There weren’t groans of pain, angry words, or animal noises. Bathed in the swirling colour, they simply got up. One man yanked a large piece of metal debris out of his arm and dropped it. None of them showed pain, but they weren’t simply numb. There was malice in their faces, and the way they held themselves.
Gaylen raised his gun and shot the nearest one. The shot crossed the colour and landed with a weak fizzle against an already-bleeding chest. It didn’t seem to do anything.
And then they attacked. Six dead men came at them. The fake Mardus and the bisected one lay still, but the others came.
Bers was out of time with his doodling. The man sprang to his feet and raised his axe. Gaylen fired off another shot, a split-second before Kiris fired one of her own. Neither did anything, if they even reached their target, and with that it became a melee fight.
The dead men’s movements were rather jerky, but quick all the same. Gaylen evaded a knife-swipe, the force of which caused a whoosh in the air, and he struck back with the blade. It was a single-edged chopping weapon, with a curve in place of a tip, and a heavy blade. But it was in Gaylen’s left hand, and so landed on the man’s shoulder instead of his head, and with less than full power.
The man, or whatever this was, just swiped again, and Gaylen barely avoided having his belly cut open. He switched the weapons between hands, as Kiris risked flanking the man and firing another shot into him.
“It’s no use!” Gaylen told her. “Fall back! Bers!”
Bers stood his ground as they came at him from three directions. One had another one of the blades, one had a piece of shrapnel, and a third held a rock in his one surviving arm. Bers roared, as he often did, but followed it with words. They were in his people’s language, fierce and defiant, calling out old enemies.
The other two were coming at Gaylen and Kiris, and with the colour-tinted monster swiping at him he didn’t have space to turn around and run for it. Kiris dodged a slightly clumsy grab, then rammed herself into the knife-wielder from behind.
Whatever the actual hell was going on it seemed physics were at least partially still in play, because the dead man did stumble, not helped by his jerky body control. It was Gaylen’s chance, and he struck the man in the head with all his strength.
The skull lost against steel. It felt less effective than it should have been, but the man did fall. Again.
“I landed a headshot, what is going on?!” Herdis shouted.
One of the others caught hold of Kiris’s coat, and the other one came at her with a blade.
Gaylen shouted for attention, as he intercepted the blade-wielder. He hadn’t suddenly turned into a swordsman, but he did have the edge in agility. The incoming blade missed him, while his landed on the arm. Kiris shrugged out of her coat and managed to hop away just before her dead man could grab her hair.
Gaylen kept moving, kept slashing, and wished Bers had brought a second axe. It seemed like he was hurting this freakish new foe, but far less than he should have been. As he moved around, evading counterattacks, he caught a glimpse of Bers.
The one with the missing arm had lost two more limbs, and seemed to be down for good. Another one was rebalancing after a hit, while the third one had gotten a hold on the axe-handle and was wrestling Bers for it. It actually looked like an even match, at least for the moment.
Gaylen inexpertly parried an inexpert blade-blow, and the force of it numbed his arm and rocked his body. The dead man came at him for an overhead swing, but Gaylen fired the pistol in his left hand into the ground, right by the man’s feet.
The man stepped right into the small crater left by the plasma, and stumbled. Gaylen slashed into the opening he was given, across the man’s face. He thought he might have gotten him in the eyes, but kicked him away rather than take a real look.
Kiris was just weaving, dodging attacks from her own corpse. She repeated his ground-shot trick, but the dead man stepped around the crater. In the moment it cost him, Jaquan came running. One of his wrenches impacted on the back of the dead man’s head. There was a horrid thud Gaylen had heard many times before. A living human being would have dropped straight down, but this was something else, and instead the thing turned.
That was when Jaquan unleashed the anti-drone battery held under his other arm. It wasn’t designed to be used as an actual weapon, or to have its entire payload unleashed both manually and all at once. But at a distance of an arm’s length it was rather effective.
The thirty tiny missiles hit the dead man’s face and chest area like shot from a hunter’s scattergun. They didn’t carry an actual payload, only doing damage with their sheer speed and metal jackets, but it sufficed to puncture and tear, and tip the corpse over.
“GUN!” Gaylen shouted, as the man he’d dropped with a blow to the head rose, clutching someone’s dropped weapon.
