Have you ever been stung by a bee?
An instant, sharp burning pain that feels like someone stabbed you with a red-hot pin, but subsides afterwards?
Actually, nah, I think the comparison isn’t apt. Let me jog my memory.
Have you ever been stung by a rhinowasp? One of those big, genetically-engineered predatory insects released by megacorps that were supposed to assassinate troublesome native wildlife, but managed to somehow reproduce on its own and became a nightmarish pest?
When it stings you, it feels like someone took a molten screwdriver, placed it again your skin and bone, and drove a hammer to the handle. Why am I bringing this up? Because I’ve just been shot in the shin, of course.
To tell you the truth, it all happened so fast that I didn’t know what was going on – except for the fact that one moment, I was trying to piece together what could have happened to the mudskipper, and the next moment, I was jerking forward by reflex.
It felt like something ‘clicked’ through the back of my right shin. Only when a litany of bullets whizzed past my hair and embedded with a thunk into the pallets of cargo behind me did I realize that I was in someone’s crosshairs.
Hot blood moistened the soles of my socks and boots. Had my reflexes been half a second slower, it was my head that would’ve looked like a punctured tire.
I managed to limp and duck out of the way, and crawled behind the cargo pallet as more rounds peppered the immediate vicinity. I instinctively tried to run, and took a single step with my weight upon my shin, but the white-hot screw of the bullet’s path offered me a warm handshake.
Hello! First time getting shot? Well, be glad you weren’t shot anywhere else! It seemed to mock in my head.
The meat of my calves felt like they were on fire, along with the rest of my shin. Every step I took drove splinters of cracked bone through the middle of my flesh. I let out a hoarse scream, but hopped away with my left leg, managing to pull the railings and use all of my arms to stumble past the corrugated sidegates onto the street again.
“IPN KOSH! HUN-KAYA-KAYA!”
“HUN-KAYA-KAYA!”
“KALI-SUYAH!”
Fuck, I grimaced. I heard those same chants at Persephone station. Pirates, mercenaries, a gang of outlaws hell-bent on hunting me, whoever they were. From the echoes off the walls of the hangar behind me, it sounded like they brought reinforcements. They most likely knew what was in my duffel bag and how much it was worth, or just wanted to kill me for the hell of it. Outside stations and the tightly-controlled core worlds, the word of law and common decency was a mere suggestion for many people.
“MENOSH! MENOSH!”
The sounds were growing louder, accompanied by the roar of a vehicle.
I desperately scanned the sides of the street to pick out a getaway, and finding one, quickly ripped off a spare hovercycle from a utility pole and threw myself onto it.
“Sorry –” a cheerful corporate voice sounded through the speakers. “Your iris is no longer recognized, as your subscription has expired! If you would like to extend your –” I clambered out of the seat in apathy.
I fell face-first into the muddied street, pulled myself up by the side of what vaguely resembled a car handle, and used my jacketed elbow to shatter its window.
So it was a car! Very nice! At least I won’t look like Swiss cheese in a minute!
Sorry bud, I apologized to its possible owner, and rammed my duffel bag through the window gap, scrambling myself through next.
Okay, this car was dirtworld model. Not bad. It has a steering handle, an ignition keyhole, the actual key by the – where – here? No, what about – nope, not here, the glove – AHA! I could use this to –
BANG – CRASH – VROOM!
A jeep covered in spikes came barreling through the gates, knocking it off its hinges. It braked for a moment, crashing into a pole, backed out again, then turned its headlights on me.
“MUKU SEYA! MUKU SEYA!” One of them hollered, peeking out the roof with binoculars. The jeep screeched its tires in an eruption of smoke as it began hurtling towards the car with me as its rather meaty inhabitant.
I turned the key so hard that it nearly cracked at the spine, and kicking my feet into the accelerator, drove away –
The car didn’t move. I had put my foot on a brake.
I tried the other pedal. That did something, I don’t know what.
I tried the other other pedal on the far right, and with a resounding, ear-splitting screech, and coughs of smoke and soot enough to drench the street, my borrowed car took off into the wild city of this hollowed-out asteroid.
