Hendrick
A loud clanking hissed through the air as metal hit metal, then noise faded to silence.
The slight buzzing of nearby lightbulbs was the only thing audible for a moment.
Hendrick had used his half-scissors to block Jim’s strike, the two blades now leveraging against each other.
Hendrick felt Jim’s force disappear.
Anna was no longer weeping, stared upward to the crossed blades. The infection in her arms had stopped spreading. Jim stumbled backwards, dropped his weapon.
“I’m… so sorry.”
Anna’s eyes were flat orbs, but their depth started to return. She looked back at her hands as she started to move them around slightly. Her movements were slow and abrupt.
“Am I... safe?” she asked.
“You only got hit by the smoke briefly. That’s not enough to infect your whole body... at least not for now.” Hendrick grabbed Anna’s hands, examined them closer. Their appearance had changed drastically, and they now looked like out of some cheap science-fiction movie.
He turned to face Anna, asked, “How do you feel? Are you able to keep going?”
“You must be joking, right? There is no way she w-”
“No, I am fine,” Anna interrupted. “It still hurts a lot, but I can handle it.”
“Are you sure?” Hendrick asked.
“Yes.” She looked down at her arms, said, “These are the consequences of my actions. I can deal with it.”
Jim swallowed, moved back closer to Anna. “But...” He looked at her arms.
“You saved me, now I saved you. We lost Jack because of me getting caught, so…” she stopped, swallowed, “...I am going to make up for it by being useful to the group from now on.”
“Let me check…” Hendrick put his hand on Anna’s arms, tested how severe the injuries were.
“Anna,” he said. “If you wouldn’t have acted as fast as you did, Jim would have ended up like that cyborg deer. He would have lost any control over himself, and since the price was only your arms, it is more than worth it. You also did the right thing, so don’t be too hard on yourself please.”
He knew that keeping the group together was essential now. Everything had somehow worked like planned so far, and he wanted it to stay that way. He once again had gotten a gentle reminder that every wrong step could cause fatal consequences. Everything could be ruined at every given moment.
The infection had managed to go rather far up, had stopped not too far away from Anna’s shoulders, but it wasn’t enough for the infection to take over her movement.
“And like I said earlier, Jim,” Hendrick added, “if it would have been a serious infection… you would have saved her life with your reaction.”
Jim seemed like he wanted to say something, but he remained silent. He looked down to where he had dropped his weapon, nodded.
Hendrick hoped that the words he said calmed Jim down a little. He had changed since they entered the first stage. It was quite impressive how much the ball of joy had matured over the course of the last few days, his whole behaviour more serious and calm than before.
He manages to surprise me every single time, he thought.
Anna flinched away a little as Hendrick touched the area where the metal and her healthy skin met. The skin close to the metal was reddened as well as rather hard. His eyes met an expression of suppressed discomfort.
“You will be safe. It’s nothing fatal or too dangerous,” he said.
“Hendrick… I need to apologize,” Jim said. His voice sounded stern but honest as he continued, “I shouldn’t have said what I said back then after… you know.”
Hendrick turned, saw Jim’s poor attempt to not look like he was close to tearing up.
“Let’s forget about that now. We need to keep going. For Jack.”
The other two nodded.
Hendrick was now certain that his words had calmed the situation down. They would all need to be as focused as possible for what was awaiting them. But for now, there had to be a moment of joy.
All three of them looked at Anna’s arms. They was a moment of silence.
“What’s the diagnosis, doctor Hendrick?” Jim said in an overly dramatic voice.
“It will probably still hurt for a while,” Hendrick said while using an unusually deep voice, “but then it should be okay. Knowing how weak her arms were before, it could almost be counted as an upgrade.”
“Like Iron-Man?” Anna asked.
“Rather, Iron-Maiden.”
They laughed.
“Good one, Hen” Jim said.
---
Hendrick opened up the remains of the spreader with his scissor, felt like opening an oversized can. A can which did bleed and had organs inside of it, even though a heavily damaged heart and a brain were the only organs to be found. His first spear had missed both of the organs barely… which had been intentional of course.