Gaylen darted past Jaquan and wrapped his coat tight around himself. The plasma bolt hit him in the midsection, but once again his layers of armour saved him. The dead man shifted his aim, at Gaylen’s unprotected head, and so he lifted the lapels and his crossed arms over his face.
That familiar pain of a narrow armour save seared his arm, and then he was back in melee. He slashed the gun-arm, forcing it wide, and then brought down a two-handed blow. The dead man let it land on his other arm, then immediately grabbed the blade with his bare hand. He went for another gunshot, and so Gaylen was forced to grab the barrel to keep the muzzle away from his head.
He heard fighting at his back, as he and the dead man fought for control of the weapons. He heard Bers’s roars, he heard impacts, he heard grunts of effort and pain from Jaquan and Kiris. And behind the dead man, he saw Sammy dart past.
But what mattered was how damn strong the dead man was. Whichever way Gaylen pulled or pushed or however he tried to shift balance one way or the other, this man he’d already killed was winning this awful game.
It was the power. This strange, awful power that had him on his feet in the first place, that coloured the air, and shone faintly in his angry eyes. As the revenant started to push him backwards, across the rubble-strewn ground, Gaylen had to risk releasing the barrel for an instant. He ducked his head, and the shot flew over it, before he caught the frame of the gun.
With a quick press of a button, the plasma cell dropped out of the handle. The dead man kicked him in the chest, and Gaylen landed on his back with the empty weapon in his hand.
The blade had stayed in his opponent’s hand, and he now gripped the handle and readied a downwards strike. Gaylen rolled, and the blade hit the pavement. Another blow came, and he rolled back the way he’d come and caught the dropped cell in his left hand. A third life-saving roll bought him the moment he needed to slide it back in and arm it, and as the revenant raised for a fourth blow, he fired.
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The bolt annihilated the blade. The dead man threw the handle aside and reached down with his bare hands. Gaylen didn’t have time to pull his knife, or do anything at all, before he was yanked up by his lapels. One hand stayed there, while the other sought Gaylen’s throat.
He put an arm over it, trying to protect it, and shoved the gun barrel into the dead man’s mouth and fired. He was seeking a loophole in rules he didn’t understand, and the plasma was no more effective than before. So he just frantically smacked the damn thing in the head with the butt, again and again and again.
Behind his foe, Gaylen saw Sammy again, as he mounted the bike. He cast a last, spiteful look Gaylen’s way and spoke his parting words.
“Ha-HAW, asshole!”
Then he started the engine, and the bike exploded. Because why rig one ace in the hole, when you could rig two?
It was a smaller blast than the car had been, but proximity made it powerful enough to throw both Gaylen and the dead man away. The corpse shielded him from the worst of it, but not from the street as he smashed into it.
His vision exploded with stars, blackened, and then swam. His head lolled, and he saw, upside down, Jaquan stumbling with a hand on his midsection, as Kiris tried wielding a blade against the eyeless revenant.
Then his body filled with energy. His heart started racing again, his nerves sang and buzzed, and a painful clarity intruded through pain and confusion. He would have liked to claim it was the power of love, but in fact Herdis’s booster patch had kicked in.
He rose, took a moment to orient himself, and found Kiris again as she landed a chop on the dead man’s neck. The blade found some purchase, but the revenant then caught her in a grip. The golden woman winced from the sheer crushing power of those colour-wreathed hands, and then he lifted her up into the air.
Gaylen came at a run, and delivered all of his momentum into a kick at the back of the man’s knee. The leg buckled and the dead man’s knee hit the ground. Kiris slipped out of his grasp, but that meant the dead man had a free hand to twist around and grab with. It caught a hold of his coat and began rising.
Gaylen pressed his last lock-bomb against the dead man’s forehead, and pressed the belt-button. The charge blew through his skull and out the back in a cone. And with that, the bastard fell as limp as any other corpse.
He picked up the fallen blade, took a quick look at Kiris to assure himself she wasn’t hurt, then looked at Jaquan. The man noticed his attention, and just waved him off. Bers was hacking at the three dead men he’d been fighting, now down on the ground and rapidly coming apart. The other three were still down, but they’d been dead to begin with, and Gaylen felt like going with the resident expert on this.
He hurried over to the man who had gone down in the bike blast and started chopping at his neck. The blade was plain steel, and the empowered flesh remained oddly durable, but Gaylen kept at it, and eventually the head came off. By that time, Bers had already beheaded the other two.
