VII. Insidious Prey
Harbingers Of Madness, Unleashing The Mind's Eye...
Reflected in the black eye of the beast's head was the warrior who had slain it. The warrior whose shivering body now lay on a cot, tended to by the woman he loved. Were it not for the beat of his heart and the odd twitch of hand or paw, Marcus would’ve been a dead hound by any other metric.
The red lovers remained off in the corner while the mechanic Eric fiddled and toyed with the spine and head of the strange android in their possession. The déjà vu wasn’t lost on Valentina, the white wolven leader conferring with the gray Brennus about the whole affair.
“You’ll be able to do more for him, right?” she asked.
Her lover nodded. “When he comes out of the shock, we can steel him for sure. When he comes out is the key here.”
“Any idea when?”
Those placid brown eyes of his went sullen. “He’ll be out for a while. I can try hypnotism again, but not with that is in the room.” Brennus cocked his head to the dead android on Eric’s operating table.
“If there’s enough room,” Eric called, gloved arms soaked in bloody oil, “maybe lay him in the back of the Hummer and work with him there.”
Sabina looked up to other men and nodded. Val and Brennus helped carry the catatonic red into the bed of her ride. Sabina propped a pillow up under Marcus’ head and climbed up into the back alongside Brennus.
“We’ll be good from here.” he said. “Best keep an eye on Eric and the find.”
She went to add something, but one look from her lover told her it was best to let him focus. When she returned to the office, Eric was already doing quite the number on the body. Limbs lay detached, the torso sat propped up in a chair, and the head. By God, the head, whose black eyes glowered clear across the room.
“Trust yourself to come look?” Eric asked innocently.
Val nodded, the white wolf crossing the room. Even with so much of it broken up, not to mention the damage sustained in the brawl, the profile it cut still sent a shiver up her spine. And yet, once she was there, looking over the whole piece, something spoke to her from deep within.
Face it, the voice said.
She went right for the head, picking it up in her spotless white hands, holding it up and looking into its dead black eyes. Seeing herself and Eric in their reflection. Seeing Marcus in that final moment, the red gentleman made both gladiator and child all in an instant.
Even as the oil and blood had rimmed the bottom of the electric wolf’s head, staining the fur and pads of her hands, the golden ring around her slender middle finger, she didn’t let go. She didn’t avert her eyes. She didn’t let the shock and pain boil over and out of her. She simply stood and examined.
“So that’s it.”
Eric looked at her, puzzled. “What’s it?”
“That’s all they are really.” she replied. “Circuits, wires, oil. Some sophisticated programming cluttered with not so sophisticated thoughts and parts.”
“When unanimated, really seems so doesn’t it?” the red mechanic smiled. “That’s about to change.”
Val set the head back down on the table. “Alright then. Let’s see if it’ll talk.”
It wasn’t as easy as getting into the strange, monitor-shaped contraption they had found before. Programming in androids always had been a complicated affair. There was always a personality masking the machinery, and Eric wanted to get right to the original model’s core. No Glenn Atwood, no scavenger, just the Colosseum guard and “recruiter” he was sure to be.
It took the grizzled mechanic quite some time under the machine’s proverbial hood to get it going, but with a final flick of switches and a few steps back from the work table by both Eric and Val, they were ready.
“It’s all on him now.” the elder red wolf reassured her. And sure enough, it was.
“Gladi-Model 298 ‘Charon.’” Even through the static crackle and the abyss of a gaze, there was something sonorous about the voice they had given it. A slight air of pleasantry to offset its appearance.
“State your mission.” Eric declared.
The black eyes seemed to fleck about, darting in the heat of computation before the head of the android spoke once more. “Procuring participants for combat.”
“Destination?”
Again the head found itself reeling through its databanks for the answers. “Colosseum Storage as part of Comm/Ent operations”
Feeling lucky, Eric went for it. “Exact location?”
“CLASSIFIED.” came the answer in a hideous, fully synthetic tone, that of an arcade sound chip bit-crushed to hell and back.
