I woke up in the original entry room of the bunker, lying without my suit and wrapped in blankets. My body felt sore all over, and a wave of dizziness hit me as I tried to piece together what had happened. Groaning, I sat up and looked around.
Techlock's presence startled me as he appeared from the shadows.
“Surprised to see me?” he asked with a smirk. “Leaving you behind would have been the intelligent thing to do, but I guess there’s some room in my life for stupidity.”
“What happened?” I croaked, my voice raw.
He sighed, settling down beside me.
“You were thrashing like a madman. I thought you were about to become one of those monsters. But then you just... stopped. I moved in, checked you, saw you were still alive, and dragged you out to the lift. Popped the control panel off, twisted some wires together, and got it working just long enough to get us up here.”
He pointed to a makeshift bed he'd set up.
“You’ve been lying there for the past two hours, muscles pulsing and growing. It’s been quite a horrific yet fascinating show. Thought about leaving a couple of times. Was about 50% sure you’d turn into some sort of giant and crush me. But then I thought, hey, Tech, Alaric’s a regular. Should probably stick around and see if there isn’t something you can do.”
I smiled wanly.
“Good to hear it all means something. Thank you Techlock.”
“Yeah. I’m a big softie. Also, you’ve got a lot of high-cred equipment with you. Would be a shame to lose it all over a false alarm.”
I chuckled, then felt electricity spit through my body. It was minor, definitely muscle spasms, but it hit hard enough that my air whooshed out of my body and I found myself gasping heavily, curled up on my side.
“That bad, huh?”
I nodded and began probing my chest with my fingers. It was tender and sore, but also much broader and thicker. Beneath my now large pecs was the beginning of a six-pack, and as I poked and prodded, my attention was drawn to my arms.
I’d never seen anything like them, apart from the soldiers and knights who were lucky enough to get core surgeries for strength.
They had thickened into veritable meat logs, streaked through with visibly pulsing arteries and veins. I threw off my blankets and stared at my nudity in awe. My legs were tree trunks, though leaner like an Aspen and clearly still subject to the whims of my runner’s build. I blew a sigh of relief over that. Would rather stay agile than become a big immobile brawler any day…
I glanced over to where my leg had been bleeding from the bullet and saw that it was completely healed.
“Yeah,” Techlock said and my eyes shot over to meet his.
“No idea if that’s a thing that is going to keep happening or not, but I noticed it too.”
It all made me feel dizzy. I held a hand to my forehead, feeling it for fever.
“Why don’t you think I changed into one of those monsters?” I asked.
Techlock sighed.
“Luck, mostly. We had those items they talked about in their logs already in hand. We just got to you in time.” He nodded, seemingly running the idea through his head one more time. “I think this is what the mutagen was supposed to do. Maybe if those poor bastards had gotten their shots in time, they wouldn’t have gone all murderhobo.”
“Sounds to me like we should go back in and get some more, then.”
His eyes gleamed with excitement.
“Yes! A simpler, easier way to achieve results similar to what the monster core surgeries can do? It’ll cause trouble, of course. Bandit Lords will get involved. But maybe if we can keep it on the hard down low for long enough, we can be rich and gone before they even find out!”
Sitting up, and stretching my new, stiff muscles, I couldn’t help but shake my head at the hand the Goddess of Luck had dealt us. I had an alien AI sitting at home waiting to help me get rich. Now, there was this super medicine sitting at the bottom of this bunker waiting to do the same thing. Maybe, when we left the place, a bunch of cred chips would just randomly fall from the sky and into my rucksack.
With how everything had been going to this point, it didn’t seem that unlikely.
I put my hand on the nearby wall and stood, making sure that nothing inside of me was ready to snap or break over the changes my body had undergone. Feeling nothing but new, raw power coursing through me, I walked over to Techlock, who watched me with wide and curious eyes.
“I’m in if you are. Quick question, though. Are you going to take any of it?”
Techlock was shaking his head even before I finished my sentence. “No way. I’m not kidding when I say that we need to keep this quiet. Just for ourselves. You're nobody, so no one knows what you look like. But if I get ripped like you, that’ll cause questions. Best I do it all after we’re already out of town.”
Stolen novel; please report.
I nodded and started helping Techlock pick the place up. He hadn’t pulled out too many things from the rucksack, but it’d be better to be on the move. It was almost certainly getting into the evening by now, anyway, and even with Techlock’s adjustment to my serf bracelet, I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time.
My mouth formed a big O as the realization that my serf bracelet wasn’t on my leg anymore came to mind. I looked down where it had been, and Techlock grinned, pointing to where I had been lying before.
“Your muscles grew so quickly that they popped off before they could activate. Was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen, lad.”
I snickered, the idea of storing some mutagen out of the city walls and using it to free serfs came to mind. Wasn’t a bad idea.
We checked over all the gear, making sure everything was in place. My former suit had been torn and discarded, so I donned a spare set of clothes from our packs, feeling the new muscles strain against the fabric.
That was another thing I’d have to deal with when we got back. Shopping for new clothes. I wondered what Elli would think of the new me, and how much time she’d force me to stand around modeling clothes.
