Re: All the little lost boys and girls (Update: 23/6/11)
Posted: 2011-08-04 03:54pm
Hey, it's this story again. Sorry about the delay; I've been sending queries out to agents and working on my Children of Heaven universe/stories as well. Anyways, we'll see if anyone out there remembers this story, yes?
In this chapter: desperation in the present, corruption in the past. Parallel lines never meet, but these are not parallel...
Coming up: betrayals, past and present.
Chapter 55:
If I ever get out of here, Abigail silently vowed as she pounded up the empty tunnel, the screeches of ghouls on her heels, I am going to find every last motherfucker that says bringing knives to a gunfight is stupid and kill each one of those sons-of-bitches.
To be fair though, it wasn’t really knives that were the problem. And whoever had decided that parable was always valid, had never expected to encounter anything like the Turned. They were fast. They shouldn’t be, not with their normal limping, skulking gait. But they could move when they wanted, faster than anything else on two legs that Abigail had ever seen. Plus, the value of normal killshots was... somewhat reduced.
Oh, sure – if you had artillery, flamethrowers, energy weapons and armoured units, then things would be a lot simpler. But if you didn’t, if all you had was small-arms and infantry... if you had to fight these things on anything approaching unfavourable conditions, then you had two options: be fast and lucky or... well, there actually wasn’t any option after that, because it didn’t matter how many you killed. There were always more. Sooner or later your batteries died, your magazines were empty, your armour was broken, your food was gone and then all the luck in the universe couldn’t save you.
Abigail didn’t want to think about how many others had come to the DROP, how many other bands of survivors had fought for days until they too, were worn down, or many of those former survivors she was facing now. She didn’t want those thoughts and she didn’t have time for them. All that mattered right now was surviving long enough for Shannon to do whatever she was doing, to find whatever she was looking for. She has a plan. She has to have a plan.
Something with pincers for hands squawked as it fell, its left leg severed at the hip by Godfrey’s fire. With barely a pause as it hit the ground, it began pulling itself over the deck with those clicking maniples. Something else staggered as Betsy crashed out a burst, but it was one of those damn EVA breeds and the shotgun’s normally flesh-tearing fusillade sparked uselessly against the Turned’s armour. Lutzberg was yelling and firing wildly as he ran, his shots as often as not going wide and those that did hit had little effect. Delphini was rabbiting up the corridor, keeping pace with Four; Shannon pointing something out to her before turning around and firing, blowing the back of a Turned’s skull out as one of the Merkilov’s large bullets punched through its eye socket. The creature moaned and staggered, but Abigail knew that something as trifling as missing the greater portion of its brain was only an inconvenience.
There are only a couple dozen, Abigail thought as one of Louis’ grenades arced over her head and exploded; a frag, it peppered the nearest Turned with shrapnel: shearing limbs, ripping muscle and tearing skin. The injured creatures staggered through their own gore, frothing and screaming in single-minded need, but they shrugged off the wounds, chewing up the distance between them and the ragged band of fleeing survivors.
Not for the first time, Abigail wondered just what it was that the Imperium had made here. She fell back up the hall past Louis and knelt. Jane was last in line now, the trooper’s gun spitting fire in brief bursts. This wasn’t a time to conserve ammo and the Darkknell realized with a thrill of horror that the Ghost was rationing her fire because she didn’t have much left. Shit. Shit, shit shit. One of the Turned rushed Godfrey, only to be sheared in half by the trooper’s disruptor, its thrashing torso smashed beneath the Ghost’s boots.
Abigail blinked. She’s quick.
“G-One!” Shannon ordered. “Fall back now!”
“Acknowledged,” the trooper replied, starting to back up. There was movement further down the corridor and Abigail watched as Unity’s massive head peered around the burning remains of the tram, watching the survivors draw back. It pulled out, slinking through the twitching remains of its kin as they continued to harry the group, torn to pieces by the mercenaries’ fire, but each one got a little closer, each one absorbed more of their dwindling supply of bullets. Leisurely stalking its victims, Unity followed them up the tram tunnel, nudging ruined bits of the other turned towards each other as it did so, ensuring they’d rise faster. Already, the first resurrection was dragging itself to its feet, leaking ichor from a torso still riddled with bullet holes. Its left arm belonged to something else, clawed fingers spasming as flesh and nerves reconnected to one another.
Drool and blood leaked from its mouth as it took lurching steps towards the survivors, testing its torn muscles and ruined ligaments as they knit themselves together.
The Watcher was screaming in her ear, excoriating them to fight or flee – Abigail couldn’t tell which and she blink–clicked his channel off, trusting Shannon to sort out any useful information from the feral’s hysteria. She could hear Emily behind her, shouting.
There was a maintenance hatch on the floor of the tram, its black-on-yellow hazard stripes and red lettering faded from years of neglect and scratched by a great many long, sharp claws. It was one of the tunnels that fed into the byzantine network of cross-tunnels and Jefferies tubes that ran above, beneath and alongside the station’s main corridors. Normally the domain of Turned, but Abigail knew why Shannon had led them there – the claw marks were from Gemma and her ‘sisters’ – like the work shafts in the hydroponics bay, this too should be free of infestation. Barely big enough for the armoured Godfrey to squeeze into, it was too small for Unity to fit through. There was just one problem, summed up by the doctor’s alarmed cry: “They’ve sealed it!” The turnwheel that unlocked the hatch was jammed with a twisted spar of metal that even Shannon was having trouble untangling from the hatch. That simple, casual demonstration of Gemma’s newfound strength was bad enough on its own. That she’d been helping them only minutes earlier...
It hurts to remember, Abigail recalled the petty officer saying. And you weren’t hungry then were you, Mackenzie? Are you hungry now, or is this one of your ‘sisters’ at play?
Abigail wondered where the infected Gemma and her ‘sisters’ had gone, if they had been blown into space, but she couldn’t spare more than a passing thought for the petty officer as she slapped a fresh cartridge into her rifle.
