Snap and Pop cracked that mother in, like, seconds. The door was mega heavy and your average army would have given up on opening it. But it was old tech, all metal and sparks, and it stood zero chance against the twins’ neon-new blend of organic protocols.
Spike felt like jubilatin’, but it would have looked bad with him being the group’s sigma leader figure, and so he just nodded as the lights on top of the thing smacked open one after the other and the lock unsealed. Their small pile of batteries was a dozen different kinds of sad boxes, and it fumed and sputtered until died with a final huff of sparks, but it was enough. They had powered the door long enough to let them into the ancient burrow. Mite and Clack were at his back and he tried giving them a good show of powerful leadership. He didn’t even flinch when the dust waterfalled on his hair from the edge of the now-open entrance.
There were no words. This was a crack team of hackers and explorers. They all knew the score, and filed in after Spike like the shadows of ninjas as they headed into the bowels of the long-dead machine.
It was all pretty standard stuff. Ancient bases dotted this entire side of the abandoned archology like back in the day the land had been sold at a special discount for shady military types. There were claustrophobic tunnels, checkpoints, and more tunnels and checkpoints. There was no power to run anything other than what they had brought with them to crack the door open, so they used their own lights.
The squad fanned around to independently explore here and there, but little was of use. Food had long dried to dust inside the mummified corpses of those who had sought refuge in these metal coffins. Their remains were smeared all over the place, not even human anymore. Just gruesome smudges on the walls next to piles of scraps.
The tech was old. Metal was cheap and the spark that once made all this machinery interesting was long gone. Evolutions like the twins had rendered the entire pile useless. But you never knew. Sometimes you found an old world weapon down in these burrows, or some interesting data that some reprobate in the town would pay for. So Spike ploughed on.
So far, there was nothing special about this place, other than Mite had pointed it out to them at the start of the day, and when Mite pointed things out, you listened. She was so tiny, always wrapped up in clothes a hundred sizes too large, and yet she had survived the longest than any of them out in the wilds. Mite knew things without knowing, and she had known this place was worth visiting. They had no idea why since she never spoke, but Spike swallowed his distaste for dead places and ploughed on.
A dozen checkpoints in, after empty warrens of garages and smashed storage places, they pushed some more metal boxes out of the way, and the stuff of legend washed on their faces and hands. Light. Spike stared dumbly. The twins gasped and clasped each other’s shoulders. Claw cursed and drew her sword.
“What the… The place isn’t dead!” it was Claw’s raspy voice, but it may well have been Spike’s thoughts.
A bright red light still burned after centuries. It was stuck up on top of an enormous door that looked even less friendly than the one at the entrance. There were painted letters all over the place. Spike had never learned to read old wall scratches, but he could tell CRAWL BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM-type words when he saw them. They looked even less inviting on walls painted the colours of spilled guts by old world machinery that should have died before organics were even born.
He turned to Claw and nodded back towards the corridor they’d just turned from.
“Keep the Snap and Pop safe. Mite, with me.”
Claw nodded and drew the twins into the marginally less lit place, looking behind her and to the sides like the shadows might spring to life and eat the three of them any second. Spike turned to ask Mite how to proceed, but she wasn’t waiting patiently behind him anymore. Mite was halfway towards a big green button next to a big red button set on the right side of the door. Spike was taller, and stronger and faster, but his fingers closed on air when he tried grabbing her by her blankets before she slammed her palm into the green button.
Spike heard the hum build into the ground before it burst through the seams of the door as vibration strong enough to shake his teeth. The door cracked open down the middle and blasted his face with dusty air that carried the dull, low stench of ancient decay. Everything shook as the entrance slid open to reveal a room the size of a town, with an enormous machine in the middle of the floor. In the middle of the machine, suspended by chains and tubes, a dude.
It was hard to see into the new room, even though blue lights hummed faintly in the far corners. The scene was bizarre. Terrifying. Nothing ever went well when messing with the old world, and this setup was creepy in the extreme. Mite just walked in as soon as she could, but this time she had to walk past Spike who was fast enough to catch her arm. She turned to look at him, or at least to face him with the opening in the front of her blanket fort dress. Spike could see the glint of her eyes. He needed a sign.
