Warmachine

The word was enough to start up a heated argument in most places of civilized society. “Don’t even speak of those horrid things!” “Have you ever seen the videos of those things in action? Horrific” “You can’t call yourself that in the ring you fucking moron, you introduce yourself as that and I’ll bash your bloody skull in m’self!” While no one today was alive during the terror they infused, the invasion had happened at the height of digital technology, for the time anyways, and nearly every act they committed was recorded and uploaded online.

There is nothing more memorable besides the day he learned his father had died and the day his mother was quarantined than the time he first saw footage of the Warmachines in action. As was recorded by whoever had initially saved the video clip the video was of a small streamer, roughly fifteen years old. The girl had been streaming a game of some kind when the machine had teleported just outside her city, flashing the stream over to her phone and looking outside she recorded everything she saw, right before it had annihilated the apartment complex she was on with a beam of pure black light.

When he was just a child, maybe thirteen or fourteen, a student had gotten in trouble for calling the Warmachines in their textbook “cool”. While most would just correct him calmly and try to hope the student would learn the difference between “cool” and “terrifying” this particular sadistic bastard of a teacher decided that the next best thing would be to play one Monica Kiluwa’s last moments for a bunch of children to watch.

The video started out normal, playing some moba that was popular at the time, before her home shook so badly it nearly knocked her off her chair she was sitting on. While panicking her mother started screaming from the other room to get under her bed, instead she grabbed her phone and swapped the stream onto it. This could’ve been for many reasons, a kid wanting their ‘fans’ to see whatever is going on with her, maybe its content that’ll help her get popular? Who knows afterall.

She didn’t have much time to explain her reasoning either, as we’d soon find out.

Once she swapped the stream over to her phone she left her small pink bedroom, stuffed animals everywhere… I still don’t know why that stuck with me. As she went through the hallway full of family photos, mother, father, siblings, she looked out her seventh story window at the monster waiting for her.

Just a few blocks away, was one of the first assaults done by the invaders, and the first time humanity realized they were at the bottom of the new food chain.

Standing roughly at sixty feet tall, and built far more like a beetle, one of the few unique Warmachines compared to the others that resembled far more traditional mech’s you’d sometimes see on screen during the morning watching cartoons as a child. Openly moving towards the city was what is now known as the Hellraiser Warmachine, as its main weapons were its sword, and two massive cannons that would fire black plasma. Far hotter than any other weapon was capable of at the time, it was several times hotter than Thermite, and far more dangerous. The fumes of whatever it was currently burning was toxic, something to do with the magic converting the burnt material into some kind of magic toxin.

The sickness would transfer into plants, animals, and people and kill them painfully over the course of days, if they survived that long anyways.

The girl was almost crying by the time she realized what was happening, shaking so badly even the recording quality had lessened in quality, the first time it fired its weapons and melted one of the buildings near her she nearly dropped the phone in terror before screaming for her mom, she started turning around, abandoning the phone on the ground before running towards her mother, only for the entire recording beginning to turn black as the Hellraiser melted the building she was in too.

The recording didn’t end all at once, the black plasma is dangerous but it still has a ‘melt time’ you could see it react on the roof of the building first, the ceiling slowly burning pure black after a few seconds of the blast on her building, the horrid sound of her screaming about how hot it was, the sound of her and her mother scrambling to get out of the building before the roof collapsed on them.

The sound of two women screaming for each other, one screaming for her mom, while the other screamed for her darling baby as they both melted alive.

And so, at the age of thirteen, I witnessed my first two deaths.

Needless to say, half the kids were crying by the end of the video, and that teacher didn’t work there after that day. I don’t even know if he ever worked as a teacher again, and quite frankly I hope he didn’t.

The video did however, completely change my views on the invasion. People can read or be taught that something was brutal all the time and not be affected. So what if ten thousand people died during some war two hundred years ago? I just want to go play basketball with my boys. It’s an entirely different thing to watch someone nearly your age get melted alive on camera. From that point on I made a point to avoid being immature about the topic, it came up in class? No jokes, only facts and information I can’t be punished for stating. Someone brings something up in a conversation about it at lunch? Ignore them or outright leave. I spent years of my life until I finally got out of school avoiding the very topic entirely.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

I think now looking back, it was some childish fear of being forced back into that classroom, and watching some poor girl I didn’t even know get melted again. I never wanted to see that again, I never wanted to even think of it again.

And yet here I was, every memory, the girl, her mother screaming, the fear and shock and terror running through her and us alike. The horror of seeing one of those things in action, all brought back at once.

“Am I going to die?” The words escaped my mouth before I knew I was saying them, and even then they barely came out as a whimper.

Giani’s face morphed into horror as she realized I had jumped to such a conclusion, and she rested her hand on my back before beginning to try and reassure me I’d be alright.

