Hot rain of the Texas springtime whipped all across the road as a solitary figure marched on their way towards home. This person, a broad man with wide shoulders and a rounded figure that jostled slightly as he walked, carried under his arm a plastic bag that was slick with the rain and held a box of a miniature diorama of a second world war battle scene. His hoodie he had worn out that day was drenched, his jeans hugging tight to his legs, and the shoes on his feet so full of water that they made a repulsive squelching sound as he walked. Under his breath he grumbled angrily at the water that sloshed at his ankles.
“Such an idiot… just had to pick today of all days. It’s only a block away, I can just use the bridge! Right, and it just had to be today when it starts raining. Thirty percent chance my ass!” He shouted his words into the wind, though only the cars rolling by on the road would be witnesses to his cries.
His mind was hooked on the events that had led up to this moment. He was overweight so he had wanted to do some walking, and to motivate him a convention was being held just across the river. In his mind, he would have saved gas and time parking by walking on top of getting his legs moving, so he had foregone his wheeled steed in order to cross the four-lane bridge that separated his apartment from the convention center. The convention was interesting and had many relics of World War two and he was even able to obtain merchandise not frequently sold at local hobby stores, though the sudden onset of a torrential downpour had soured his mood. Thus, here he was: trudging along in the dirty brown rainwater on his way back home.
Ten minutes of cursing and gritting his teeth after leaving the convention, this man had finally made it to the bridge that would get him home. His apartment was in view at that very moment with the lights on and his cat undoubtedly peering from the couch to the window. He managed to let out a chuckle as he imagined the feline’s reaction once he got home drenched in rainwater. Not wanting to waste another minute in the awful swamp that was the hot rain, he began to jog with high steps through the rushing water pouring down the hill leading to the bridge.
Unbeknownst to this man, he would never arrive at his apartment. A driver behind the wheel of a rather large and overly modified pickup truck sped through the heavy rain with reckless abandon, falsely believing that their years of masterfully terrible driving would act as a safeguard against mother nature’s designs. All it took was their high speed and a sufficient depth of water to send their vehicle into an uncontrollable spin as they neared the bridge. The man on the sidewalk didn’t get the chance to turn around before the vehicle struck him from behind, both making a terrible crunch and a gut-wrenching scream as his limp and broken body went over the guard rail and into the swollen river below.
Thus, the life of this man came to a tragic end, but his story was not over quite yet.
__________
With an exhausted groan, the man who had been so violently thrown into the depths of the water stirred from a troubling dream, one of hospitals and doctors using weird instruments of science upon him for hours on end. He rubbed at his head, which pounded with an intensity matching that of a drumline at a parade. Everything in his vision was a blur once he opened his eyes: foggy white lights, steel colored walls and a baby blue floor, and white boxes with blinking lights and colorful faces that he guessed were monitors of some kind. Slowly he began to realize that the nightmare of being under the scalpel wasn’t just a dream, nor was the memory of his near-death experience with whatever vehicle had hit him.
With all of his meager might he tried to push himself up and move for the edge of the bed, but his body felt strange, alien even, as though his muscles had forgotten how to move and his bones had become as heavy as lead. Defeated, he flopped back into the soft fabric of the bed and let out a frustrated growl, clenching his fist and panting hard from the exertion. His mind was racing despite the foggy feeling and the dizziness that kept his vision from focusing on anything. All he could do was lay there and pray that a doctor or nurse would come along and tell him that he had survived his accident and that this was all just some miraculous recovery.
His prayers were somewhat answered when he heard a pneumatic hiss of a door opening, and with a start his eyes snapped open. There was someone here now, someone tall and slender, wearing a red top and dark bottom, with what looked vaguely like a lab coat. “Doc…” He croaked at them, realizing as he spoke that his throat was dry and his lips numb.
“Andrew.” The figure said in a distinctly feminine voice. The accent was bizarre, a sort of tongue that didn’t sound particularly used to saying his name and put too much accentuation on the consonants. He waved this off as perhaps being a side effect of whatever was keeping him so numbed and weary.
He lifted his right hand as best as he could a few inches above the bed, his hand trembling feverishly as he tried to reach out for help. The woman approached, wrapping a warm hand around his own. He sighed, a wave of relief washing over him as he felt her touch. “Doc…tor…h-help…” He weakly uttered, swallowing hard as he tried to clear the lump in his throat.
