Unbeknownst to MACHINE FACE, a month indeed passed in the cage’s timeless void.
It started like every other day. An insignificant, unceremonious continuation of the previous day, the day before that, and so on. A perpetual, unbroken cycle. But on that day, the cycle was destroyed, and MACHINE FACE finally died.
He was sitting against the wall, when he felt the rebar in his legs vibrate from a distant quake. His chest cables swung like chimes stirred by an ominous wind. Yet, the airless atmosphere in the cage remained still. MACHINE FACE stared at the padlocked door. It stared back. He lay back down, and went back to gazing at his sky, wishing that it would come crashing down on this world. Maybe from the rubble a metal fairy—mangled and twisted just as he—would float down and cast its fairy magic, making from thin air a glorious buffet of the finest, most tasty foods. Ham sandwiches, stretching all of six-inches.
For a moment, he thought the sky moved. But it was merely the red light of the security camera on the ceiling blinking out. Coincidentally, the shrill blare of an alarm had begun to seep through the walls.
Suddenly, there was a beeping, a scraping slam, then hasty footsteps that echoed in the cage. MACHINE FACE sensed something, a feeling he thought could no longer exist within his rusted heart.
Hope.
“Get your ugly ass up, we’re moving!” The helmet head screeched, sounding like the wheels of a ruined train locking to a halt. The faint glimmer in MACHINE FACE’s eyes died.
Exactly two breaths following his orders, the helmet head already had his metal arm fully extended and crackling. As usual, it would appear MACHINE FACE wouldn’t be walking himself out. He cast a defeated glance behind the helmet head, expecting to see the usual entourage of other helmet heads and white coats.
However, there was nothing else there. Nothing, except for the slight frame of a woman, raising the not so slight weight of a steel crowbar. She swung it down like the cleaving blade of an angel of vengeance, leaving behind fiery contrails—the flowing redness of her hair that whipped the air like leaping flames. The crowbar cracked against the helmet head’s skull, making him no longer a helmet head, just a head (and barely so). For the first time in a long time, MACHINE FACE got to see what bits of fractured bone looked like coming from anyone other than him or his cage mates.
The light from outside the door seemed to form a dramatic halo around the face of their saviour, and a golden glow sparkled from her garments. She flicked a speck of blood off her cheek as she stepped over the limp body and into the cage. MACHINE FACE studied her majestic posture, while the others simply cowered in their corner, too afraid to move a single muscle. The alarm’s blaring noises were like the holy trumpets preceding a great pronouncement. She began to boldly speak in a voice as stern as her narrowed eyes.
“Come with me! I’m here to save—”
HURGHHH.
The woman cut her own sentence short by the vomit spewing out of her mouth and adding to the filth on the floor. Lamentably, her nose wasn’t desensitised to the smells of the cage as theirs were. Her crowbar dropped with a clang as she doubled over like a slug, puking for a few seconds, then gagging a couple moments more. After a short pause, with her arms still clutching her belly, she straightened back up, wiped her mouth with a sleeve, and was finally prepared to get back to the business of rescuing.
Then she got a good look at MACHINE FACE and the rest of the vomit all came pouring out.
While that continued, footsteps rang outside. Someone rushed to the door, a man this time, dressed in the same thick worker coveralls and high-visibility jacket as the woman. He had meek eyes hiding behind a pair of thick glasses that looked more like goggles. He was tall, and had thick arms like tree trunks, but no weapons to carry in them, excluding the small hammer clipped to his toolbelt if that counted.
“Red, what’s the hold up, it won’t be long before they show up—” he spoke urgently…
…until he adjusted his eyes to the darkness of the cage. Saw the walls. Saw MACHINE FACE. Although he whiffed the same scents and witnessed the same sights as Red did, he made a rather valiant effort to hide the horror and disgust on his puckered lips—at the very least, his bile stayed in his throat.
“This one ain’t a person, Oak.” Red spoke gravely.
Oak looked at a loss for words. His face was a blend of sympathetic pity. But he collected himself. Stared straight at MACHINE FACE, even if his neck looked like it wanted to twist away in the opposite direction.
“W-Well, are y-you? A… person?” Oak croaked. Truthfully, he wasn’t even sure what kind of answer he was expecting to get. Or if he should have even been expecting one.
Indeed, MACHINE FACE was deaf to their words. He was too busily engaged in an extended viewing of the open door, unobstructed by any helmet head, in a trance of some sort. He had lived so much of his life trapped in a cage that his mind had to take some time to register the widening of its bars.
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I’m free. Free? What does one do when they’re free?
Stand up. They stand up, and walk by themselves. No dragging. No sizzling.
MACHINE FACE rose up to his full height, his neck craning against the three metre-high ceiling, and his lanky body uncoiling like a spool of heavy cables. His movements were accompanied by the hideous screeching of a collapsing tower of rusted beams.