“The magic is infused into your soul, but it isn’t spreading. So far from what we’ve researched the magic they used to power their Warmachines were soul powered. It’s the main reason the fuel rods are so dangerous to research because someone who isn’t gifted in magic or who isn’t careful can easily damage themselves irrepara-” she caught herself on the last word, but not fast enough.

“I’m fucked then? I-I can't go under and have my leg removed or-or try and go under some new treatment to have this shit taken out of me?!” My voice was rising near the end, almost a cry as I realized something almost as bad as death had found me.

“No, I’m sorry we can’t operate on it. Removing the magic would require a level of risk that quite frankly wouldn’t be worth saving the leg, even losing all of your limbs has been declared a more humane act than operating on a soul wound such as this Markus.” Giani explained, trying to calm me. I would have been touched by how gentle she was for once if I didn’t feel like my entire world was shattering around me.

I can’t fight. I can’t fight, I can't get more cash for the treatments. I’m still a year away from the danger zone for the Ambrosia treatment, and after three years there is practically no chance of her ever waking up regardless of treatments. My mother is going to die and it’s my own damn fault.

Oh god mom what have I done?

“I can’t- I can’t do this right now, I got- I gotta take a minute.” At this point the realization had hit full force, and I wanted to be anywhere, even back in a pit than inside this damned hospital. In the place where my mother was going to die of a sickness she only contracted trying to help the people who hate her for doing so.

The place she left me.

“Mark, you can’t- MARK!” With Giani calling out to me from behind I grabbed my cane and stumbled away from the room as fast as possible, tears streaming down my face as I went.

As I passed the receptionist desk Jane tried to call out to me, but I could hardly hear her through my own pound heartbeat and the thoughts racing through my mind.

Barely made it to my car at the pharmacy before I collapsed. The run in with the cartel was traumatizing enough, coming so close to death, so close and yet coming out had left me with night terrors of the woman and rod she had, no doubt by now, used to smash my knee in. Yet through all of that I still powered through it. The nightmares were getting less severe, I wasn’t terrified every morning checking my locks and making sure no one had broken in to scout me out or take me down in my own home, I was relatively safe so long as they didn’t get me out in public.

Now though an even more terrifying thought had formed, something I knew would wreck me a thousand times worse than any beating.

I can’t save her, I can’t save my own mother.

All this work, the beatings, the run ins with gangs, almost getting murdered a dozen times over the last year, the fucking cartel, Larrell, all of it worthless. I’ve only saved up fifty grand, the damn lowest down payment, if I am lucky to qualify for it, would be seventy at least. Johdi will only clean the cash if he gets ten percent, lowering what I've technically saved by giving five thousand to fourty-five grand. I was saving up so much cash and hiding it, not even when I needed to pay rent I was behind on, never spending more on food required, all of it worthless. Hell I didn’t even offer the cash when the cartel grabbed me because the thought of touching it terrified me, yet after all of that?

How the fuck am I going to save up another twenty-seven grand in the next two years with a busted leg? I can’t. The only jobs I would qualify for would only pay around ten to twenty grand a year working fourteen hour shifts all day every day. I can’t take out a loan because of my history and credit, they’ll laugh me out of the banks. Even if I borrowed five grand from every friend I have ever had I would only make it to fifteen, if they didn’t just tell me to go fuck myself.

And even if I barely qualified, down to the dollar required, what are the chances she gets in?

By the end of his crying session he had ended up sitting down against his car door. Looking at the sky as the hits kept coming.

The damn waiting list is massive, they only treat a few hundred people a year, with thousands infected at the moment waiting for some miracle in Quarantine Wards. The down payment system they require has only been used a few times as well, with reports of bribes to get rich people's family members first pick on the treatment list.

The only chance I ever had was this big job for Larrell, then running through fights in the last few places that are entirely safe for me to even work out of then cashing out with Johdi and hoping I got the down payment in quick enough to be higher on the waiting list, she cant wait five years, she cant even wait three.

Have I been deluding myself this entire time? Am I truly this stupid to think that anything truly good would come of this worthless fucking life, in this worthless goddamn world, filled with these worthless goddamn people?!

I can’t treat her, and I have a massive lump of cash at this point that I might not even be able to clean because the second I go to Johdi in my weak ass state he’ll body me and take it for himself, the skinny fucker was always a bastard. Only reason his system works is because he’s already rich, so who is going to notice if he hires someone to ‘clean floors’ for a year for more than they are worth as a ‘signing bonus’. The entire thing only works because he pays off the Beaters. What happens if I refuse to give him the cash after he demands it? Just take it out of my hands and throw me into the streets where a pair of Beaters can just arrest me for assault and never worry about me again?

Even keeping the cash as it is isn’t feasible. I can only spend it on fast food, grocery stores without security scanners or cameras, or black market areas that don't care as long as you have cash. No bank will randomly accept fifty grand from some hood rat that obviously doesn’t work a normal job.

Fuck.

Fuck