Whoever this person was, doctor or not, seemed to understand that he was struggling greatly and assisted him by reaching their other hand for the frame of the bed. There was a whir of machinery as Andrew was pushed upwards from behind, his bed morphing into a recliner of sorts for him to sit upright. He felt the weight of his own body shift, his breathing becoming easier as the figure reached for something else. Something cool and hard touched his lips: the edge of a glass cup filled with water. “Drink.” the voice commanded gently, not that he needed the encouragement. He greedily drank all that was offered, his free hand moving up to try and tip the glass farther only to drop back to the bed.
Once the glass was empty he began to cough from the feeling of his body rehydrating from the water, his chest tingling as if he had been completely desiccated from within. Now with his tongue wetted and his lips regaining some of their former flexibility, he tried to speak once more in a less hoarse voice. “Where… where am I? What happened?” He opened his eyes to the blinding lights above, squinting as he tried to find the face of his caretaker.
Then he finally spotted her, and he let out a gasp. This person, no, this woman was the most elegant woman he had ever seen. Perfectly straight hair tied into a tight bun, eyes like piercing emeralds, skin as fair as freshly fallen snow, and a heart shaped face with a pair of rounded glasses perched atop her sharp nose. Her expression was calm, not quite impassive but also not a smile, almost as if she were respectfully acknowledging him like some old time noble. She blinked slowly and tilted her head, the corners of her mouth up turning into a cat-like smile. “You are at the Greater Metroplan Hospital, in the care of the best doctors available. There was an accident, and you had to be brought here for medical reconstruction.”
Andrew blinked at her explanation, the words spoken not aligning with the answers he had expected. He wondered to himself: what was this Greater Metroplan? Who was this person? And what the Hell does medical reconstruction entail? Pushing himself up into his chair a bit more comfortably, he locked eyes with this woman for a moment before scanning her attire. A red button up shirt and a black pencil skirt with a lab coat, as he had assumed, but there were details missing, such as any discernible fabric or stitching, no folds, bends, or creases either. Something about how perfect she was made his spine tingle, a reaction that made him feel like this wasn’t right.
With a steady tone he decided to dig further into this strange woman’s identity. “Who are you? Are you a doctor of some kind?” He double checked her outfit, her face, and even squinted around at the various screens around him. She didn’t have a nametag or any pockets on her clothes, and the devices around him were displaying information that he knew was wrong. The ECG sitting to his left was locked at displaying an average heart rate, despite that he felt his own pulse slamming into his chest as his anxiety rose, not to mention that there weren’t any electrodes on him as far as he could tell. His suspicions were only getting worse as the woman hesitated to answer.
After a moment of delay, the woman gave him another uncanny smile and tilted her head the opposite direction. “I am Miss Trina, I am a medical assistant akin to a nurse. The doctor is busy at the moment, so I am taking care of patients in his stead. Please be at ease, as I am a fully capable physician able to meet any patient needs.” The strange accent of the woman made her use of most words a challenge for Andrew to understand, but he was able to follow along enough to understand.
Slowly, Andrew tried to move his legs under the covers and get a feel for them, daring to glance down in satisfaction at seeing he could flex his ankles and toes. It was with this glance down that he noticed that he could not only see his legs all the way up to his hips, but he could now see clearly down to his navel and below. He was so thin that he barely resembled his old self at all. He let out a shuddering breath, his eyes snapping back to this Trina woman with an urgent question in his mind. “How long have I been here? What… what happened to me? I need to call my sister, I need to-” He was interrupted in his panic by his own lungs seizing, forcing him into a coughing fit that made him double over involuntarily.
Miss Trina, in the fashion of an actual healthcare professional, managed to ease Andrew back into his seat after helping him come down from his coughing fit, a new glass of water in hand as he tried to catch his breath. “Please take slow sips, Andrew. You need to recover your strength.”
Begrudgingly he complied, keeping a wary eye on this oddly serene woman the entire time. Once the glass was empty he took a break to slow his breathing and heart rate as he had done any time he lost his temper. Carefully he approached the topic he had wanted to visit earlier, gripping his bedsheet tightly and pulling it up slightly. “Thank you for the drink, but I need to know, Miss. How long have I been here, and does my family know where I am? Please, if I’ve been here long enough that I’m this thin, then… just please tell me.”
