CHAPTER 42: HUMANE| PHILTERWORKS—IV

  COMMONWEALTH INDUSTRIAL PARK—NOVEMBER 20th, 1992 | EARLY EVENING

  ?

  Sigils hummed as Janice twisted her key into place.

  The door swung open, and Cameron entered.

  Out of his peripheral vision, he saw Guts whizz past him, singular green-white eye blinking amidst the swirls and coils of the wispy, wind-like aura that the sprite was made of. Cameron couldn’t help but smile. His theory was right—Guts would protect him so long as it felt Cameron was actually in danger. And without his hexling abilities active, that was a given.

  Inside, the room was occupied by six men, and the only thing that unified them was their kevlar vests, their pistols, and the surprised look on their faces. They were quick to the draw, but Guts was quicker.

  Fast as it was, it didn’t expand in size, not like Mercedes’ sprite did.

  Guts was no larger than a softball, and moved like he’d been thrown by a professional pitcher. It slammed into the first man to point his barrel at Cameron, throwing him into the side of the wall. It stared down at him, and upon blinking, a gust of wind thrashed him into the metal concrete floor again.

  Another man attempted to fire, not at Cameron, but at Guts.

  The sprite whizzed to the side, blinked, and inadvertently sent him barreling towards Cameron.

  Now or never.

  Cameron pushed off his back foot, crossing the distance faster than he anticipated, and pistol whipped the man in the face right as he fell. Something cracked; either the man’s nose or his face, and he fell to the ground with a groan.

  Two down. Four to go.

  And the remaining guards weren’t so idle.

  Ringing filled Cameron’s ears, and he hadn’t registered the fact that he’d been shot until he saw the bloodspatter hit the floor. A burning sensation shot up and down his arm, traveling along the length of his left side. A groan escaped Cameron. Pain surged where the bullet went straight through his shoulder, but he pivoted nonetheless, fueled by an adrenaline so human and so strong that it put whatever part of him was hexling to shame.

  The one who’d fired at him was close.

  Straight-shot. He didn’t need two hands, and luckily, his good side wasn’t dealing with a bullet wound.

  Cameron raised his arm and fired.

  Not once, but three times. All of them hit the man in the torso, and while the kevlar saved the man from certain death, it didn’t save him from Guts. The sprite zipped towards the grounded shooter—who laid flat on his back, winded—and blinked at him. Once for safety’s sake, twice for good measure. He’d been thrashed across two sides of the room by the time Guts was done with him.

  Three down.

  “Shoot that thing, damn it!” one of the remaining guards yelled.

  Clips were nearly emptied, and bullets ricocheted across the room as Guts bobbed and weaved. Even if they did hit the sprite, Cameron wondered how much good it would do. Given the thing's aversion to damage, however, Cameron surmised that whatever bullets they were had the capacity to damage Guts.

  All the more reason for things to end quickly.

  On his good side, Cameron shoulder-bashed the guard who yelled, shoving him up against a wall. He smacked him across the face with his Reign 18. One of his teeth flew to the side and rocketed outwards with a burst of blood. Dazed and disoriented, Cameron adjusted his grip on his pistol, planted its barrel flat against his chest, and fired.

  Two left.

  His good hand began to shake. Cameron grit his teeth, and tried to tighten his grip around his gun to stabilize the tremors that seemed to multiply in his hand with each passing second. A bullet grazed him just to the side of his head. Had Guts not shoved the man to the side, that bullet very well would’ve landed in his throat, or straight into his skull.

  Cartilage tore and ripped.

  A chunk of Cameron’s upper right ear was on the ground, and blood steadily flowed along the side of his face and neck. Something between a ring and an ache consumed whatever he should’ve been hearing. He fell to his knees, and very nearly onto his back. His grip faltered, and the Reign 18 dropped onto the ground. If it weren’t for the wall behind him, he’d be prone.

  He’d gotten so used to relying on his hexling abilities that pain, when felt, seemed worse. More pronounced. It was the kind of throbbing, stabbing pain—so strong that it made Cameron feel like he was going to vomit. Worse still was the ringing. He couldn’t hear out of his right ear.

  One left.

  Guts had kept him busy while Cameron gathered his bearings. Muted gunshots fired off until they didn’t. Slowly, Cameron stood, hand holding his bloodied ear, and narrowed his gaze onto the last of the guards. He was out of bullets, and Cameron lacked a gun. Both of their eyes swiveled towards the floor, where the Reign 18 had made a home between a group of bodies—some unconscious, some dead. The man leapt, and as he did so, Guts blinked at him, sending him hurling into the opposite concrete wall. A groan escaped him.

