Panic.

Panic was the only thing Alex Cheng had on his mind right now.

The warning lights on his control console flared like the roiling coals left after a bonfire's apex. In the distance he heard the tell-tale sound of a thermite charge, Tsang Solutions standard. Behind it came the clang of solid metal slamming against the floor.

Oh God, no. No no no. Whatever she wanted was going to earn him a fate worse than true-death if he allowed himself to get taken. Anything that bitch of a woman wanted, she got, sure... But maybe it was time for her to lose? Maybe it was about time someone stuck it to her? Really spat in her face? He couldn't help but smile at the thought - it might feel good to fuck her over one last time. He wouldn't really have a chance to try again, after all.

The IRE site's observation room doubled as its saferoom for staff, and while he was the only staff member in the room, that didn't mean a damn to the normally slick and level-headed vampire. The concrete walls... The bio-locked blast doors... Even the fucking panopticon on the wall, the one that showed every cell, every room, at all hours... They comforted him. They had been a source of security for a long time. What had it been, twenty years?

And now they'd be his tomb. Great.

He had been at his desk, doing the usual - chain-smoking disposable vapes and watching comedy specials on his phone - when the call arrived. The front desk administrator had rang him up, sounding oh-so-compliant, and a little bit scared. Alex didn't blame her for the fear.

"Erm... Sir, Mr. Cheng, sir, there's someone from HQ here to see you. Judas Alighieri. She said she needed to, uh, speak with you, and-" And that had been about where Alex cut the call short, so immediately incensed that he threw his phone at a wall to shut her up. Now here, in the present, he was feasting on his last little banquet of mischief before Judas got to him.

He had walked (sprinted) over to the control console, beginning to pore through the different commands at his disposal. He could lock down every door in the building, shutter every window, trigger every laser-wire that would set the suppression emplacements to activate; hell, he could shut down the fucking ice-cream machine in the canteen if he wanted. The staff canteen. That would've been a dick move, though, and he wasn't trying to piss off anyone but the bitch herself.

Alex raised black plastic to his lips once more, a trembling hand barely able to keep the stick still while he drew a deep, cherry-and-menthol puff. An application of teeth to hold the mouthpiece helped steel his nerves. The exhale to follow came from his nose, like he was a dragon puffing smoke, and while it burned a bit, it was something he had always wanted to do. It would've been significantly improved if he smoked actual cigarettes, or even a cigar, but fuck that - they didn't make menthol cigars, anyways. And even if they did, he doubted they'd be good.

Now he wanted to try one. Shit. Focus, Alex, focus. One shot at glory, one shot to make it count. The soon-to-be-ex-IRE site manager grabbed the nearest chair he could grasp, a leather-lined computer chair, and took a seat. The sound of boots was approaching, and with it, more doors falling. They were just down the hall now.

Click. Screams. Sweet, succulent screams, the screams of a squad of goons who wouldn't be able to use their lungs anymore. The suppression systems in place were great, he had to admit, but whoever had the fucked-up thought of filling a hallway with aerosolized silver? Well, it was a good thing they only worked domestically, because it was some genuine war crimes shit. Alex couldn't help but laugh just thinking of it, and the thought was only heightened by the visuals.

Up on the panopticon, one of its many screens was a nightmare to behold. Five, no, six Tsang corporate security brutess writhing on the ground, screaming in pain and pleading breathlessly for help. Further down the hall, a handful more thugs in black and red regalia clicked filters into their helmets. The bravest of the second group went from man to man as they reached the first group, kicking their helmets off and painting the tiles with their gore. Got his fatigues slick and red for his trouble, but still, it was a mercy to everyone involved.

Another breaching charge was placed at the next door - two to go after this one, and the suppression elements became even meaner the closer they got. Judas better hope she brought a lot of men, because if not...

Alex smiled as he considered the slim hope he may actually live.

No, no, Judas wasn't that kind of woman - she didn't underprepare, she prepared exactly as much as she needed. It reminded Alex of a story he had heard about the Great Wall of China. The story went that the architect in charge requisitioned the bricks for it in a single, specific lump-sum, down to the last brick. The emperor, thinking it was impossible for such a thing to be determined down to such precision, told him to order a bit more. Just to be safe, you know? So the architect added a single brick to the order, and when the wall was built, and all was said and done?