This time, rather than tilting her head and smiling, the strange woman gave him a blank stare that almost seemed shocked. She blinked again, then looking towards the far wall for a moment she paused before returning her attention to him and offering a saddened look. “I am sorry, but I cannot answer all of your questions. Doctor Owens has stated that he wants to be the one to explain matters directly. If you want, I can call for him right this moment.” The saddened look she wore changed to an expression of curiosity, her eyes never once leaving his, or for that fact even blinking.
Remaining calm was all Andrew could manage, though through his tensed form he managed to give her a reply. “Yes, please call him right away.” He watched the strange woman’s face morph into a smile a moment before she seemed to space out, her eyes becoming unfocused for only a second before narrowing and tracking him once more. Without any sort of answer or confirmation, he began to try and slide away from her towards the edge of the bed, probing her with a question to hopefully distract her. “Are you gonna get the doctor?”
Her smile returned, along with her slight head tilt. “Yes, the doctor has been called. He will be here shortly.” She reached towards the night stand beside the table again, raising the glass once again that had just been empty but was now full. “Would you care for another drink? It is important that you rehydrate yourself.”
Andrew’s hairs along his body stood on end, his patience for the strange woman finally reaching its limit. “No, I don’t want any more water. Just… get that glass away from me, okay?” His breathing was becoming faster, his pulse quickening as he watched the woman tilt her head once again.
Instead of a reply she simply stood with the glass, turned towards the far wall, and walked over to set the glass by the wall before turning back to him. “Is this distance sufficient?” She chimed, putting her hands together across her abdomen.
Not quite understanding what she meant, Andrew shakily nodded his head in agreement. “Sure, I guess.” Oddly enough, the woman remained there, staring at him with that same eerie smile. This behavior made him even more nervous, making him feel like he was talking to some kind of android or something. He dismissed this thought, as it wasn’t his concern at the moment.
With a fair level of difficulty he pushed himself towards the edge of the bed, pulling the sheets over his legs to reveal their thin form that barely responded to his will. He swung his legs over the edge and sat upright with his feet dangling in the air, panting from the level of exertion it took just to move such a short distance. He had to have been there for years to become this atrophied, he thought to himself.
Now that he was at the precipice of putting his own weight upon his own feet, he stole a glance back to the nurse who was still in the corner. She stared at him with unwavering patience without breathing or even blinking. “Do you require assistance?” She chimed, smiling wider than before.
“No thanks.” He grumbled back, still unnerved by her presence. He looked down to the floor and took a shallow breath, sliding further and further until he could feel his weight pulling him towards the ground. He braced himself, hands on the sheets gripping them tightly as his skin made contact with the floor. There was a dull sensation of cold tile on the soles of his feet, along with a wobbling from his knees as they fought to keep him upright. His heart was racing as he struggled to remain upright, grunting as he felt his knees buckling just from the weight of his own body. He couldn’t do this, he was going to fall!
He closed his eyes right as he felt his legs give out, the world falling forwards as he took a nose dive towards the tile. He knew it was going to hurt, and all he could do was let go of the bed and put his arms in front of his face in preparation for the fall. A fall that, strangely, never came. He opened his eyes to find that he was being held up by a firm arm wrapped around his chest. It was Miss Trina, who had somehow crossed the room so swiftly that Andrew hadn’t even heard or felt her move. She smiled down at him as she effortlessly pushed him back up until he was sitting comfortably at the edge of the bed.
With her same graceful movements she moved in front of him, lowering herself down to meet him at his eyes level. “Are you unharmed? You nearly fell from your bed, and as such needed to be rescued. Please do not perform such risky actions that would conclude with your own injury.” Her voice was warmer now, showing a level of compassion that was absent moments ago.
Blushing from embarrassment and frustration, he gave her a reply through gritted teeth. “I’m fine, I just want to stand up and find this damn doctor myself.” He felt the heat of his anger running through him as it usually did when he became upset, thus forcing him to close his eyes and take a few long breaths.
In response to his attitude, the lady stood back up and produced a chair from what seemed like the wall to sit in front of him. She placed her hands on her lap, and looking up at him she gave a smile that seemed almost warm. “The doctor is on his way here at this moment. Please remain patient and seated for your own well-being.”
