Hiiro
The blazing sun was nearly three fingers past its zenith, but I couldn't stifle my yawns any longer. We'd already refilled my car's tiny 80-litre fuel tank twice and our parade through the winding, hilly foot paths showed no indication of nearing its conclusion. The unending crowd's celebrations had faded into a continuous rumble of white noise that mingled perfectly the with gentle vibrations of my car puttering away slightly slower than the average walking speed of an elderly woman. The temperature, humidity and regular shade were all just right, trying to lull me into an afternoon nap now that the ripe scent of unwashed sweating bodies had become omnipresent enough to blanket out everything else. My heavy eyelids drifted shut in a long, lazy blink before half-opening again to peer at the 'road' we were traveling.
A heavy shove found my right shoulder. With the momentary alertness I'd been given, I found Alice glaring dispassionately at me.
"Eyes on the road." She said, soft-spoken as ever. I thought I heard a note of fatigue in her voice, but that probably had more to do with my own sleep-muddled perceptions than anything else.
"What road? I haven't seen the road in ten hours." I said, exasperated.
Alice turned her eyes back to her arcs, ignoring me entirely.
"I'm in Hell. This is Hell, isn't it?" I asked, peering down at the odometer.
Our convoy had been rolling for nearly twelve hours and in that time we hadn't even covered fifty kilometers— and most of that distance had been covered before we reached the city edge in the first place. These city streets all looked the same, yellow-orange buildings with colored blankets doing their best to block out the worst of the sun. I tried to think back to my escape route, but ended up just spacing out until Alice gave me another shove.
I was about to protest, but then I heard something out of place. A faint pop, pop noise from… somewhere. In the dense rat's nest of city streets it all seemed to merge together into a directionless blanket of noise.
"All cars, is anyone shooting?" Alice asked.
"I've got nothing up here." Tony said.
"It's the idiots behind me." Rock said. "The truck ran out of money, the Vigia are shooting to spook them off."
"If we're out of cash that means we can turn around now, right?" Tony asked.
"Wait one, I'll ask the Client." Alice said, then turned from her radio to address Celio and his napping lieutenants in the back. "Your charity wagon in the back has run dry. How do you want to proceed?"
"What seems to be the issue?" Celio asked.
"Your men are getting heavy handed with the locals." Alice said.
"Haven't you ever trained a dog? Sometimes it is necessary to establish dominance, and if that means being 'heavy handed' as you call it, then that is just the price of doing business. No? If those of this district have forgotten their manners, well then my men will just have to remind them how the civilized world works."
"Starving dogs have a tendency to bite the hand that feeds them." I grumbled, apparently a little louder than I'd thought.
"A dog that bites its loving owner deserves to get put down." Celio said, his forcefully charming voice at odds with the pitiless words.
A trio of gunshots punctuated his sentence with a grim finality. The ambient rumble of the crowd dissipated somewhat and for a long minute there was a heavy silence in the car.
"I've got a lot of movement in the crowd, they're thinning out." Rock said over the radio.
"You see?" Celio asked. "The lesson has sunken in. One can only hope they remember it well so that it must not be repeated too often."
Between the narrow, twisting streets and all the blind corners/hills, I couldn't see either of the cars behind me, but soon enough the ripples reached us and pressed onwards at the unparalleled speed of gossip. As much as I would have liked it too, the crowd didn't vanish into thin air or retreat to their homes. Instead maybe one in six people decided they had better things to do than clog the walkways and chipsealed promenades; it was a noticeable improvement, but only just. Soon after we were able to increase our convoy's speed from a slug's crawl to a stately trot of just over ten kilometers per hour. I gazed longingly at the rest of my speedometer, wishing I could open up the throttle a little more and be done with this parade. A breeze not quite cool but better than tepid slowly filtered over my head to carry away some of my beaded sweat.
I couldn't help but compare the cluttered streets of Crucibab to those I'd once driven back on my homeworld, despite all the differences. Maybe it was just another commonality of terraforming planets or something as arcane as the 'human condition' but glancing at the idling workers around me felt so naggingly familiar it itched. I think it had something to do with the clothes, the way everyone was bundled up against the elements with little beyond the generic human shape to catch the eye. Flapping ponchos could have been heavy scarves, the balloon-sleeved garments an off-brand type of winter jacket, and the face-concealing veils were oh so similar to the balaclavas that left nothing but the eyes plainly visible. Several times, I thought I spotted hostility in those peering eyes we passed yet I could never hold a gaze long enough to see if there was anything to my suspicions.
