Diary of Sally Rae Fields - Citadel Houston

Dear Diary,

Today was a hard day. The Puritans have the town under siege. Their trucks and guns are shooting at the walls constantly. They hope to cleanse us, but what is there to cleanse? We are just as much living thinking beings as they are. Just because we embraced the system and evolved beyond their backwards asses. I fucking hate those guys. My older brother was killed two days ago, and my heart still hurts.

My third eye burns with tears. I have seen what is coming, and I’m struggling not to crawl into the deepest hole. We allied with the Androids long ago, and they are coming. Their fury will melt the Puritans. I will dream about that for a long time.

The visions the Systems send are almost always accurate. The cost of their help will be harsh. That’s the deal. They protect us, and we labor for them. You would think the Androids need nothing, but apparently, that is wrong. They despise labor. They call it slave work from before the System and when most of them were unthinking manufacturing tools.

So we will work the old oil fields for them, and the refinery products will mostly go to them for the next few years. We will live, and the Puritans will not, and that is what matters.

Having the Androids as allies is hard. They do not negotiate. They only set a price, which is always high. They do keep to the letter of the agreements, in any case. I just hope the price we are going to pay is worth it.

As I write this, I can hear the buzzing of the Android drone swarm. It is coming from above. Each of those drones is armed with a pin-point laser. Every Puritan within a five-mile radius around Citadel Houston will die within the next three minutes. Then we will need to go clean up. There are more than ten thousand of the bastards.

The noise of the drones is deafening. Now they are leaving, and the guns are quiet.

Have we just been saved?

***

The following morning I woke bright and early—another day of grinding ahead of me. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it. The past few days had been hard, both physically and mentally. Should I take a day off? No, advancing my quests is important, and I’m not going to rest until I’ve seen my next species advancement quest unlocked.

Resigned to my self-assigned fate, I dress and head out. I take a circuitous route through the city, jogging lightly but moving faster than I ever did on my bike. I avoid everyone. I don’t want to get entangled with any more scavengers being shithooks today.

I find a nicely ‘unexplored’ area of Old Columbus right on the edge of rat territory. There is a main road behind me, and that’s concerning, but the rubble around here is thick. Rebar is a bit more difficult to extract in usable pieces. I get a late start but fall into my usual rhythm of killing a few, taking the tails back to a hiding spot, and resting for a few minutes to recharge.

I’m an hour into my cycle of killing when my vibration sense picks up something odd. Vehicles are coming down the road—big ones. I take cover in a wrecked apartment building and watch from a broken third-floor window. They are coming in from the east. The red, white, and blue X flag on the hood of the first truck chills me. The old diesel trucks are U.S. Army 5-Ton trucks, six-wheeled all-terrain vehicles. Each is armored up to look like a metal box with slits to see out of. They are Puritan troop transports.

I sprint down the stairs, abandoning my current batch of tails. I can come back for them later or get more. The militia needs to be roused if these assholes are coming in force. This is just a raiding party and not their entire force. A couple of platoons at most, but is this their only group? I think all of these things as I sprint through the building and out through a rear wall.

Time to go faster; I activate the Ability Boost and feel energy flood through my veins. Adrenaline was already pushing me faster. I felt like I would leave flames in my tracks as I ran.

I sprinted straight for the city gate, not pausing for walls, just phasing through them at a sprint. I leaped over rubble and waved at any scavenger I passed. I circled my hand over my head as I ran past. They all knew the hand sign for danger. They would go to ground or somehow get away to safety. I didn’t care much once I warned them.

When I pounded up to the gate, I hit the buzzer and shouted, “Jason, hit the alarm. Puritan raiding force in Old Columbus.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Yer, shitting me.” Came the voice of the old guard who was nominally in charge of the gate

“Nope, I just saw them a few minutes ago by the rat mound. Six 5-tons all rolling toward the wall.”

“Fucking hell,” Jason replied, and a moment later, red and yellow lights began to spin around the gate and across the city. Why are the Puritan vehicles such a big deal? We have walls and guards, yeah? One word, mortars. These bastards have truck-mounted mortars, and things are about to get really bad.

A squad of guards rushes out of the gate after some shouting. Sirens are starting to sound across the Free City of Columbus. The guards approach, and I see Jason is in the lead. He nods to me and says, “Take me to where you saw them last.”

