Jack. If you tell us to go, we will,” Tegan said. She sounded exhausted and scared.

  “Hold or advance, but do not fall back. I’ll send help,” I said.

  “We’ll try,” she said, and then the connection was cut as another salvo of rockets burst along the inner wall, sending clouds of debris skyward. I saw battle in three directions, but nothing from the east. I turned to issue orders for our advance, but stopped.

  There were corpses in the street behind the next ring of defense, and they weren’t any we had made.

  “Kirby, send a charge over that log and get me a door. Now!” I shouted.

  He responded instantly by hurling a small oval across the space between us and the next line of defense. It exploded on contact, shattering the barricade into a storm of shrapnel that left screaming Kassos soldiers in a ten-meter radius.

  “On me,” I said, firing at two men who were reaching for their weapons.

  The Daymares cleaned up the rest in seconds with a flurry of shots and we were through to the next choke point. It was a wide street with good buildings, littered with bodies in a variety of poses. All had been shot at close range by weapons that left exit wounds the size of a coffee can. The road was drenched with sticky blood, and it was so fresh that there were no flies buzzing away as we picked our path over the victims.

  “Citizens?” Lenza asked, her eyes wide with disgust. She was a soldier, not a killer, and what we were looking at was pure murder.

  “Looks like it, and they were killed—defending something?” I asked, peering down the street. A shot whined away into the sky, and Kirby fired into a doorway thirty meters away. The answering scream told us it was a hit, then relative silence. In the distance, fighting raged on, but here, there was an odd lull.

  “Defending that door of all things? Did their leaders bail on them?” Lenza asked.

  There were buildings of five and six stories in Kassos, and even the odd tower, but the bodies we saw were all on the way to a low structure surrounded by a circular pond with a single walkway into the center, where a pair of wide doors were set inside and angled for access to something underground.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked.

  I got a series of shrugs, and then I got an answer.

  Three people rushed the doors with guns drawn, screaming for the doors to be opened. They got their wish, but not in the way they hoped. A door slid inward, revealing a long-barreled weapon held by a Proc, who fired three times with clinical precision, bursting the chests of all three people.

  “Those wounds make sense now. They weren’t running or defending. The Procs hold something there, and the people are trying to get to it. I think we fought our way into a civil war,” I said.

  “One sided, but yeah,” Kirby agreed.

  The door closed and the Proc vanished, leaving three more bodies steaming in the rising sun. A series of massive concussions rocked the eastern city wall, and a Vampire streaked away at maximum speed, heading into the rising sun before banking sharply to the north.

  “Jack, they have the wall,” came Tegan’s call over the comm, her voice broken with strain.

  “Where are you?” I asked her.

  There was no answer, and the Vampire made another combat run, glittering darts erupting from its guns as it swept low enough that I could see the pilot’s facemask as he banked over us before breaking south this time. He was being bold but smart, giving a different side to the shooters after each pass. Rifles and rockets were crashing across the city now as the fighting spread, and then the comm chirped just as part of the eastern wall erupted in flames.

  �
��Pushed—outside—almost all dead, running—can’t—” Tegan’s voice came in and out, ending with a bright squelch as her comm went silent.

  “They’re done. It’s on us to get inside that structure. I want the Procs. We get the Procs, we take the city. Kassos doesn’t want the Procs here—the bodies tell us that much,” I said, checking my weapons before we went over the top. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” Kirby said.

  My team was seven strong and spread out wide enough to bracket the doors with suppressive fire until I could get close enough.

  I didn’t say anything. I went. Leaping forward, I pushed my body to the limit, legs straining like a sprinter’s as I blurred into motion across the broken pavement and shattered bodies. When I reached the outer ring of water, the door opened and a barrel stuck out, just as before. Kirby and Lenza rose up to fire—

  —and another Proc leaned around from the other side of the underground entrance, weapon blazing as he fired into their center mass, killing Lenza and Kirby before they could utter a sound. I shot him in the gut, tearing his innards wide as he fell forward, pink coils of intestines in his right hand. He looked surprised, then he just looked dead as his face drove forward into the rocky ground.