More distant, directionless popping interrupted my sleep-muddled thoughts, this time as staccato bursts of automatic fire. I glanced over to Alice who was already grabbing at the radio.
"Rock, sitrep."
"Wait one." He answered tersely.
Somehow the silence that followed felt as heavy and omnipresent as the blazing sun overhead.
"More of the same," Rock stated eventually. "Some locals tried climbing on the penny-wagon and the Vigia took exception. We think they left some bodies, because the crowd is scattering."
"Eyes up, everyone." Alice ordered. "Things might get interesting."
Another burst of automatic fire punctuated her order.
"There's no need for alarm," Celio stated from the backseat. "That sound is common street music in these quarters."
A single shot boomed over the others, solemn and lofty in the lull that followed.
At the same time, the delayed thinning of the crowd had finally caught up to my car; a veritable tide of beige and tan clothing hurriedly pressing forward. Maybe all the gunfire really was as commonplace as Celio made it sound. I didn't spot any overt shoving, no one was trying to drag down anyone else and if there was anyone getting trampled to death under those sandaled feet, I wasn't seeing it. Though I did see several flashes of mud-brown boots buried in the swell of humanity. It was peculiar how something so commonplace could somehow look so foreign in a crowd, after all people had always worn sturdy boots back on Intatenrup. So why did they seem so out of place now?
"The lead car is slowing down." Tony reported.
"Why are they wearing boots?" I muttered, my sleep-muddled mind putting the thoughts into words.
Another rip of gunfire peeled through the air, echoing within the dense city walls all around us.
"I've got Vigia dismount-" Rock started to report.
A flash of light pulled my eyes to my mirrors just in time to see a rising fireball. The multi-band radio erupted in competing cries.
"Contact rear!" "Left side! Left side!" "Enemy front!" "Second floor! Right Side!" "The crowd! They in the crowd!"
"We're surrounded." Alice stated, her voice level and commanding to cut through the din. "All cars, spear through. Weapons free."
No sooner than the words had left her mouth than my foot hammered down on the gas pedal and a clatter of sparks bounced off the hood of my car. The crowd practically vanished, hundreds of people throwing themselves into buildings, off the road or behind anything at all, so long as it got them clear of the gunfire.
Those that stood their ground were pulling rifles, firebombs, grenades, machine guns and even fat tubes I didn't recognize from their concealing robes. Each and every one of the combatants spreading their boot-clad feet into wide stances as they opened fire.
"Everybody DOWN!!!" I roared, my words barely audible in my own ears over the open throttle of my engine, the thunder of gunfire and the groaning steel of my car's thin armor plating.
Everywhere I looked, someone had a weapon pointed at me. Every inch of my car was under fire. The windows spiderwebbed with cracks for a single second before shattering in a hail of serrated glass that shredded my shirt and tore into the exposed skin of my shoulders, arms and the hand locked in a death grip on my steering wheel.
In the time it took me to blink away the dusting of glass, my pristine white-paneled car was now battered and pockmarked by gunfire. A quarter-second glance to my right, Alice huddled low in her seat, firing bursts from her SMG out what was left of her window.
Red lights pulled my eyes forward, over my rapidly climbing speedometer. The lead car had crashed into sturdy mess of scrap iron, those Vigia who weren't already dead hunkering behind open doors and firing machine pistols in all directions. I lifted my foot off the gas, making ready to pull alongside them.
"No! Keep driving!" Alice yelled, firing another burst.
"They'll die." I answered. My words becoming prophecy as one man leaned a little too far out of cover and toppled over like a puppet with its strings cut.
"So will we. We DON'T stop."
I grit my teeth, tempted to disobey her, tempted to do the right thing and save whoever I damned well could. But I didn't. The killing heat inside of me was boiling up inside my bones, screaming to be released. I slammed my foot to the floor, gunning the engine to full as I savagely jerked the wheel away from our doomed escorts.
I tried to spare the doomed men a glance in my rearview mirror only to discover it'd been shot off along with my passenger-side mirror. I didn't dare risk taking my eyes off the rubble-strewn road or lifting my head enough to look over my shoulder. The canvas sunroof was in tatters overhead, little more than rags stretched over its metal ribs. My passengers, that precious cargo to be preserved above all others, could all be dead and I wouldn't even know.
I spotted a faint tail of smoke and a smoldering wreck in what was left of my driver-side mirror. A single burning man staggered away from the former lead car. All the guns pointed at us, all the shrapnel flying through the air, and somehow that man was untouched as he howled in anguish— begging to be saved, or for merciful death. Rock's car came barreling through the smoke and delivered that death without slowing in the slightest.
