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LMG ‘Red Glory’ SMG :: 196/220

Nightmare sounds dwindle, and we all collapse into a dribbly mess on the floor of the lift. Well, except Tufty - who launches at Badger to hug him and check he's okay. And Kami, who tries to pry him off - with limited success. And, uh, Gremlin - who skips all about us in hyperactive excitement. Happily chewing a horrible, monstery, leg.

So just me then.

And Demon, who slumps hard against the back wall. Tended by a pale-looking Zipper.

"You okay, big guy?" I ask our [Berserker], knowing full well what the reply will be.

%he exact one he'd give if his spine was snapped.

"Zha." He nods, eyes sharp and golden. "Fine."

I hesitate, sharing a glance with Zipper. Then I sigh out my resignation, and lean back to shut my eyes. Letting the old metal box sing me a lullaby of creaking groans as it worms its way down into impossible depths. My breath still panting out in rough bursts. My armour oiled with sweat and unnameable goo. My whole body wrung out, weirdly sticky, and wired as Hell.

It's everywhere. My face smeared with gunk. My fingers, toes, Hell even my damn nose.

And still, I shiver. Chilled by something deeper than cold.

“Damn..... that." I choke out at last. "That was freakin’ crazy.....”

"Hellcrawlers, mate." Zip unfurls his grimy helmet as Kami scans a grudging Demon's ribs and back.

"Yeah. That. But not just that. That ain't even the bloody start." My moist tail flicks as I turn to glare at my real target. “So. Thought ya’d follow us? Huh?”

“YEAH!! I SURE DID!!!!” Badger flails, happily, from inside his aggressively protective Tufty-hug. “Cause what if you needed some HUGE THING blown up!?! You'd be all like 'oh no! I don't got a Badger! Wot do I do???' And I'd be like ''WOOOO!! Here I am!!!' And you'd be totes-”

I slam a hand into the side of the lift, and the pair jump clean off the floor.

“I TOLD YOU!!!! STAY IN THE BASE!!" I scream. "YOU COULD’VE DIED!!! WHAT IF-!?" I choke out. Heaving and shaking as I crawl toward him. "What if you died!? Ya lil idiot!!? What if you died? Joan made me bloody promise I'd look after ya!"

"And I super promised too! In secret!" He beams, crossing his fingers and toes. "I'll look after Spook! I double-ultra-MEGA promise!!"

"You can't!!! You just can't!!" I roar back, making him blink. "You're bloody snack-size to those things! You don't even got a gun!"

"Bitesize." Kami injects. "Crumb sized."

"You're hopeless." I breathe, willing the boy to understand as I reach for him..... and let my hand fall away. "You just.... you.... hopeless..... Why can't I stop you? You just keep bleedin' wandein' off into bleedin' monster nests!"

"I don't!!" He huffs.

"YOU DID! YOU JUST DID! We JUST got bloody swarmed by em! Twice! What if you'd gotten bloody eaten?" I shudder, and grip my face. "Monsters bloody everywhere!! You could’a got eaten.....! And I'd never have even known! I'd be looking forever, and I'd..... I'd never find you......”

Badger's big eyes blink up at me, slow and brown and soft. He looks at Tufty. He looks at Kami. Then back at me, forehead wrinkling. Head titling.

And then he says something that drills ice and terror into my heart.

“Huuh!?" He blinks again. "What monsters???”

We all stare at the kid.

Then at the ghastly, twitching, Hellcrawler leg in Gremlin's happy gob.

"Spook." Says Kami, in a slow and cautious voice. "Did I just hear that right?"

"I'm wonderin' that too." I stutter out. Leaning on one arm, and shaking. "Badger....?"

"WOOO!! YEAH!!! YOU REALLY DO NEED ME!!!" He waggles happily.

"No- You- Dumb...... Squirt-" I malfunction, horribly.

"He's suppressing, mate." Zip says, cautiously. "Gotta be."

I blow a breath. "I guess. Maybe."

"Or he's just too daft." Kami smirks, ruffling the kid's mess of hair. Which, in accordance with how often Badger brushes, actually makes it neater.

And I sit there. Re-picturing the fight.

I want it to be simple. For him to be my lil idiot. For him to be oblivious to the horrors, and just.....

But no. He called out to us. He saw the Hellcrawlers first. He warned me.

So what is this? What's going on?

"Badger." I say, very slowly. "How many scary critters did ya see? On the way up here?"

"Uhhh.....?" He blinks at me, then rummages in the horrid recesses of his satchel. Producing something six-legged and hairy, with too many eyes. "I saw this one!! I call him Sir Boris, Destroyer Of Snacks! Cause he ate all of mine!"