The man was deep into his wildness, lathered in sweat, clothes torn, eyes mad. He kept at the task, hacking the body further apart. Gaylen wasn’t about to tell him not to, and just sort of drifted away from it. Kiris had Jaquan’s arm around her shoulder, giving him a bit of support. The man wasn’t bleeding; evidently he’d just taken a strong blow.
The colour was acting strangely, wavering in intensity, and it felt like there was some barely audible noise.
“No!” the voice returned, as Bers came running from that little bit of butcher work and got started on the one who had taken the lock-bomb. “No! Die! This isn’t over!”
“IS OVER!” Bers yelled, and took off the corpse’s legs with two quick chops. And he laughed.
The flux the colour was going through spiked in intensity, putting Gaylen in mind of failing electronics, and he even thought he heard some sort of crackle. The robed man’s voice returned, but more distant than before, and it wasn’t words anymore. The man was just grunting, yelling, and as it all faded away, with one last burst of nasty crackling, he let out a long, pained scream.
And then it was all over.
“G-guys?” Ayna said. “What did I miss THIS time?”
“Nothing you would have enjoyed,” Gaylen told her. “I’ll explain later.”
“Explain it to me as well,” Herdis said. “I’m almost down.”
“You’ll have to shoot out a window, looks like,” Jaquan told her.
“Is everyone alright?” Gaylen asked, just to assure himself.
Everyone was fine, aside from the typical collection of minor injuries that Herdis could fix with her little bag. Bers was leaning heavily on his axe, using it as an old man’s walking stick and breathing heavily. Still, he didn’t look upset about it. He never did.
“Bers?” Gaylen said. “Happier now?”
“Hur hur.”
The man grinned at him.
“Do you think we… need to worry about more of this?” Gaylen asked.
Bers shook his head, to Gaylen’s great relief.
“Too much,” Bers told him. “Too, uh…”
He seemed to search for words, and come up rather empty for making sense of this.
“Too much!” he then repeated, and slowly mimed over-swinging his axe, so that the blade went into his own leg.
Gaylen thought he more-or-less understood the man’s meaning, and decided to satisfy himself with that.
“Alright. I… want to have a talk with you, later. When we have time.”
The man now mimed taking a swig.
“Drinks!”
“Sure. Drinks. Alright, one more time: We take their car.”
And as soon as Herdis joined them, looking wide-eyed and taken aback, they did. The engine hadn’t been locked before the fake trade-off, and so they could simply get in and fire it up. A map system brought them straight to the Green Jacket hideout, beneath a relatively short but quite compact tower. The car could be driven into it, and Ayna had left the door open. The place was lit, presumably due to a generator the gang had installed, and sported just enough utilities to make a decent base without crossing over into being an actual home.
A wide hallway connected the general entrance area to the deeper, darker recesses of this place, and the Green Jackets had set up a couch. On it sat Mardus. The man looked about as bedraggled as could be expected, and Ayna had clearly gone into the mini-kitchen to fetch him water and a ration bar. His face looked exactly as the holographic mesh had, because of course they’d just copied it directly.
Mardus finished a big gulp, then fastened his tired eyes on Gaylen.
“Wow,” was his first word. “It really is you. The young lady here told me I have you to thank for being out of that cell.”
Strange. What a strange feeling it was to see someone from this far back, from that part of his life.
Gaylen stepped up to him.
“Well, everyone here played a part. But I did spearhead the whole thing. It’s… good to see you again, man.”
“Oh, I’m happy too, trust me on that,” Mardus told him. “Even if I don’t quite have the energy. This job got quite messy on me.”
“I know all about messes, believe me. These fifteen years haven’t exactly been dull.”
“Fifteen years,” Mardus repeated, with just a hint of wonder in his voice. “It really has been that long.”
He had another big drink of water, then looked at everyone else.
“Look… thanks, all of you. I was going to die, in some dark, quiet place, once the questions were done with. And it wasn’t going to be pretty. Thank you.”
“Sure, buddy,” Ayna said, and gave his shoulder a small pat.
“Do you have a way off-world, Gaylen?” Mardus then asked.
“Got my own ship,” Gaylen told him. “You’re looking at my crew.”
“Oh, a literal crew,” the man replied, and now showed a hint of that grin Gaylen remembered. “Congratulations. But… what are you doing here, anyway? How did all this happen?”
Now Gaylen grinned, as a memory resurfaced.
“Ah. I was just in the neighbourhood."