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"Main road blocked, turning left at barricade!" Tony chirped over the radio.
"Left at barricade." Alice repeated, slapping me in the shoulder until I mimicked the words too.
The barricade as it turned up just after a blind hill, was two mid-rise buildings that had been collapsed onto the narrow foot streets below. Shattered bricks, broken bodies and splintered twigs of furniture spilled everywhere for at least a hundred meters and nearly a quarter that in height. There was a hand sticking out of that rubble near the top, impossibly distinct at this distance. It was a child's.
I swerved left, kicking the staff car into a loose drift down an alleyway barely wide enough to accommodate its width. My fishtailing rear bumper crashed into the wall, lifting my rear end in a gut-wrenching lurch. I snatched at the steering wheel, wrestling to correct the wobbles that threatened to send me pin-balling off the walls or worse, to wedge me between them.
I regained some notion of control just in time to spot the splattered remains of human bodies clogging the alleyway, illuminated in grisly red by Tony's taillights. There had been nowhere for these people to go and clearly Tony had needed the alley's narrow clearance more than they did. They'd been crushed under his tires, smeared across the walls by his doors and even bisected between the roof of his vehicle and a low-hanging catwalk overhead. I blinked the gory desolation from my eyes and followed the trail he'd blazed out of the alley back onto one of the district's main foot streets.
"Rock, after the alley turn right." Alice relayed.
"Looks like a straight shot back to- BRACE BRA-" Tony was cut off a second before a cacophony of noise reached me through the whistling remains of my windscreen.
"Right's a dead end." An unfamiliar man's voice groaned over the radio. "Lead car, out of commission."
I crested a rise in the switchback, hilly streets, slammed on the brakes and saw what had happened. This road was a straight shot back to an actual highway, but there was a ten-meter drop without so much as a warning sign in the intervening dead ground. At the bottom of that ten-meter drop, embedded in the heart of a building like the world's most overly-manufactured meteorite was Tony's car.
"What's your situation, Ken?" Alice asked. "Can you exfil?"
"We're all walking wounded." Ken groaned, then after a pause to catch his breath and growl a curse. "Scratch that, two DBNO, two walking. Car's stuck, we're not going anywhere."
"Get us turned around." Alice said to me, then over the radio. "Dig in down there. Rock, provide support by fire and get them on board. We'll meet you back at the house."
"Got it." Ken answered.
"Coming up behind you now." Rock said.
I unclenched a white-knuckled fist from my revolver, moving the rictus limb to my gearstick. I finally sat upright in my seat, a dusting of broken glass raining down from my tattered clothes as I shifted into reverse and looked over my bloodied shoulder.
Treu's imposing shoulders were unmoved where he sat, an impossible ring of untouched automobile surrounding him in a half-meter circle. I could only blink my eyes at the perfectly symmetrical sphere of his unnatural influence, which hadn't extended to anyone else in my vehicle. One of Celio's lieutenants—it was impossible to tell which given that the ragged corpse was little more than bloody streamers of meat—was slumped over the passenger compartment's low wall, as if he'd been gunned down while trying to climb out. The other lieutenant, whom I thought might be Yuan, was prone on the floor in a mess of tangled limbs with Celio and Bim. The staff car's extravagant interior, along with most of its exterior I now realized, was in mangled tatters. The fact that the car was still running at all was nothing short of miraculous.
"Where should I go?" I asked once I'd finished my J-turn.
Already, the stray sound of gunfire and explosions was getting closer. Not yet hot on our trail, but still too damned close for me to breathe a sigh of relief.
Alice replied by jumping into the back and throwing a protesting Yuan into the the passenger seat. The heavyset man's plain clothes were in disarray, he reeked of sweat and spilt liquor, and I noted a discoloring wetness spreading from his trousers. He blinked, as if he couldn't make sense of what had happened or how he got here, and with spasmodic stiffness he upholstered a beautifully engraved, gold-plated pistol.
"I need directions." I repeated, the tension in my voice perfectly matching that of Yuan's entire body.
"D-Drive." He stammered.
"Where?"
"T-T-To t-the Salvador P-Palace?"
"How do I get there?" I asked, speaking slower now.
"The highway." He said, flicking the muzzle of his pistol in a shooing/go-that-way motion down the road.
