“You sooo don’t wanna fight me when I get serious.” Mace proclaims. A silence drifts through the darkened corridor.
“You hear me?!”
Still, only a stoic silence from the man in a suit standing opposite him. Mace’s eyes glance over the man’s shoulders and arms, both wider and broader than his.
Shit. I really have to fight this guy.
Blood pounding in his neck, he goes for it, lunging with his right fist at the man’s temple. But the man reacts, swifter than his thickset build would suggest, sending a bare-armed strike that connects straight up Mace’s attacking arm. The impact’s sheer force splinters the bones of Mace’s forearm apart like the fibres of a splayed toothpick. His arm cracks to the side, then droops limply beside him like a garden hose as he desperately backpedals away.
At the rate things are going, there’s no chance he can beat the man, not like this. Mace knows what he has to do, and he really wishes he doesn’t.
Ah, crap. I hate doing this. Oh well, here it comes…
He forces his mind to concentrate on the suffering, on every nerve of his flesh that is overwrought with pain. The agony is overpowering, even for one like Mace. Behind gritted teeth, he bites off his tongue. His eyes roll back in their sockets. All the while, bits of blood and bone drip down to his aching feet, soaking into the carpet.
It’s then that he ceases to be human. He’s no longer Mace.
He is now MACHINE FACE.
A maniacal laugh fills the corridor. The suited man takes a cautious step back.
At the ravaged site of MACHINE FACE’s arm, the blood congeals into a dark, oily sludge that looks and smells like old motor oil. The shattered bones seem to carbonise and take on a black, metallic surface. Then their jagged ends retract, twist and reform until there is no longer any evidence of the damaged forearm. The arm has healed as much as it has repaired itself. Although, it no longer looks anything like it used to. It’s now replaced by a craggy, saw-like blade that extends at an angle from his elbow like a flat growth.
At the same time, his gaping jaws spread in a manic open-mouthed grin, and out sprouts a black, muscly tendril—in mid-transformation from a tongue to the serrated rod of a steel drill bit. It sticks 37 centimetres out from his mouth like some sadistic, misplaced unicorn horn. His lips seal around the drill bit, then they morph and solidify into the hard, stout shaft of a drill chuck.
vrrrrrRRRRRRRRR.
MACHINE FACE whips his face around in savage arcs, and the whirring power drill is taken along for the ride.
The suited man dodges his wild attacks with the grace of a bobcat. His reflexes are far better honed than the undisciplined MACHINE FACE’s. But, the man has one fatal flaw. He doesn’t have a power drill for a face, and a literal bonesaw for an elbow. Eventually, he succumbs to the vicious onslaught.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
MACHINE FACE’s face sinks into the man’s chest, in the same motion as and with all the intensity of a child burying tear-stricken cheeks in the embrace of their dear mother. But his drill chuck lips don’t kiss the man’s sternum gently. The drill stalls and sputters half the time, and in the other half, it makes a messy entry as it struggles to cave ribs and snap the spine.
A crimson-stained tip ruptures out the other end of the man’s back. Blood vomits from his mouth onto the top of MACHINE FACE’s scalp. That would be the final chapter of any regular mortal.
But the man’s arms reach around MACHINE FACE’s shoulders with an explosive intensity that a dead man shouldn’t have, and his contracting hands seize the sides of MACHINE FACE’s neck. He wrings it like a soaked, dirty rag, except that this rag cracks.
MACHINE FACE crumples down to the floor. But, only halfway, because his drill face is still stuck in the man’s chest, like in a human popsicle where he is the stick.
Unfortunately for the both of them, this is not to be MACHINE FACE’s end either.
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He didn’t remember his name. Not anymore.
He no longer had any memories of the world beyond the cage, save for one. The dusty image of a tall building, impossibly high, something he could no longer fathom when his entire sky stretched a whopping 3 metres from the dank floor. And also words being spoken to him.
“We will make you Immortal.” The one who’d said it was the sort of person who’s very smart, and wears a white coat. He thought that he’d been excited by those words at the time. Excited to finally attain immortality. He forgot what immortality was. Something to do with living. What was living? He only knew that it meant not being dead.
And if that was all there was to it, then immortality was real, but also a myth. Him and the others there were undying proof.
They were amalgamations of flesh and metal. And just as two persons may have unmatching heights, or moles on different parts of their skin, so did the metal in each of them manifest in different ways. He had no mirror to look upon, but he could feel his face, taste its corroded coldness—-his visage was a mangled wireframe, contorted roughly in the form of a misshapen head. He had limbs of rebar. Metal cables twisted around and through his torso like exposed, dangling ribs.
The five others were as hideous as he was—none of them were the product of a seamless, beautiful fusion. Instead they were like the malformed moths of a perverted, incomplete metamorphosis. Bodies of sagging flesh. Knobby, protruding bolts. Grinding against their nerve endings constantly. And when they moved, a horrible digging into their insides. Their bodies themselves were as much cages as the faceless walls surrounding them.
He thought of the room as a cage, but it was more a box, really. It had regular dimensions, and enough space for one to freely stagger a few steps before reaching dead endedness, though they usually just lay against the hard, cold floor. He thought the place had been sterile and bare, once. Bare it still was, but no longer sterile—desiccated layers peeled off the walls, moist in some of the fresh spots. A shell of decayed flesh, containing its occupants who could not die, yet could not be said to be truly living, either.
On one side of the box, there was a door with an electronic padlock, which the helmet heads used to enter sometimes. Like them, the helmet heads had metal for arms, and metal shells covering their flesh. But it was temporary metal, metal that was held or worn. They could still shed off the metal, be free of it, become pure flesh. He envied them.
Once, a helmet head came to take one of them. The door had scraped open, and the helmet head had raised his arm along with its metal extension, which crackled the air like the sound of joints popping.
“Back away, MACHINE FACE!” The helmet head spat at him. The foot of his stilt leg slightly crossed the helmet head’s path. But he didn’t shift it. He was too distracted by a strong thought within his cranium.
Hmm. MACHINE FACE. He liked the sound of that. It sounded… rough. Ugly. Metal. Like him. It also sort of sounded like a band he used to listen to.
What was a ‘band’?