Willy Reed

William Reed stumbled out of the wreckage that had once been his office. It was a miracle he had survived the Wyvern attack. They had come out of nowhere and descended on his administrative building ten minutes ago and wreaked absolute havoc. One of his bodyguards had shoved him inside a private washroom and it was the only reason he still lived.

He was confused. Wyverns were high-grade creatures, very dangerous and freshly spawned. But their spawn points would have all been far from population centres.

The creatures could fly, of course, which gave them the ability to range far and wide.

That only provided the how they got here but not the why.

Every piece of literature his people had unearthed which pertained to the behaviour of spawned mobs was clear. The location of their spawning crystals dictated what they considered their territory. The wyverns should not have attacked the city, let alone pass over hundreds of other inviting targets to attack the Faction’s headquarters in the heart of Milwaukee.

It was almost as if they had been directed in some other manner.

The building was on fire, and he choked on the plumes of thick, black smoke that invaded his lungs, but he had to keep going and find a way down to the ground floor. Things cleared a little once he got into the large room that housed his secretarial pool. Mostly because the roof was completely absent. This had to be where the winged beasts had broken through. Amongst the debris, he saw the broken bodies of the young staffers who worked there. All of them were torn apart without mercy, they never stood a chance.

As Reed stumbled through the smashed masonry and steel pylons, he noticed a pattern to the destruction which dislodged a worrying thought.

His nephew Hudson had returned from Minnesota unexpectedly earlier that day and proceeded to barge his way into the building as he usually did. There was something different about him today, though. His mannerisms had changed. It was subtle, many wouldn’t have noticed, but Reed knew his nephew well and spotted it. The word choices he made didn’t match his personality and during the brief conversation, Reed got the distinct impression that his nephew no longer knew him, not the way he should.

It had been concerning. Perhaps Hudson had started to lose his sanity. God knew that there were times Reed felt like he was on the verge of losing his.

He already suspected that Sholmdir had a lingering hold over the boy and the situation had seemingly only worsened during his sojourn to the frontlines. The battle had not been the distracting boon Reed had hoped for. The meeting hadn’t lasted long. The gruff giant had stormed out, unsatisfied about something; it was unclear what precisely. The complaints and demands had been couched in very general terms, no specifics.

A few minutes after Hudson departed, Janice had come in with a question. She was the same young woman whose nose had been busted by Hudson a few months earlier. Reed had seen the poor girl’s legs, crushed under fallen masonry. She was dead now as were so many others. He shook his head and pushed away the dark thoughts.

Hudson had left a rather large knapsack in the waiting area outside the office, and Janice wanted to know what to do with it. It was too big for her to carry, so Reed had told her to get one of the janitorial staff to move it to an old lost and found locker in one of their stock rooms. Hudson could collect it from there when he cooled down and remembered that he’d left it behind.

The Wyverns had crashed through the roof above the area where Hudson’s knapsack had been left. They then rampaged deeper into the building, towards the janitor’s stock room where the pack had been taken too.

Following his suspicions, Reed abandoned the plan to escape the building immediately and wove his way around the wreckage, following the wyvern’s path through the building.

He had to know.

He couldn’t reach the final destination because a large section of the floor had given way and made it impassable, but it got him close enough to examine the area and confirm his fears. The stock room had been annihilated and it looked as if the wyverns had then burst through the roof above to escape. Launching their large bodies into the air is what had likely caused the floor to buckle and give way.

As the ugly truth warred within him, Reed noticed something out of the ordinary. A mote of dust that gleamed unusually in the firelight, a sparkly white not yellow or orange. Its behaviour differed from the destruction which surrounded him. The dust and ash inside the building were being churned upwards, light enough to be affected by the updrafts caused by the various fires that grew with intensity. This mote defied the laws of physics and pushed through the heat vortices aimed unerringly at him

He tried to duck and back away, but the mote mirrored his movements as if it were being guided by an unseen hand. Scrambling backwards, he caught his heel on the remains of a demolished wall and fell on his ass, bruising his coccyx. The mote seemed to sense his vulnerability and zipped forward until it struck Reed’s forehead, dead in the centre.

Reed recoiled with fear but felt no pain. A strange, cold sensation emanated from the point of contact and then his body froze and tensed as he started to convulse on the ground.

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Foreign thoughts and feelings flooded Reed’s mind. It was a massive, brute-force assault on his consciousness that threatened to shut his body down. Images and sensations that were not his own washed through him. Pain, loss, bitterness, and decay came from another source. It was an infection targeted at his soul, one that would prove fatal, he knew it and could do nothing to prevent the corruption from spreading through his body.

Mixed in with the understandable despair of his impending death came a name that rang like a bell, determined not to be forgotten.

Maurice.

Against his will, Reed was forced to recall or experience snippets of another man’s life. Absorb a measure of the man’s fate. The fatal corruption was a mere delivery mechanism for this knowledge. A tragic side-effect.

However, the memories which assailed him were jumbled and out of sequence. He also suspected that significant parts were missing and little of it made sense. Lying there in the rubble it felt like he was in the implacable grip of Maurice’s shattered memories for hours. In truth, it was merely a handful of seconds before Reed regained control of his body and was able to shakily climb to his feet.