Behind her, Shannon had given up trying to pull the girder out and was using the surgical laser in her built-in medical gear to cut through it, but the thin red beam was intended to cauterize and suture, not burn through metal.
“Hurry, Four,” Abby shouted unnecessarily as she dropped to one knee, forming a firing line with Godfrey and Hernandez. Her disruptor would cleave through the blockage in a second, but she needed a moment to get it into her hand, a moment she didn’t have. Most of the Turned were down, twitching gobbets of meat hauling themselves together, but Unity was still there, still slinking towards them, completely unhurried. It had found them once; it would do so again. The praetorian’s massive head tilted towards the women, three of its eyes watching them. It made a staccato hiss as it evaluated them,
“Get my blade,” Abigail told her Shannon, feeling her partner’s hands free the disruptor from her back, the Darkknell focusing her attention on Unity, the three faces that formed its visage staring back at her. Whoever they’d been, however long they’d fought... it hadn’t been enough. And it didn’t matter. There was nothing human in the creature’s eyes, no trace of Mackenzie’s fear, none of the Mother’s insanity. Kill and eat and kill and eat. That was Unity’s sole drive now.
“Fuck you,” Abigail whispered towards the massive grotesque as she set her carbine down, pulling the anti-material rifle off her back and snapping it out into its full length. “I’ve got something special just for you.” She chambered one of the weapon’s precious few rounds. Armour-penetrating, high explosive. Intended to punch through the armour of heavy troopers and light vehicles alike. A thin killer’s smile wormed onto the Darkknell’s face as she lifted the weapon, zeroing in on her target.
A roar shook the halls, rattling Abigail’s bones inside her armour as the tusked praetorian they’d fought earlier thundered onto the scene. The only trace of its ruination at Godfrey’s hands were the splotches of milky, discoloured flesh that made a patchwork pattern out of its hide. Its massive clawed hands were splayed as it slunk along the deck, its flanks pulsing with its heavy breaths, rancid steam wisping out from its drooling maw. Its muscles twitched in feline anticipation, thick black talons clicking against the deck. tap tap tap
tap tap tap
Unity looked from its kin to the survivors, its lipless mouth somehow managing to grin wider, almost as if it found joy in the situation. It glanced back at its companion, opening its distended jaws and hissing an imperative. The second praetorian screamed and bound forward, thickly muscled arms and legs pounding against the deck as it flew into the waves of gunfire, shrieking from its eroding features. A living engine of destruction, forged from bone and flesh instead of metal and ceramic. It would never stop, never tire, never die.
Lutzberg let out a panicked wail, firing wildly and utterly off-target. Emily was more accurate, her pistol snapping again and again, but the doctor’s shots had no more effect than the petty officer’s fire. In Louis’s hands, Betsy roared, cycling through the ammo drum so fast her barrel began to glow and Godfrey’s cyclic cannon whined as the Ghost spent the last of her ammo in an attempt to kill the charging praetorian. It was almost on them.
Like a gladiator facing a charging lion, she raised her sword.
“Wait,” Shannon told the trooper, watching Abigail. “Wait.”
“Zeroing,” Abigail whispered. It was fast, almost too fast...
...there.
She squeezed the trigger and the crash of the hypersonic round filled the tramway, overpowering every other noise, so loud that the mercenaries’ autosenses overcompensated, momentarily shutting down their audio receptors entirely. The bullet took the charging praetorian in the flank, just behind the forward left shoulder. Intended to tear through light vehicle armour, no amount of flesh and bone could stop it and the round punched through the monster’s body, ripping it in half as it detonated within the Charger’s flesh.
The Turned screamed, an uncomprehending gargling wail as it ruptured, front and back halves skidding across the deck in a tsunami of infected blood and corrupted organs. It coughed, gagging weakly as it struggled to recover from the strike, even its robust nerve net temporarily overloaded as it spasmed and thrashed amidst its own gore. It couldn’t die, but it could be crippled.
Under her helmet, the Darkknell’s lips twitched upwards in the barest of smiles. “Got you.”
Its hindquarters were twitching and wobbling, slipping on its own entrails and gore as a forest of writhing tendrils spasmed out from its torso, seeking to pull itself back together. The praetorian looked up at Abigail from its ruined face – one eye had been burst by the survivors’ fire – and let out a wet, rippling exhalation, all the noise its perforated lungs were capable of creating. Then, it reached one of its massive hands towards her and began to pull itself along the deck, leaving a vast red smear behind it as it began to pick up speed.
Abigail grabbed another anti-armour round and slammed it into the rifle’s breach. She never got the chance to fire it as Unity was suddenly there, smashing her to one side with a secondary arm. The woman rolled with the blow-
-Unity’s tail wrapped around Godfrey’s sword arm and as if the trooper weighed no more than Abigail, it yanked her off her feet and sent her clattering over the ground, right into the other praetorian’s path-
-Lutzberg was sobbing in terror and scrabbling blindly away in panic-
-Emily was screaming, but Abigail couldn’t make out the words as Unity rounded on the petite doctor and its jaws opened, wide enough to engulf Delphini’s head-
-ropes of saliva dribbled from its teeth as it leaned towards Emily and Abigail tried to pull herself up, but she wasn’t fast enough, couldn’t make it there in time-
-and Shannon was in front of Emily, firing into Unity’s gaping maw.
The monster staggered back, shrieking and coughing blood. One of its four arms clutched at its throat as it rasped and gagged, another swinging at Shannon. She was fast, but not fast enough and the Turned’s talons scored across her cuirass. Unity shook off its injuries – what was a shredded brain and massive soft tissue damage to it? – and, open-mouthed, it lunged.
Its jaws gnashed empty air as Shannon pulled Emily down, both women rolling under the enraged creature. Shannon fired into its throat and the underside of its jaw, praying to every god that ever was or would be for it have a weak point, any weak point. Its hands stabbed down in a frenzy of slashing grabs as it tried to seize the women and drag them out from under its body, or simply pull them apart.