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With no real means of resisting, or for that matter even standing on his own, Andrew could only grimace and stare at the floor like a scolded child. He took deep breaths to keep himself calm as he flexed his hands, trying to fight through this constant state of exhaustion that seemed to be clutching his very core. It was infuriating to feel so helpless, so feeble when what felt like a few hours ago he was fully capable of walking, jogging, and forcing his way through a crowd of fellow convention goers with ease. Regardless of his physical state, he realized that he needed to remain calm until he knew more of what sort of situation he was in.
A short while of awkward silence took place, with the man sitting on the bed avoiding eye contact with the bizarre woman until he heard the pneumatic hiss of what must be the door to the room. He looked over to see that there was indeed a door of some kind built seamlessly into the wall, from which a new figure arrived. He was tall with a lean figure, almost like a bean pole with a shaggy mop of hair atop a white lab coat. As he drew closer, Andrew couldn’t help but see a striking resemblance between this new man and the woman sitting before him, though the man had a distinct addition of a small patch of chin hair and square glasses. His clothing was similarly lacking any sort of seam, marking, pockets or id card as far as Andrew could see, which made him nervous.
The man, sensing Andrew’s nervousness, raised his hands and spoke in a silky smooth voice that spoke of confidence and a relaxed atmosphere. “Hey, buddy, relax a bit. Nobody is going to hurt you. Here, let me introduce myself, I am Doctor William Thast, though you can just call me Will if you’d like. I prefer names instead of honorifics.”
Unlike the oddly rigid stance of Miss Trina, Will’s actions felt organic and real, and as Andrew noted, he was actually breathing and blinking unlike the woman. Andrew felt somewhat relieved to see that he was dealing with something more human than whatever the nurse was, though he kept up his guard as he responded to this doctor. “Where am I really? I was told this was a hospital, but I don’t believe that. What is this place?” Andrew felt his fingers digging into the bed, his heart thumping in his chest as he awaited the lank man’s answer.
William stared down at his patient with a somewhat sad expression, then with a glance to the nurse he nodded towards the door. “Trina, can you give us a moment?” The nurse complied, silently walking towards the doorway and stopping outside, turning back right as the door slid shut with a hiss. Now alone with Andrew, the doctor sighed and walked over to the now abandoned chair to sit.
With a sigh, the doctor rubbed the back of his neck and looked up at the disoriented man sympathetically. “Alright, let’s be one hundred percent honest here. First off, this is a hospital, and this is a special room made to be a little more familiar to you. Yeah, it’s not perfect, but budget cuts suck and recreating these monitors was a hassle. Regardless, this is the part of the hospital that deals with patients who might experience chrono-synaptic shock after waking up, and it’s my home turf, so to speak.”
Andrew blinked at him, not fully grasping the concepts being given to him. “I… what does that all mean? What exactly happened to me?”
William sighed and scratched his chin, glancing up at the ceiling as he fumbled around with his words for a moment. “Well… uh… shit, I guess there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Alright, lemme ask you: What’s the last thing you remember before waking up here? Maybe from there we can walk our way to where we are now, save some time on backtracking and all.” He waved a hand at Andrew, urging him to answer the counter-question.
“There was a bridge. I was walking home after a convention and… something hit me from behind. It hurt, I was scared, and then…it got dark and cold. I woke up here after dreaming about being experimented on.” Andrew explained, slowly rubbing at his own elbow anxiously, dreading what might be said in reply.
Humming for a moment, the strange doctor rubbed his chin thoughtfully and nodded slowly. “Alright…so that saves me some time, since you remember that much. So that thing that hit you on the bridge, that was a truck. You got hit by a pickup truck that spun out of control. It was fatal. You basically died right then and there, but we managed to save you.”
Stunned, Andrew let out a shuddering gasp. “Fuck…that’s…damn. How did…how did you save me?”
There was a pause as the doctor considered his words, glancing to the floor for a moment until he figured out how to answer. “Honestly? We didn’t save you so much as we just nabbed your brain out of your head. See, your body was completely smashed by that accident. Organs popped, bones snapped, and the spine… yeesh, it was like a jigsaw puzzle. That, and there was no way we could get the rest of your body before it tumbled into the river, so we just took the one part that was still working and built up from there.”
