I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been receiving a lot of, uhm… a lot of positive feedback recently. Massive amounts. Twenty messages a day. Ah, okay... not twenty. Probably three a day for a while there. Thanks everyone, it’s really inspiring. Keeps the story going. So keep sending it. =)
Hmm, I’m mainly trying to build on personalities in this chapter. I’m particularly liking the way Jaime, Gunther, and Dom are coming out… but bah, that’s me, you’re supposed to be telling me how I’m doing. Anyway, I also wanted to set some things up for the next chapter. I think the next two or so are going to be rather tense, have a lot of excitement in them and whatnot. Erm, and, uh, yeah.
--- --- --- --- CHAPTER THREE
--- --- --- ---
The worker peeled piece by gooey piece from every nook and cranny of the deceased body in front of him, digging remnants of metal and augs of all kinds out from under the whitening skin, hearing bones snap and seeing the last blood the body contained ooze out like porridge. Sometimes he would have to reach a gloved hand in, dig around the intestines or other various organs manually, extracting as much as possible for recycling or even further use on another body. It was a gross job, but somebody at UNATCO had to do it.
Andreas tugged softly on another aug sample deep within the body. This one in particular had been specifically attached right to the nerves - some of them were like that, welded right into an organ or flesh. Most of them were like that. Some of them were nice and loose - the kind that were just implanted, the kind that were easy to take out. Andreas liked those. He pulled those out first every time they gave him a new body to disassemble. Then it was the attached suckers. He hated those.
He pulled at the piece some more with his tools. He’d have to sever the flesh and bone and nerves around this one, clean it out, sterilize it. But he had enough of that for the day. He’d rather filter the organic matter of the damn thing with a torch. Maybe he could borrow a flame thrower from Sam Carter. He chuckled through his surgeon’s mask at the idea.
Andreas gave the piece one heavy yank. He watched the fleshy mass around it stretch to unnatural limits like pulling a slice from a hot pizza, and finally snap, splattering a bit of liquid up on his uniform. He got the aug out, but it still had a chunk of fleshy tissue hanging on it. It could be cleaned. He threw it into the pan that held the rest of the smaller, lesser gadgets and augmentations he had removed so far.
“Now here’s a Kodak moment.” Malcolm Whiteman stepped up behind him, looked down at the pale and just-beginning-to-decompose corpse. “Finally got your ass kicked, eh, JC?” he jokingly asked the carcass. Andreas grinned a bit.
“Doesn’t this look fun?” Andreas asked, prodding various other larger augs he still had to remove. The eyes would be a pain. He’d have to dig them out.
“Oh, yeah, buddy, I mean, I gotta get this thing hung on my wall. Beautiful.”
“I can’t believe they actually took this guy down.”
“Gunther did. Hermann. You know who he reminds me of?” Whiteman took a sip from a soda can he had been holding. “Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
“Schwarzenegger? Nah… Schwarzenegger is Austrian. Gunther seems more like a...” Andreas pulled another piece out the forceful way, resulting in a loud snap as the surrounding tissue broke. “Ralph Moeller. Remember? He was Hagen in that old ‘Gladiator’ movie.”
“’Gladiator’? I never saw that.”
“Oh, come on! You don’t watch those old movies? ‘Gladiator’. What’s his name, Russel Crowe was in it. That movie was great.”
“I don’t know…” Malcolm said, looking at the floor. Then something seemed to pop into his head. “Oh, you know what I think was great? ‘Killer Zombies from Mars’! Drowning in blood was cool.”
Andreas stopped and stared at him.
“What?”
“Never mind,” Andreas said with a sigh. There was a pause. He extracted a scalpel from one pocket and circled around the table to the other end. He stood next to the body’s head. “Want to see how I take out eye augs?”
“That depends.” Malcolm grinned a little. “Will it be as disgusting as the mess Nevarre made when JC took her out?”
“Oh, man, you saw that?”
“Yeah. Nasty. Blood all over the place. The janitors were pissed.”
“That woman was a bitch anyway.” Andreas plunged the scalpel down into one of the dead JC’s eye sockets with a slight thuck. He started twisting the tool around a while, viscously tearing at the tissue on the sides of the socket, so that he could eventually work down to the muscle behind the eyeball. Nobody actually had the physical strength to just rip someone’s eye out in one yank - You would see that in the movies all the time. Somebody would dig somebody else’s eye out with a pen or something. But there’s so much thick flesh and tissue holding onto an eyeball that it’s just not possible without taking the time to literally saw your way through it.
Vision is augmented my ass, he thought.
