Quantum wrath, p.23
Quantum Wrath, page 23
The tree stumbled back, and it was aided by a furious kick from Lu with her platform boots. Then she slammed the stock of her rifle into it and kicked it again.
The tree creaked and squeaked as it turned tail and scuttled into the forest at top speed. I had a brief glimpse of a gnarled back that looked like it had been hacked relentlessly with an axe. The wood was puckered there almost like wounded human skin, and red sap oozed from the jagged notches.
Then the tree was gone.
I turned to Lu.
“Thanks,” I sighed.
But instead of words, all that came out of my mouth was a cluster of floaty dandelion pods.
I spat and wiped my mouth as I shook my head in utter confusion. I gestured at Lu for us to get the fuck out of here, and she nodded vigorously with her pink eyes wide.
The motion made me realize that the pink tips of her hair had changed into flowers, and the rest of her long blonde tresses were now pale, dangling vines.
I saw that Lu’s eyes were fixed on my face, and I wondered what the hell I looked like.
We sprinted for the door. At the last second, Lu dove to the side, and she came up with something in her hands.
I had no idea what it was, but I just shoved her toward the door. We needed to get out of here before we turned into goddamn trees or something.
I thrust my hands out to shove the door open, but then I saw that they were now brown and gnarled just like the tree bark. Fuzzy dandelion pods filled my mouth as I hissed out a curse.
Then we were back out in the tower. I spat furiously to clear my mouth of dandelions, and the floaty little seeds spewed everywhere.
Lu was next to me, so I slammed the doors shut behind us and locked the manacles again.
She collapsed back against the door, then leaned sideways and spat, too. A glob of dandelion seeds fell to the ground below her.
“Okay,” she wheezed. Then she straightened up. “Oh, my god, it worked. I talked. Heath, are you okay?”
I hesitated for a moment. Did I want to risk talking again? I felt like I had come horribly close to suffocating.
But when I reached up to rub my jaw, my hand felt smooth instead of rough and gnarled. Relief surged through me, and I decided to give talking a shot.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded slightly hoarse, but there wasn’t a trace of dandelion in my mouth. “You?”
“Fine,” she mumbled. “But holy shit, what the fuck was that tree thing? Was it… a person?”
I stared at my hands as I traced over the smooth skin with my mind spinning.
“Maybe it was once,” I suggested with a numb feeling in my gut. Then I sighed and gave my head a shake. “Alright, we need to– what are you holding?”
“I snatched this just before we left,” she said as she passed the object over for me to examine. “I had it in my head to grab any weapons I spotted. I know that probably shouldn’t have included an axe since I already have the best one in existence, but my brain wasn’t fully functioning in there…”
“Understandable,” I muttered as I hefted the axe.
It was made of gnarled bark just like the trees. I could see veins running through the wood, and where they came to an end, there was dried red sap crusted onto the wood.
There was red sap on the blade, too.
“Sap?” Lu whispered at my side. “Or…”
I let the axe clatter to the ground. “Next chamber.”
Lu snatched up the axe and hurried along at my side as I bounded up the next set of stairs. I was filled with renewed energy all of a sudden. I felt like I could climb a mountain right now, and then beat the shit out of someone at the top of it.
Maybe the stuff on the axe really had just been sap, and maybe those trees had never been people. I didn’t really give a fuck. This lab was already shitty enough to deserve annihilation.
But as we crested the stairs, I knew that wouldn’t be enough.
We should save our big annihilation energy for the obelisk. That was where the orders came from. That was where the head honcho lived, and based on what I’d seen so far, he was practically begging to be dismembered, charred, and bludgeoned to a pulpy puddle by an actual adversary for once.
Here, our task was to supply ourselves with some handy weapons to make that task more possible. Any destruction we could cause along the way would just be a bonus.