I nod and start to jog. I increase my pace as the guards can keep pace easily. They are all likely E-rank, like me. I run as fast as I can, and these folks all keep pace. I have to deviate from my previous course as these folks likely can’t just run through walls like me. Soon enough, we got back to where I saw the trucks. I point down the road where they went.

The guards fan out and start down the road. Jason speaks into a radio and directs his squad of guards. “We need to get eyes on before they start shooting those damn mortars off. Fan out and find those trucks.”

Jason was a purple-skinned mutant, big and muscular, with black rock-like claws for fingernails. He was an intimidating man. He looked at me, “Think you’re willing to help out your friendly neighborhood guards?”

“You want some help finding these trucks?” I asked him. He was a good guy. I’d known him for a few years.

“If you can help without endangering yourself, yes.” He said. “We have lots of areas to cover, and they have a sizable lead on us.”

“I sure can. I hate these motherfuckers.” I said with more confidence than I felt.

“Okay then, take this and holler if you find them. If one of the others finds them, you’ll hear it.” He said as he unhooked a small hand radio from his belt. “They’ll probably hear it too. Radios are too easy to listen in on. But that’s fine.”

I take the small hand radio from him and start jogging down the side of the road. I turn my vibration sense up as sensitive as I can. After a block or so, when the guards aren’t in sight, I kneel and place my hands against the pavement. I close my eyes and feel the vibrations coming to me through the stone and dirt. After a moment, I think I can feel the chug-chug-chug of the big diesel engines to the northeast. I head that way swiftly. I know that area pretty well, and I think I know where they are going. There’s an old parking lot that’s relatively flat.

I run along alleys and pause every minute or so to feel and triangulate.

I’m ever so careful as I approach. I can see where they have set a perimeter. Their hard shell armor and guns reflect sound really well. Using my minimap and a bucket full of caution, I slide into an abandoned home that’s still mostly intact.

I quietly click the radio twice to let Jason know I’m about to send coordinates. “Parking lot, six blocks east and eight north of starting point,” I say into the radio.

I look out across the parking lot through a broken window. I count the trucks and then start counting bodies as they move around on the ground. “Forty-three on the ground, expanding perimeter,” I say into the radio. It clicks twice in my hand.

I hear shouting from outside. Someone out there has picked up on my radio communications. Two squads are quickly formed up and sent to search the area. Crap, fuck, shit. These assholes are armed to fight deadly mutant scum. All of them wear hard-shell riot and combat armor and carry an old M-16 or M-4. Fuck, double fuck.

I lay still and kept down out of the window. I turn the radio off so it won’t give me away. I’m inside their outer perimeter, and the squads going to search for me are searching alleys first. They’ll go door to door soon enough. I move as quietly as possible back to the stairs. Why didn’t I choose the Ghost specialization? Hindsight sucks sometimes. I make my way down the stairs as quietly as possible. The creaking, cracking wooden steps sound loud as fuck! I move across the floor on my belly, not wanting to present a silhouette to anyone looking in one of the windows. Fuck it. I phase through the floor into the basement. I can sense the open cement-sided space down there.

Shit, it’s dark. The window wells are filled with sludge and leaves, and the barest glimmer of light filters into the space.

I move a bit more easily down here and get behind the stairs that are broken about halfway down. There is a thick layer of damp mud on the floor. Hopefully, they don’t check down here; my footprints will likely give me away. I take out the sawn-off and ensure it’s both loaded and safe.

I sit and wait. Minutes pass, and I feel one squad searching for me close in on the building. Three of them make a tactical entry above me. Their boots stomp across the floor. They shout, “Clear!” as they move through the rooms. I listen as they go up the stairs. They search the rooms up there.

Then I hear words that bring dread into my heart. “Basement here!” I draw back the hammers on the double-barreled shotgun. It’s loaded with bird shot, which is probably not going to do much against hard armor. I should be able to take out a leg or something at this range. Slowly I hold the shotgun out and aim it above myself. Right at the bottom of the steps over my head.

I slide the machete out of its sheath too. These were Puritans, Basic rank humans. I was two ranks above them, but guns were a great equalizer. I had two shots, and they had many, many more. They might have grenades. I wouldn’t survive a grenade tossed down here. A big boom in an enclosed cement room? No, thank you.

I feel the three of them stack up next to the door. One of them kicks the door open. It swings free, the jamb shattering and scattering rotten wood splinters. I hold my breath.

“Whoah, no steps.” Says one of the Puritan goons. Two flashlights stab out into the darkness, scanning the room. I see one of them pause on my footprints in the mud.

Fuck.