We all regard the terrifyingly ratlike abomination unto God, nature, and common sense.

It regards us right back.

Somehow, there is comradery.

"Is it me, or is that thing kinda cute?" Kami voices, after a moment.

"Yeha......" I squint. "They usually are. Right up until they lay eggs in ya eyeballs."

"Lucky all ours are plastic." Kami adds, quickly, as Gremlin's lil head perks up.

"Yums yumssss?"

"No! Eyeballs are not yum yums!" I state emphatically.

"Butsss.....?" A little head tilt. "Yumsss yumss tho?"

I sigh. "And I was bloody worried about the rat-thing."

Like magic, Gremlin's head swivels toward Sir Boris. Who Badger, promptly, shoves back in his bag with a lil "EEP!"

"Wanna prerecord the funeral?" Kami snorts, as Gremlin hops down to investigate the bag. Snuffling eagerly, and pawing at it.

"NOOO!!! Sir Boris!" Badger wails as he swats her away. Which, of course, activates feisty-pounce-giggle-butt-wiggle-murder-mode..... until Demon reaches out and squashes her flat.

"Immai." He grumbles, in that weird language of his, keeping his hand flat until she behaves.

Or something roughly bloody adjacent to it.

I glance back at the others. The lift shuddering, imperceptibly, as Polybius runs it up and down. Giving us time to rest.

But though we try again and again, we don't get much more out of Badger. Just a lot of babble about how he "followed" us "super secret ninja style! KAPOW!" and that it was "DOUBLE ULTRA MEGA BRUTAL!". Oh, and he got totally bloody lost after we 'locked him out' on the bridge.

Which was about when I told Kami to "begin the throttling".

It didn't help.

And so I'm left to wonder, and ponder, and worry as the lift coughs its last. A frown on my face as we roll out into the cool, silent, darkness of a lost hyperloop station. Scanning a darkness that presses in against the edges of our light. Stroking the grim white tiles of a hollowed-out train-station. Their shining surface cast in dim, unreal, colours cast by a fallen 'Exit' sign.

Abandoned stalls, caked in thickest dust, loom at us from between thick pillars. The powder worked deep into every chocolate wrapper. Every roll of fruity chews. Every cup of coffee, left in silence where it fell.

The sheer emptiness of the place hits like a granite wall. Endless, unbroken, and balefully watchful.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Emptiness, with a mind. With a soul. With a hunger. Broken lights reducing the tiles to islands of shadow and yellowy light. An old sign cutting the dark with its dim, impatient, blinks.

Welcome To Jubilation!

New Quebec’s Finest station!

“Je me souviens, Quebec….”

“Huh. This tower had a name….” Kami murmurs to the sign. Her breath stirring tiny fronds of dust as she wipes it away with a rubberised finger.

“Yeah…. All the towers did, back when. Big hopeful ones, full of cheer….” I shake my head. "Didn't do them no good."

"We remember Quebec...." Kami frowns as her implant translates, then her eyes burn dark. "No you bloody don't. And now, nobody remembers you....." She smears her hand across the sign, as if to scrub it away, but turns from it with a shudder. "Come on. Work to do."

We glance at Zipper, but he shakes his head.

Like I said, we all got our damage.....

I turn as well, and we whisper away into a pristine labyrinth of tiles and turnstiles. A shaky, shivering, Tufty catching Badger by the hand and shushing him quiet as the stillness overwhelms us. The void of a space once filled to the brim with hurried people now turned desolate.... and eerie. Automated trains, deep bellow, puffing whispers of wind through the station. Rattling wrappers the only travellers there will ever be again.

Except for us.

Kami splits the terrible two, and we slip deeper into the concourse. My implant rapidly glitching, horribly, through different languages as it tries to translate the signs that decorate the walls around us. Text flickering. Jarring. Peeling off the walls, to glitch and crack the air around my head. Unseen by all but me.

🡨 Saída e Elevadores

Toilettes 🡪

🡨 Estacionamento

餐廳 🡪

I shut it all out as we slip under a flashing emergency shutter. Entering the vast and silent station. Fast food kiosks, dead with dust. Lifts jamming open and shut, as if to admit the ghosts of the ancient dead.

We slip past them all.

Past escalators churning endlessly on and on. Past symbols for the Blue Line, and Orange. Past broken [ERROR]s that rip at my reality. Tearing free to fill the air with static and light.

It's getting worse.

But I've got to ignore it.