The answer he had heard horrified him, causing Andrew to choke on his words and stare at this doctor in show. Everything he had just heard was utterly insane, because as far as he could tell this was still his body. Then again, he realized that it made sense why he felt so wrong. Everything was sluggish, heavy, and his form was so scrawny now, it would only make sense that something was terribly wrong with him. He looked back to the doctor, his silent horror still etched into his face. “Explain. Please, this doesn’t make sense.”
William nodded, reaching over to the side and picking up a loose pen and clipboard with paper on it. He began to scribble small figures, diagrams, and a strange machine as he began a lengthy explanation.
“Okay, so, this is going to be a crazy explanation, but just stick with me here. First off, this isn’t the twenty-first century, it’s the thirty-eighth. You’re in the future, technically speaking. You seem to be following, so let’s move on. How we did it was with a time machine slash teleporter device called the fixed time matter relay, which in essence acts as a one-way gateway to pull things from specific places and times in the past. Bermuda Triangle, Mount Everest, deep parts of random forests, anywhere where lots of people go missing is usually where this thing grabs people from. There’s a really advanced series of conditions it uses to determine that whoever is being taken either never going to be seen again or otherwise would have died had we not taken them, but explaining that would take months of lessons in quantum mechanics and time-space emergent technologies. The end result is that people who were going to die in the past are brought to our present time, most of the time as either full bodies or bodies that can be restored from the state they were taken in, or in rare cases like yours, just the brain of the person. The machine does all it can to bring over as much of a person as it can, but the scan it got from you was… bleak.”
The doctor paused in his explanation, allowing Andrew to soak up the information and ask a question for confirmation. “So… you portaled my brain over a thousand years into the future because…I was basically roadkill?”
The doctor bit his lip,nodding as he sucked air in through his teeth. “Yeah…pretty much! There’s a lot of science behind it, but boiled down, you’ve basically got it.”
Andrew closed his eyes and tried to understand it, but even he knew that what he was hearing didn’t give him enough information. “Why? What’s the point of doing that? You pull people into the future, but there has to be some kind of reason, right?” He was trying his best not to become upset, but he felt the beginning of hysteria creep into the back of his mind.
Instead of immediately replying, the thin man reached into his coat and produced a small white capsule-like device. With a few taps he managed to make a handful of pills appear from the machine, tossed them into his mouth, then offered some to Andrew. “Here, take these. They’re just mild anxiety meds, but they’ll keep you calm as I explain. Even I need a few for what I’m about to tell you.” The doctor stared at Andrew quietly until his sincerity was recognized and the man from the past took the pills.
Once he swallowed them down, he took a deep breath and began again. “War. That’s why we’re pulling people from the past. We’re in the middle of a war and we are losing.I told you I wasn’t gonna sugarcoat it, and I meant it. We need everything, from civilian cooks and doctors to soldiers and commanders, anything that’ll help us protect Earth. Sure, it’s not the most morally or ethically acceptable solution, but when your back’s against the wall you do what you can.”
Maybe it was whatever the drugs were, or perhaps it was just a dormant part of Andrew stirring, but the situation being explained like that made him somewhat lucid. “Who are you at war with?”
William was taken aback by the sudden interest, blinking a few times before his own curiosity came into play. “You seem oddly interested, could I ask why? I mean, most others brought to this time begin asking when they can go back as soon as they are told about the process, perhaps because time travel is mentioned. Are you not interested in that?”
Andrew himself seemed perplexed, mentally trying to gauge his own reactions. “I’m not sure. Going back to see my family and friends again is definitely one of my top priorities, but… this is time travel stuff, right? Can’t you just send me back to my own time whenever you want? So technically, they won’t even know I was hit by a truck or worry about me because I’ll just come back to that time like nothing happened. And as for the war stuff, I was always sorta… well…I like warfare from a historical point of view, so being given a chance to be a part of the history of the future seemed really crazy.”
The doctor hummed and tapped his pen to his chin, smirking slightly as he gave Andrew a knowing stare. “You were a bit of a science fiction lover, weren’t you?” When Andrew nodded his agreement, the doctor smiled and chuckled. “I thought so. We’ve brought over many, many others like you, as well as soldiers. Fiction lovers took to the aspect of time travel easily, and warriors understood war in turn, but you had a grasp of both at the same time. While not unique, it is drastically refreshing compared to those who have neither and begin to beg and plead to be sent home immediately upon learning of the situation they are in.”