The second spear had then caused fatal damage and killed the thing. Hendrick reached inside of the mess of wire and blood, pulled out a small device, tossed it to Jim.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“Catch. That’s its tracking device. If it stops moving for too long, the factory will know. It also is our VIP backstage-pass.”
Hendrick kept digging around in the red mess, searched for something as Jim answered, “So we just show it and they let us in?”
“Nah…” Hendrick stated while tossing pieces of brain matter aside. “We can enter through that garage door over there.” The brain inside of the creature was rather small, like the one of a rabbit or fox.
“Won’t there be more of these things?” Anna asked. “I don’t really plan on getting more upgrades for now, to be honest.”
“Nah again. The tunnel behind the gate will lead us inside the factory. There’s only one spreader assigned to every tunnel, so we’re fine.”
An old engine could be heard. Hendrick looked up to see Jim standing in front of the opened garage-door while holding the tracker. “Yup, works.”
Hendrick pulled aside another piece of metal, uncovered what he was searching for. A grin manifested on his face.
“What are you searching for, Hen? The border is already kinda close. Let that trash-can rust there.”
“Not yet, Ann. We still have some preparations to do,” Hendrick said, gestured with bloody hands while talking. “Jim… get up here and help me real quick. I need to cut something out of there.”
Jim moved towards him, climbed up the metal covered beast without asking any questions. He looked inside of its opened body, tilted his head. “Is that what I think it is, Hen?”
“Most likely.”
“You think this is a good idea? I’m not sure if we should get too close to that thing...”
“Can you help me tie it to my back?” Hendrick asked.
Jim blinked once. Slowly. “...You want to... what?”
Anna stood close to the gate, moved around her freshly upgraded fingers one after the other. She had her signature ‘What the fuck are you guys doing over there?’ look on her face.
He lifted up a tube, checked if there were any holes inside of it. There appeared to be none. “Yea, I’m serious.”
Jim scratched his messy hair, chuckled. “Isn’t this... you know... a bad idea? And kinda dangerous as well?”
“I don’t know… maybe?”
There was a moment of silence between the two of them.
Then they both started smiling at each other.
---
Anna
Footsteps echoed through the long, grim tunnel… if you could even call it a tunnel. Back at the beginning – shortly after they had entered the door in the jungle – it had still pretty much looked like one. More or less similar to how the tunnel system had looked like back at the first stage, just a little more metallic. The ground hadn’t been entirely out of metal, but there were chunks and bits here and there. Cables had been rather rare close to the entrance, crossing the path like they had lost their way. But besides that, nothing out of the ordinary.
Around what she estimated to be 60 minutes later, there wasn’t a single grain of dirt left. The tunnel’s walls now were completely covered in metallic shards and plates, levers, parts of engines and so on. Some of them even moved around as if they were part of one massive structure. But compared to all the earlier mentioned things, there was one that stood out in its quantity: cables. There were thinner ones too, but the most were huge. Still, somehow the whole mess of a tunnel was sorted in a way which made it straight and open enough for a spreader to fly through.
Damn, she thought. An electrician would faint immediately if he would see this.
Even without any source of light it would never get fully dark down here for some reason, which reminded her of the first stage as well. These were some odd familiarities... the starless, one coloured sky; the light without source, and so on. All these weird things that did not quite make sense yet remained consistent for some reason. Anna decided to not question too many things around here anymore, yet she wanted answers to at least some of her questions.
In the rare case that there was a light source, it was a lightbulb randomly growing out of a cable, almost as if to test if it was still working.
Another oddity was the lack of noise. You would expect a place like this to make all sorts of loud sounds, but it was almost silent. Anna could hear her footsteps as she walked.
“Hey Hen,” Jim finally asked, breaking the silence which had swept over them for a while now.
“Yea?”
“If this giant factory thing keeps working all the time, where does it get its electricity? Where do these cables even come from? I mean, they probably use the metal from the virus to construct stuff… but I never seen a single windmill or solar-panel or whatever.”