Our shapes flicking shadows as we leap the turnstiles for the Hyperloop. My hand hitting the card sensor as I flip over the top. Demon kicking off it, right after, as Kami grunts and spider-crawls. Pulling herself over. Tufty lands atop the barrier beside her, in a shaky crouch. Peeking over the edge as as Badger squirms and pops through the gap underneath.

He gets stuck, rips free, and leaps up in exultation. Fists rising. Inhaling rapidly.

Zipper tackles him in a blur of blue. Hand over mouth. And we all hold our breath as the dead station rumbles. Distant shadows shivering as Demon's clawed hands flex and glint. His horned head snapping from noodle-bar to sushi-stand as we eye the shadowy kiosks.

Worse things than Hellcrawlers out there.....

I flick gesture, and we slip down the long tunnel to the loop. Hopping ourselves onto a rolling staircase of giddying, gut-gnawing, height. My claws biting rubber banister as it carries us down, and down, into the belly of another tower. Burrowing us deep into the silence and the stillness. Signs flickering, awakening, as we pass.

Hologram starfighters blast free from some long-dead movie, shooting out rainbow bolts of excitement. A butler leaning down to offer us a tray of golden-clad balls that Badger tries to take. A sultry women, in a bright red dress, coyly puffing perfume like we all know damn well who she is.

And all the while Normals, dressed up as GMOs, dance up and down silvery divider. Singing a song from some old play that will never exist again. A king of beasts upon a great, sharp, rock.

But all of it, nameless.

The very words burnt away to flickering, mutating, symbols by time. And the damage to my implant.

No longer one language, but many.

Hundreds. Thousands.

Meaningless glyphs, jumbled beyond all knowledge.

And beneath all the static and chaos.... I hear a faint, yet gradually rising, tone. A half-heard thing that flutes and flutters in the far-away distance..... A note of dire warning. Or the aftershock of a terrible bell sunk deep under water.

I shut my eyes, and shiver, as holes of darkness and wireframe light break the tunnel around me.

Twisting my friends, by fractional degrees, into digital mockeries of life.

Kami nudges me and I stir. Lifting my toes, on reflex, to catch the end of the escalator as we hop off into the station itself. Following bright gold markings down to The Sun Plaza Line, past numerous others. All vowing to carry us away to places so long gone they may as well be fiction. Neo Singapore. Nouvelle-France. And the vast heights of the grand New British Empire.

All of it lost forever. Fallen to dust, and shadows.

Just like Quebec.

We slip past hallways into unknown places, and down again. Adverts for yoghurt splaying out above abandoned spots for buskers who will never play. A quiet emptiness stirred, not simply with dread. Or fear. But with that pressure-shift of awareness you only get in subways late at night.

It’s a place of transitions, not people.

An nowhere place at the crux of this vast, forgotten, crossroads….

If Purgatory exists, it's like this. A lonely old subway stop on the long, rattling, ride to Hell.

I lick dry lips, as Demon steers a shivering Tufty onto the left-hand platform. The camera above following our steps as we walk all the way to the curtain of energy shimmering at the edge. The tunnels, on either side, little more than a line of dim lights plunging away into bottomless pits of black.

I flatten my hand against the curved field, and it buzzes and stings me. "Shit."

"Be advised." Polybius hums through the local tannoy. "Hyperloop systems are not normal trains. What exists beyond that veil is pure, and absolute, vacuum. This eliminates air resistance, allowing the trains to achieve massive speeds. Suspended, as they are, in a levitation field."

"But?" I grin.

"This section of The Loop is one of the most damaged, locally. Breathable levels of air are expected for most of your trip."

I frown. "Most?"

"The station is still depressurised." The hyperloop timetable glitches as Polybius takes it over. Displaying a long tube broken into sections. "As is one other section along your route."

We share a look. "You can vent it?"

"Pressurise." The Machine Mind corrects. "I cannot. The systems are hardwired to prevent remote tampering."

"Well. Shit." I grin, as Tufty and Gremlin chase the rat thing about the station - pursued by a frantic Badger. "Guess we better do some rewirin'. Where's the box?"

My implant almost shatters as Polybius highlights a discrete, blank-faced, security door. But Kami and Zip break it open in a matter of moments, leading us into the hidden guts of the facility. Low lights. Concrete walls. A messy break-room. And a door stamped with an overly cheerful black-and-yellow lightening bolt.

The kind that indicates 'fun stuff inside'.

I lean back out. "Oi! Shortie squad! Get over here!"

Tufty yelps, and stiffens, mid rat-murder-pounce. Lands, delicately, and-

Badger blunders right into his side, crying "SIR BORRIS!!!" Bowling him over into a tangled mess of yowling limbs, which Gremlin happily takes full bloody advantage of. Swiping. Giggling. Biting tasty ears and noses, while the rat-thing scurries under a bin.

