Shadows of Elysium: The Laughing King

Chapter 1: The Code: Mercy

The sight of the little blonde girl named Marcey in the bedroom doorway calling to come get breakfast filled young Jasper with dread, knowing the way she died.

As soon as he awoke, Jasper was dressed and on the staircase. Other details didn't seem right either. The walls were plain white and dizzying to look at. Fingers were blurry, and he counted seven on the left hand and three on the right. It was clearly a dream, but it felt like far more, and it was arduous to remember why at the moment.

Do you ever wake up knowing something was going to go horribly wrong that day? Jasper and Marcey were running down the stairs before the screaming had even started. Their feet touched the last step, and Marcey ran to grab a gun. Jasper's was already equipped as he rounded the corner. Shaking hands raised to level the sights with his dad's head.

Parasites dripped from the man's eyes as he pushed his wife against the wall and bit down again. Her neck and shoulder were filling up with tadpole sized squids as the wounds bled. The first shot was next to nothing for Jasper; it was quick and without remorse. How could he have felt bad for giving his dad peace and saving his mom? Besides, it wasn't his dad anymore.

His vision clouded with tears as her knees hugged the floor. The parasites had already entered the bloodstream but had yet to reach her eyes. It was still his mom's eyes looking up, knowing and kind, "I'll always love you."

Jasper awoke sweating profusely with a smoking revolver in hand and the harsh reality of why he slept with it hitting once again. The sun was halfway through the sky. Waves of heat rippled out of the desert and into the small patch of trees the night's hammock was tied between.

It would've been easy for a man as barbarically large as Jasper to fall asleep on the soft earth and not struggle with the climbing. However, sleeping outside in the Wastelands was a risky move, and sleeping on the ground was a guarantee that a parasite would crawl into your ear and latch onto your brain.

As if to drive this home, a foot-long cone with deep rows of teeth struggled to climb the tree roots below with its thin, fleshy appendages. Jasper took a long moment to think about the unfinished dream and an even longer moment to relive the faces of the dead. Some had died in his arms, most by his hand.

Counting had become a lost cause somewhere around 100, but all of their faces came swarming back to mind every single day. Before long, he found himself staring down the barrel of a .45 caliber revolver.

The other hand brushed up against his chest pocket where two books were tucked; one called The Code, and a Journal (mostly full of the terrible jokes that passed for humor this side of the walls). The deep wave of shame and pride could have easily made his trigger finger twitch, but instead, he put away the gun.

After all, why not die fighting.

A stag handled knife fell straight down from the hammock. It pinned the vile cone to the tree roots with a thunk and a horrific locust screech, its tendrils flailed wildly in death throws. Jasper followed the knife six feet down onto a bad ankle (broken by a mutant slaver years ago). He then stumbled into the tree with his right shoulder and slid down face-to-
...mouth with the lumpy cone. A lone tendril touched his cheek and melted into the skin. Jasper pulled back from the dead creature before it could pass on an egg and sat up against the tree.

The man from Valoria slipped his pauldron off of the offending shoulder and undid his leather jacket with more struggle than a Valorian would have admitted. A small bullet shaped scar lay on his chest with a much larger star shaped exit wound wrapped around the shoulder (the bulk of the scarring on the back). Jasper applied a salve that would supposedly help and gathered up the heavier weaponry and other things that couldn't be slept with.

A .50 caliber sniper rifle slung over shoulder, an overly massive sword (named Memento-Mori) even for a 7' 10" brick of muscle, a rucksack, a hammock, and a halberd that served as a cane to help walk up over the hill and into the valley. He straitened a hole-riddled cowboy hat against the sun as the smell finally hit his broken-time- and-time-again nose.