Its maw darted down, saliva pattering onto Shannon’s armour as it tried to get its mouth around her head. She grabbed its mouth, forcing its jaws shut. Steam flared from its nostrils as it pounded the ground around her, but the Halo held onto Unity’s mouth, keeping it shut. like any predator, its strongest jaw muscles closed, not opened. It would take enormous strength to hold an old-Earth alligator’s jaws open, but almost anyone could hold the reptile’s mouth shut and so it was with this monstrosity.
The creature bore down on her, its reeking breath overpowering her suit’s filtration systems and she gagged at the stench of it, her arms shaking as it pushed against her, struggling to get its mouth free, jerking its head back and forth, but Shannon desperately clung to its face, refusing to let go. Unity reared back, but still Shannon held tight, digging her fingers into its flesh for purchase but little by little, her grip was loosening.
“Run!” she shouted at Emily, so loud that static blasted from her speakers. “Run!” she screamed again as Unity slammed her against the deck. Emily scrabbled to safety, just barely avoiding the sweep of Unity’s claws, but Shannon couldn’t see to confirm that, she couldn’t look away from the abyss of the monster’s eyes and the rage, the hunger and the fury that formed the void.
I will have you. You are nothing. Better than you have come here. Better than you have died here. Nothing you do will matter. You will feed us, or become one of us. Your victory means nothing. It pushed harder, its maw almost touching her helmet now. You are nothing. It reared back and smashed her against the wall. Shannon cried out in pain and her hands slipped a fraction more.
“No...” Shannon whispered, her eyes tearing as she tried to look away, but it was so close that Unity was all she could see, the malice and intelligence in its eyes, the sense of triumph as it knew she was weakening. Even struggling against her, its limbs still fought against the others in a blind frenzy of slashing blades, forcing them back. None of them could get near her.
They can’t help you. You’re going to die – as you lived. As nothing.
“No.” It came out as a plea, not a challenge.
You are nothing.
You are nothing.
“No!” Shannon screamed, wrenching her hands with a burst of desperate strength. She felt more than heard the crack of the praetorian’s bones and it jerked back so fiercely that she finally lost her grip. Unity shrieked hatefully from its splintered maw, its lower jaw all but torn off. One of its forelegs came crashing down, hard enough to shatter her armour and crush the bones of her chest, but someone grabbed her at the last second and pulled her out of the way. Godfrey.
The trooper lunged forward with her other arm, jabbing her disruptor up into Unity’s torso and the monster screamed again, heaving back off the blade before Jane could eviscerate it. Its broken jaw worked with an ugly crackling sound as it clicked back into place, the bones knitting. There was only the briefest pause in the battle as Unity gathered its bearings, looking from the half-dozen survivors surrounding it, to the steaming hulk of its fellow praetorian, hewn and butchered by Godfrey’s blade but even now twitching and pulsing in the spasms of resurrection. The praetorian’s eyes flicked over to the lurching horde of its lesser kin as, reborn and gabbling in hunger and rage, as they drew closer. Foul blood leaked down its sides from a plethora of wounds, but true its kind, none of them had even slowed it down, while each of the survivors was drenched in sweat, bloodied and bruised, tired and weakened.
“Three,” Shannon whispered softly over the comm, still staring into the monster’s eyes. “Burn it.”
Abigail carefully drew an incendiary, thumbing the detonator on. The praetorian’s head shifted as it evaluated its targets. “That’s right,” the Darkknell purred. “Make your choice.” She threw the explosive. Unity saw it, knew what the small metal sphere was and was already moving away, fast despite its size. But not fast enough.
Heat and light flashed through the dark tunnel, flames washing over the monster’s flank. It screamed again, the noise deafening, and again the mercenaries’ autosenses shut down as Lutzberg, Delphini and Hernandez clapped their hands to their ears in an effort to block out the awful noise. Burning, Unity thrashed, shrieking and roaring as the flames licked over its armoured hide. For an instant, the creature’s berserker instincts almost took control and it nearly rounded on its tormentors. Instead, the monster’s mind won out and it turned and fled back down the corridor, aflame and yowling like the damned as it sought some refuge from the fire spreading over its flesh. Abigail hoped it burned.
“That won’t hold it long,” Shannon said, dashing her ‘big sister’s’ hopes. “The air’s still too thin and it’ll find some way to put out of the fire.”
“Stop, drop and roll,” Louis commented dryly as he put a round into another Turned, cratering its patchwork torso. He snickered at his own joke, the sound manic and almost a giggle. They were still coming, but in ones and twos now as they pulled themselves together. “We have an evac plan?”
“Yes,” Shannon answered after a moment. There was something in her voice and Abigail realized what it was as she noticed the limp in the Halo’s step and the stain on her leggings. She knelt back at maintenance hatch, finally cutting through the last lock. “We go down.”
~
She’d had a name once. She remembered that much. Sometimes, she even remembered what it was. She didn’t want to. Remembering it brought back other memories. The sound of her mother’s voice as she sang lullabies. The feel of her father’s hands when he picked her up. Faces. Other names, places. It was worse than the hunger. She’d tear at herself until her skin hung off her flesh in strips and the pain blocked out the memories. She didn’t want to remember. There were words and faces and sounds and smells, knives that cut through her over and over until... until she forgot again.
They’d told her how beautiful she was. What lovely, strong children she’d have. Then they’d stopped telling her. She’d been their hound until they drove her out. Then, she was this.
Tabitha. That had been her name. Blood dripped from her talons as she cut into her palms and she rasped a pained breath out between her teeth.
She was the second youngest sister. The oldest was Kiyomi. Their youngest was called Gemma. Both of them were here. She didn’t know where her other sisters were and the worry gnawed at her. She didn’t count her brothers. She didn’t like them.