“W…. water, please”.
No way. Spike jumped back, and even Mite seemed taken aback by the croaked ghost of a sound that could not possibly be the voice of the dude that should have had the good grace of dying hundreds of years ago.
Mite’s hand tugged his sleeve. She was pointing at his waist. He shook his head and looked for Claw, who was still peeking around the corner curiously. Spike freaked out to the max, and signed for her to hold back. Claw didn’t need to be told twice.
Spike’s heart hammered at the inside of his throat, and he froze long enough to feel stupid for not running away. When he pulled back, Mite held on with surprising strength. She nodded towards his belt again, at the water flask he kept there.
Spike closed his eyes and nodded. Mite knew.
He stepped into the room and was met with the much fresher, much stronger smell of the prisoner. The man certainly smelled like he was dead. Except he wasn’t.
The prisoner was old, with wrinkly skin and patchy white hair. Full homo sapien too. No extra limbs or nostrils or nothing. It was the creepiest, freakiest thing Spike had ever seen. It made him lose his step for a second, but he had to mind the campfire stories and never appear anything less than pure sigma. So Spike walked up to the dude, unhooked his canteen, and squirted a long stream of water down his throat.
The man’s eyes had been closed, and nothing happened for long enough that Spike was about to turn back when his nightmares turned out to be all real and not fantasy. The voice again.
“Please… more”.
This time the man’s eyes were open, but that wasn’t even the weirdest part. One eye was blind-white, the other the most shockingly blue he had ever seen. And he looked less wrinkly. Or maybe not. Maybe the stupid ghost lights were messing with Spike’s mind, but Mite was still there, and this story was going to be a good one. Jobs for a year for the guy who talked to the dead homo sapien.
So he squirted a little less water than before into the bizarre direction of the man’s gaping mouth. The teeth… they looked so white. Unnatural.
This time, Spike saw it happen. The man fleshed out before his eyes. His skin became a little less wrinkly. His blind eye gained a little colour and lost all milkiness..
“One more time. For the road. Please.”
The words made no sense, but there was something mystical about the moment. There was a thickness to the air, like when the story got good and you leaned forward to listen in. He just hoped it wasn’t a moment that warned against the dangers of rampant technology and monsters born of humanity’s hubris right before they wrecked the world.
Spike squeezed, the man drank, and finally closed his gross mouth. Then, the prisoner smiled, and the smile wasn’t entirely nice. It wasn’t evil nasty, but there was a line in that smile that was like a storm brewing on the horizon. The room felt colder.
“Thank you, young one. You have helped me in my time of need.”
Except the old dude wasn’t talking to him but to Mite. And Spike would have been pissed off if the scene had been a little less creepy. He was just happy dude was throwing those eyes somewhere else.
Then, the old man strained like he was going to the toilet, which would have accounted for some of the stench, but instead he was struggling to free himself from his restraints. Spike couldn’t keep his eyes from opening wide enough to let his soul escape when the metal creaked, whined, and finally cracked. Old man had just ripped his hands free of old world metal, and was sagging like he’d exhausted himself. Which was understandable, in a who-the-hell-understands-any-of-this way.
But there was no time to even say anything. Mite rushed forward to prop the old man, which was hilarious because she was about half a fart tall. Less hilarious was the way the room was going dark and quiet. Like the old man had been powering it, which made no sense because homo sapien were useless antiquities that lacked the organic power to survive in the world their mistakes had wrought.
Even less amusingly, even though the room had gone dark, there was a rumbling from the floor that Spike didn’t like the sound of one bit.
“Bol… you are but children.”
The old man was still looking at Mite but Spike almost slapped him right then and there. Except Mite had been trying to get his attention, pointing to the door and waving. This was something Spike could hang on to, instead of all the confusing shit that had been happening. Crap of legend aside, even people who had no faith in organics knew that when Mite pointed, you ran the hell out of wherever you just were. No matter what the strange old man you just rescued from machines of the end days was mumbling in his delirium.
“This place is all wrong… no… grace…”
Spike had already stopped paying attention. He propelled himself out of the room ahead of Mite, and saw that one of the preciously dead corridors was no longer dark. There was a faint blue light humming around the edge of its corner. A small echo bounced its way to his ears and it was hella scary. Like it had started much, much bigger very, very far away.