“Let’s make a plan,” Techlock suggested. “We stay ready for a fight in case some of the mutants come after us. The container is leaking, so we look around for a patch and see if we can’t seal it. If that’s a bust, we put as much as we can in the ziplo containers. They can hold liquid, so no huge problems there. Are a bit flimsy to outside damage, though, so we wrap them in blankets to cushion them.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Maybe one of us fills the ziplos while the other looks for a patch? Just to make sure we get as much of it as we can. We don’t know how fast it is leaking out.”
Techlock cocked his head.
“Yeah. Smart. Alright, we’ll do that then.” He walked over to the shredded remains of my old protective suit and knelt down over it with a knife. Cutting at the fabric, he separated the hood and air filter from the rest of the mess. “We can cinch this tight, might do you some good just in case.”
“In case of what?” I asked.
“In case of old-world bullshit.”
He stood up, handing it over to me. I grabbed it, taking a few minutes to inspect the air filters and goggles, ensuring they were still functional. The last thing I needed was to go down in my new super body glory, only to choke to death on a weaponized fart.
“Alright, I think we’re ready,” I said, feeling a mix of apprehension and excitement. “Let’s do this. I sure wouldn’t mind another shot or two.”
Techlock coughed and then slapped my arm.
“Are you nuts, lad? That’s basically what you said last time. How about you stop tempting Lady Luck and we just get on with it already?”
With everything in place, we clambered back into the main halls of the bunker. This time he wielded the torchlight while I held my newly looted saber in my right hand. I was beyond ready to test both my new weapon and body in combat. A smile rose to my lips when I imagined CD’s response to all my changes.
The walk back to Storage 2 felt different this time. Before it’d all seemed mysterious and curious, but now it felt more threatening. I kept wondering if the mutants had found their dead and if they had the intelligence to come after us.
After all, they’d been human once.
It was harder to walk through, knowing that every creak and gurgle might give away our presence and signal an attack. More than once I felt my heart in my throat over what turned out to be the moaning of a stopped-up pipe or the squeak of a rat.
Techlock followed directly behind me, his movements cautious and quiet as he directed the high-intensity beam to light up all of the bunker’s nooks and crannies.
“Think we’ll actually run into more trouble?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. “Maybe they’re like bears; more scared of us than we are of them.”
“Don’t count on it,” Techlock replied, his eyes darting to every shadow. “If they’ve got even half the humanity they once had, I guarantee you they are out for vengeance.”
We moved cautiously, each turn and corner revealing more of the bunker's neglected interior. The flickering lights cast eerie, dancing shadows that played tricks on the eyes. I kept my torchlight ready, its beam slicing through the gloom.
We passed by the cafeteria again, its overturned tables and scattered debris a reminder of the chaos that had unfolded here. The sight of old, broken game consoles scattered across the floor made me pause.
“Kids used to play here,” I muttered. “But this was a military outpost, so why did they bring their kids?”
Techlock frowned.
“I think the Church books say that when the tribulations were at their height, friends and family all came together as a single fighting force. That’d be kids, too.”
Lying on his back yet in good condition, a teddy bear gazed up at me. In my mind’s eye, I could see the kid, a little 8-year-old boy, running from the screaming monsters of the labs. Maybe even as the aliens smashed the dam above. Was harsh. I hoped it wasn’t true.
Fingers snapped near my ears and I jolted back to the situation at hand.
“Hey! Alaric! Keep your head in the game. No time for daydreaming.”
I shook off the melancholic thoughts and we worked our way back through the rest of the cafeteria and to the lift. It was an exciting thing, stepping inside and seeing the buttons now lit up dully, a couple even flashing like an emergency SOS.
Techlock reached over and hit one of them, and the door shut, before groaning loudly.
“Did it do that when you had it go up?” I asked.
He shook his head, then braced himself. Now quite worried, I followed his lead as above I could hear the strained snapping of a cable slowly coming undone, overrun by the sputter and clank of its well-broken untrustworthy motor.
The lift was moving, slowly, but the metallic twirl above told me that it might be better if it was moving a bit more quickly. The floor vibrated beneath my feet, and the walls seemed to close in as the lift shuddered and twanged its way downward. The flickering lights above us cast a sporadic glow, illuminating the rusted cables and the grime-coated walls.
“We’re gonna die in this thing, aren’t we?” I asked.
Techlock grumbled something before stumbling forward and hitting all of the buttons. The lift stopped moving, and with it, the unraveling noise from above ceased.
A metallic whining voice filled the compartment.
“9-1-1; what’s your emergency?”
The voice came from somewhere hidden, and I wondered what new mess we’d just gotten ourselves into.
“Hello?” Techlock said, moving from his position of safety and pacing the compartment, searching for the source.
“9-1-1; what’s your emergency?” the voice repeated.
It was the same exact tone every single time, and I understood at once that we were dealing with a so-called automated system. Some of the older scavengers had told me about them before. They generally got ripped out and dismembered for parts. Not many of them were more than a recording.
Still, they sometimes retained command functions that could be accessed audibly. Given the situation we were in, it seemed worth a try.
“Hi there! Yes, uh, the emergency. We’re in a lift and it feels like it’s about to fall apart and crash.”
“Processing query; Query processed. Help is on its way. Units have been contacted for dispatch. Estimated time of arrival is: never. Error, no units detected. Calculating alternate rescue.”
Techlock shook his hooded head and sighed.
“Was a good try, for sure. Just wish it could have actually helped us.”
He leaned back, slumping into the wall of the lift and letting himself slide to a plop on the floor.
Above us, the lift cable twanged hard and we began to fall.