Six Months Later
I was having the best morning I could remember in weeks—namely, one spent asleep at my desk—until Ethan came and ruined it all.
He strode in with a crisp manila folder in one hand and a phone in the other, blonde hair combed back and looking far too perfect for the end of the world. His expression was just the right shade of sombre that signalled an end to my leisure.
I stared him down. Don’t do it. Was that the faintest wisp of a smile that crossed his normally stoic face? Dammit. He was going to do it.
“They’re going to need you down by the Southern plantation,” he said, breaking the stand-off. “Spontaneous Twisting. Looks like a Class C emergency.”
“Get someone else,” I snorted. “I’ve already doubled my quota this week.”
He shrugged a pair of perfect, chiselled shoulders. Seriously, why the hell wasn’t he one of the Outers? “There’s no one else.”
“What about one of the executives? Dawn’s inner circle? Jared, or Frank?”
“You know they’re for escalation only. Class B or above. We at least have to check it out first. If we break protocol, you know what will happen.”
“Mandatory seminars,” I grunted.
“Mandatory seminars,” Ethan echoed with a sigh. “For both of us, as if that makes sense.”
“What about the other peasants like me?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“We haven’t been able to fill the gap left by Emilia, and until Madison and her team come back we’ll be short-staffed. Everyone else is either on a mission or already responding to an emergency in the field.”
“I know, I know,” I said irritably. “It’s just that Madison and them should be back already. And Emilia’s an utter sell-out. Ran off to Portland just because they threw more money at her.” I pointed an accusatory finger at him. “But I want a complaint filed. Come to think of it, we don’t have a complaints system yet. Fine. I want a complaints system, and then I want to file one against Dawn for overworking me. This wasn’t in the contract.”
“I’m sure our fearless leader will be all too pleased to bury your complaint, followed possibly by your house. Shall we move?”
Ah, right, movement. I cudgeled my tired body into action and got up. Somehow, being active for thirty-six straight hours with minimal sleep had really muted the urgency of people turning Twisted. It didn’t help that our Immediate Response Technician teams were really good at what they did. We hadn’t had a casualty in weeks. “Any casualties?” I asked.
Ethan huffed out a short breath. “Two.”
Damn. That meant there would be three Twisted, which would be exponentially harder to contain. How could I have gotten so complacent? Just because I was a little tired, I had stopped taking it seriously? Pull it together, Chris. Outers like myself were all that stood between humanity and extinction, and even if this nightmare still felt very new, I couldn’t forget it.
I sprinted the rest of the way to the car. I’d love to say that Ethan struggled to keep pace, but he matched my speed with an easy lope. we exited the shabby low-rise and headed to the cars parked out back. Vancouver looked very different than it did six months ago. Buildings were abandoned, businesses with faded shop signs had become home to mice, flora, and the occasional immigrant family that hadn’t yet checked in with Housing. Everything was in a general state of disrepair.
I guess that’s what happened when you spent most of your time trying to stay alive.
We sped down roads covered with vegetation, detritus, and enormous cracks from when the army initially tried to use common munitions against the Twisted. Their hearts were in the right places, but if they hadn’t reacted with the human default of “can we blow it up,” things might have been very different now.
It was a quick—if bumpy—ride to the Southern plantation. One of the small mercies of the Outage was that traffic was a thing of the past. I didn’t know how they did it in other habitation zones, but at least in Vancouver, vehicles were only permitted for the Twisted Removal Unit. Everyone else had to hoof it the old-fashioned way, or take their chances with bicycles on the torn-up streets.
I heard that in Portland, they had public transit up and running again. Maybe it wasn’t such a surprise that Emilia left for greener pastures.
It was clear when we’d arrived at the emergency site—you just had to look for the knot of people in disarray, some running to watch, the smarter ones running away, and everyone just generally masquerading as walking fire hazards. The car pulled up to the edge of the crop field; we’d have to do the rest on foot. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that what was happening at the three trial plantations in Vancouver was more important than any individual’s life. The continuity of our entire community depended on it. We had aggregated all of the foodstuffs manufactured before the Eclipse the the subsequent Reckoning destroyed the world, but they were all either long expired, or on their way. Our future lay with farming, and under no circumstances could we suffer damage to one of our plantations.
