We approached the door labeled Storage 2, its metal surface apparently once painted over by the painting of an eagle clasping arrows. It was still there, but the outlines that still remained were rusted and pitted, giving an elderly and wounded look to the divine symbol. I gripped the handle, feeling the a sucking resistance as I pulled. Techlock joined in, and our combined effort forced the door to budge, but with reluctance. It groaned as it gave way, a gush of water bursting out and cascading over us.
The water was ice cold, carrying a putrid smell that burned the inside of my nostrils. I gagged, feeling acid rise in my throat, as the water sloshed over my pant legs. It soaked through the outside of the pants, and I winced as water flooded my legs through the bullet hole from the turret, and then seeped into my wound. It burned even as the tide of it almost swept me off my feet.
The water subsided, and we stepped into the storeroom. Rows of shelves stretched out before us, filled with military crates and supplies. The shelves were mossy and sagging, but some few still maintained their shape despite untold years of existence. Still sitting in the places they had been packed, mounds of mulched items and loot rotten over their embrace. It was a sad sight, but one that was made better when I spotted a small white packet labeled Chips, Salted. I snatched it out of the muck and added it to one of the pockets in my vest.
“Good find,” Techlock mumbled through his air filter. “The packaging on a lot of this stuff is all that keeps it from being mush and dust. The ancients, they really knew how to keep stuff from going to hell.”
He sidled over to a shelf and grabbed at a green and gray mess of moss and mold, ripping it off in layers that he slung into the murky water slapping at our feet.
“Like this,” he said, nodding his hooded head towards his find.
I came over, checking it out from his side. Underneath the rot and ruin, there sat boxes of ‘Bars, Choco’. Most of them were shrunken in and ruined, but a few looked absolutely pristine, their white boxes seeming to glow with holy light as I reached out to grab one.
Techlock slapped my hand, but laughed as he did so. I grinned under my hood, full well knowing the creds a box of these could muster.
“Seventy–thirty,” Techlock muttered, pulling the good boxes out and stuffing them into one of our scavenging ziplo containers. They were a curious mesh of metal links and clear, malleable plastic, and you could easily fit and seal several thousand creds of loot in one of them.
I chuckled, pulling my own scav-ziplo from my vest pouch.
“First come, most profit? You really are an asshole, Tech.”
He shrugged, moving away from the shelf and further into the room, his eyes scanning the shelves for anything of value. I followed, each step splashing in the shallow stagnant water of the storehouse. It was much like a swamp, but unlike any of the swamps I’d been to previously.
Topside swamps had a lot of room in which to breathe, I realized. This one had nowhere to vent the gasses and decay that it produced. Even with the door now propped open, the air was almost too thick to breathe, and I gave thanks to the Tech Gods that we had air filters.
I saw a promising mound on the next shelf and moved over to engage it, tearing the mulch off the top as Techlock had shown me before. It was a box labeled Gears, Micro, and next to it was another box labeled Springs, High Tension.
“For all the tricks in Harlotville,” I cursed aloud. I heard Techlock rush my way, splashing and clawing through the water in his haste, and didn’t even bother to turn and look at him when he got to me and started laughing hard.
“Might be time for a renegotiation,” I grumped, picking up the boxes and stuffing them in my scav bag.
“Good luck with that,” Techlock responded, chuckling a bit more. “Look, Alaric, I’d be a shit business owner and probably broke if I let my heart tell me how to do my job. Just be happy that you’ll get a nice cred kickback on those sales. Or, hell, you can stuff them in the shop when you get back and not have to deal with me for that much longer.”
I cocked my head. It was a good point, one that I would definitely consider.
“Besides, we should probably hurry up and get done and out. Looks to me like you’ve got at least a quart of water stuck in your boot.”
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I glanced down at where the bullet had torn through my pant leg and observed my wound still trickling small spirals of blood into the semi-transparent greenish-brown murk.
In doing so, I managed to catch sight of something else. I don’t know if it was Techlock’s goggles catching the dim lights above that brought me to look away at just the right time to exactly the right spot, but there, just above the water line on a lower shelf, a white and shiny object that absolutely caught my eye.
“Finders Keepers,” I yelled, splashing forward.
Techlock turned and caught sight of the box and started to race after me. It was no contest, though, and I reached it well before he did.
Stabbing my gloved hands through the mulch that overlayed the kit like bread on a sandwich, I tore it away from some light chitinous roots and squinted at it through the dim light. The case was white plastic, its corners embossed with some rustless metal, and its front was marked by the faint but universal lines that denoted health and science.