“Yeah,” Malcolm finally said, carefully watching Andreas’s less-than-orthodox dismantling procedure. “Anna was definitely a bitch. And Gunther freaks me out, too. He seems obsessed with her or something. He got so pissed about JC fraggin’ her like that that he went berserk all over the place until Dr. Reyes had to sedate him. And he’s sick, too.” He shifted towards the corpse. “He dragged this thing into Manderley’s office and put it on his desk just for show. Both him and Anna were sick. Maybe they belong with each other. Heh. I bet they had some kind of sick little machine romance thing.” He laughed. “I wonder if they ever tried to nail each other.” He started laughing harder. Andreas shifted nervously, still digging and sawing at the eye. Malcolm kept rambling. “The two of ‘em… appliance porn!”
Andreas suddenly froze. Stared at Malcolm wide-eyed.
“What?” Malcolm said, smile fading.
Andreas wasn’t staring at him. He was staring behind him.
Malcolm started to turn around slowly.
But he never even got halfway around before something hit him in the back. Hit him hard. It sent a shockwave of pain up his spine and through his body. His vision blackened for a moment, he felt like he was going to pass out right there. More pain erupted around his body, and he suddenly found himself restrained. Malcolm struggled to regain his vision, struggled to escape the hurting - And then color and light rushed back to his brain, hit him like a brick.
He found himself staring into the eyes of none other than Gunther Hermann. The agent had Whiteman pinned up against the wall by his throat, holding him with one clenching fist, seething with rage, staring into him with cold eyes.
Malcolm made a gurgling noise. He realized he couldn’t breath.
Gunther squeezed harder.
“I… am not… a machine.” Gunther shook slightly. He looked like he was going to explode.
Malcolm made further gurgling noise, trying to respond, trying to gasp for air, felt trapped.
“You’re going to kill him!” Andreas shouted from across the room, backed up against the wall, still holding his bloody scalpel. “Agent Hermann! You’re going to kill him!”
Gunther paid no attention. Only squeezed harder. His metallic body resonated a livid heat, his augmented muscles tensed... For a moment, there was just a long pause. A long pause of anger and regret and worry and pain and helplessness. Just a long, breathless, dead pause. Nobody moved. Time seemed to tick by like it was stuck in slow motion. Every second that passed amplified the normally quiet tick of the clock into a blaring, monstrous thud. Every breath lingered in the air for eons.
And then with abrupt speed, everything returned in a blur.
“GUNTHER!” Andreas yelled one last time, and Hermann finally and immediately dropped Malcolm to the floor and stared at him with big, remorseless, dead eyes. Gunther glanced down to JC’s corpse.
The corpse returned his dead stare.
They shared the same eyes. The same perspective. He and the corpse.
And then Gunther picked up the partially disassembled body with one hand and threw it through the glass window of the medlab. Broken shards and sparkles exploded into the air, suspended in time and space, then all hit the floor in a shattered, soundless opera.
The body hit a wall and collapsed.
Unmoving. Gray.
Malcolm wheezed, his windpipe finally opening after the pressure that had been applied, allowing the dull air of the facility to rush back into his lungs. He coughed, violently, spitting up blood, holding his chest as though he had an open wound.
Gunther gave him one last empty stare before stalking out of the room.
Andreas breathed a moment. Just stared into nothingness. Stared down at his blood-drenches hands. He had dropped his scalpel somewhere along the line.
Perhaps you could say that Gunther was not completely a machine. He had human in him. But he wasn’t any more human than he was machine. And that human part of him was struggling to feel things - To separate itself from the machine… This was not a good thing. Gunther was only tormenting himself, and being tormented. His humanity was twisting itself in cruel ways. The man would go insane if he weren’t helped.
Andreas looked at Malcomb, crumpled and hurting on the floor.
Idiot, he thought.
--- --- --- ---
Dominic leaned over the railing of the warehouse rooftop, staring out at the Manhattan skyline. There were more out there. He knew there were. More of the NSF. Finding them would be easy enough. Getting them to fight again would not be. He couldn’t even convince his own team to leave the building. Sure, the death of their commander didn’t help. But it couldn’t be changed. Especially not by sitting around. He didn’t know how to get that message across.
Maybe he should just give them time to let their emotions settle.
Maybe he was just trying to push them too hard.
He didn’t know. He didn’t really care, either.
Whatever Hollywood tells you, whatever you see on the screen, whatever the media invents or you see in the next issue of National Enquirer magazine, there are no heroes. There are winners and there are losers. But they’re all ordinary guys.
Dominic was not a hero. Dominic was just a guy with a cynical view on the world.