They were left with a single spare brick. Judas was that architect, in Alex's mind - so used to this violence, this systematic, syndicated savagery, that she knew exactly how many men she'd need at any given moment. He wondered briefly what kind of factors were needed to mold someone into such a monster. What had she gone through, where had she been schooled? Had she had a rough childhood?

The goons in the hallway were setting up the next bomb, combat boots clopping around on the hard tiled floor, their sound slightly wettened by all the blood they had to stomp through. That wouldn't be a problem for them soon - if they continued to have legs to stand on, anyways. Click.

A slot on the wall opened, about three feet up, the slot itself only about two inches tall and wide. From its mouth came a small metal protrusion - it looked like a laser pointer to the outside observer, and that was the sort of dark humor that kept Tsang weapons engineers from jumping into the nearest woodchipper. Another slot, and then another, and then another, slots opening and laser pointer heads appearing all along either side of the wall. The security goons didn't even hear them over their own comms-chatter.

The first beam hit the squad leader straight in the pelvis, skewering him from one side of his hips to the other. The scent of cauterized flesh filled the air like the breath of death, and once again, a chorus of screams ripped through the building like the choirs of Hell. The laser pointer projections swept from side-to-side, taking them each at the waist, letting legs and torsos tumble free of one another.

These guys wouldn't be in nearly as much pain as their comrades, but without legs, where could they go? Alex laughed aloud now, hitting the site intercom button half-way through just to taunt his aggressors-to-be. The sound of his high-pitched cackling serenaded each agonized soul outside, but like clockwork, the next squad to run the gambit began to shoot out the hallway speakers.

The lasers switched off. They drank a lot of power, and Tsang considered the death of employees an acceptable loss, so they had an inbuilt uptime-blocker. That was fine. One last hallway, and then the party would really start.

The third group trudged up to the door with all the enthusiasm of an old-world funeral procession. Funeral was an apt word of choice, Alex figured, seeing how Tsang would probably just let these dollar-store hitmen die rather than pay their medical bills. The next door was breached, and now all that stood between him and his opponents was the final steel blast door.

Alex was beginning to tire of this game already - he had such a fun surprise planned once they actually got there and confronted him. His blackened blood was pumping thick and hot in nearly-dead veins just thinking about it; in fact, it nearly had him aroused. Thinking of the carnage... Of the chaos... Oh, yes. Just his mental image of Judas's face as she blew a gasket at his little party trick would make this the finale of a lifetime. A second-lifetime, that was - his first death, a voluntary self-termination in a Tsang medical center, hadn't been nearly so glamorous.

The final group placed their charge at the door to Alex's lair. They swept the hallway once, twice, thrice with their guns, scanning every inch of it for traps. Sadly for them, they didn't look up - didn't look into the long fluorescent light set into the ceiling, same as every other hallway subsection, same as the rest of the entire compound. The whole IRE site had lights just like this one, so why would they?

For the second-to-last time, Alex pressed a button on the console, and leaned back in his chair to watch before the fireworks had even begun. Click. The lighting tubes and thin sheet of glass below them shattered like translucent confetti, joined in their shrapnel hail by a veritable blitz of heavy steel ball bearings. The ball bearings, however, weren't just dropped - they were projected outwards by a trio of previously-concealed barrels, the guns firing with a din to rival a shipboard cannon. Volley after volley of shotgun-spray assaulted the room below, each barrel holding twelve rounds of fifteen pellets each, the sound of their ejection alone enough to penetrate the blast door's thickness.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

What pellets didn't penetrate the security officers' armor instead met their bodies with such force as to shatter bones, gouge flesh, and rupture organs. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how one viewed it, far more pellets found purchase in unarmored flesh.

These men didn't even have time to scream. The hallway subsection they had been in was now a disgusting crimson swamp, a marsh of flesh and blood, bodies rendered into pulp forming a second, far-squishier flooring for the final group. This group, however, was different - and while Alex had assumed it would come to this, seeing such a prediction bear fruit was both cathartic and dreadful.