Through the usual buzzing sound that insulated the next door, I could clearly hear the noise of fists and feet beating against the metal. The whole door shuddered and jumped every now and then as the tight manacles shifted against the handles, but otherwise it seemed to be holding strong.
I raised my eyebrows at Lu.
“Sounds like they want out,” I said.
“Well, let them out, Heath,” she said with a Cheshire Cat smile. “It’s only good manners.”
I saw now that she was letting her rifle rest on its sling, and she had the red sap-encrusted axe in her hands.
“May I?” She raised the axe and shot me a hopeful look.
I smirked. “Ladies first. First strike’s yours.”
Glee danced through her pink eyes as she readied herself.
I snapped the manacles with a single yank. Half a second later, the double doors flew open.
Men came boiling out all at once. The first of them died with Lu’s borrowed axe buried in his skull. She left it there for safekeeping and helped the man on his way with a boot to the ass. His limp form toppled off the ledge into the empty air.
I managed to rip his gun out of its holster just before he fell, and I jammed it hastily into the waistband of my jeans for now. There was no time for tests or fuck-ups at the moment.
I grabbed two men in front of me and smashed their heads together like coconuts before I shoved them off the ledge after their companion. Lu decapitated another with her sludge-gun, and I growled in displeasure as a green jet lanced past my face.
“Careful,” I snapped.
“Sorry, Heathy,” she panted as she chucked the head casually off the ledge and shoved the body after it. Then she hefted a weapon in her hand. “Got his gun, though.”
She promptly slammed the weapon’s muzzle into the last attacker’s temple. I ripped his guts out with my borrowed machete for good measure and then booted him off the ledge, too.
I glanced down at the pile of mangled men on the floor below, and then I looked at the weapons in our hands.
Lu sighed with dismay as she looked at hers. It had already looked weirdly similar to the weapons we’d taken earlier, but it had seemed more compact. Now the barrel slid out to elongate the weapon, though, and revealed it was almost identical to ours.
“Goddamnit!” Lu grumbled. “Don’t get me wrong, these things are fun as hell, but I wanted to get my hands on something new–”
“Here.” I shoved the gun I had grabbed into her arms and grabbed the new acid gun for myself. Then I shot her a stern look. “Look as much as you want, but wait a bit to test it out, alright?”
“Right, right,” she said with impatient glee.
I took the acid gun for myself and examined it, because in her impatience, I thought Lu had overlooked a very cool feature of this one.
There was an attachment below the gun’s barrel that looked like nothing so much as a grenade launcher to me.
Still, I had to test it out to be sure. What if we went into some type of battle and it fired out goddamn dandelion pods or something?
I stepped to the ledge and glanced at the floor below. We were a good hundred feet up.
I shrugged to myself as I aimed the weapon downward and found the trigger on the extension.
“Get inside the room,” I said to Lu as I aimed.
“What?” Lu asked blankly. “Why are you–”
Shot fired.
I glimpsed a cylinder whizzing down into the darkness. Then I snatched Lu by the shoulder as I yanked one of the double doors open, and I shoved her unceremoniously into the room ahead of me.
“Just a precaution,” I said as I closed the door behind us. I had no idea how big the blast radius of the grenade– if that’s what it was– might be.
It sure as hell sounded like a grenade. I heard it explode with a shuddering boom down in the bottom of the tower, but I paused to contemplate the room we were in for a brief moment.
This capsule was a simple one. It was still about fifty feet in diameter, and there were no boulders, buildings, trees, or anything like that. Instead, there was a scattering of tables, something that looked like a kitchen, and even a wall of screens like I’d glimpsed in the city. There were plush couches arranged in front of the screens, and even something that looked vaguely like a weird-ass air hockey table at the far end of the room.
“What…” Lu giggled. “Do you think we interrupted those jackasses on their lunch break or something?”
“Apparently,” I muttered as I glanced at the half-eaten food on the tables. “But that reminds me…”
I jogged over to the kitchen area and scanned the cupboards and cooling devices that lined the wall.