This was gonna be something good for sure.
“Ah, damn,” Techlock said as he got closer. “Well found, Alaric. Will be great creds for sure. Let’s open her up and see what’s inside.”
“Hold on,” I said, pulling the case closer to my face. There were faint words on the bottom. I put one gloved finger underneath them, sounding out the syllables as they came clear to me. “Muta-Prep,” I intoned. “Blockers and Limiters. That’s the stuff they talked about in the journal entry, isn’t it?” I asked.
As I talked, I popped open the case and surveyed several intact plastic vials of various colors. Each was labeled with a letter and a number. I pulled the vial marked A1 out of its slot, and rolled the liquid, watching it spin inside. It looked like cherry juice, though maybe thicker and a bit more syrupy.
I replaced it and checked the rest of the kit. Nestled beside the vials was a large, overly complicated, and frankly scary-looking injection device. It had multiple syringes and a series of dials and levers, giving it an appearance more akin to a torture device than a medical tool.
“Yeah. They said they used them too late and so they didn’t work against the mutagen," Techlock said, inspecting the vials. "Something about this is giving me the devil’s stink eye. It feels dangerous."
I turned toward him, ready to make fun of his sudden cowardice, when my eyes caught sight of a large container in the back of the room. The light above it had directly gone out, but now I was close enough to read its faded, stenciled words. It was marked with a symbol showing three interlocking circles, and directly underneath that were the words ‘Mutagen X02’. My heart skipped a beat as I saw it was cracked, its contents leaking into the water that surrounded it.
“Uh, Tech,” I stuttered, my voice rising and my heart beating more quickly. “Did those journal entries say why the blockers and limiters failed?” I asked, setting the case back down on the shelf, still open, and bent over to examine my wound.
Nearby, Techlock stared over at the broken container and shook his head.
“Inject yourself. Now!”
“With what?” I asked, panic rising in my chest.
I reached out to the kit, grabbed the cherry-fluid-like A1, and slotted it into the strange injection devices. Barely thinking, I grabbed a thicker orange B1 and slotted that as well. I noticed the injector still had one more open slot.
“What in the abyss do I put there?”
Techlock lurched forward, grabbing randomly at the case and stuffing a blue liquid into the slot. Tearing the injector away from me, he grabbed my leg with one arm and lifted it up to the bottom shelf of the unit. Holding it there, he used his left hand to stab the needle of it into my calf, depressing the trigger of it.
A loud mechanical whirr sounded, followed by some of the worst pain ever. It was the sensation of being stabbed, then having the knife be spun and twisted inside of me, before being hooked to an electro-lamp that was then burned hot to full power.
“Aaaaaah!” I screamed. I reflexively tried to kick my leg out, but Techlock held firm.
“Oh, no you don’t. I know you think I’m an ass, and I think you’re an easy person to take advantage of, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you wimp out and die on me.”
“Ah! Aaaah!” I screamed out in torn, breath-stripped gasps.
The liquid of the injector was both flame and ice in my body, and I could feel it moving through me in pulsing waves. Whatever the liquids were, they weren’t just solutions carried through the blood like the medicines of the mid-tech and present. No, I could feel a tangible presence tearing through me, like small little monsters nesting in my flesh and setting up shop within.
“Steady there, Alaric. I still need someone to carry my stuff for me on our way back,” Techlock growled.
The fluid in the injector had drained, and he let go of my leg, slapping it back into the case and stuffing that into his scav bag.
I kicked my leg off the shelf and reeled, my consciousness swimming laps around my body in a dizzying kaleidoscopic spin. I reached out for the shelf to steady myself, but instead missed and splashed face-first in the murk.
“Damn. Well, it was nice knowing you, kid,” Techlock said, his voice muffled and echoing. “Would have liked for you to stay alive. Or human. Or whatever the hell is happening here.”
I thrashed in the water, hearing my heart beat juicily in my ear. Water was splashing over my hood; thankfully it had drained enough at this point that it didn’t go over my entire body. Instead, I thrashed on the floor, half-submerged in mutagen-tainted, possibly irradiated, and poisonous dirt water.
“Tech!” I gasped.
It came out as a growl, and I could feel the muscles in my body bulging, something pulsing under the skin of my hands. In a furious panic, I tore off a glove and stared in horror as my fingernails grew out rapidly, and the veins in the back of my hand throbbed visibly.
I was so royally fucked.