Bullets whizzed and cracked past my sideview mirrors like thrown whips. I raced past the streets, past the narrow bends, running into garbage cans, outdoor tents, food stalls, and sides of markets, the jeep following just behind, leaving a trail-mix of chaos and destruction upon its wake. It must have been night, or something equivalent in this city of perpetual neon and hazy red, because not many poor souls were out and about to get flattened under our tires. I tried to avoid whoever and whatever came in my way, but the jeep and its cronies bristling with rifles made it a point to place their singular focus upon turning me into tomato paste. It cleaved the neon signs into neat ABCs as it cannoned through the streets with the dexterity of a rhinoceros.
A neatly placed bullet shattered the back window and embedded itself into my rearview mirror.
I swerved hard left, drifting the car with a scream that rang out into the starless sky, only to see the jeep run headfirst into a concrete wall, back out again, and chase me as if nothing had happened.
Pling. A bullet punctured the car frame at an angle and gifted me a new ear piercing.
Droplets of blood flicked off my flinging lobes as I twisted the car here, there, anywhere, into an alleyway and out the other end, into a boulevard, trying to shake the jeep loose.
But it just kept coming.
My eyes were practically bulging out of my sockets trying to see any way out, any method to lose them, or get them to crash, but a rocket-propelled grenade wailed past my right and onto the pothole below me.
The airbag punched my face as I felt the car lift into the air, and then smash through a poorly-built wall into somewhere lit in orange. It rolled over several times and came to rest on its back with a trail of sizzling sediment.
I’m just glad I had spent secret nights in my teenage years sneaking out from our farmhouse villa and taking my hands on rodeos, because without the acuity and fortitude required to orient oneself and grab onto the shoulders of a rampaging wildebeest, I would have been knocked clean out. Though my vision resembled a kaleidoscope of colors, I convinced my fumbling hands onto the car door, and with my still-functioning left leg, kicked, kicked, and kicked the door open, my right leg bleeding all over my face.
A middle-aged man dressed in a worker’s overalls grabbed my hand and pulled me from the wreck, but had a hard time because I was hell bent on crawling back inside to retrieve my duffel bag brimming with diamonds. Other workers were frozen in place, confused, with soot and grime smeared across their faces and arms in the middle of work. Huge pools and vats of molten metal carpeted the colossal indoors, sizzling steam and smoke wafting out, overhung by a maze of suspended grated walkways in a multitude of tiers, draped in railings, heavy machinery, and foundry hooks. Concrete paths and narrow alleys ran in the gaps between the pools of molten metal and presses printing steel.
“...DANGER! GUNS! GANGS!” I hollered, frantically pointing outside to the growing sound of the jeep.
A look of immediate understanding washed over his face. The middle-aged worker took my arms on his shoulder and helped me limp away, presumably to help, but the cacophony of a broken metal gateway rang off the walls before we could turn a corner.
“MUKU SEYA! KALI-SUYAH!”
A whizz, a crack, the sound of a sack being hit by a bat.
The middle-aged man crumpled to the ground with me in tow.
Blood began to pool on the concrete.
A deafening siren began to ring off the walls of the steelworks. The workers overhead and next to me all scrambled out and climbed the ladders, staircases, and ramps towards the tiered walkways, and raced as fast out as tides escape the shore after an earthquake.
The last few workers disappeared beyond my vision across the far end of the walkways, abandoning me to face the assailants alone. I shook the middle-aged worker next to me, but his eyes were frozen in time.
I scrambled up, swearing in pain at my splintered shin, twisting myself free from debris. I ducked past a hydraulic press as bullets ricocheted off and dived into the pools of molten steel, shooting off viscous splashes that splattered on concrete.
I had to escape. I had to climb the walkways. But this place was a maze. Just a few glances here and there and there was no telling which direction was which, neither could I remember where the workers had run off to in this heat-riddled haze, not to mention the 12 kilograms of cargo weighing down my back. But it was money. I couldn’t abandon it. No, not now.
I craned my neck hither and thither, ignoring the searing ache from my leg, limping like a deer with a broken leg, limping towards a single ramp that could bring me up a peg.
It was hot. Unbearably hot. Sweat pooled and ran down my hair, head, and face like waterfalls. The fumes of the molten steel below stung my eyes and wafted up to skewer my nostrils. I limped aimlessly in one direction, hoping that it took me deeper into the maze and then out again, so that I could lose my assailants.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“MUKU! MUKU!”