There was a moment of hesitation before the time traveler could ask his next question. “Can you send people back in time?”
“Of course. While the process of screening people for transit into the future must meet extremely specific criteria, sending people back is much simpler, so long as we follow certain procedures to not disrupt the timeline. You can probably guess, but people sent back have no memory of being taken here, or the idea of an alien abduction is implanted into their head. There’s some sort of series of time-travel laws that exist that govern that what we do and have chosen to do is already set in stone so we can’t actually create a paradox, but why tempt fate by giving it the chance to go terribly wrong?” The doctor chuckled, smiling slightly.
After a moment of thinking, Andrew looked back up to the doctor with a renewed conviction. “So who are you fighting? Is it aliens?”
With a scoff, Doctor Thast rolled his eyes and shook his head. “No, at least not this time. Humans, as always, are trying to kill themselves off because of a dispute. Actually, this whole war is because we don’t know how to approach aliens. This side of the war, the Earth Coalition Supporters, wants to make peace and accept the rights of alien lifeforms while the others, the Mankind Supremacy Bloc, genuinely believe that alien life is detestable and needs to be destroyed. As you can imagine, the presence of such an ideological divide led to an unavoidable civil war, and now the entire solar system is a warzone. The aliens are understandably keeping their distance until this war has ended, though I dread to think what might be the fate of the human race if the MSB is victorious.” He sighed and closed his eyes, shaking his head with remorse.
“That’s so stupid.” Growled Andrew, a grim look on his face. “How can people be so stupid, even in the future?”
“Tell me about it.” Breathed the doctor. He glanced at the man seated on the bed and saw his dour expression, and sensing that he was truly upset by this fact he smacked his lips and stood up to his full height to place a hand on his shoulder. When Andrew looked up at him he offered a kind smile to calm him. “People have always been the same, but we can always do better. Anyways, I believe this talk has at least given you a firm grasp of your situation here, and you can now rest at least a little easier. I don’t expect you to leap up from your bed and immediately rush for the front lines, but since you are recovering from full body cellular reconstruction you can at least rest for a few more days and think things over. These are dire times, but we are not so desperate that we will force those we bring to the future into service.”
The doctor then assisted his patient back into bed comfortably, laying him on his back and slipping a small device around his wrist. With a push on its circular face Miss Trina rushed in, her eerie smile seeming much less intimidating to Andrew than before. He looked up from his bed at her, then back and forth between them in slight confusion. “Right, you probably want to know about her. Miss Trina is a false-synthetic, a mixture of organic tissue and flexible machinery around a metal skeleton. She is a fully capable caretaker and will provide you with anything you request of her, and she can assist you in many other categories such as teaching and physical rehabilitation. If I am not around, a mere press of a button will have her rushing here to assist. And yes, she looks just like me, I have heard it too many times already. You can blame my sister for that, as she was the woman who invented and mass produced the Trina model based on her own cells. Every nurse here looks like her, so finding the real Mary is impossible.”
Andrew was about to comment on this when another lookalike to Miss Trina walked through the door, staring at him with the same unblinking glare. “Doctor, patient fifty-eight is experiencing a second rejection to the altered membrane surgery. We are currently following your directions to mitigate the cellular damage, but your expertise is required.”
William let out a tired sigh, taking his pill dispenser out from his pocket and downing another duo of pills as he turned for the door. “Alright, on my way. Administer compound nine and apply stabilizing ointment in quadruple dosage for both. Keep her in the yellow at the very least. Andrew, you rest easy now, and if you’re hungry there’s some pretty decent food that Trina can get you from the cafeteria. I’ll be back later, buddy.”
With that Andrew was left alone with the caretaker synthetic, her watchful gaze constantly looking over him. With a weary groan he closed his eyes and sank into the sheets, fumbling his hand around to find the controls that would set his bed back to being flat. Once fully reclined he closed his eyes, hoping that his fatigue would dissipate with the passage of time. It wasn’t long before he drifted off to sleep, Trina seated beside him in an idle state while the lights dimmed automatically.