Unity ran by, a blur of armour plating and smouldering flames. She watched it go, wincing in sympathy for the praetorian. The creature unsettled even her, but it was family. “Gemma,” she rolled her sibling’s name down her tongue. It felt wrong to use it – she knew Gemma felt the same pain she did, but she needed her newest sibling’s full attention.
The other girl didn’t turn to look at her, but she cocked her head, listening.
“They hurt Unity,” Tabitha hissed.
“I know.”
“They killed Mother.”
“I know.”
“So many lost.”
“I know.”
“Then why?” she all but shrieked. Kiyomi flinched at the sound. She was the smallest of them and she had been Turned barely into her teenage years. She crept forward and nuzzled Tabitha and Gemma in turn, licking each of them and making worried little keens at her sisters’ argument.
Gemma reached out and stroked Kiyomi’s hair, eliciting a purr from the smaller girl. Likewise, Tabitha returned Kiyomi’s nuzzle, though she remained looking at Gemma, awaiting an answer. “Because I know them,” Gemma whispered. “I know where they’ll go.” The woman turned back to the darkened corridor, running her tongue over her teeth. “It’s a Halo. It’s looking for the oasis.”
Tabitha’s lips drew back over her teeth. “High in the pine tree, the little turtledove made a nursery to please her little love.”
“‘Coo’, said the little dove, ‘coo’ said she,” Gemma took up the rhyme, continuing to pet Kiyomi. She smiled at Tabitha and rested her head on her sister’s shoulder. “In the long, shady branches of the dark pine tree.”
~
Then:
“I’m not sure about this.”
“It’s okay Sare,” Dyson’s voice whispered through the comm. “You’re doing fine.”
Jessup’s only response was a sound much like a whimper as she squeezed herself through the tunnel. It was only intended for maintenance bots and emergency venting and she had to drag herself through one hand at a time. She wasn’t claustrophobic, not normally, but scraping through the pipe inch by inch in utter darkness wasn’t really conducive to her mental well-being. She couldn’t see anything at the end of the tunnel, even with the infra-red goggles she was wearing. It might mean there was nothing to worry about, or it might mean that there was a new Lurker breed that didn’t show up on infrared waiting there for her. “How much further?”
“You’re almost there.”
“You’ve been saying that for ten minutes.”
“And if you’d been moving faster, you’d be there already.”
Another little whimper and Sarah stammered an apology. “Sorry, I’m sorry.”
“Just keep going,” Dyson said soothingly. “You’re doing fine. Let me know when you’ve reached the end.”
Without waiting for her reply, he switched the mic over to its mute mode, leaning back in his chair. The scent of perfume washed over him. “She’s almost there,” he said to his visitor.
“Good.”
“You’re sure she’ll be safe?”
“One of my sisters will watch out for her,” his companion whispered, her tone rising and falling in a disturbing singsong. “And we’ll both get what we want.”
“I know we will,” Dyson replied, reaching back to stroke her cheek, the action eliciting a trill of pleasure that rose into a questioning purr. One of her hands slid down his chest, between his legs. “I’ll get what I want?” she chirped.
His right hand slipped into her torn blouse. “And what’s that?”
She circled around him and straddled his lap, her red eyes staring at him with a mixture of need and hunger. Her lips moved, drawing back over her teeth, her tongue licking out. Her clawed hands rested gently against his shoulders. She began to rock back and forth, lifting herself up only enough for him to unfasten his pants. “I want,” she purred softly as he took a hold of her hips and began to guide her movements. “I want to remember this.”
~
“God, I thought the live ones smelled bad.”
“Nine, if you puke on me, I will cut you in ways that will make you useless to a woman. Don’t even think I won’t.”
Louis forced his gorge down, ineffectually covering his mouth with one hand as he sloshed through the effluvia. “Four, no offence, but this was the best plan you could come up with?”
“Unity can’t fit down here,” Shannon replied without looking back at Nine. “The others can’t open the door. If they do, they still can’t spread out and rush us at once.” In the distance, they could hear the clanging as claws and talons beat against the hatch, but it wasn’t something you could force open.
“Yeah, great. But aren’t we headed back towards the garden where you said all these horrible things were being made?”
“This is a waste tunnel,” Shannon confirmed. “For overflow if the main sewage lines ever became blocked up. It’s also intended for maintenance on the pumping systems and tramway.”
“Yeah, I got the ‘waste’ part of it,” Louis said with a grimace as he lifted his boot, clear translucent strings of goo dripping off the sole. “I just want to know our heading.”
“As do I, daughter,” the Watcher’s voice crackled through the comm. “Where are you going? I need to know. I want my locket. It’s what you promised.”
“I know what I promised,” Shannon answered the feral human. He’d called her ‘the daughter’ before. And Rabbit Mask’s reaction to her name... her cheek burned. You shouldn’t have seen that,” her great-gran’s voice ran through her head. You shouldn’t have seen any of it. Promise me Shannie, promise me that you’ll forget. All of it.
I promise. “I promise,” Shannon repeated the words without realizing that she had.
“Four?” Abigail queried.
Shannon blinked. “Sorry, Three. Just talking to myself.”
There was a bit of a giggle over the comm, then a raspy, steadying breath: “Where is the daughter going? Where are you going, Shannon Hayes-Halo?”
The redhaired woman put a steadying hand on the wall as her injured leg trembled, close to buckling. “This tunnel leads to one of the secondary tram lines. Can you get a car there?”
“Yes, yes, of course. It’ll take longer. More obstructions, more side-routes-”
“Just do it,” Shannon interrupted, too tired to argue.
“You’ve done well, daughter of sin. You, the little moth and the other forgotten.”
“They’re not forgotten.”
“They will be,” the Watcher assured her in a brief moment of lucidity. His tone was almost kind. “You will forget them. Their names, their faces, what they meant to you. You’ll only remember pieces and then you’ll wonder what those pieces go to. One by one they’ll fade away... and then you’ll be left. Acheron flows into the Lethe.”