A bullet punctured my duffel bag, split past the railings, and rebounded off the metal walls in a cacophonic frenzy. I ducked and screamed aside as I quickened my pace, my right leg lagging behind leaving a trail of blood for them to find.
This won’t do, this won’t do! I lamented, as I ducked sideways behind a large concrete pillar, tore off my jacket, and wrapped it around my bloodied shin. I tightened it as far as my shaky, fumbling hands could allow, took a deep breath to pull myself up, and continued my pace as the hurried voices and occasional gunfire punctured the air where I’d been mere seconds ago, the wrapped jacket on my leg making it look like a drumstick out of a fryer.
I turned a corner when one of them – dressed in a spiky jacket with a green mohawk – came out of the blue. He swung a crowbar at me with two of his hands, which I managed to block by swinging my duffel bag around, ringing the diamond within; he tried swinging at my head this time, but I ducked and smashed his feet with the diamond-laden bag. It toppled him, making him lose that minute balance needed to stay safe on the metal walkway – and sent him tumbling down ten feet below. He landed on an intersection between the concrete alleyway and the molten pool of metal, and accidentally dipped one of his arms into it trying to soften his fall, which then promptly exploded in a burst of vermillion steam.
Shrieks of pained anguish pierced the terse air, and it was just a moment until the next round of jeers and cheers and screams and bullets began to roll towards my direction like a tempest.
Three of them appeared at the far end of the alleyway I had just left, and pointed their muzzles at my figure – I dodged just out of the way, one of the bullet grazing my cheek and another cleaving through my hair, as I spotted a cargo elevator jutting from the steel jungle. I scrambled on it, almost losing my balance twice, and frantically smashed and held one of the large buttons on its free-wire console, bringing me up – I backed into a corner, head held down, as the attackers shot from below with a hailstorm of rounds.
I’d reached the maximum height near to the ceiling, and stumbled out on the highest tier of walkways when a loose screw caught the sole of my boots, twisting me sideways – and a stray bullet undid the railing upon which I’d just leaned, making me tumble and fall off the ledge, my duffel bag hanging loose by a single shoulder.
I held onto the ledge with my dear life, my feeble hands and fingers on the grated metal edge making futile protests against the inevitability of weight. I felt the fingers of my right hand slip one by one, until at last I was hanging by just my left hand, until it too, began to slip.
Seldom before had I been caught in a situation with absolutely no way out. Even with Voltaire a week back, we – Maine and I – could eke out a way to rise beyond the collapsing sky.
But this, hah, what an irony, am I right? To come this far, to have successfully brought Maine to safety, to have 127,000 credits worth of precious diamonds on my back, with no way to climb, only molten steel below awaiting to devour my fall.
I heard voices of half a dozen on the lower floors ring out from a corner, and heard their magazines click crisply into their rifles. I could feel their crosshairs fix upon my struggling back.
I’m sorry, Maine.
I’m so sorry.
If only I could have left my chipscreen with you so you won’t wake without money to go by...
If only I’d been a little stronger, a little wiser.
I don’t know how all this happened – because it happened too fast – but... I was the sum of my choices, and those choices led me here.
To this destination.
Was this...
The end of the line for me?
In the split second I was choosing whether to be shot or fall on my own accord, a burly hand grabbed my wrist.
A deafening blow of a pistol rang out just above, and I was yanked up, my left shoulder nearly ripping, and thrown onto the walkway again.
A colossal, muscular man with tan skin and swept hair of ice-blue shielded me from the guns below, returning fire in an equal measure of volume with a two-barreled pistol, ducking, taking cover behind a pillar.
He noticed me shuffle away on my back like some sort of challenged tortoise. I sputtered half-dazed, half-astonished, fully confused. When did he appear? Who was he? He’s not a part of the gang hunting for me?
“What are you doing?” He frowned, letting loose the spent thermal clips of his pistol onto the grated steel. “Get the hell up and run away!” He bellowed, motioning me towards the direction of escape.
I pointed to my bloodied jacket on my shin. The red was hard to make out because everything around was bathed in crimson, orange, and blue.