I blink. Zipper snorts. Kami scowls.

"I told you! Keep away from the cat." She growls, storming over to drag Badger out by the leg.

"KAMI! You saved me!"

"Yeah, yeah." She grumbles, grumpily.

"C'mon." I grin as Demon edges over to retrieve a feisty Gremlin from under the bin.

"But Sir Boris!"

"He'll be fine." I promice.

"Or not." Kami grins. "Hopefully not."

"BORRIS!"

But she drags him off down the hall, regardless. And, soon after, we breach the seal on the second door with a thick hisss. Sliding down the short ladder, onto a gantry maze of metal and sifting light. Drones skittering off, deep, into a world of tangled cables - thick as my neck.

I settle feet onto the punched metal, and slip a look over the side. Into a dark world of wires and pipes and machines from a lost and long-ago time, before all memory.

Not far down, at least.

Biting treads grip our skin as we worm our way past massive engines of unknowable function. Past glass tubes, filled with light. Past beads of humming, harmonic, energy that flick along tubes. Fighting our way through, into a long and awkward room - directly beneath the platform itself.

It's entire length stuffed with ancient metal that pulses back against the ravages of time.

"Gotta be old, mate." Zip whistles. "Like, real old. Y'know? Maybe founding of the The City old."

"Which 'founding'?" Kami says, wryly, from somewhere inside a control box. Her face aglow with buttons and blinking lights.

He blinks. "Like, The Beginning? Right?"

Kami snorts. "Which beginning?"

"None o' that." I growl, pointing upward. "See that big ole row o' nodules runnin' along the ceiling, end to end? Bet that's right along the platform edge." I grin as Gremlin lands on the machine my my face. "Which means that's the tek runnin' the barrier. We drop that, an' we're in."

"Can we.... explode it? Can we?" Badger gasps in a giddy little whisper. Clutching his cheeks.

My eyebrow cocks. "And by 'we' we mean 'you'? Right?"

A furiously fast nod.

"Not a chance, shortie." I snort. "That ain't originTek, but it's pretty damn close. We're gonna salvage it on the way back. Well, much as we can carry."

"Buut? Buuuut? Can't I help?" He wibbles, pathetically. Reaching out to me with noodly arms.

"Not a chance, kid. I still remember the last time ya 'helped'."

"So does the media." Kami coughs.

"And what's left of New Texas." I add, with a wince. "Anyway, we're dallyin' here. Kami, hit the thing."

She nods, and something deep in the guts of the control box goes click. Followed by a Hellish 'BRAWWP!-BRAAWWP!' of kaxons as the whole room flashes red. Metal shrieking and shuddering as the machines trigger an emergency shutdown.

An instant later, I hear the result above - a massive pocket of vacuum unleashed into the waiting air with a roaring BANG that knocks dust off the walls and shakes the walkway beneath us.

"All clear?" I yell into the ringing silence, as our ears pop. Pulling myself upright.

"WOOO! BRUTAL!!! Implosions are still 'plosions!" Badger cheers, spinning happy circles until he falls over. Because, of course, he would be the first to recover.

Zip wrenches himself upright. "Mate, like what? Thought it was gonna.... y'know, like?"

"Equalise slowly? It was supposed to." Kami growls. "Must have hit the wrong button."

"Or the right one!" Badger giggles manically. "WOO!!! Do it again!!"

`"Shhhh!" I growl. "C'mon....."

We slip up the stairs to a platform in total disarray. The track a chaos of crisp-packets, surprised bug-drones, and other debris. "Bloody Hell, mate. Glad we weren't caught in that." Zip says, as Badger's 'new rat friend' pops its eyebally head out of the mess. Looking more than a little dizzy.

"Sir Boris!!" Badger whoops, swinging the dizzy rodent/thing in mad circles.

"Oh goodie." Kami says. "It survived."

"No worries. We can murder it later." I tease.

"Heeey!!! Noo!!" Badger huffs, skidding to a stop.

"It's for his own good!" Kami cheers like a six-armed schoolteacher, electing even more huffs.

I snort, and shake my head. Static buzzing skin as I drop into the curved belly of the hyperloop track. Turning to stare down that endless, hypersonic, tunnel into absolute infinity.

And the absolute unknown.

I crack my neck as the others drop down behind me. Zipper and Tufty landing light. Demon, heavy. Kami tottering on the curve as she staggers down.

But then we focus. Weapons ready.

"Alright." I grin. "Get ya game on. Cause this is it....."

It's time to take our first piece of The Left Hand.

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