Shannon closed her eyes briefly. I know. Her cheek still burned and somewhere, in the back of her head, she could still hear her great-grandmother’s voice telling her, begging her, to forget.
In this chapter: desperation in the present, corruption in the past. Parallel lines never meet, but these are not parallel...
Coming up: betrayals, past and present.
Chapter 55:
If I ever get out of here, Abigail silently vowed as she pounded up the empty tunnel, the screeches of ghouls on her heels, I am going to find every last motherfucker that says bringing knives to a gunfight is stupid and kill each one of those sons-of-bitches.
To be fair though, it wasn’t really knives that were the problem. And whoever had decided that parable was always valid, had never expected to encounter anything like the Turned. They were fast. They shouldn’t be, not with their normal limping, skulking gait. But they could move when they wanted, faster than anything else on two legs that Abigail had ever seen. Plus, the value of normal killshots was... somewhat reduced.
Oh, sure – if you had artillery, flamethrowers, energy weapons and armoured units, then things would be a lot simpler. But if you didn’t, if all you had was small-arms and infantry... if you had to fight these things on anything approaching unfavourable conditions, then you had two options: be fast and lucky or... well, there actually wasn’t any option after that, because it didn’t matter how many you killed. There were always more. Sooner or later your batteries died, your magazines were empty, your armour was broken, your food was gone and then all the luck in the universe couldn’t save you.
Abigail didn’t want to think about how many others had come to the DROP, how many other bands of survivors had fought for days until they too, were worn down, or many of those former survivors she was facing now. She didn’t want those thoughts and she didn’t have time for them. All that mattered right now was surviving long enough for Shannon to do whatever she was doing, to find whatever she was looking for. She has a plan. She has to have a plan.
Something with pincers for hands squawked as it fell, its left leg severed at the hip by Godfrey’s fire. With barely a pause as it hit the ground, it began pulling itself over the deck with those clicking maniples. Something else staggered as Betsy crashed out a burst, but it was one of those damn EVA breeds and the shotgun’s normally flesh-tearing fusillade sparked uselessly against the Turned’s armour. Lutzberg was yelling and firing wildly as he ran, his shots as often as not going wide and those that did hit had little effect. Delphini was rabbiting up the corridor, keeping pace with Four; Shannon pointing something out to her before turning around and firing, blowing the back of a Turned’s skull out as one of the Merkilov’s large bullets punched through its eye socket. The creature moaned and staggered, but Abigail knew that something as trifling as missing the greater portion of its brain was only an inconvenience.
There are only a couple dozen, Abigail thought as one of Louis’ grenades arced over her head and exploded; a frag, it peppered the nearest Turned with shrapnel: shearing limbs, ripping muscle and tearing skin. The injured creatures staggered through their own gore, frothing and screaming in single-minded need, but they shrugged off the wounds, chewing up the distance between them and the ragged band of fleeing survivors.
Not for the first time, Abigail wondered just what it was that the Imperium had made here. She fell back up the hall past Louis and knelt. Jane was last in line now, the trooper’s gun spitting fire in brief bursts. This wasn’t a time to conserve ammo and the Darkknell realized with a thrill of horror that the Ghost was rationing her fire because she didn’t have much left. Shit. Shit, shit shit. One of the Turned rushed Godfrey, only to be sheared in half by the trooper’s disruptor, its thrashing torso smashed beneath the Ghost’s boots.
Abigail blinked. She’s quick.
“G-One!” Shannon ordered. “Fall back now!”
“Acknowledged,” the trooper replied, starting to back up. There was movement further down the corridor and Abigail watched as Unity’s massive head peered around the burning remains of the tram, watching the survivors draw back. It pulled out, slinking through the twitching remains of its kin as they continued to harry the group, torn to pieces by the mercenaries’ fire, but each one got a little closer, each one absorbed more of their dwindling supply of bullets. Leisurely stalking its victims, Unity followed them up the tram tunnel, nudging ruined bits of the other turned towards each other as it did so, ensuring they’d rise faster. Already, the first resurrection was dragging itself to its feet, leaking ichor from a torso still riddled with bullet holes. Its left arm belonged to something else, clawed fingers spasming as flesh and nerves reconnected to one another.
Drool and blood leaked from its mouth as it took lurching steps towards the survivors, testing its torn muscles and ruined ligaments as they knit themselves together.
The Watcher was screaming in her ear, excoriating them to fight or flee – Abigail couldn’t tell which and she blink–clicked his channel off, trusting Shannon to sort out any useful information from the feral’s hysteria. She could hear Emily behind her, shouting.
There was a maintenance hatch on the floor of the tram, its black-on-yellow hazard stripes and red lettering faded from years of neglect and scratched by a great many long, sharp claws. It was one of the tunnels that fed into the byzantine network of cross-tunnels and Jefferies tubes that ran above, beneath and alongside the station’s main corridors. Normally the domain of Turned, but Abigail knew why Shannon had led them there – the claw marks were from Gemma and her ‘sisters’ – like the work shafts in the hydroponics bay, this too should be free of infestation. Barely big enough for the armoured Godfrey to squeeze into, it was too small for Unity to fit through. There was just one problem, summed up by the doctor’s alarmed cry: “They’ve sealed it!” The turnwheel that unlocked the hatch was jammed with a twisted spar of metal that even Shannon was having trouble untangling from the hatch. That simple, casual demonstration of Gemma’s newfound strength was bad enough on its own. That she’d been helping them only minutes earlier...
It hurts to remember, Abigail recalled the petty officer saying. And you weren’t hungry then were you, Mackenzie? Are you hungry now, or is this one of your ‘sisters’ at play?
Abigail wondered where the infected Gemma and her ‘sisters’ had gone, if they had been blown into space, but she couldn’t spare more than a passing thought for the petty officer as she slapped a fresh cartridge into her rifle.
Behind her, Shannon had given up trying to pull the girder out and was using the surgical laser in her built-in medical gear to cut through it, but the thin red beam was intended to cauterize and suture, not burn through metal.