Blood dribbled from every orifice, and he spat a wad of the crimson fluid out to clear his mouth.

Reed could feel the creeping rot of malevolence take root in his body. He had maybe a few days before it swallowed him whole and resulted in death. Under normal circumstances, learning he had a few days to live would be at the forefront of his mind, but not today.

Maurice’s memories may have been jumbled but he managed to parse a few elements together. The man had been a gangster, a killer, but that was not the important part. The critical piece of information was that a fragment of a horrific intelligence had taken control of Maurice and the heartbreaking final scene it had shown him.

Hudson.

His beloved nephew. That foul entity had stolen Hudson’s body. The earnest, driven, young man was lost.

Reed felt a flash of guilt for being happy that it hadn’t been Hudson who betrayed him. A foolish thing to be happy for. If Maurice’s memories were to be believed, Hudson would be tortured by this fragment that wanted to enslave and destroy the world.

Not on Reed’s watch, it wouldn’t. His own death might be near, but he could still act. He would free his nephew despite what that would mean. Dead would be better than enslaved to a monster that had stolen his body.

Reed stumbled away from the gaping hole in the floor and picked his way across the debris until he reached a stairwell that led down. When he reached the bottom, he used his shirt to craft a makeshift mask to cover his face and covered his head with a jacket before staggering into the chaotic atmosphere outside. A self-preservation instinct had kicked in and he felt it best that no one should know who he was until he’d had time to figure out how advanced the fragment’s plans were.

The building was surrounded by townsfolk and emergency responders. People were rushing around, crying, and in general disarray.

A soldier whom he didn’t recognise grabbed him by the elbow when he half-fell out the smashed front door and helped guide him away from the destruction. “Are you alright? Any injuries we should know about?”

“I’m fine,” Reed hacked out a cough, the smoke inhalation meant he needn’t make any effort to disguise his voice. The inner corruption wasn’t something anyone could do anything about, so he didn’t mention his imminent mortality.

“Good. Good,” the soldier said but kept a firm grip on his arm and kept leading him further away. “What department are you from?” he asked casually.

“Finance,” Reed responded with the first lie that came to mind. Once the smoke had cleared, he’d got a good look at the soldier’s uniform and recognised the patch on his arm. It hadn’t been from the Wisconsin First, the regiment most loyal to him and stationed to protect the city. He was from the ninth, colloquially known as Hudson’s Hardboys. The regiment answered directly to his nephew. None of them should have been in the city. They ought to be in Minneapolis, on the frontline with the expansionist army. “Wilson’s department,” he elaborated on the lie. “I was in the john when everything went to hell. What the fuck happened?”

The soldier grunted in acknowledgement, seemingly believing the impromptu deception. “Did you see the Governor inside?”

“No, should I have? Look, sir, what is going on?”

The soldier stopped and looked around and leaned in conspiratorially. “Don’t mention this to anyone else, but there was an attempted coup. The colonel of the Wisconsin First launched a terrorist attack to take over. We fear he has killed the Governor or taken him captive. That’s why we’re searching for him. Luckily, Hudson Reed, the Governor’s nephew, got wind of the coup and brought us back to snuff it out before it could take root.”

“Coup?” Reed whispered in unfeigned confusion, trying to parse and make sense of the cockamamie story the soldier was peddling. “Not monsters?”

“Nah, there were no monsters. This is all the work of rebels from the First.”

“I swore I s…” Reed caught himself just in time. According to his cover story, he’d been in the restroom when it happened. “…heard the screams of monsters. Big ones.”

“Illusions,” the soldier confided quietly. “The traitors had a talented illusionist fake a flying monster attack to cover their tracks. Very clever, but not clever enough. We’ve seen through their lies.”

The wyverns had been no illusion. Reed had seen them swoop down from above out of his office window. Why would this soldier be lying?

And then it clicked.

This really was a coup, just not by the First, who remained loyal. One organised by Hudson or to be exact the creature which inhabited his body. It explained the lack of discipline being shown by this soldier who was blabbing intel to random survivors. It wasn’t ill-discipline, he was following orders and disseminating the false narrative to smooth the transition of Hudson’s takeover.

Whether this had been something his nephew had been brewing before being co-opted was a question that might never be answered. It was possible. Hudson had been very dissatisfied with Reed’s decisions of late. Either way, it didn’t matter. This simply made the situation far worse than he had initially feared.

Reed had been right to keep his identity a secret. If he had told this soldier who he was, he would certainly have been detained and likely executed out of sight. The goal of any sensible coup attempt would be that the incumbent didn’t survive the initial attack. But anyone with eyes could see that the section of the building where his office was located had not been completely destroyed.

His survival was a possibility. No wonder they were afraid he might have made it out.

There was a thunderous crack as an explosion from inside the building rocked the area. The soldier lost his grip on Reed’s elbow when he took cover from the falling debris, and this allowed him to slip away into the crowd.

He didn’t have long, but if he was lucky, it would be long enough to do something useful with the time he had left.