Judas herself led this charge, with only a few heavily-armored retainers at either side of her. She was smiling, and even stopped to kick at the gore on the ground in the wake of the final emplacement. No armor for her... she didn't need it. Nothing Alex could or would do could hurt her. Physically, at least.

So when she knocked, so sweetly, so gingerly, Alex flicked the switch to open the blast door and let her in. Her thugs stepped in first, visually sweeping the room; neither of them seemed to give a shit about Alex himself, instead only focused on ensuring there were no further traps. Judas knew there weren't. She stepped in as confidently as she would a boardroom to discuss a Christmas bonus.

"Hello, Alex. Lovely welcome you've given my boys. Their medical bills are coming out of your paycheck, but, I'm sure you understand..." Judas's saccharine way of speaking was just as appealing and quick to wound as a candy filled with razor blades.

Alex felt her presence, that vampiric influence of hers, crash against his own. It was a little mental war, one that played out in both the back- and foreground, much to his disgust. Even now, Judas was so intent on control and dominance that she was trying to mind-game him into submission. He sneered at her, but the sneer became a cocksure smirk as the slender woman closed the distance. She drew up a chair of her own from one of the other consoles in the room, taking a seat only a few feet from her quarry.

"Well, Alex... I'm here because of your little 'side business'. You know the one. Purity Francharde." She leaned forth, propping herself up on both hands, elbows to her knees like she was speaking with a friend at a cafe. Alex leaned back once again in his seat, folding his hands in his lap, bringing one leg over the other to cross them coyly.

"Oh? Purity? What, is she not completing her task effectively enough? I could call her in for additional training - I hear she's very popular with a certain crowd, I think we can play off of that..." Naivety was achieved without so much as a giggle, though Alex's lips did twitch at the corners as he fought off a smile. Judas rolled her eyes, chuckling, before giving Alex his due response. She had the time to play this game, anyways.

"No, no, Alex... Purity is no doubt scarfing down plenty of research material on a nightly schedule, more than efficiently for my standards. However, I mean your deal with her. Are you going to make me say it aloud?" A sharp black arch was raised, inquisition false enough that it was Alex's turn to laugh.

"Oh? I mean... If you would care to do so, Judas, I'd be happy to hear it. As it stands currently, I've not the foggiest as to what you are referring to..." Further feigned innocence, accompanied by a straightening of the back within his chair. Alex even put on a small pout for good measure, playing into the act as much as he felt he physically could without getting sick. Judas groaned.

"You’re supplying her, Alex. With meat. I’m sure of it, I’ve got proof and everything. I could take you straight to the god damn executive council, and get you castrated like the naughty little tomcat you are. And worse, too…” She gave him a wink, her lips pulling back to give him a smile that was more of a baring of tooth and fang.

“Wire inlay on your nervous system, made of silver. Constant, piercing agony, every day of your life until you finally self-terminate. A cavalcade of misery to go along with the rest of your miserable little existence. Maybe replace all your teeth with silver implants… Lower you into acid a millimeter at a time, only to pull you back out once you’re just a head…”

Alex cleared his throat to cut Judas off, beginning to interject without even letting her make a space in her speech. “Ahem! You’ve never struck me as the kind of woman to endorse pulling out, in any sense of the word! But, yes. I admit it. I was dealing meat.”

In any other context, the phrase ‘dealing meat’ would have been met with a rather admirable bit of humor. Right now? The implications of it were all too real, and the associated consequences bearing equal import. The punishment for meat-dealing was cauterization of certain body parts, beginning with non-essential organs, but you only got a handful of warnings. Fuck up again, or badly enough? You’d wish you had just been dropped in acid.

“Good. At least you admit it - that’s more than I had hoped to get out of you, if I’m being honest. Now that that’s all settled, Purity herself: where is she? I need to speak with her regarding one of her harvest candidates. Collections have been scarce recently.” The implication of how Judas would approach fixing that was all too clear, and while Alex had facilitated Purity’s oppression, he still felt a kinship with the pink-haired prostitute. Purity was friendly. She was a darling. Hell, he even sort of liked her girlfriend - what was her name?

