Episode 4 - Cold Fusion

  Chapter 33 - Operation: Erratic Possibility (3)

  If I didn’t know better, I could be convinced the world was ending in this warehouse.

  Pooka navigates nimbly though the steam, leaping pipes, cantering around tanks and between ponds. Around us, men and symbionts scream maddened oaths and incoherent garbled regrets. The Cygnus trumpet, I can hear their beating wings. Somewhere a psittaculid caws and screeches. Occasionally a status light flashes in the gloom, diffuse red and green and blue illuminating the oppressive steam blanket trapped in the warehouse with us.

  Men pass us as flailing shadows, Pooka deftly dodging their grasping hands. The occasional one brushes against my legs, knots fingers in my clothes, or brushes Pooka’s sides and my own shared awareness of his body. I kick them back and off him before Pooka decides to do worse to them.

  I don’t know why things ended out like this. My guess is that between the concentrated dose designed for thousands of people, and it being super-heated, the Erratic might be having a more extreme effect than I expected. Although Adrian did say it turned people mad. I can feel something in my bond with Pooka, a strengthening of what was already there, but nothing slipping me beyond my already sometimes tenuous control of our separate identities. I guess I hoped they might feel something more like I did. It was a stupid plan.

  To these men, or these symbionts, it must be overwhelming to feel something like this, compared to what they normally feel. Or maybe the Erratic is doing something else to them as well.

  They are not conduits. This is not a natural partnership even with the chains unlocked. These brothers were likely never meant to leave the hollow. Both suffer. I will grant them mercy when we are done.

  I’m sorry this didn’t go better.

  Pooka’s hide trembles beneath my hands. His mind almost caresses mine, like he’s resting his chin on my knee again. I feel a fleeting love, a growing trust, a yearning sadness. If only he had my youth still, and optimism he’s grown too jaded and ancient to feel.

  We tried something new. It is the first time I have done so in many lives.

  Only a few moments pass before we slow to a canter behind the huge columns containing the reverse osmosis membranes, and towards the work area where I last saw Everett on the cameras. I vault down into the pale and jog up to the manifold control, Everett’s lock still hangs over the clear plastic cover pulled down over the switchboard.

  Then I spy blood on the ground.

  I can smell it through Pooka, tracing the scent. It’s not Everett’s, I can tell that through the senses Pooka offers me and his familiarity with the humans regularly around me. We wander after it, Pooka stepping behind me as the Equus still, his head tipped downwards and large nostrils flaring as he breathes in the moist, iron tang of fresh blood.

  I almost trip on the dead body when it emerges from the white. I kneel to get a better look, Pooka nuzzling it with his lips. The human’s neck is clean and whole; this wasn’t one of the men Pooka killed already. Instead there are several deep stab wounds on his chest, red blood blooming across his workwear.

  I take a deep shuddering breath. Everett might not be any different from these men then.

  An alarm begins to call. Its klaxon is followed by an intensification of the cry of the men around us, like panicked beasts whipped into frenzy. I hear them moving just beyond my vision, trampling boots against the floor, or the echoes of metal pipes and crashing bodies. Pooka flattens his ears against his skull, his burning eyes turning the white around us red as it reflects back his sight when he looks over his shoulder towards the open areas of the warehouse between the sedimentation ponds. The chaos calls him still, primal instincts yearn to return and kick and boil again. Only my focus moves us both forward.

  “Everett?” I call hesitantly into the still.

  “Conrad?” replies a familiar voice with a strangled choke. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Where are you?” I ask.

  “Don’t come closer!” warns Everett. Despite his words, I step towards the sound of his voice, trailing my fingers over the metal surface of an upright water tank.

  “Why?” I can’t quite keep the shake from my voice. Pooka pushes his muzzle into my shoulder, jostling me with his huge equine head. His ears are pricked forward and alert, and his eyes burn with protective fire.

  “Because...” Everett steps from the white, his maintenance coveralls and arms splattered with red. His jaw is clenched so tightly he might crack a tooth, his eyes blood shot and wild, and his usually poised tension trembles as if he’s only just in control of himself. In his dominant hand, his knife, the one he normally conceals on his body, is gripped in knuckles white beneath the blood.

  I keep my distance. Pell is still on his shoulder, three of her legs stretching up the side of his head. Her own eyes catch the red of Pooka’s in the mist.

  “Are you alright?” I ask.

  “How the fuck are you so okay?” he asks, taking a shuddering breath. He grimaces as if the words are too loud and cause him pain. “Fuck, Adrian get out of my head.” He lifts one hand to his forehead and stains his swarthy skin with streaks of blood from his fingertips.