  Cameron dove, and he landed on his bad side, where his arm had long since stained his beige denim jacket clusters of red. An exclamation of pain was forced out from his lungs, but he reached for his gun nonetheless.

  Just as the man began to stand, Cameron pointed, aimed, and fired.

  He missed the first time. But not the second.

  A bullet pierced through the man’s leg. He groaned, held his thigh, and mumbled incoherently. Cameron rose to his feet, and with a heavy foot, paced over to him. Wisps of wind gathered around Guts, but before it could blink, Cameron whistled. Guts turned, and Cameron shook his head.

  As deftly as he could, Cameron reached for one of the four vials of pasteurized demon blood on his person, which were attached to his belt next to where Gut’s cage was. He grabbed a vial, bit the cork off, and downed the repugnant, slimish liquid. One would work. Two would’ve been ideal, given the state of his arm, and his ear. But Leroy had warned him about double-dosing, and he’d seen first hand the kind of hangover that could induce. His ear burned, and he could feel the blood steadily dripping from the severed cartilage. His arm would stabilize and heal, but that chunk of his ear wouldn't be growing back.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “There’s another.. hnng..” Cameron exhaled sharply. Standing proved to be harder than he thought. He popped a squat in front of the guard, and rested his good hand over his knee, Reign 18 tight in his grasp. “Door. Another door, right over there. Sigilmarked. Friend of mine told me there’s a woman here. A woman there.” Cameron pointed his gun at the door. “Behind that.”

  The guard scoffed.

  Cameron set his jaw. “Somethin’ funny, asshole?”

  “It’s not a woman anymore.”

  Cameron nodded slowly, and with a sudden jolt of energy, stood up and pistol whipped the guard unconscious with his pistol. He’d served his purpose; which was to confirm whether or not Janice had been lying. For all Cameron knew, this whole thing could’ve been her way of getting Cameron killed for snooping around.

  Guts shrunk in size a bit and no longer blinked. The greenish white will-o-wisp settled, and hummed to itself as it found an idle position next to Cameron’s shoulder, levitating just above it.

  “Janice!” Cameron yelled, voice straining. He leaned up against the wall and tried to steady his breathing.

  Hours ago, he’d slain half a dozen garou. Viscous, ugly things. Meaner and stronger than any of these oafs, and yet, they’d done more of a number on him than any of those fiends had managed with their claws and fangs and bestial strength. Cameron recalled Leroy’s whole spiel about how he had to learn to conduct himself without his abilities. If Guts hadn’t been there to cover him, Cameron knew he would’ve died. He had a lot to learn.

  Janice slowly stepped inside of the room. Her eyes widened at the scene. Six guards were unconscious, and a handful among them were dead, as evidenced by the blood. And the room, it wasn’t particularly large, which had a way of making the whole thing look worse than it was.

  Before she could say anything, Cameron nodded towards the sigilmarked door. “You’ve got a key for that, yeah?”

  “Yes.” Janice awkwardly stepped over the downed men and reached for her sigil-marked key. "I should warn you, it—”

  “Just open the door,” Cameron said curtly, pushing himself off the wall and walking over towards Janice. Janice twisted the key into place. Sigils buzzed along the length of the steel, and as soon as she opened it, Cameron was greeted by the sound of whirring.

  ?

  His mouth dropped open. His pupils shook. His heartbeat quickened, and it drummed inside of his chest, and speedy beat after another.

  A massive steel table strapped a creature into place. Drychus metal chains secured it in place alongside dozens upon dozens of dense leather straps. Transparent, medical-grade tubes were strung into the arms, legs, and chest of the thing. At first glance, Cameron thought it was a garou. It had all of the hallmarks, all of the signs: gray-black skin, mangled tufts of black-red fur. Only it was larger, and far more wolfish than it was human, unlike the garou, who seemed a bastard mix of the two.

  Blood was being drawn and extracted from it, slowly, steadily, but at a constant rate. The siphoned crimson traveled up and along the various tubes into metal containment cylinders, which were connected to piping that went into the walls itself. Another set of tubes pumped a purple-pink liquid into her arm, and Cameron couldn't even begin to imagine what that was. Worse was the tube attached to the opened maw of the lycan. A feeding tube, most likely.

  Behind the creature, an automated lever of sorts—or maybe a pump—set the cadence, and determined the push and pull of the blood extraction.

  Cameron turned to the side. Vomit shot out from his throat and splashed onto the floor and wall.