Spike turned to Claw and pointed the way they had come. Claw didn’t wait for him to point. She nodded, sheathed her sword, turned and grabbed one twin in each arm. Before Spike had turned to yell to Mite, Claw was already pounding her way back towards the exit.
“Leave the dead weight, Mite. Something bad is hungry!”
But Mite shook her head and pulled on the old man. He stepped after her, trying to pick up speed, but he was coughing and breathing like a wounded beast that didn’t even know it was dead yet. Spike wasn’t going to lose Mite, so he rushed in, pinning the old man against his shoulder and lifting him in a single motion. Dude spat out what sounded like his last breath, and Spike turned and ran. He didn’t look behind himself to check on Mite. She’d be fine. Mite always was fine.
Spike had no time to wonder at the weirdness this excursion was accumulating so he didn’t stop to think about how the lights overhead, in every corridor and in every hall, shone red when he ran past. The old man was news. Unfortunately, news was rarely good.
But Spike ran, his lungs swelling and burning in his chest, his throat too ragged to draw in enough breath. His pain meant nothing because now he could hear whatever was behind them clawing its way out of the base, and it sounded like hundreds of knives slamming into the metal walls. He could smell it too, oil and sparks burning in the dead air.
From this side, the entrance lock looked like a moon in the old drawings, when it was thin and on its side. Spike coiled, grabbed the old dude’s butt, and threw himself at the light, head down, eyes closed, unable to take another step, heart slamming itself against the inside of his head.
And it wasn’t enough. He did have another breath in him, it turned out, and it came out as a scream when cold, wet fingers slashed across his calf, tearing it to red ragged shreds. He landed on his face and turned just in time to see the thing that had chased them worm its way out of the mega door.
It was a nasty old construct. The ones that looked like demon insects with way too many legs, and everything on its body ending in a bladed, hooked torture horror. It was also made of blades. And red light shone through every place where two blades overlapped. It was big. It had eyes, naturally glowing red and entirely focused on Spike. Or rather on the wheezing near-corpse on his shoulder.
It was the end. Spike saw the chunk of metal Claw threw at the thing’s head, and watched it disintegrate as the creature slashed at it with indifference, never even looking away from the old man.
It had been decades and decades since anyone had a tale to tell about a base’s defence systems being up. Ten times that long since anyone had actually been threatened by one. No one had ever come across anything this reminiscent of the horrors of the old world.
“Demon, leave them! I’m here!”
The old zombie had fallen off his shoulder and somehow managed to stand. Spike had seen him power an entire ancient base, but that the old man could talk was still unbelievable.
The creature was mesmerised by its target. Every sharp thing on its body was aimed at him. Just to further abuse Spike’s senses, it seemed to hesitate before striking. Like it was weighing its options against the dead fart talking. But it was only a few seconds, and then it struck.
Mite had been walking steadily, never running, never rushing, as was her way. There was nothing casual about the way she held herself when she turned to face the blades that had been aimed at the old man. Nothing random about the way she spread her arms to make a larger target of her tiny body wrapped in that bundle of clothes that ended up looking like a pile of blankets because she was so tiny.
The blade made no sound other than a little gluck as it came out the other end of her, pale yellow blood coating its edges.
The old man screamed. Except it didn’t sound like an old man. It was a little like a roar, a lot like the sound of the wind raging against their shelter on the coldest nights of the year. The scream died in a silence that was even more terrible.
“Thank you, little one. Let’s take a trip now.”
At this point, Spike had no idea what was happening, but he felt light-headed. The world wasn’t supposed to work this way. They weren’t supposed to have ever come across this thing. They weren’t supposed to be alive. The old man wasn’t supposed to just get up, pick up Mite, and walk to the edge of the precipice just outside the base entrance.
Most importantly, his breathing wasn’t supposed to be this slow. The creature wasn’t supposed to be turning this slowly. The old man wasn’t supposed to be the getting straighter, his arms filling up with every step as Mite breathed her last breaths in his embrace.