  The Proc inside trained his weapon on me and fired, but I was already sliding across the poll’s lip to throw a massive rooster tail of water ahead of me. The water deflected his aim enough that his shot carved a channel in my forearm, then shattered against a building some thirty meters distant. My arm went wide, turning instantly numb as I dropped my shotgun and spun from the inertia, fighting to keep my feet even as the Proc stepped out into the sun with a cold smile on his inhuman features.

  The Vampire pilot fired at him with no adjustment, having come in at wall height. The darts tore the Proc apart in an orgy of gore, his ribs and innards splattering backward like confetti as his body was blown back inside the mysterious doorway. I gained my balance just in time to see the pilot nod and break east, off to support Tegan as she fought a desperate stand against forces I could not help her with.

  As I stood panting, dripping blood, and fighting to clear my vision, I heard the sweetest sound ever from the east.

  Wolves.

  Then the screaming started.

  “I think reinforcements have arrived,” I said, sick with anger at the deaths of my people. Thin shrieks of pain began to drift to my ears, and in the distance I saw a soldier throw down his weapon and begin running. He made it five steps and a wolf the size of a Great Dane rode him to the ground, ending his struggle with a single snap of its jaws on his exposed neck. The wolf shook his corpse like a doll, then threw it to the ground and howled at the sky in triumph before turning to rejoin the fight. A hippo crashed through a section of barrier, its rider firing the mounted rifle in regular beats—wham—wham—wham—until the soldiers in front of her were so much meat on the ground.

  It was Tegan, her armor torn and blood sheeting down her face, but she was alive, and she was in the fight. A pair of wolves blurred past her and she gave her hippo the spurs, then she vanished around a building with a cry as she began firing again.

  “Hold this perimeter!” I bellowed to the surviving members of my team.

  I heard a chorus—much reduced—of agreement, and then I was at the door.

  “Aristine, I’m going underground. The Procs have some kind of safe room. Can you mark my position?” I said into my comm.

  “I have you.” Her answer was instant.

  “Losses?” I asked her.

  “Some. We flanked them and then we surprised them, just like you thought. If we lose comms, will you be at this location?” she asked.

  “Or down. Don’t know what I’m going into. I’ll leave the channel open,” I said.

  “I’m listening.” She didn’t tell me to be careful because she was a soldier, too. I stepped to the door, peered around the edge, and went inside.

  It was a slaughterhouse. There had been three Procs inside the door, and all three were splattered across the walls by the Vampire’s explosive rounds. It was a small room leading to steps that turned hard left five meters in. I listened, catching hints of the battle outside, then began to creep forward, pistol and blade at the ready. Sweat dripped into my eyes and down my neck, but it felt cool out of the growing day. The walls were bleach white, and on a whim, I pushed my fingertip against the nearest part. It gave, then began to reform immediately. Memrock. That meant this place was old, or at the very least advanced. Light emanated from a bar mounted at the top of the stairwell, curling away around the turn.

  I paused when a soft noise reached my ears. There was a mechanical quality to it, like metal on metal, but muffled by distance. A shadow fell across the landing below me, and without pausing I leapt down the stairs, knife extended to strike in the chest of a Proc who looked shocked, angry, and then quite dead as I hammered his corpse into the soft Memrock wall. I caught him as the last breath hissed through the gaping wound near his heart, letting him slide softly to the floor, bent at an angle as if he was sleeping off a Saturday night bender.

  He had a pistol lashed to him with a fabric that stretched like skin, but was glimmering with ghostly luminescence. I took the gun, left his corpse, and continued down to the landing, listening with the intensity of a jewel thief. I heard distant voices and the distinct sound of boots on stairs. The Procs were going further down, which meant there were more levels of whatever it was I was in.