“Hurry, Four,” Abby shouted unnecessarily as she dropped to one knee, forming a firing line with Godfrey and Hernandez. Her disruptor would cleave through the blockage in a second, but she needed a moment to get it into her hand, a moment she didn’t have. Most of the Turned were down, twitching gobbets of meat hauling themselves together, but Unity was still there, still slinking towards them, completely unhurried. It had found them once; it would do so again. The praetorian’s massive head tilted towards the women, three of its eyes watching them. It made a staccato hiss as it evaluated them,
“Get my blade,” Abigail told her Shannon, feeling her partner’s hands free the disruptor from her back, the Darkknell focusing her attention on Unity, the three faces that formed its visage staring back at her. Whoever they’d been, however long they’d fought... it hadn’t been enough. And it didn’t matter. There was nothing human in the creature’s eyes, no trace of Mackenzie’s fear, none of the Mother’s insanity. Kill and eat and kill and eat. That was Unity’s sole drive now.
“Fuck you,” Abigail whispered towards the massive grotesque as she set her carbine down, pulling the anti-material rifle off her back and snapping it out into its full length. “I’ve got something special just for you.” She chambered one of the weapon’s precious few rounds. Armour-penetrating, high explosive. Intended to punch through the armour of heavy troopers and light vehicles alike. A thin killer’s smile wormed onto the Darkknell’s face as she lifted the weapon, zeroing in on her target.
A roar shook the halls, rattling Abigail’s bones inside her armour as the tusked praetorian they’d fought earlier thundered onto the scene. The only trace of its ruination at Godfrey’s hands were the splotches of milky, discoloured flesh that made a patchwork pattern out of its hide. Its massive clawed hands were splayed as it slunk along the deck, its flanks pulsing with its heavy breaths, rancid steam wisping out from its drooling maw. Its muscles twitched in feline anticipation, thick black talons clicking against the deck. tap tap tap
tap tap tap
Unity looked from its kin to the survivors, its lipless mouth somehow managing to grin wider, almost as if it found joy in the situation. It glanced back at its companion, opening its distended jaws and hissing an imperative. The second praetorian screamed and bound forward, thickly muscled arms and legs pounding against the deck as it flew into the waves of gunfire, shrieking from its eroding features. A living engine of destruction, forged from bone and flesh instead of metal and ceramic. It would never stop, never tire, never die.
Lutzberg let out a panicked wail, firing wildly and utterly off-target. Emily was more accurate, her pistol snapping again and again, but the doctor’s shots had no more effect than the petty officer’s fire. In Louis’s hands, Betsy roared, cycling through the ammo drum so fast her barrel began to glow and Godfrey’s cyclic cannon whined as the Ghost spent the last of her ammo in an attempt to kill the charging praetorian. It was almost on them.
Like a gladiator facing a charging lion, she raised her sword.
“Wait,” Shannon told the trooper, watching Abigail. “Wait.”
“Zeroing,” Abigail whispered. It was fast, almost too fast...
...there.
She squeezed the trigger and the crash of the hypersonic round filled the tramway, overpowering every other noise, so loud that the mercenaries’ autosenses overcompensated, momentarily shutting down their audio receptors entirely. The bullet took the charging praetorian in the flank, just behind the forward left shoulder. Intended to tear through light vehicle armour, no amount of flesh and bone could stop it and the round punched through the monster’s body, ripping it in half as it detonated within the Charger’s flesh.
The Turned screamed, an uncomprehending gargling wail as it ruptured, front and back halves skidding across the deck in a tsunami of infected blood and corrupted organs. It coughed, gagging weakly as it struggled to recover from the strike, even its robust nerve net temporarily overloaded as it spasmed and thrashed amidst its own gore. It couldn’t die, but it could be crippled.
Under her helmet, the Darkknell’s lips twitched upwards in the barest of smiles. “Got you.”
Its hindquarters were twitching and wobbling, slipping on its own entrails and gore as a forest of writhing tendrils spasmed out from its torso, seeking to pull itself back together. The praetorian looked up at Abigail from its ruined face – one eye had been burst by the survivors’ fire – and let out a wet, rippling exhalation, all the noise its perforated lungs were capable of creating. Then, it reached one of its massive hands towards her and began to pull itself along the deck, leaving a vast red smear behind it as it began to pick up speed.
Abigail grabbed another anti-armour round and slammed it into the rifle’s breach. She never got the chance to fire it as Unity was suddenly there, smashing her to one side with a secondary arm. The woman rolled with the blow-
-Unity’s tail wrapped around Godfrey’s sword arm and as if the trooper weighed no more than Abigail, it yanked her off her feet and sent her clattering over the ground, right into the other praetorian’s path-
-Lutzberg was sobbing in terror and scrabbling blindly away in panic-
-Emily was screaming, but Abigail couldn’t make out the words as Unity rounded on the petite doctor and its jaws opened, wide enough to engulf Delphini’s head-
-ropes of saliva dribbled from its teeth as it leaned towards Emily and Abigail tried to pull herself up, but she wasn’t fast enough, couldn’t make it there in time-
-and Shannon was in front of Emily, firing into Unity’s gaping maw.
The monster staggered back, shrieking and coughing blood. One of its four arms clutched at its throat as it rasped and gagged, another swinging at Shannon. She was fast, but not fast enough and the Turned’s talons scored across her cuirass. Unity shook off its injuries – what was a shredded brain and massive soft tissue damage to it? – and, open-mouthed, it lunged.
Its jaws gnashed empty air as Shannon pulled Emily down, both women rolling under the enraged creature. Shannon fired into its throat and the underside of its jaw, praying to every god that ever was or would be for it have a weak point, any weak point. Its hands stabbed down in a frenzy of slashing grabs as it tried to seize the women and drag them out from under its body, or simply pull them apart.