I stepped out of the car into a scene of carefully managed chaos. Thankfully, most of the people had long since fled, with only a couple remaining on the scene staring at the unfolding melee. Portable fencing made of a pliable mesh and covered on one side by see-through plastic sheeting had been unrolled into a large circle. It wasn’t really meant to stop the Twisted, but it might slow them down for a few seconds. The handful of individuals remaining behind the fencing were made up of technician-hopefuls—not that they were turning away any volunteers—and the hopeless, those resigned to what they believed was humanity’s inevitable fate to perish. Maybe they were right.
Oh, and the teenagers. Of course there were teenagers. Three loudly cheering idiots pressed against the fencing, convinced of their immortality and just here to watch a good show.
At the centre stood the heroes of it all. I might have felt tired, but these folks couldn’t have had it any easier. Vancouver Habitation Zone’s Immediate Response Technicians were comprised of regular vanilla humans who split their days between vigorous physical conditioning and running circles around any spontaneous Twisting that happened within our community. Clad in their distinctive orange vests layered over hazmat suits, they were making extensive use of durable, flexible netting, rope, long poles, and their legs.
Caught in between their antics, exhibiting mindless aggression, were the Twisted. They still retained the form and figure of humans, but a single look at any exposed skin would dispel the illusion. Soft dermis was replaced by a corrugated matrix of something darker than obsidian and harder than diamond—probably. Cracks in their shells seethed with a brilliant orange luminescence, ebbing and flaring in time to their mindless screeches.
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As I ran to the scene, I watched two techs with a thick rope held between them at foot level rush past and trip up one of the Twisted, where it would hopefully thrash on the ground for a time before getting up. Three others threw layer after layer of netting over one Twisted, pulling at the thin nylon to keep the creature disoriented. The three with poles had isolated the last Twisted, and were taking turns prodding at it, keeping it off-balance, each immediately retreating when it faced them. Guns, flamethrowers, swords, and any manner of conventional weaponry didn’t work on the Twisted; their skin was incredibly durable and difficult to puncture or cut. Aiming for the exposed cracks also accomplished little; they were protected further down with a thinner, but even more durable shell.
In addition to their nigh-indestructability, the Twisted had super-strength. I had watched one rip a brick wall apart with its bare hands. Their sole instinct was to seek out the nearest human to spread their infection, through which they could Twist others in turn. By some cosmic balance, however, they were also dumb, mindless beasts. They would always take the straightest route. When tripped by a tech, if we were lucky, they would take a few seconds to get up before resuming their measured steps. If we we were unlucky, they would simply crawl, and become that much harder to stop.
“Stay back!” a pole-wielding tech roared at one of the cheering teens, a freckled youth with auburn hair who had clamoured over the fence to get a better view.
The Twisted, sensing the sudden motion or perhaps just seeing an easy target, whipped its head around to look at the teen. The orange light of its cracks briefly dimmed before blazing to prominence as it spat what looked like an especially dark and viscous glob of the blood directly at the him. It hit the him in the face, and his horrified expression quickly morphed into a dull one. Almost more quickly than I could follow, cracks rippled across the youth’s skin, which began to darken to onyx. A faint hint of lambent orange kindled to life underneath the rigid matrix.
The Twisted’s bodily fluids were contagious, something the army had unfortunately learned the first time they had used missiles against the Twisted. Missiles could penetrate Twisted skin and kill the abominations. They could also aerosolize the blood and cause a chain reaction of Twisting to ripple out from the point of impact.
The Twisted did worse than kill you. With a single touch or some blood, they could turn you into them.
“Ignore the new one for now; it will take more time to Twist fully. Focus on the other three until an Outer arrives,” one of the techs called out to the group.
Gods, he was just a kid. Or had been, anyway. This couldn’t continue. Internal Twisted epidemics became exponentially more difficult to handle the more Twisted there were. But I couldn’t do anything yet. I calculated mentally. I was still too far away—just ten more seconds until I could reach the nearest one.
Someone spotted me. “It’s Chris!” he cried, and a cheer went up among the beleaguered techs. They redoubled their furious efforts, adding all the more frenzy into their dance with death. A single puncture in their suits combined with the touch of a Twisted spelled doom, and they knew it. But still they persisted, running, jumping, prodding, harassing, and doing absolutely everything in their power to keep the monsters occupied until I arrived.
I needed to get closer. About 100 feet, or approximately a quarter of a football field, was my comfortable range This wasn’t to say that I couldn’t use my power at greater distances; it was just the maximum distance I could accommodate for any precision work. Any farther, and I was just as likely to kill a tech as I was to kill a Twisted.