  Around the landing, the hall opened up into a room that had five doors, each covered by a soft, heavy curtain of clear material. The curtains moved slightly as if there was overpressure, but I saw and heard nothing.

  Except for the blood.

  Outside the third door, a blood trail went inside the room, lurid drops of crimson sprayed across the sterile white floor in a pattern and color that was fresh. The blood might have fallen as I was descending, it looked so bright under the light bars that ran along each wall and above each doorway. The smell of copper was heavy—far too present for what blood I could see on the floor.

  I stalked to the exterior wall, two doors away from the blood trail. The room was still silent, save for the hum of a cooling unit somewhere below me. I looked inside the plastic curtain and saw formless shapes, bright with a metallic gleam and unknown purpose. Using the tip of my blade, I pushed the curtain back. There was no reaction. I risked a look and saw a surgical room, unoccupied, medium in size, and festooned with gear that made little sense from where I stood.

  When I entered the room, its purpose became clear.

  The table was scarred, clear, and crafted of plexiglass or some similar component, and it had seen hard service for a long time. There were restraints, a series of small tubes, and a pump with a clear reservoir attached. Overhead, a light lay dormant, as did a series of machines that looked suspiciously like a heart-lung unit from a critical care ward. A second pump was mounted to the foot of the table, with two tubes of colored material. Divots in the table matched where a victim—not a patient—would be placed face down to expose their spine, brain pan, and whatever else the monstrous Procs were stealing from people to extend their evil lives.

  It was a kill room. A plunder room. A place of horror, and pain, and violation of a kind I couldn’t begin to understand, and there were five of them in this facility alone. Standing there with my fists balled, a curtain of rage descended over my eyes that threatened to sear the nerves in my body. I knew hatred now, an emotion so deadly that in that instant, every Proc died. They just didn’t know it yet.

  My blood continued to patter on the floor as I reopened my wound despite the best efforts of my ‘bots, and then I heard a cough. I listened and heard it again, but it wasn’t a cough—it was a whimper of pain, and it was coming from the room where the blood trail led. Slipping out into the hall, I turned for that door and looked inside.

  A man lay on the table, face down and shaking, his back opened up to reveal every vertebra and the back of his skull. He spasmed again, the
n his left foot began to shake in a wild rhythm, jerking the blue tube out that had been inserted into the middle of his heel. A long, silver needle fell out, clattering to the table as it leaked a viscous fluid that spread slowly over the clear surface.

  I went to him as his other foot began to shake. To my horror, I knew he was alive, and there was a gag around his mouth. I reached for the gag as his back arched in one final, massive spasm, and then he went still, fluid dripping onto the floor in a patter that sounded like the rain in hell.

  There had been a reservoir attached to the pump, but it was gone. The Procs had done things to him in the name of their sick needs, which meant they were on the run, and there was only one way to go. Down.

  I followed their retreat, gun drawn and blade at the ready, past a series of turns and stairs until the space opened up before me into a yawning area the size of a warehouse. The air reeked of oil, hot metal, and scorched rubber, and three Procs wrestled with a long cart piled high with clear tanks, sloshing obscenely with stolen spinal cords, brains, and other organs, the fluid pink around them under harsh chemical light from above. They were so intent on their cargo they didn’t see me walking toward them, my newly acquired pistol at the ready.

  Steel decking ran out over a gash in the earth, and parked there in all its glory was a massive drill with the number one embossed on a huge panel. Each tub of human tissue had a small refrigeration unit attached, pumping bubbles from a tube that ran the length of each lid, and the fact that the Procs were taking the time to wrestle with such a massive weight told me they were leaving, and not coming back. They knew the dance was over, and I decided to end all thoughts they might have of a safe escape.

  I aimed at the tallest Proc and pulled the trigger, sending a round of searing light toward its skull. The creature’s face vanished, along with the rest of his head as he pitched, quite dead, into the space beyond the steel deck. Like a crash test dummy, he spun once and vanished in the gloom below before his co-conspirators could so much as move a muscle.