  Janice paced over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, and with his good side, he swiped it away, pointing the Regin 18 at her head. The barrel pressed against her skull, and with gritted teeth, his features warbled and twisted into an even split of anger and disgust. “What the fuck is wrong with you people!? Christ, what—.. what even is this?"

  Tears welled in Janice’s eyes. She didn’t even hold her hands up. Cameron’s lips quivered. He cursed under his breath, removed the gun from her head, and held a hand behind his neck, Reign 18 pointed toward the ceiling.

  “Her name is Tania Ackerman,” Janice said quietly. “She... she’s a lycan. She was—is—just a girl, but Mr. la Cerva, the overseer, he said that she was vital to the production of our latest alchemical elixir.”

  Cameron lowered his gun and pointed at the she-wolf. “Her eyes aren’t even open. Does she even know what’s happening to her? Or.. or why?”

  “No,” Janice whispered. “From my understanding, the Argent Group had been tracking her for some time, which inevitably resulted in her capture. The details are blurry, as Mr. la Cerva only shared bits and pieces with me."

  "They managed that? How?" Cameron asked, dumbfounded. Maybe there were some heavy-hitters working for them, or they had enough people to completely overwhelm her. Given how much trouble the garou were to deal with, Cameron imagined that Tania had to have taken out her fair share of gun-toting assholes.

  "They are professionals, from my understanding," Janice said.

  "And how many more did she kill before you finally managed to strap her into place?"

  "None," Janice said, shaking her head. "That liquid being inserted into her bloodstream, the pinkish one, as you might have already seen, is an alchemical sedative. Paradiso, as it's called at our retailer boutiques. A euphoric sleeping agent. For some time now, it has been used as a means of putting her under an induced coma. It.. such a thing, according to Mr. la Cerva, was necessary. Both for our own safety and as a supposed humane way of handling her containment."

  “Humane? Containment?” Cameron scoffed with contempt, and studied Tania's form. "You people turned her into an involuntary fucking blood-bag. You've got her hooked up to a goddamn feeding tube with, what, liquified fucking dog chow!?"

  "I didn't say I agreed with him," Janice muttered. "Or with this company's practices."

  Underneath all of the fur and the dense musculature, there was a person. Cameron grit his teeth. The garou in the forest, that massive horde. It must’ve been this lycan’s doing. Her creation. But to what end? She'd created a small army, only to leave her shocktroopers and vanguards idling in the Pines. There had to be more to it than that, and Cameron couldn't begin to guess the reason. There was no telling how many people she'd turned, or what purpose they might serve at the expense of living the rest of their lives as monsters. This woman wasn't absolved from that, far from it, but nobody deserved to be made into a permanent experiment.

  "This.. this is wrong. Wrong in so many ways, for so many reasons, that I don't even know where to begin," Cameron said under his breath.

  “Lycans have a regenerative capacity” Janice explained. “But this is only true when they are within one of the several stages of their transformation. There was no other way for.. for Mr. la Cerva to extract her blood, which is a vital alchemical reagent for his latest project. And to keep up with production goals, a certain amount of her blood must be extracted every day."

  Cameron's grip tightened around his Reign 18. Every day from now until forever. So long as they had that damned feeding tube connected to her, she'd spend the rest of her life being a glorified blood-bag for Bluestein Philterworks, out of sight and out of mind. Assuming this turned into a prim and proper product, the people who might go on to use ether's shelf-ready version would be none the wiser.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Cameron asked, his voice low and direct.

  “Because,” Janice said, her voice low and trembling. “Because I'm as guilty as those men in that room. Complacent. I had every reason to leave this company, and I could have left—I… I should have, but I didn’t. Or, I could've helped her. I could've told someone, placed an anonymous tip to the Civic and Occult Authority, and I didn't. I don’t know why I’m saying any of this. Maybe I just need to say it out loud. For myself. So it’s out there in the world, in the universe, that I was a part of this horrible, horrible thing, and—”

  “Tell her yourself,” Cameron said, pacing around the room.

  Janice’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “I said, tell her yourself. What you did, it happened. Make your peace with the fact that you’re part of the reason she’s stuck here. Won’t fix what you did. Between you and me, if she decides to rip your throat out or something, I won’t stop her. Not my place to take that away from her. But by the same token, you’re part of the reason why she’s going to leave here. And supposing she does kill you, at least you’ll die knowing you tried to do the right thing. If you’re truly sorry? That alone will be worth it. Now help me shut this thing off so we can get her out of here."

  CAMERON KESSLER

  GUTS

  JANICE OLIVERA

  TANIA ACKERMAN

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