Hendrick, who was currently carrying a box shaped object on his back, stopped moving. “Give me a second.” He moved over to one of the cables, pulled his scissor out of the fixture he had built for it, and stabbed it inside one of the cables. Not very deep, just enough to leave a scratch.
“Now watch,” he said.
Anna and Jim gathered around the cable, looked at it as it started to generate material outwards. It healed itself, but then expanded outwards as a small cable started growing until it was able to attach to a different cable close by.
“Wait…” Anna said. “I think I get it. They behave like mechanical roots. These aren’t really cables, are they?”
Hendrick got up, put his scissor back, said, “Yes and no. They are cables and they are the roots of the trees.”
He pointed alongside a cable, continued, “The virus turns everything metallic, and the roots of the trees and plants connect to a giant underground system. And this system leads to the centre of it all.”
Jim gasped. “So that’s why they infect the forest. They don’t need the material, they take over the plants itself.”
Hendrick nodded. “The outer layer is infected until the inner parts can be easily commanded. It then harvests its Energy without killing it. As you can see, it’s all densely connected with each other.”
“Like a virus…” Jim said.
Hendrick nodded.
“And what about the animals?” Anna asked. “I mean, they aren’t connected to anything, so they can’t be used for Energy, right? They also use the barrier to keep them close… why?”
“Energy isn’t the main reason the factory exists, Ann. The electricity is only keeping the machines running. No… that’s not its main focus. They use something way more valuable from living organisms. Something plants don’t have. That’s why they capture them. It’s to have control over them, to keep that something safe in case they need more of it in the future.”
“Something… something what?” Jim asked.
“You just need to know that what we saw back in stage one is nothing compared to what is down there. You need to see it with your own eyes to believe it, since it’s nothing you can easily explain with words.”
“Ah, alright, that’s just slightly unsettling.” Jim said. “Can we talk about something less disturbing for once, please? We’ll sure have lots of unsettling stuff to deal with once we arrive down there.”
Anna looked down at her arms, which were still hurting like hell. She slowly started to get used to moving her fingers again. The only thing she had problems with were the finer, more accurate movements. She wasn’t sure if she could properly aim her bow like this, but if she wouldn’t be able to put her years’ long experience to use, she figured that she would be a little pissed.
Her arms felt heavy. It was as if someone had put a thick layer of mud on her skin and had let it dry. There also was a light vibrating sometimes, as if something was moving under her skin.
Anna looked back at the cable that had just grown out of the bigger cable, asked, “Wait… wouldn’t that mean that my arms can do that kind of thing as well?”
Hendrick shrugged. “Perhaps… Maybe if you get enough electricity through your body, but let’s not try that.”
Jim looked at Anna’s arms, tilted his head. “Please don’t swing around on cables attached to other cables. Iron-Maiden is already one superhero rip-off too many for this adventure.”
“Real funny, Jim,” Anna said while trying her best to not giggle. His jokes sure were dumb, but for some reason they were kind of cute from time to time. Especially since they had gotten increasingly rare in the last couple of days. The eased up tension was a welcomed change of pace, but she felt like it wouldn’t last for very long. Not as long as they were here.
“We should move now. The device still tracks us, so we shouldn’t be standing around at a place for too long,” Hendrick said. “As long as we stick to my plan, we should get in while avoiding most problems.”
“Wait, you used that kind of wording earlier. Most problems? What’s with the rest of the problems?” Jim asked. “And now that I think about it… isn’t using this tunnel kind of like cheating? I mean… aren’t we supposed to enter at the top of the factory?”
“We deal with the problems once they arrive.” Hendrick said. “Also, it’s not cheating… we are just making it a little easier by using the chances given to us. The tunnel leads us down, and that’s where we want to go.”
“Now that you say it, Hen... where exactly do we want to go?” Anna asked.
“To the deepest part of the factory,” Hendrick said.
“It’s the place where they bring the living beings to,”
“and the place where the factory originally started growing from.”
---