I started at the left and opened them methodically two at a time, and I snatched a few food items that looked non-perishable and shoved them into my bag. Not enough stuff to weigh me down, but just so we’d have a little extra something after we warped.
Well, assuming the food held up through the warp.
There seemed to be about a fifty-fifty chance of that, in my experience. And some food seemed to hold up better than others, so it was good to have a variety rather than just what we’d grabbed from the ship.
A delighted giggle echoed out from the other side of the room, followed by a sort of roaring swoosh that set off every alarm bell in my body.
A fireball whizzed through my field of vision and smashed into the far wall. It was about the size of a baseball, but as soon as it hit the wall, it licked at the metal and spread like the shit was made of wood.
One glance over my shoulder revealed a giddy Lu bouncing up and down with her pink eyes blazing and the new firearm clutched in her hands.
“Out,” I barked as I rushed for the door. “And no more playing with that ‘til we’re at the obelisk.”
I had to admit, though, shooting fireballs was pretty fucking cool.
Lu pouted, but it was spoiled by the gleeful little way her lips twitched up at the corners, and I knew the prospect of being able to use the weapon in earnest so soon delighted her.
And honestly, I was feeling almost delighted, myself.
Looking down over the ledge only increased my buzz. There was now a miniature canyon in the floor below us. The mangled remains of the bodies that had lain there were scattered everywhere within and around it. There was also a big, cave-like gap in the nearest wall.
“Yeahhh, this’ll come in handy,” I said as I patted the weapon.
Then we headed up to the next set of doors. I pressed my ear against one and heard nothing but buzzy silence, so I unlocked the manacles and slowly cracked one of the doors.
This capsule had something like a mudroom that divided it from the doorway. But instead of shit like boots and coats, it was full of…
“Is that a fucking trumpet?” Lu snickered as she danced over to take one off the shelf. Then she moved on to a tall, sinuous instrument whose flared end was shaped into a snarling wolf’s head. “Oooh, look at this one…”
“Do not fuck with those yet,” I said as I paced over to the door leading into the rest of the capsule.
I slowly cracked it open just enough to look inside.
Like the first capsule we had scouted, this room was full of assorted boulders, crates, and barrels that were scattered out across the huge room. But this capsule had something like foam insulating its walls.
Foam that glittered with an eerie, magical-looking light.
Any windows it might’ve had were completely sealed off, and it looked like the whole ceiling was insulated in the same way.
Then I spotted one of the Unit men.
He was facing away from me, and he was slowly creeping around one of the boulders to look at something on its other side.
But more interestingly, he was holding a flute to his lips.
“What the hell?” I mouthed silently to myself.
The man wasn’t playing the instrument, just standing there with the mouthpiece held to his lips like he was waiting.
Then something came into view from behind the boulder: A man hurrying away at a hobbling run.
He had the emaciated, gray-skinned pallor of a crawler, and the same fear was etched into his features as he looked around frantically to see if he was being pursued. As he shuffled desperately along, he completely missed the sight of the crouched Unit man.
Then the Unit asshole shot up to his feet and started playing the flute.
The sound was jagged and chilling, with a grating screech to it that instantly made me tense. Nearby, Lu sucked in a breath, with the air hissing sharply between her teeth.
At the same time, a thread of silver light shot out of the flute’s end. It arched up like a snake and then shot directly toward the fleeing prisoner.
My eyes narrowed as the blinding glare washed over me even from this distance. I felt the pressure of Lu’s hand gripping my shirt as she wedged herself under my armpit to see through the door, too, but I didn’t look away.
As it approached him, the light split into six segments, flared apart, and then zagged into his body from all different angles. One arced around and stabbed into his open mouth, while two drove into his eyes like ice picks. Two more lanced into his ears, and two shot up into his nostrils. Then several more light beams shot into his body to puncture his gaunt chest and the flesh between his shoulder blades.