He could stare out on the city all he wanted. He could put bullets in as many heads as he wanted. He could jump around in slow motion wearing an overcoat, dodging bullets like raindrops in a storm. He could even wear a cape and give himself a stupid name.
That wouldn’t make him a hero. He could still die, just like everybody else.
But it was his job to take a bunch of ordinary people and fight a bunch of other ordinary people for their cause. All those bureaucrats and killer suits out there were just fleshy masses called people, too. Even the augmented ones. Even JC Denton.
Even JC Denton wasn’t a hero. He could die just like everyone else.
And he did.
One side of the fight was the NSF. The NSF had what they had and got to make do with that. The other side was the corruption in corporate America and their cooperation with the government. Was the government itself. Was Gray Death and all the strings attached to it. Was all the black operations flying over the heads of all the people on this planet. It’s just amazing how often people forget to look up.
And that side could hide behind their desks and their stupid ties and their armies of goons all they wanted. But they were just ordinary people. They thought they had limitless power. They didn’t. All it takes is a bullet fired in the right direction and boom, it’s all over. They don’t seem to get that. They take everything they have for granted and try to take everything they don’t have and then take that for granted too.
Idiots. All of them.
Anyone who thought he was better than someone else was an idiot. Anyone who thought he ran the world was an idiot. They would kill themselves with their own ignorance.
Dom yawned. He was tired all the time. It was getting late, but that didn’t matter. He was tired all the time because his sleep schedule hardly even existed. He would rest whenever he could, which was not often, and at sporadic times.
He turned around, meaning to head downstairs, back into the building, when he saw Jess standing in the doorway. She was looking at him.
“Want something?” Dominic asked, pulling a cigarette from one pocket and a lighter from the other. He put the cigarette in his mouth and clicked the lighter, once, twice, each time emitting a fluorescent glow that broke the surrounding blackness.
“You smoke?” she said.
“Not really.” He looked at the pack of cigarettes in his hand. He’d been going through a pack a day.
“Well, you shouldn’t.”
“Don’t.” He turned around and leaned on the railing again. There was a long pause.
“Dom,” she said, walking across the gravel rooftop to him. “I know you’re having trouble dealing with the squad. They don’t understand you. They don’t know you.”
“I know.”
“You ask them to put their trust in you… And then all you do is push them away.”
Dominic shook his head. He released a breath of smoke into the air. It curled away like it had a mind of its own.
“You also keep telling them we need to do something,” she continued, “but then you do just what they’re doing.”
“Which is what?”
“Sitting around, feeling sorry for themselves.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Look, Jess, I’ll tell you this once. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I don’t feel sorry for anyone else, either. Don’t try to get to know me. Don’t try to feel sorry for me. What you can do right now is leave me the hell alone.”
Jess stared at him for a while. “Bullshit.”
“Good for it. Go away.”
“Bullshit, Dom.” She started walking back to the building.
“And tell the guys we’re moving tomorrow,” he shouted after her.
She gave him the finger and disappeared back into the building.
“Yeah, thanks,” he muttered to himself.
Tough girl. Beautiful, too. Not too many of those. He liked that.
--- --- --- ---
Jaime was nervous.
They were leaving for Hong Kong the next day. Jock, Alex, and himself had been formulating a plan for how to slip away as quickly as possible. It’ll be a piece of cake, Jock told them, as long as we have our timing right. Slip out before they have a chance the lock onto the chopper and things’ll be fine. As long as nobody gets suspicious or they don’t have any heads up about or departure, it’ll be a piece of cake.
Pretending not to be nervous was not a piece of cake.
I could use some chocolate cake right now, Jaime thought.
Reyes did not handle stress well. It was visible. He wore it like a suit. He wasn’t nervous for himself, really, he was nervous for Jock and Alex. Jaime was taking a public flight to Hong Kong, so he was really out of the danger zone. But Jock and Alex… they had to leave in the chopper. Alex could’ve taken a public flight, he just insisted on going with Jock. Jaime didn’t understand him.
Jaime also did not like taking risks.
“Doctor?”
Reyes snapped back to reality and looked at the eyes of the patient he was treating. He felt dazed. He had lost himself in his train of thought for a moment.
“Sorry…” Jaime murmured.
“You okay, doc? You don’t look so good. Maybe you should see a doctor.”
“No, I’m fine. Just a little preoccupied.”
“Oh.”
Jaime looked down at his hands. They shook visibly.
“Doc? You sure you’re okay?” The soldier glared at his hands curiously.
“Sorry,” Jaime murmured, burying them in his coat.
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