I shifted gears straight into third, launching my pockmarked car down streets barely wide enough for five people to walk abreast. Our blind, breakthrough rush may have thrown me off familiar roads, but my internal compass knew I'd be driving parallel to the killbox we'd just broken out of. I put on as much speed as I dared, flying around hairpin corners and blind hills with eyes peeled open.
"Rooftops! Left side!" I cried out as soon as I spotted them.
A single team of riflemen started spraying fire at my speeding car as soon as the words left my mouth. Then another joined in, then a machine gun and soon everyone and their cousins were spraying lead in my direction. Maybe one in ten shots landed on the dented metal of my car but the ambushers made up for their lack of accuracy with sheer weight of fire. One in ten swiftly became three in fifty, then twelve in two-hundred. There was so much lead in the air ahead of my car it started blurring the street ahead of me like a thick rain of metal.
The chipseal road replied with inoccent joy, jumping skywards to fill the air with stone hail that pattered off my car's grill and destroyed any bit of traction my perforated tires still had. It took every bit of skill I had to keep my car pointed mostly straight. The gravel road could have been sheet ice for all the grip my wheels were getting. Hell, sheet ice covered in a centimeter of rain would have been better than the rocky scree and blasted craters I was drifting into.
Alice was hosing the ambushers with her SMG, the flash of its muzzle lighting up the single shard of glass still clinging to my driver-side mirror. Yuan took notice and, not to get outdone by a tiny woman like Alice, started blasting his gold-plated oversized pistol one-handed directly across my face. I was deafened from the first shot, half-blinded by the third and entirely confused when he dropped the pistol at my feet after the sixth shot.
I bent down to snatch the pistol away from my pedals and when I sat upright, I noticed that the upper quarter of my seat was a burning mess of leather upholstery and metallic frames. I wasn't sure if I'd melted the seat or if I'd just dodged an untimely death, but I didn't have time enough to figure that out. Yuan was slapping at my arms frantically. I turned my head and saw him pointing a bloodied fist at an upcoming street. I spun the wheel hard to make the corner-
Then my world became gravel.
Then sky.
Gravel, then sky.
Gravel, then sky again.
The world settled for an even split of gravel and sky. Something about that didn't seem right. I attempted to regather my bearings, but everything was wrong. Buildings were sideways, the road was to my left and the sky wasn't up.
I unbuckled my seatbelt and fell to the road. I was confused, everything hurt, and my bones felt like solid fire cooking me from the inside out. It wasn't exactly my usual, but it was familiar enough that I could use it as a benchmark and figure everything else out from there.
I was lying on the road, everything was spinning too. My left arm was streaked with blood and had a solid kilo of glass shards sticking out of it. I'd been shot in the leg, the stomach and the right shoulder; if I was only noticing it now, then it probably wasn't that bad— there was nothing I could do about it, at any rate. My ribs were killing me, same with my guts and neck; that'd be from the rollover.
The car was still on its side, its unsecured occupants had all been thrown clear during the crash. Bim was struggling to pick herself up off the road, her tattered white dress stained with wriggling blacks and dripping reds. Treu was looming over her, entirely unscathed by the crash, the air around him was blurry like a heat haze but somehow different. Yuan was nowhere to be seen. Alice was dragging herself to an unmoving Celio, one of her legs snapped neatly at a new joint halfway down the shin.
There was squawking noises coming from somewhere. A dry, hot wind was blowing from behind me up on the elevated highway. Engines. I could hear engines now too. Not from the highway, not above me with the rest of the background noise. Back from the way we'd fled. There was a truck coming flanked by bikes, the passengers of each brandishing weapons.
Why was this planet so damned hot? I was burning up from the outside in now, every scrap of heat in the air around us seemed to be beating down on me. I snatched up my revolver from under my smoldering clothes and dumped the shot from the cylinder. Patting down my new harness, I found four black-and-red tipped bullets, the rest of the rounds having been thrown loose sometime prior. With hands that felt like nothing but fat-tipped thumbs, I loaded my revolver and started walking towards the oncoming vehicles.
Alice was with Celio now, too busy saving his life to spare a single glance at me or my burning clothes. Yuan had appeared at her side sporting a freshly-bandaged arm, acting as an unskilled nursemaid. Bim was still writhing on the ground, her watchdog looming over her with a look of such predatory glee on his face that I almost thought the mountain of a man was a different person. In his hand, Treu was holding a finger dagger that seemed to catch all the light of day and then some.
"Come on you wretched Devil." Treu growled under his breath. "Show me how much of a Monster you really are."