Its maw darted down, saliva pattering onto Shannon’s armour as it tried to get its mouth around her head. She grabbed its mouth, forcing its jaws shut. Steam flared from its nostrils as it pounded the ground around her, but the Halo held onto Unity’s mouth, keeping it shut. like any predator, its strongest jaw muscles closed, not opened. It would take enormous strength to hold an old-Earth alligator’s jaws open, but almost anyone could hold the reptile’s mouth shut and so it was with this monstrosity.
The creature bore down on her, its reeking breath overpowering her suit’s filtration systems and she gagged at the stench of it, her arms shaking as it pushed against her, struggling to get its mouth free, jerking its head back and forth, but Shannon desperately clung to its face, refusing to let go. Unity reared back, but still Shannon held tight, digging her fingers into its flesh for purchase but little by little, her grip was loosening.
“Run!” she shouted at Emily, so loud that static blasted from her speakers. “Run!” she screamed again as Unity slammed her against the deck. Emily scrabbled to safety, just barely avoiding the sweep of Unity’s claws, but Shannon couldn’t see to confirm that, she couldn’t look away from the abyss of the monster’s eyes and the rage, the hunger and the fury that formed the void.
I will have you. You are nothing. Better than you have come here. Better than you have died here. Nothing you do will matter. You will feed us, or become one of us. Your victory means nothing. It pushed harder, its maw almost touching her helmet now. You are nothing. It reared back and smashed her against the wall. Shannon cried out in pain and her hands slipped a fraction more.
“No...” Shannon whispered, her eyes tearing as she tried to look away, but it was so close that Unity was all she could see, the malice and intelligence in its eyes, the sense of triumph as it knew she was weakening. Even struggling against her, its limbs still fought against the others in a blind frenzy of slashing blades, forcing them back. None of them could get near her.
They can’t help you. You’re going to die – as you lived. As nothing.
“No.” It came out as a plea, not a challenge.
You are nothing.
You are nothing.
“No!” Shannon screamed, wrenching her hands with a burst of desperate strength. She felt more than heard the crack of the praetorian’s bones and it jerked back so fiercely that she finally lost her grip. Unity shrieked hatefully from its splintered maw, its lower jaw all but torn off. One of its forelegs came crashing down, hard enough to shatter her armour and crush the bones of her chest, but someone grabbed her at the last second and pulled her out of the way. Godfrey.
The trooper lunged forward with her other arm, jabbing her disruptor up into Unity’s torso and the monster screamed again, heaving back off the blade before Jane could eviscerate it. Its broken jaw worked with an ugly crackling sound as it clicked back into place, the bones knitting. There was only the briefest pause in the battle as Unity gathered its bearings, looking from the half-dozen survivors surrounding it, to the steaming hulk of its fellow praetorian, hewn and butchered by Godfrey’s blade but even now twitching and pulsing in the spasms of resurrection. The praetorian’s eyes flicked over to the lurching horde of its lesser kin as, reborn and gabbling in hunger and rage, as they drew closer. Foul blood leaked down its sides from a plethora of wounds, but true its kind, none of them had even slowed it down, while each of the survivors was drenched in sweat, bloodied and bruised, tired and weakened.
“Three,” Shannon whispered softly over the comm, still staring into the monster’s eyes. “Burn it.”
Abigail carefully drew an incendiary, thumbing the detonator on. The praetorian’s head shifted as it evaluated its targets. “That’s right,” the Darkknell purred. “Make your choice.” She threw the explosive. Unity saw it, knew what the small metal sphere was and was already moving away, fast despite its size. But not fast enough.
Heat and light flashed through the dark tunnel, flames washing over the monster’s flank. It screamed again, the noise deafening, and again the mercenaries’ autosenses shut down as Lutzberg, Delphini and Hernandez clapped their hands to their ears in an effort to block out the awful noise. Burning, Unity thrashed, shrieking and roaring as the flames licked over its armoured hide. For an instant, the creature’s berserker instincts almost took control and it nearly rounded on its tormentors. Instead, the monster’s mind won out and it turned and fled back down the corridor, aflame and yowling like the damned as it sought some refuge from the fire spreading over its flesh. Abigail hoped it burned.
“That won’t hold it long,” Shannon said, dashing her ‘big sister’s’ hopes. “The air’s still too thin and it’ll find some way to put out of the fire.”
“Stop, drop and roll,” Louis commented dryly as he put a round into another Turned, cratering its patchwork torso. He snickered at his own joke, the sound manic and almost a giggle. They were still coming, but in ones and twos now as they pulled themselves together. “We have an evac plan?”
“Yes,” Shannon answered after a moment. There was something in her voice and Abigail realized what it was as she noticed the limp in the Halo’s step and the stain on her leggings. She knelt back at maintenance hatch, finally cutting through the last lock. “We go down.”
~
She’d had a name once. She remembered that much. Sometimes, she even remembered what it was. She didn’t want to. Remembering it brought back other memories. The sound of her mother’s voice as she sang lullabies. The feel of her father’s hands when he picked her up. Faces. Other names, places. It was worse than the hunger. She’d tear at herself until her skin hung off her flesh in strips and the pain blocked out the memories. She didn’t want to remember. There were words and faces and sounds and smells, knives that cut through her over and over until... until she forgot again.
They’d told her how beautiful she was. What lovely, strong children she’d have. Then they’d stopped telling her. She’d been their hound until they drove her out. Then, she was this.
Tabitha. That had been her name. Blood dripped from her talons as she cut into her palms and she rasped a pained breath out between her teeth.
She was the second youngest sister. The oldest was Kiyomi. Their youngest was called Gemma. Both of them were here. She didn’t know where her other sisters were and the worry gnawed at her. She didn’t count her brothers. She didn’t like them.
Unity ran by, a blur of armour plating and smouldering flames. She watched it go, wincing in sympathy for the praetorian. The creature unsettled even her, but it was family. “Gemma,” she rolled her sibling’s name down her tongue. It felt wrong to use it – she knew Gemma felt the same pain she did, but she needed her newest sibling’s full attention.