Esper James? Something like that. Didn’t matter now, though - and he doubted it would ever matter to him again.

Alex felt a gun barrel press to the back of his head. He reached a hand out to the console, laying his hand there as if to simply change its position. The guard that had taken up position behind him didn’t seem too threatened by that.

Alex sighed deeply before responding, only half of it fake. He was suddenly very tired… Not just of this scenario, or from his physical state, but a simple and generalized exhaustion. This whole world was exhausting. Tsang was exhausting. Why did things have to be this way; why did they have to live in such a world, one that encouraged behaving this way? He was tired of it.

It was good that he wouldn’t have to deal with it much longer.

“Alright, Judas, I get it. You’re jealous. Purity has a cute girlfriend, one who happens to be your secretary, and suddenly you’re faced with the reality that you can’t always have what you want! Fine. Purity is outside town right now, five miles north, hiding out-” A gesture from Judas, and the pull of a trigger, shut Alex up mid-sentence.

The blast of the gunbarrel at point-blank was enough to make Alex’s ears ring. This would have been more bothersome if his lower jaw and a portion of his head weren’t removed by the sudden presence of projectile lead.

He gurgled and scowled, his spare hand going to grab himself by the hair, holding his head up. He wasn’t unconscious, but the confrontation had quickly become one-sided. Judas, splattered with his blackened blood as she now was, smirked. The tension between them was palpable, but not quite so palpable as the newly-removed teeth that littered the area.

The businesswoman made a businesslike snigger, now leaning back in her own chair to mimic Alex. “Shut the fuck up, Alex. Please. I’ll get to her… We’re gonna take you to a clinic right now, get your jaw replaced so you can tell me what I want to know. Get up. Now.”

Alex wordlessly refused. It was now or never - the moment was here, and it would never arrive again. His hand on the console, the one he had laid there so innocuously, pressed one final button.

Click.

Alarms began to blare immediately, throughout the entire facility. Up on the panopticon, the show’s climax had begun. Every cell in the building, in unison, was thrown wide - Prisoners both second-living and first-living flooded into the halls, making as best of use of this sudden jailbreak as they could. Unprepared guards were accosted and overwhelmed in short order, and when the gaggle of prisoners hit the main courtyard, the front gate had already been opened for them. They were free to go, courtesy of the site overseer.

Judas’s calm, smug facade cracked instantly. She opened her mouth to reprimand Alex, but she didn’t get the chance: his button-pressing hand shot like a comet into his shirt. There was an odd, chunky metallic sound, one that caused Judas’s goons to become more alert than they had been this entire evening.

“Ma’am, he’s got a bomb! Back up!” The hired muscle who had blown off Alex’s jaw from behind took him by the shirt collar, dragging him back a few feet and throwing him to the ground. Judas didn’t move - she wasn’t afraid enough to override her rage - and the consequences reared their ugly head.

Alex laughed a gurgling, blood-laden laugh for only two seconds, nearly three, before the grenade went off. He was almost immediately doused in white-hot flames, the area around him blossoming into a fireball that reeked of burning flesh.

He couldn’t hear what Judas was saying as she berated him, his ears quickly beginning to crisp and crackle as his self-immolation went unmolested. It’s not like the thugs carried fire extinguishers, right? Even as his eyeballs began to melt, the utter, undiluted rage on Judas’s face made it all worth it. Made dying worth it.

In his final moments, as the raging inferno of incendiary chemicals and second-living flesh consumed him, he thought of Purity. He hoped she’d be okay. Hoped she’d be able to stay safe from Judas, and whatever the fuck was going on. Eventually, he was too burnt to even think.

Judas spat on his cinders once his corpse was little more than pungent, smoking carbon. That little bitch may have finished himself off, may have escaped her, but that didn’t mean shit. At the end of the day, he was one more two-faced traitor who was out of her hair. That was a good thing, she figured - at least she wouldn’t have to hear his smarmy-ass voice at executive councils anymore.

Now, though, she had bigger fish to fry than him: she had to find Purity.