I paused, about to ask him what he meant, until I saw it.
Bim was trapped in the throes of some kind of transformation. Blackened, abyssal flesh-goop was trying and failing to reform the shape of a human being. There was something at the heart of all that writhing, slithering, undulating, rigid wrongness; a thing made of silver and an impossibly pristine bone. The shape of the abominable flesh-thing's mass was that of a flower in bloom imploding back in upon itself yet unable to approach the bud at its center, caught in two contradictory states at the same time, unable to correct the imbalance of either.
A human arm threw itself from the abyssal mass and splattered like water before retreating back the collapsing heart of the thing. Bim's white dress, tattered and torn into little more than rags, was the only solid reminder keeping the unknowable, inhuman mass from complete detonation. The mass would contort into shapes that hurt the eyes and strained the mind just to look at, only to snap back into knowable rectangles and spheres that tried and failed to fill the dress with a woman's curves.
"What-" Was the only word I could choke out at the incomprehensible sight of… whatever it was I was looking at.
At my word dozens if not hundreds of staring, blinking, knowing eyes appeared on the mass like tumors boiling to the surface. They looked at me, into me, with an intimacy unlike any other I'd experienced. Those eyes saw every second of my life including those I hadn't lived yet. They saw the universe as I did and they saw the question that I'd chased across the stars to this very moment. For the first time in my life, I truly felt like someone saw me as I was. And those eyes accepted every broken bit of me exactly as I was.
Every eye except two beautiful golden orbs closed in unison. A ripple of cohesion radiated across that blackened mass, reality constraining the impossible flesh inside a shell of plausible existence. Seams of fleshy red and rich gold jetted to the surface like magma, solidifying the strata of a human body. The silver and bone trinket rebelled against every touch of the normalizing tissue around it, but inevitably it was wrapped in golden-black flesh and plastered over with flawless bronze skin. Her body flushed out the rags of her dress, the indecent tatters doing little to conceal the mounds of her sex. The unwoman's angelic face was the last thing to form.
The knowing eyes were already in place, twin gateways into a relentlessly curious soul, and it was around these alluring amber eyes that everything else took shape. Her brow and cheekbones attended their regal positions. Hair sprouted from all the proper places and nowhere else, perfectly groomed in an instant. The balance of her features took on an aspect that could only be called divine. Her full lips formed with four words ready to spill from them.
"You are mine, Hiiro." Bim proclaimed, as if begging the universe to contradict her words.
She'd whispered my name, and all was set right in the universe. My soul soared like a solar flare at her voice, shoving aside all notions of fear or pain or longing. I was energy made manifest, heat and life all at once. The shimmer surrounding Treu vanished in an instant, his empty hands curling into spoiled fists.
A shower of gunfire ripped into the gravel around me, scattering my reeling thoughts. The truck and its biker outriders had closed the gap, a hundred meters away and barely slowing down. In seconds they'd barrel right over us and that would be that.
I hefted my revolver defiantly. It was too late to run for cover. Even if I could, I was done running away, orders be damned. Conviction blazed inside of me so fiercely it felt like any second now I'd explode into an unleashed conflagration.
There were twelve bikes plus the truck. With four shots of armor-piercing incendiary bullets, I'd be lucky to thin them out before they killed us all. I was going to die, but I'd take a few of the bastards with me.
I cocked my weapon's hammer with a flame-wreathed thumb, squaring the truck's driver down the length of my revolver. He was close enough that I could see the whites of his eyes, his savage black-toothed smile and the glint of something metallic poking up from his shirt.
I pulled the trigger, every single gram of indignant resolve I had was focused into a laser-sharp thought. I hope you bastards burn.
My bullet slammed into the driver's chest, and the truck exploded.
Flames erupted from the truck, long tongues of it glutinously lapping out in every direction but mine. Men were screaming as they burned, as their bikes' fuel tanks caught fire, as the very world itself become a raging inferno.
Yet somehow, I felt cold. I collapsed to the gravel, my limbs shivering in sudden hypothermia. I was so impossibly cold I felt my spasming muscles tearing from the simple effort of keeping me from freezing to death. There wasn't a single scrap of warmth in all that hellfire that could reach me.
Memories from the arctic flooded my slowing mind. I was in cold shock. I was dieing. I saw the flyers landing, the ones that had rescued us so many years ago. Giants of steel were climbing out, running through the snow-white flames.
There was something on my chest, like a single candle's light in the darkness of space. And there was a voice too.
"In my light, you will burn eternally, my Hiiro."