The two strangers in front of him winced reflexively. Red snatched up the metal arm—no, seeing it separated from the helmet head’s body, MACHINE FACE could now remember that it wasn’t a metal limb at all; it was a plasma baton (more colloquially known as a ‘slag bat’). She thumbed the mechanism with practised motions, skipping past the slag bat’s crackling stun setting and going straight into its melt mode. A broiling sheathe of superheated air formed around the baton.
“WAIT, put that down!” Oak hissed. But his own hand twitched at the hammer on his belt, belying his words.
However, MACHINE FACE paid them no heed, moving past them towards the shining exit. Red brandished the slag bat, appearing moments away from striking the mangled flesh-metal that was centimetres in front of their faces—but given his share of beatings by the helmet heads, he could easily tell when a bat was raised with the intention to connect, and when it was just raised as a threat, as it was now.
He squeezed out the door and into the corridor where he had at least some headroom. It was then that he felt that something was wrong. The four others. Shouldn’t they have been eager to follow him out? He looked back, and saw that they were still as motionless as stone. Then he realised. They weren’t moving because they weren’t alive. Their immortality hadn’t been real to begin with. He didn’t know a shred about any of their pasts. They hadn’t spoken a single word before. Yet, they were the only other beings who had endured the unending nightmare with him.
MACHINE FACE’s soul had already been squeezed until there was only an emptiness. His body was beaten. He had nothing, and nothing to give. Still, a black drop slid down his cheek panel, more an oily globule than a tear. That was the most he could afford them.
He made one last glance back to the cage, his personal Hades. He was now Sisyphus, cheating death and escaping the clutches of hell. Hopefully, with a kinder fate awaiting him.
Of course, he wasn’t out of the woods, not yet. Just released in a larger enclosure. He was going to need to find a way out of this damned place. Away from all the white coats and helmet heads. Fortunately, he already knew the directions. He could smell the wind. He could smell freedom.
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“Where the hell’s it going? Going there just brings you deeper into the facility!”
Red and Oak, equal parts dumbfounded and shaken by the strange encounter, stared at the creature’s back as it staggered down the corridor.
“Yeah. And we need to follow it.” Oak declared.
“You can’t be thinking what I think you are. There’s no way that thing is what we’re here for.” Red replied, not because she was afraid of getting close to it. Being scared was Oak’s shtick. She wasn’t afraid of anything.
“We both heard the brief. That’s our target. What else could possibly be a ‘top secret bio project’?” Oak straightened his glasses.
“Nuh-uh. I was expecting a glowing vial of super cancer, or a green vial of toxic super gas, or—or—just something that fits inside a vial… and that thing clearly doesn’t!”
Oak could only look on with pity, lamenting his colleague’s lack of a sound education in the sciences, as well as the decision made by his superior—in which he had no say—for the two of them to be partners on this operation.
They were operatives of Memento Mortalis, an underground rebel organisation fighting for the freedom of society and all its mortals from the clutches of their Immortal overlords. Well, ‘operatives’ was direly stretching all definitions of the term. Most of the people Oak had worked with so far was a motley crew that might as well be random kids plucked off the streets.
Clearly, that was because one didn’t even need a resume or CV for Mortalis’ rather dodgy hiring process—in Oak’s personal opinion—just a burning desire to see society freed and the Immortals crumbling to ash. His current partner Red had plenty of that. Too much, in fact. Even though they were around the same age—she was 20, he was 21—he found himself sorely wishing that she could be more sensible. Not that he dared ever say that to her face. He was terrified of inciting her anger, more so than he had been of the horrifying creature approaching him in the cell.
Well, even disregarding whatever perceived flaws he saw in Red, the two of them honestly had their work cut out for them, operating undercover and alone in this secret Immortal research base. Like in most ops they’d experienced, their chances of succeeding smoothly were low, while the chances of both of them dying horribly were sky high.
Make no mistake, despite appearances, they were among the top operatives of Mortalis. But that meant nothing against the simple fact that their enemies outnumbered them largely, and were, well, immortal. They had lifetimes’ worth of experience and knowledge, and were notoriously difficult to wound or kill. It was easy to see why the rebellion had made little headway over the years. All the rebels had on their side were grit, guts and blood to spill. And guns. A lot of guns. Enough guns to keep a True Immortal in the dirt for a solid few minutes.
Speaking of guns, Oak was still wondering where on earth theirs had gone. Earlier on, while Red had gone ahead to look for prisoners to rescue, he’d gone to check the vent where their firearms were supposed to be hidden. He’d found nothing except rats and cobwebs.
“Also, I’m not so sure about going deeper in without guns,” Red scowled, “LAST time we let Joy handle the weapon drop, man.”
In truth, they weren’t a pair of partners. Their team was supposed to be a trio. But just like their firearms, their third ally had still yet to show.
“—Screw the guns. We have to follow it, now!” Oak shouted, waving towards the creature that had begun to bolt off and round a specific corner, like an animal on a scent trail.
There was no further argument as the two of them started chasing.