  “You were locked in,” I surmise, taking another step closer. I can’t tell if any of the blood is his. He seems disorientated, but not harmed. “Is Adrian okay?”

  “Yes, probably, I don’t fucking know. Don’t come closer, I swear my head is going to split open.”

  A garbled cry sends me spinning, our voices attracting the other men to our location. Pooka spins, bellowing with sudden fury. He rears, kicking his hooves over my head protectively, and plunges into the white before I can even stop him. Everett buckles against the tank he’s leaning on, putting both fists to his head and contorting his face with pain.

  Still cautious of the knife in his hands, I keep my distance. “Everett, we need to get out. You need to keep yourself together, keep track of your edges.” I instruct.

  He spreads his fingers and stares at me with dawning realization, blue pupils almost glowing between his fingers. “Why aren’t you affected?”

  “I-”

  “What did you do?”

  “Don’t.”

  “You fucking did this?”

  “I did!” I scream in reply, bunching my fists at my side. “I told Pooka to blow the Erratic. I did this! Happy? It was that or let him kill us all! It doesn’t matter now. It’s all fucked, we need to get out of here.”

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Those men are broken!” he yells back at me, fully dropping to the ground in a crouch. “Let alone the fact this operation is royally-”

  “Oh, go watch a fucking clock! Nepo-baby! Executive! I don’t fucking care!”

  “You-”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” I can feel my emotions boiling over, Pooka’s feral thoughts spinning them out of control and beyond my ability to bottle up any longer. I catch flashes of him dancing between the bodies of men, hooves flailing. “I’ve gone along with everything at Aquila! You all have no idea what you’re all like! You think it’s all just ‘another job’ but it’s my life! My family! You’d be dead if I didn’t do this. Fuckin’ dead you hear me! I’ve saved your miserable life!”

  Everett’s jaw hangs open in stunned silence, his fingers clawed around his face and dragging against his skin in agony at whatever still torments him internally.

  “If Pell is wrecking up your brain, good! You probably deserve it!”

  “She’s not. She’s trying to help,” yells Everett back, choking his words off with a strangled gasp. “I’ve got a billion fucking eyes!”

  I lift my hand to my mouth suddenly realizing what might be happening. Everett was locked in with Adrian, usually a one-directional bond from Adrian to his target. When they say the Erratic strengthens bonds, what they mean is it opens the bond to actually work both ways, just like Pooka and I are. Through Adrian, Everett must be connected to the Vespa as well - but, without Adrian’s naturally dampened capacity. Somehow he’s holding on to being this coherent while being bonded simultaneously to Adrian, Pell, and every single one of Adrian’s symbiont’s bodies.

  And every other human in this place is a dribbling mess from just their own symbiont entering their head. I cannot imagine the strength of will he must have to hold on.

  “Oh fuck, Rhett…” I immediately soften, holding my own hands out in front of me. He still has that knife in his hands.

  Rhett drags one hand down his cheeks, staining his face with rusty streaks. “I can’t believe you did this. It only goes this badly when you are involved. Did it ever cross your mind to actually think about your actions?”

  “Oh- just shut it. Can you put the knife down?”

  He watches me between his fingers as if he’s assessing his own safety, like I’m a threat to him somehow. Pell lifts one leg and lands it slowly on the side of his skull, her forelimbs bobbing and her body hunkered tight to the side of his head. She isn’t wild, screaming with the other symbionts. She’s still here with him. She might be the weak link in their relationship, he might be barely able to hear her, but she’s still choosing to be here with him.

  Rhett’s fingers uncurl slowly one by one, like he is fighting his own body to discard the weapon. With a clatter it drops to the ground at his side, bouncing on the concrete. I rush to him to close the distance, ignoring the blood on his hands as I draw them down from his face and search his cobalt eyes with my own.

  “You have to know where your edges are,” I instruct. “The places that are you and the places that are them, in your own head.”

  Our bodies. My heartbeat.

  Rhett takes a breath, but surrenders his hands to my own and lets me draw them down, pushing them into his own chest. His fingers are slick with blood in my hand, but I rub them with my own anyway, trying to give him feelings from his own body to focus on.

  “How?” he asks, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallows.

  “Find something that is only you. And hold onto it.” I push his palm against his chest over his heart. “Listen to my voice.”

  In the terror of the world around us, I wait with him. I’ve never seen him like this, always perfectly indifferent, brimming with poised control. Here he seems scattered and vulnerable, grappling with whatever the flood of thousands of bodies mixing their sensations in his head feels like.

  “This is what it’s like?” he asks slowly. He doesn’t need to explain he’s asking about me, his eyes do that with how he looks at me as he says the words. His hand tightens on his chest, bunching his overalls in his fist.