“Yes, little one. It’s the first gift. They used to put it under my trees.”
Claw was still roaring, somehow suspended in mid-air, in a leap so heroic that it somehow did deserve time so it could be appreciated. If there was a mad universe where they lived, Spike would make a great telling of it.
The old man had reached the edge. He was still talking softly to Mite, who was still, and still bleeding on his jacket. Had he always worn one? Was it bright red? Spike had no idea. All he knew was the screaming pain of his torn-up leg, and the terror towering before him, the nightmare made of blades and light.
“It’s a simple step. We just need to reach 55 miles per…”
And then he was off the edge, falling to his damn death. Time sped up again, with a scratch as sound returned, along with normality. And the death of a hundred knives thrust at his face in spite and rage by the cybernetic dragon.
Even this wasn’t going according to plan, however. Because just as he was about to be sliced to ribbons, a red flash exploded from the bottom of the fall the old man had taken. And time didn’t just slow down now. It shattered, and the world became a bunch of broken flashes, with the winds of winter hounding the universe from one vision to the next.
First, the old man was back next to him, and Mite was by his side. She was holding the prisoner’s hand, and there was no slash in her chest. Then the dude, who still looked old but the kind you wouldn’t want to call old to his face because his hair was long and full, and his arms filled with muscle, he was standing before Spike, arms thrown up in an invocation.
“Blixen! Vixen!”
And two shapes leaked out of the darkness on each side of the monster, each taller than the mega door. They looked like they were on all fours, and the twisting shadows growing out of their heads glistened with malice and death. They rammed into each other, the creature between them. It was smashed to small pieces. They did not stop. With each detonation of the two beasts slamming into the creature, less and less of its light shone, until all that was left leaked on the floor in a puddle of mist that slowly wormed its way back to the red-clad stranger who’d just saved their lives by telling the rules of reality to take a hike for a minute.
This time, his eyes were almost painful to look into. They were so bright and charged with blue that his irises practically glowed, and staring into them tore at a part of Spike’s heart he didn’t even know he had.
The man extended his hand to help Spike up. Spike took his hand before remembering his mangled leg. Which didn’t hurt when he stood, so he looked down and saw that his calf was back to normal, scaled over with hard brown growths.
Spike had questions. The old man spoke first.
“They tried to take my energy to violate the world. They almost succeeded until your friend dreamed of me. And you came to rescue me. I owe you a great debt. The world does.”
While he talked, the old man walked between them, collecting stuff from the floor. When he touched Claw, her fingers grew back to half their size, losing the bony protrusions that hurt her on wet nights. When he put his hand on the twins’ heads, the fleshy growths that connected the sides of their faces melted away, and were replaced by shiny wireless modules. The twins stared at each other, grinned, and then hugged each other, for the first time since they were born.
In the meanwhile, the old man kept talking crap.
“I have to restore balance. It will be difficult.”
He looked up, something wicked and irresistible in his eyes.
“It will be an adventure.”
He put down the last sheet of metal, and Spike saw he’d built a kind of low box, a couple of metres wide, and a little longer. The metal simply stayed put when he placed it against the other pieces, like it was scared of disobeying him.
He pushed the metal thing to the edge of the precipice again, and stepped in. Mite followed. The dude turned to Spike.
“You coming? It’s not scary, we just need to reach…”
“55 miles” Spike completed the sentence. Not knowing its sense, but knowing. Whatever. Mite was standing with the old dude. That was enough for him. Claw and the twins followed.
The old man grinned and shouted a mighty HO that wasn’t sound but that travelled through the air, and there were nine beasts before them, and they shook their heads and stomped their feet, and then the sled took off. And it was way more than 55 miles per hour.
They flew on a crystalline road that hadn’t existed until they were on it, and that disappeared as soon as they passed. Once they had enough speed, the old man blurred a little. He changed, a different face for each angle Spike could see him from. He became many, each shedding and taking a different road, each a different possibility for the world.
And they rode on with the red madman and his insane power that made absolutely no sense but still reshaped reality around it, and Spike threw his hands in the air and jubilated, feeling like an idiot because it was an absolutely idiotic thing to do that made no sense whatsoever. This was going to be one hell of a story.