__________
Somewhere, on a distant battlefield in a city long reduced to rubble, three soldiers dressed in a gray drab huddled in the ruins, clutching sleek black rifles in their arms tightly. The sound of thunder rumbled in the distance as rain poured down the cracked stone walls and torn metal panels. All three had their eyes peeled, peering out into the gloom of a monotone landscape on all sides. The very air was a ripple of light, a field of tv static that made the towering spires all around them blend together into a single wall of indistinguishable landmarks.
One of the soldiers nervously toyed with a selector switch on his weapon, breathing steadily as he watched for any sign of movement in the lifeless city. “Is it still out there?” He asked, his eyes darting to the man next to him.
“It is. These bastards never quit once they smell blood.” He growled, adjusting his rifle to rest against his shoulder.
The third man looked out to the right, slowly raising his weapon and patting the middle man’s leg to get his attention. “North. One-fifty meters. Movement between the buildings.”
The others snapped to look in that direction, faces turned to stone as they raised their weapons. They peered through the downpour to try and see what their ally had seen, but the torrent was a curtain that obscured any attempt to see anything. A few moments of tense silence filled the air as the three men waited patiently for something to happen, but no such event came. When the man on the right relaxed the other two calmed as well, though their attention was on the third man.
The middle man nudged him, frowning under his helmet. “You just fucking with us?”
“No. There was something there, I know there was.” He hissed, his gun still tightly in his hands.
The left man shook his head and turned to look on his side, letting out a frustrated whine. “How can you see anything through all this? Thermals, dead. Magnetics, dead. EMF, off the charts. Geiger… don’t even ask about the Geiger counter. Can’t see shit, can’t hear shit, the fucker probably lost us.”
The middle man rolled his eyes and peered down from their ledge to the streets below, noting the many wrecked vehicles around them. “Maybe. We’d hear it if it kicked the rumbler, but it’s still-”
His voice cut off as a groan came from the opposite side of the building. The three spun around, staring across the long empty space of the ruins to see the rain on the far side. All three tensed up as something moved in the rain, something enormous that reached up to the fifteenth floor they were on. The thing moved with surprising grace, the rain pattering off its shape making a clear silhouette as it got closer to the building. It was sleek, angular, and definitely not a shape they were happy to see. It stopped a short distance from the building, almost as if it could sense the eyes upon it.
The left man swallowed hard and began to stand up, only for the middle man to grab his belt and hold him at a crouch. He protested quietly, kneeling but glaring at the middle man. “It’s right fucking there! We need to get out of here!”
The middle man growled, his finger pressing the trigger in anticipation of a fight. “Shut up! We’re fucked either way we run, so just wait! Maybe it hasn’t seen us yet…”
The third man, the one on the right, was deathly silent as he squinted at the thing in the rain. “It’s not the same one.” He growled, closing his eyes and bowing his head.
The middle man saw his ally lowering his gun and gasped, nudging him harshly. “The fuck are you talking about? Get your weapon up or-”
“We’re already dead.” Declared the third man, his voice solemn and resigned.
A moment later the three were bathed in red light, not from what they were facing, but from something behind them. The middle man and the left man spun around to see a massive form in the rain right behind them, glowing red light shining through the rain. Panic set in, and the center man raised his gun to fire. One shot got off before something crashed into him, wrapping around him and pulling him free of the building. The left man, scared beyond his wits, tried to flee towards the stairs. He screamed, dropped his gun, and sprinted as fast as he could. He was approaching the stairs quickly, his body a blur as he sprinted towards it, but he would never make it there. One moment he was there, body whole and the exit within his reach, and the next there was nothing but a crash of thunder and a red mist where his torso once was. His legs tumbled towards the landing and rolled, flopping to the ground a few inches from the way out.
From the rain came the sound of screams from the second man, frantic gunfire that only succeeded in illuminating the enormous metal beast that held him aloft. There was a hiss, a whine, and a revving sound as something like heavy machinery began to move, followed by a gargled scream and the snapping sound of human bones. The third man, after hearing his allies meet their gruesome ends, began to weep softly as he unclasped his sidearm. He slowly raised it, armed it, and pressed it to his own helmet. The titans in the rain made no move to stop him, they merely watched as the poor man fell lifelessly to the ground in a heap.
Then, as suddenly as they appeared they vanished into the rain, lightning and thunder crashing and illuminating their massive humanoid forms as they hunted down more soldiers hiding in the ruins.