Breaking Point

Chapter 2: Out of the Fog, Into the Fire

Zaid took a sudden sharp breath.

The buzzing in is shoulder was gone.  He felt strength in his limbs again as though they had never been restrained.  He was acutely aware of his deprivation -- thirst, starvation.  It was too dark to see with his natural eye, but his synthetic eye never had issues with darkness.  As his awareness increased he found that he was able to pull his left hand free of its pillar restraint.  He looked down at his right arm and it reformed to the comfortable and familiar shape of his hand and wrist again.  Looking at the wire-tethered spike by his neck, he pulled it callously out of his body, a full six inches of it dripping with his blood, no more painful to him than a sliver.  He felt the chain at his back, finding it to be too difficult to undo without being able to see it, so he pulled himself down with his feet until the chain snapped, several links dangling down his back.  His right hand formed a pry-bar with a hinge, useful for undoing the boot restraints on his feet.  Finally he could stretch and undo the tension of weeks of restriction.

He hesitated.

This is what Draygon wanted.  Why couldn't I just stay in my restraints?

He took a breath and closed his eyes.  No fatigue.  No voices.  Only clarity.

At least I'm not insane.  He thought back through his conversation.  Maybe not being insane was actually worse.  Draygon's voice promised Zaid his freedom.  This meant he had to be still alive.  That his psychic abilities had grown even more powerful to project his voice over a much greater distance.  That there was something sinister planned.

Those words.  "Or, you can try to choose to stay imprisoned, only to create yet another of your worst moments as they come to contain you."  Zaid's memory flashed back to that time.  Only this time he saw himself where he was, scores of enforcement crew around him, arms and legs being ripped from sockets, dead charred bodies formerly running for safety.  Never again.

He didn't have a choice.  He had to do what Draygon wanted, or everyone who came to contain him would die.  He pressed forward,  remembering the way he was brought in, finding his way to the elevator, ripping the door open and ducking under the frame in order to fit his three-meter-tall frame through.

With no electricity to power the elevators, Zaid extruded sharp spikes from the compartment on his left wrist and the fingers of his right hand formed razor sharp tips.  He scaled the concrete walls of the elevator shaft, dropping particles and leaving puncture marks as he went, until he had ascended from the deep basement to the ground floor, pushing the elevator up and out of the way.

He emerged through the door to a dead human carcass lying face down on the marble floor, with round stab wounds and a chunk taken out of her back.  She was clearly running away from whatever killed her.  The blood splattered across her white coat was still red and wet.  Whatever did this to her wasn't human, and it had to be close by.  Zaid's arm morphed into an ion blaster and a half-meter-long blade extruded forward from his wrist.  He knew he was about to meet it.  And it wasn't going to be pretty.

Bright moonlight illuminated the voluminous lobby through ceiling-to-floor windows as Zaid stepped forward slowly, gun-arm slowly sweeping, looking for any signs of movement, ready to shoot at whatever killed that woman.  He reached the edge of the staircase leading to an overlook surrounding the lobby.  Two more dead on the stairs, one face down and the other face up.  He went to the left at the top of the stairs.  The crimson carpet was scored with marks from a plasma rifle, leading up to another dead body.  This one was still clutching his weapon, and looked like he served as a more hearty meal than the first woman he had seen, at least in terms of the fraction of flesh remaining.

Now there was a clearer blood trail to follow, showing a large number of point-footed legs, rounding a corner and into a room.  This was it.  Zaid peeked in, sweeping his aim from corner to corner before fully entering the room and stepping around the desk.  The floor was clear.  His eyes went back to the blood trail.  It went up the wall and up to the ceiling just above the door.

Four meters long.  Chitin-plated carapace.  Six arthropod legs on each side of a segmented body.  Two scorpion tails, each over two meters long, with a ten centimeter stinger at each tip.  Two pincers, each a meter long.  Two large black primary eyes, facing forward, and six more smaller secondary eyes surrounding its head to see in every direction.

Zaid froze.  Not out of fear, but knowledge.  Its instinct is to attack anything that moves too quickly.  This could be over a lot more easily if he could get in a good shot first.  He slowly aimed his gun-arm at the creature's head, hoping to hit its primary eyes.  Slowly.  Slowly.  The ion cannon made a faint whine as it charged up to take the shot.

Big mistake.  Too loud.  The creature skittered with all the speed of a cockroach from a light, down the wall and straight toward the source of the sound.  Zaid's first shot hit one of its back legs but that didn't make a difference; it still had five others on that side.  He stumbled back against the wall as it tackled him, holding its heavy pincer back with his hand.  It managed to bite at Zaid's belly.  His other hand returned from its gun form to protect him from the other pincer.  Its two tails flailed forward, one of them slapping his face with the stinger and the other making contact with his chest.  The pain of the venom motivated Zaid, boosting his strength to overpower the pincers and crack one of its exo-joints.  Now acting threatened, the creature attempted to retreat but Zaid's fist met its front eyes, crushing them before he gripped it by the bridge between its eyes and slammed its full long body against the wall.  It struggled as Zaid dragged it out of the room, flailing and stinging his back, before being whipped overhead and slammed down against the railing, its chitin plating broken and its rear body paralyzed.

Zaid dropped it from the overlook, then jumped down to crush its head, ending its struggle.

His belly grumbled.  It had been a long time since he had eaten anything.  He looked down at the bite marks on his belly, already healed.  He changed his arm to microwave emitter form and held it against the dead creature for a few seconds before changing it back to a hand, peeling back the plating and taking a chunk of steaming meaty flesh and shoving it in his mouth.  "What?  It's only fair.  You got a bite of me, I get a bite of you.  Quit complaining."  Zaid chuckled at his own joke.  Humor he'd learned from Rellik.  Made him feel a little more human, a little less monster, at least for a brief moment.  She always had something funny to say at the end of every skirmish.  He missed that.  He could never have that sort of camaraderie again after the incident, at least not in person.  They'd kept in touch over cellnets but were always being pulled in different directions.

His thoughts were interrupted by that hiss.  Meet me on the roof.