I was perhaps thirty feet away from the fencing before I was finally close enough to aim. Ethan, who knew my range and abilities, breathed a sigh of relief from where he had been keeping pace beside me. As long as I could reach the Twisted, one way or another everything would be fine.
I was a teleporter, and for taking care of Twisted which were alone or in small groups, there was no one in Vancouver HZ more reliable.
I readied a simple steel nail in my hand. It was probably easiest to describe using my power akin to throwing a ball. I didn’t so much calculate a trajectory as instinctively aim—my brain filled in all the calculations automatically, and without ever informing me that Math had taken place without my consent. I required a wind-up, except instead of levering back my arm, I was building up a wave of energy which would form the basis of the teleportation.
And finally, the release. A rush of energy left me as I clenched my fist and the nail vanished from my hand, accompanied by a small pop that was felt more than heard. The Twisted nearest to me froze, and then abruptly crumpled to the ground as disjointedly as a hundred pounds of reinforced interconnected plating would allow, the orange glow fading from its cracks. The scientists working in the Twisted Research Unit would later find a familiar nail piercing the black core of the Twisted, a core which typically rested precisely where the human’s heart used to be.
I kept running as I pulled another nail. A second to get the aim right and—pop. I clenched my fist and a second Twisted died. The third was handled just as efficiently, allowing the fatigued techs to get a bit of rest. Thankfully, none of these Twisted had manifested variant abilities. I found certain abilities, such as super-speed, fairly hard to deal with, if only because aiming became a lot harder.
I was finally within range of the last Twisted. It was the newly-Twisted teen, and was going through a typical period of lethargy after Twisting before it awakened to carry out its mission of mindlessly destroying humanity. It wasn’t that teen anymore. I couldn’t think of it as a human. Swallowing a mouthful of bile, I teleported the nail into its chest. It screamed, cracks in its skin flaring into incandenscence, sunken, empty eyes fixed on me. The techs around it swiftly backpedalled, those with poles raising them in preparation.
I swore. This one was a variant; its core had shifted during Twisting. Okay, time for Plan B. “Clear out!” I shouted. The techs had seen this move before. They ran past the fencing, dragging the few spectators they encountered after them. I pulled out an old-fashioned grenade, pulled the pin, and quickly teleported it into the Twisted’s body. I didn’t want to wait around to see if it manifested any special abilities. While sometimes I could afford to take my time teleporting nails into variants like some kind of high-stakes Battleship game, this one’s variation was unknown, and if we were unlucky, it had the potential to be truly horrifying.
Thankfully, everything worked exactly as planned. My ordnances had just shy of enough strength to damage the Twisted’s rock-hard skin, and so its far more malleable internals—the core inevitably included—were shredded in a storm of blood, metal, and gunpowder, all contained within the Twisted’s own shell. To observers, it looked like the Twisted shuddered a bit in time with the sound of a muted explosion before falling to the ground, dead like the others.
Ethan sent off some rapid-fire text messages to notify headquarters that the response had concluded with three casualties, the lab that three norms and one variant would be heading their way, and the growers to come manage any crops that may have been damaged during the battle. He was my logistics guy; each of the Outers had one. They handled everything from casualty reports to emergency triage to driving our sorry asses around—basically anything that wasn’t killing Twisted. Ethan was one of the best, and for all that I was envious of his good looks, strong charisma, and seemingly endless well of energy, I’d be lost without him.
After a short time, one of the technicians called out “that’s five, let’s wrap it up.” They roused themselves from where they had been sitting, unmoving, cutting all-too-familiar figures of bone-deep weariness, and began wrapping up the Twisted corpses in, of all things, carpets they had brought expressly for that purpose. We knew from the scientific method applied in the most gruesome way imaginable that within a few minutes of the core’s destruction, a Twisted and its fluids lost all of their infectious properties. No one was really willing to figure out exact timing, but a five minute policy had never failed us before.
All in all, responding to this Twisted threat had taken about an hour. We piled into the car and Ethan drove me back to headquarters. I felt a little sorry for Ethan—this couldn’t have been an easy week for him either while Madison and her team were out on a mission—but it was short-lived as I realized the full advantages afforded to my lofty position as an Outer of Vancouver HZ and fell asleep in the passenger’s seat.