  “The clarity is I think,” I reply. It feels suddenly liberating to say this to someone. Pooka is too distracted elsewhere to really be paying attention. “I can’t tell who we are sometimes. I don’t control, we just overlap. We’re not dangerous, just a bit confused sometimes. You’ve got more than one voice in there too though, I don’t have that.”

  He swallows again. “Adrian's livid. Mum is going to throw a fit. We need to abort.”

  Not the first time I’ve been called in to be disciplined. “I came to get you out of here. I-”

  Rhett pushes me aside, surging to his feet. I gulp a yelp of surprise as my shoulder hits the ground. Before I can even process what he’s reacting to, he has the knife in his hands again, rising to meet a man I couldn’t hear coming through the sound of the alarms. They grapple in the steam for barely a second, the crazed man no match for Rhett’s practised efficiency, like his body moves without the need for his conscious control even now. Rhett closes any gap between them and plunges his knife into the man’s throat, down into his chest cavity behind the collar bone. Blood sprays, black in the fog, and he lets the knife go down with the body stepping back from it with a predator's precision. It’s not clean. The man gasps and chokes on his own blood for several moments as it comes up through his mouth and nose. I feel the taste of bile in my throat, and a faint feeling of pointed teeth that aren’t mine.

  Disgusted, Rhett kicks the body away from him and turns back to look at me, trying to brush the blood off on his clothing with trembling hands. “We aren’t getting out unless we fight our way clear,” he grunts.

  I push myself up to my knees again, cupping my bruised shoulder with one hand, watching the dead body with shock, then I blink to steady myself. “They won’t go back to normal when it wears off?”

  Rhett shakes his head, taking a step as he seems to unbalance himself with the motion. “No,” he grimaces again. “Adrian had more than we were given on the Erratic. We can handle it, we have high bond levels. It breaks someone not used to it, permanently, even after it wears off. Nothing will help those men, not at this dose.”

  I squint at him. “What do we do?”

  “We fight our way out.” His jaw tightens, his eyes dart, his fingers twitch. He might have responded swiftly to one man, but he’s barely in control of himself. And they’ll go down spitting their own blood between their teeth. They don’t deserve that.

  I will be the storm. A tempest of final mercy. The rain shall wash clean.

  I get to my feet, and steel my heart.

  Go Pooka. Set them free.

  We become nothing. We slip away to mist.

  The humans we danced between grasp at air after us, tripping on their fallen brothers. We relished their chaos, dissolving into their madness with joy and abandon. Their terror and death slaked our thirst. Creatures of rotting flesh before us, sapping life from a mother drained, destined for death the moment they were born.

  We are relentless. We had forgotten. Greater than we have been in a dozen lifetimes, for this will be our conclusion. This time, we will die one final time to be at last with our mother earth.

  But not quite today. This time we will try again.

  We gather the energy required for our judgement. The instant cone of subzero cold freezes the dozen men in our vicinity. Their bodies shatter as they hit the ground.

  Metal, like liquid and vines, joins our shapeless symphony. Swirling, writhing, dancing, twirling. We spin it from the tanks and pipes around us. Water twists after, freezing as curling branches and motes of crystal snow. They bloom like forests, frozen in place as we sap their turbulent energies. Pressure, heat, momentum, every force of the mother is ours for the taking. The men swept into us are consumed by rushing water and rending metal in our mounting storm as we surge outwards.

  When we have enough, we unfurl as cataclysm.

  Tendrils mix with metal and ice, pure energy becomes fire and lighting. Every direction, all at once, we instantly are. We take sixty bloodless lives in an instant of profound destruction.

  My brothers fall, their passing shape a moment of black mist as they sink again to hollow.

  The only place that we do not touch, contains two bodies. One with a sister who chooses to stay. Who it seems has a host with a small hint of conduit too, bred weak and thin, but a hint none the less.

  And the other is my precious love. Who called me twice, and now who shows me something new. Who offers me herself as solid stone where I am wind and rain, to feel and think and love again. We overlap; and I do not hate where she holds me firm, and where she begins to soften me again.

  I will bloom once more. Youthful and hopeful. As a bud dreaming of the spring after the snow.

  Crikey steveirwini (you can guess this one)

  Aleiodes sharkirae (named after Shakira)

  Sylvilagus palutis hefneri (Hugh Hefner, agh, it's a rabbit too. Don't ask too many questions about there being three names here, I'm not explaining subspecies!)

  Dracorex hogwartsia anyone?). I'm not saying science has to be serious, and not have a bit of fun. But I think leave human names out of it! Bird Names for Birds! Skulls for the Skull Throne!