The other girl didn’t turn to look at her, but she cocked her head, listening.
“They hurt Unity,” Tabitha hissed.
“I know.”
“They killed Mother.”
“I know.”
“So many lost.”
“I know.”
“Then why?” she all but shrieked. Kiyomi flinched at the sound. She was the smallest of them and she had been Turned barely into her teenage years. She crept forward and nuzzled Tabitha and Gemma in turn, licking each of them and making worried little keens at her sisters’ argument.
Gemma reached out and stroked Kiyomi’s hair, eliciting a purr from the smaller girl. Likewise, Tabitha returned Kiyomi’s nuzzle, though she remained looking at Gemma, awaiting an answer. “Because I know them,” Gemma whispered. “I know where they’ll go.” The woman turned back to the darkened corridor, running her tongue over her teeth. “It’s a Halo. It’s looking for the oasis.”
Tabitha’s lips drew back over her teeth. “High in the pine tree, the little turtledove made a nursery to please her little love.”
“‘Coo’, said the little dove, ‘coo’ said she,” Gemma took up the rhyme, continuing to pet Kiyomi. She smiled at Tabitha and rested her head on her sister’s shoulder. “In the long, shady branches of the dark pine tree.”
~
Then:
“I’m not sure about this.”
“It’s okay Sare,” Dyson’s voice whispered through the comm. “You’re doing fine.”
Jessup’s only response was a sound much like a whimper as she squeezed herself through the tunnel. It was only intended for maintenance bots and emergency venting and she had to drag herself through one hand at a time. She wasn’t claustrophobic, not normally, but scraping through the pipe inch by inch in utter darkness wasn’t really conducive to her mental well-being. She couldn’t see anything at the end of the tunnel, even with the infra-red goggles she was wearing. It might mean there was nothing to worry about, or it might mean that there was a new Lurker breed that didn’t show up on infrared waiting there for her. “How much further?”
“You’re almost there.”
“You’ve been saying that for ten minutes.”
“And if you’d been moving faster, you’d be there already.”
Another little whimper and Sarah stammered an apology. “Sorry, I’m sorry.”
“Just keep going,” Dyson said soothingly. “You’re doing fine. Let me know when you’ve reached the end.”
Without waiting for her reply, he switched the mic over to its mute mode, leaning back in his chair. The scent of perfume washed over him. “She’s almost there,” he said to his visitor.
“Good.”
“You’re sure she’ll be safe?”
“One of my sisters will watch out for her,” his companion whispered, her tone rising and falling in a disturbing singsong. “And we’ll both get what we want.”
“I know we will,” Dyson replied, reaching back to stroke her cheek, the action eliciting a trill of pleasure that rose into a questioning purr. One of her hands slid down his chest, between his legs. “I’ll get what I want?” she chirped.
His right hand slipped into her torn blouse. “And what’s that?”
She circled around him and straddled his lap, her red eyes staring at him with a mixture of need and hunger. Her lips moved, drawing back over her teeth, her tongue licking out. Her clawed hands rested gently against his shoulders. She began to rock back and forth, lifting herself up only enough for him to unfasten his pants. “I want,” she purred softly as he took a hold of her hips and began to guide her movements. “I want to remember this.”
~
“God, I thought the live ones smelled bad.”
“Nine, if you puke on me, I will cut you in ways that will make you useless to a woman. Don’t even think I won’t.”
Louis forced his gorge down, ineffectually covering his mouth with one hand as he sloshed through the effluvia. “Four, no offence, but this was the best plan you could come up with?”
“Unity can’t fit down here,” Shannon replied without looking back at Nine. “The others can’t open the door. If they do, they still can’t spread out and rush us at once.” In the distance, they could hear the clanging as claws and talons beat against the hatch, but it wasn’t something you could force open.
“Yeah, great. But aren’t we headed back towards the garden where you said all these horrible things were being made?”
“This is a waste tunnel,” Shannon confirmed. “For overflow if the main sewage lines ever became blocked up. It’s also intended for maintenance on the pumping systems and tramway.”
“Yeah, I got the ‘waste’ part of it,” Louis said with a grimace as he lifted his boot, clear translucent strings of goo dripping off the sole. “I just want to know our heading.”
“As do I, daughter,” the Watcher’s voice crackled through the comm. “Where are you going? I need to know. I want my locket. It’s what you promised.”
“I know what I promised,” Shannon answered the feral human. He’d called her ‘the daughter’ before. And Rabbit Mask’s reaction to her name... her cheek burned. You shouldn’t have seen that,” her great-gran’s voice ran through her head. You shouldn’t have seen any of it. Promise me Shannie, promise me that you’ll forget. All of it.
I promise. “I promise,” Shannon repeated the words without realizing that she had.
“Four?” Abigail queried.
Shannon blinked. “Sorry, Three. Just talking to myself.”
There was a bit of a giggle over the comm, then a raspy, steadying breath: “Where is the daughter going? Where are you going, Shannon Hayes-Halo?”
The redhaired woman put a steadying hand on the wall as her injured leg trembled, close to buckling. “This tunnel leads to one of the secondary tram lines. Can you get a car there?”
“Yes, yes, of course. It’ll take longer. More obstructions, more side-routes-”
“Just do it,” Shannon interrupted, too tired to argue.
“You’ve done well, daughter of sin. You, the little moth and the other forgotten.”
“They’re not forgotten.”
“They will be,” the Watcher assured her in a brief moment of lucidity. His tone was almost kind. “You will forget them. Their names, their faces, what they meant to you. You’ll only remember pieces and then you’ll wonder what those pieces go to. One by one they’ll fade away... and then you’ll be left. Acheron flows into the Lethe.”
Shannon closed her eyes briefly. I know. Her cheek still burned and somewhere, in the back of her head, she could still hear her great-grandmother’s voice telling her, begging her, to forget.