The man clutched his forehead briefly and, returning three shots into the attackers below, ran out from the pillar, grabbed me by the torso and lifted me up on the shoulder. He began thundering towards the direction of the supposed escape when a large caliber bullet ripped a suspension cable holding the flooring up, and plummeted us down to the tier immediately below. We landed on a secure junction of walkways with a painful thud, and rolled behind the tall hydraulic cover of a steel printer to let a hailstorm of fire miss us by inches.
“Sons of bitches,” he swore, letting loose a large globule of spit onto the hydraulic to see it flattened. He peeked out in between the hydraulics to see silhouettes of moving figures taking positions on the labyrinthine walkways not far off.
I was too dazed and frightened to speak after what had just transpired, except notice that the pirate-mercenaries hollered intimidating chants no longer. For them, it was no longer a chase. There was a new opponent in the arena, and giving away their position with sound was no longer a sensible tactic. Especially not in this maze.
“There’s no way up to the control room from here. Only option is the elevator,” my savior assessed, handing me his two-barreled pistol. “You ever used a gun?”
“Y – yeah. For skeet –”
“That’s enough,” he said, taking the pistol back, flicking a little switch, and handing it back. The little engravings on the handle read ‘Carnotaur MX-1.’
“Don’t switch the fire mode, or your wrist will come off,” he commanded, as he hoisted off the triple-barreled shotgun from his back, casting the sling aside. “Just a warning. If you shoot me in the back, I will kill you, understand? Don’t dare bite the hand that feeds.”
“I – I won’t!” I rasped, clutching the pistol with shaky fingers.
“Good,” he said, laying his hands to the railings and feeling its vibrations. He closed his eyes. Some part of his head had lines of circuitry running through it; it glowed green for a split second as his shut eyes twitched like in the middle of a wild dream.
He opened them again.
“8. Six of them on this level, two down below. We have to clear them all, ‘cause that’s the only way out. You watch my six. I’ll move slowly. Chances are you won’t have to shoot, but that’s only if some sneaky bastard doesn’t have the gall to make it behind us. Got it?”
“Got – got it,” I stammered, aiming down the blunted sight of my two-barreled pistol into the distance, turning to look for his six. The duffel bag pushed into his back.
“Stick to me if you want to live,” he said, lifting the duffel off my back and hoisting it on his right shoulder. “Have your back against mine. If you can’t feel it, you’re as good as dead.” I couldn’t protest having the duffel bag of diamonds being taken away like that, but I wasn’t a fool. I knew this was the only way out.
The steel mill had become dead quiet. Only the sizzles of the molten metal, the clang-clang of the automatic hydraulics, and occasional eruptions of frizzled smoke made themselves known. There were no chants anymore. No more jeers. No more wild shouts. Only the tense silence of an ambush of eight against two.
My savior and ally began shuffling forward. He was thankfully patient with his advance. I limped back, trying to ignore the throbbing pain from my shin, touching my back to his. Both of our sweat must’ve felt scalding against one another.
Slow, rhythmic breathings. I aimed down my sights, cognizant of any figure, any face or form that looked like a human being in this deserted portion of the steel highway. The shadows of machinery and the technicolor of blue-yellow-red mixed to form various hallucinatory shapes. I shook my head and kept my hand as steady as I could, though it was shaking so wildly you could hear the individual clips vibrate against the handle.
My savior and ally could hear it too, his back pressed close against mine. We inched forward bit by bit, senses sharpened to fine points, the fume of dry steel and coal vapor obscuring our visions.
A muzzle flash and a bang from the corner of my eye. The bullet cracked past our heads, and before it had time to bounce, a brilliant explosion of firelight issued forth from the shotgun next to me, sending its plasma shell to swat the attacker off his feet and into a wall with a splatter.
“One,” my ally replied in a hushed whisper.
We could hear minute steps as the attackers shuffled into new spots to pounce us. The first skirmish undoubtedly exposed our positions.
We advanced as steadily as ever, our footfalls soft upon the metal, my ally turning this way and that with the shotgun in his hand. Though I couldn’t see him, I could feel the clackering of the instrument as it swung to new sights, new targets.
A buzzsaw-sound cleaved the air to herald the arrival of several rounds. Many of them spliced into the burly bicep of my savior, spraying blood; but speedily blocking the rest with the duffel bag, he swung his shotgun to unload several ear-splitting rounds towards the top of a press.