He crumpled to the ground in a heap with silver smoke puffing out of his wounds.
Needless to say, I was intrigued as fuck by this point.
The Unit man smirked and swaggered over to the man’s body. He pulled a little notebook out of his pocket as he walked, and then he knelt to examine the prisoner’s corpse while he jotted things down.
After a few moments, he got to his feet and headed straight for the door.
I turned to Lu.
“I want to talk to this guy before we kill him,” I said in a low voice. “Find out exactly what this shit is. Keep your mouth shut and your hands where I can see them.”
She immediately obeyed, and I couldn’t help but smirk a little.
The Unit man was whistling a cheerful tune when he shouldered through the door.
He stopped short at the sight of me and frowned.
“Who the hell’re you?” His voice was a low grunt that sounded as if someone had taught a gorilla how to talk, and his caveman-like brow scrunched up in confusion when he caught sight of Lu. “And who the hell is she?”
“We’re here to fix the sound panels,” I said in my most self-assured voice. “The boss said some people who strayed out into the woods have been… overhearing things. He’s not pleased.”
“Oh, shit,” the man muttered, and his look at Lu turned from dubious to subservient in a heartbeat. “Well, you do what you have to. That idiot in there was the last of our test subjects for tonight.”
“Cool,” I grunted. “Man, that flute thing, or whatever it was, was fucking brutal. I walked in just in time to see it. Didn’t want to interrupt and get caught in the crossfire…”
“Don’t worry,” the Unit man chortled. “This stuff is in its final phase of testing. No defects. They only go after what we’re aiming for. As for this little beauty, I like to call her the Sense Slammer. Doesn’t look too interesting from the perspective of a watcher, I s’pose, but it hits all the target’s senses– white light so bright it sizzles their retinas off, a screaming sound that bursts their eardrums on contact, organ penetration, plus a smell and taste that would make ‘em throw up if they weren’t busy dying. Man, this shit never gets old.”
He shook his head and smiled in a way that was almost dreamy, but then he seemed to come to his senses.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I’ll wait here while you fix the panels. I understand the magic shit might take a while, but it’ll have to be done– those bastards in the holding cell can rot a little longer. These weapons are top-notch, see, ready to be shipped off for mass production, so it’s not like I can leave them unattended…”
“Right,” I said with a nod. “Wait, uhh… Holding cell, you said?”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “It’s full to bursting, even after the new stretching devilry. Don’t s’pose you’d be able to fix that, too?”
His tone was halfway joking, but there was a genuine glint of hope in his eye. I gathered by his tone that people who could practice magic were held in high esteem here, so I decided to just roll with it.
“It’s possible,” I said. “I’d have to see the room first, so I could get a better sense of it.”
“Right.” He shot me an impressed look. “It’s just upstairs. I’ll escort you up soon as you’re done with this.”
I nodded matter-of-factly. That was all the information I needed.
Then I turned to Lu and smiled as I tilted my head at the man, and I spoke in a tone so low that only she could hear.
“This one’s yours, Blondie,” I said. “But make it quick, alright?”
Her eyes flared pink, and she leveled her acid gun at the man without hesitating.
I watched as she blasted the fucker’s skull in half with a jet of hot green acid. He slumped to the ground, and then she stood over him while she traced the shape of a heart into his chest cavity. When she was done, his chest had been hollowed out into a bubbling green sea of liquid.
“Right,” I exhaled. Then I snorted and shook my head. “Can’t you ever do anything like a normal person?”
“Nope,” she said with a cheeky grin. “What’d he say to you?”
“That this shit is all in its final phase,” I said as I gestured to the wall full of instruments. “Oh, and that they only go after what the wielder is aiming for.”
“Ooooh,” Lu hummed as she bounced over to the wall. “Sooo… Can I take some, then?”
“With your attention span?” I snorted. “No. Mental aim is different than physical aim.”