Two figures ragdolled off the top as if they were hit by a swinging log.
“Three, damn,” he swore, tearing off a portion of his shirt with teeth to wrap his wound –
A new figure threw himself out with a knee-slide from between the gaps in the machines, and shot the shotgun away from his hands – in that split second between life and death, I swung towards the attacker, closed my eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Two rounds exited in rapid succession from the barrels, the gun flinging off my hands with the recoil and careening into the air.
I must have missed, because my ally charged into the assailant, taking some shots in the torso, and kicked him away with all his might.
The assailant tumbled off the railings into the molten metal below. If he wasn’t unconscious, the sounds of... well, I hadn’t had time to think about that, because fresh blood spurted forth from where my ally had taken the rifle shots.
“Fuck,” he swore, coughing up blood, letting the spent shells frost the floor. He tore off a syringe hanging by his belt and stabbed himself in the wound with it, emptying its contents with a muffled huff. “Muddied my steel,” he muttered, as he pressed his back against mine again, handing me my dropped pistol, making our way through the densest part of the steel-concrete labyrinth. His breaths had quickened.
We were at maximum edge. We swung, aimed, and almost pulled our triggers at any vague shape and form that looked to be human. My leg screamed and screeched in my head, pleading to give it rest. But the time hadn’t come yet. There were still four assailants running about.
A grenade rolled between our legs.
My ally kicked it away as fast as it could, clacking off the walls. It exploded on the hook of the suspension cable, undoing the platform and throwing us off to the level below.
Two assailants laying on wait from a hidden section of the top unleashed their barrage of bullets on us, cleaving my ally in his left jaw – but he swiftly threw the duffel bag over our heads and returned fire with the shotgun, the shells half-penetrating, half-reflecting in a firelight of smoke and sparks against the grated metal, tearing the legs of the two assailants. The two groaned and winced in pain, and quietened to silence as my ally unloaded yet another shell to finish the job.
Now there were two remaining.
We got up and started moving again, to clear out the rest, aiming at the tier above, when shotgun fire – not ours – screamed past our figures with pressure we could feel, and embedded themselves into the press. Without a moment of hesitation, my ally returned with fire of his own. The assailant ducked behind a corner, and shot a suspension cable, ripping it off – the tension came undone, and slapped my ally hard in the right shoulder, cleanly tearing it down the middle to let blood pour through.
Raising the duffel bag as a shield, my ally charged full-force, head-first, into the position of the assailant, who tried to kill him, neutralize him – the shotgun pellets ripped the duffel bag and bounced off the diamond, cracking it, revealing its glittering contents, interrupting his charge into a multitude of skids. But shells had to run out, and when it did, my ally swung the entire barreled diamond into his face, and smashed the figure’s jaw and teeth clean off.
And just before I had time to close the gap and stick with my ally, I noticed a silhouette of a nose, blue against the azure shadow cast by a machine, and two pairs of eyes, two pairs of eyes on a face, an unequivocally a human face just 20 feet away from me, in his hands a crimson glow of a pistol, aiming at me and my ally –
I unloaded a few rounds, and missed – but before the assailant could react, my ally had heard my shots and swung around to unload a spray of thunderous shells in his general direction.
The last assailant, the ambusher-to-be, slid down the splattered wall of the machine leaving a trail of crimson paste.
It was done.
“That’s all eight,” my ally said, cracking his neck, reloading his shotgun.
The spent shells had barely hit the floor when a moving shape leapt from the topmost walkway above and swung down at us with a gleaming machete.
Without thinking, I raised my Carnotaur pistol to the heavens above, the muzzle briefly passing by my ally’s face, upon which I read a disbelief at my supposed betrayal – and unloaded six heavy rounds on the descending assassin, nearly spraining my wrist.
The machete landed blade-first into the grated metal plating, and the assassin from the heavens shortly thereafter with a hideous sound of crunching bones, limp, dead.
“Nine,” I remarked, leaning by a railing.
Color and trust returned at once to my ally’s eyes.
“Good shot,” he commented, shutting his eyes once again to feel the vibrations of the railings, the minute circuits on the side of his head glowing green.
He opened them at last.
“That’s all of ‘em,” he declared, holstering the shotgun by his belt.
“Call me King. What’s yours?”