“But you said it was part of Comm/Ent.” Val interjected, the thin white wolf taking a step forward. “Is that not part of a public-facing operation?”
The answer came packaged in those pleasing tones. “Details of the operation are held on highest security order to maintain illusion of combat narratives.”
Val looked back to Eric. “That Havenese for ‘don’t break kayfabe?’”
The mechanic nodded and turned his attention back to the severed android head. “The switch mechanisms might be one way of bypassing that security, but we also need to be 100% sure which switch arrangement does the trick. This current one is just a universal factory setting.”
Before he could go any further, he felt the clutch of the huntress' hand pulling him back away from the machine. “Let’s see what else is public knowledge before we start playing hacker.”
Valentina pulled up a seat to the work table and sat down in front of the head. She locked eyes with it, her jades placid in the face of those obsidian voids.
“Tell me: you recognize my face?”
The answer was as calm as her question. “Yes.”
“What match was I in?”
The dead eyes shifted and searched once more, at last replying “Match XK9.”
“How many in attendance?”
“Full House: 10,000.”
Val’s body tensed, but her strength never wavered. “Why was I chosen?”
“Shortage of City Talent.”
She went silent, processing the answer herself.
“Any factoring for capability or skill?” Eric pressed.
“Minimal factoring.” came the android’s reply. “Competent driving ability is primary. All other factors are secondary.”
Val looked back to Eric, puzzled. All she got was a nod of encouragement. “How many of you are still talent scouting?”
When the head blared back with “CLASSIFIED,” she threw herself up and away from the table. Eric crossed the room after her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Just that I thought I was on a roll only to hit another dead-end.” the white wolf sighed. “It won’t tell us where the lucky contestants go and it won’t tell us how many of these things are searching for them. Two items that’d go a long way.”
Eric nodded. “Shall we start the hacking then?”
Valentina looked back to the head, its eyes reset and staring dead ahead, into the room itself. She scratched at the back of her own before looking up to her scruffy old friend.
“Just don’t lose him.” she said solemnly. “Whatever you do. Don’t lose him. Last thing we need is more hell raining down our way”
Eric pulled her close. “I won’t Val, I won’t.” He could feel some of her stress melt away into himself. The worry, the hope, the horror. In a way, he was pulling it right out of her and into himself. He saw the ephemeral transference at work when she came out of his embrace.
“Mind if I take the old girl out for a spin?” she smiled. “Think I need some time to just…think. Don’t want to disturb the crew while they tend to Marc.”
He threw the keys at her without missing a beat. When she marched out, Brennus was the first to ask where she was going.
“Off for a quick drive.” Val replied. “Want to get my head cleared.”
“Need any help with—”
“No, not that.” she cutoff. “Would like to keep my clothes on this time.”
Brennus turned his attention back to Marcus, letting out a distant “come back cleansed then” before continuing his work on the sedate red wolf.
At first she didn’t think anything of the exchange, but Brennus’ cold gaze, staring as she pulled away in Eric’s old Apache pickup didn’t sit right. She let it go though. Everyone was tired, everyone had better things to fret about.
The sun warmed the sands to a reddish-orange shade as the old machine rocked and rolled across the plains. Valentina hadn’t driven stick in a while, but welcomed the change. She felt that feral thrill creeping up through her again. The springing of claws, the full-body shiver of excitement as the needle rose and the engine roared.
Soon the dying light gave way to dark, and the huntress knew her joyride had to come to an end. It was on her way back that things began to change.
First it was a feeling. In spite of her quipping to Brennus, she felt as though her jeans were phasing through her, that the hard leather of her sandals was going from suede to sand itself as she held the throttle down. She felt her eyes grow heavier and heavier.
The Apache’s white-eyed headlights lit the patch back to Eric’s garage, the blur of pat-down tire tracks in the sand, stones and brush off to the sides flashing by the white wolf as she ran the truck flat-out. But off on her right, she noticed a boulder. A banded boulder, made up of different red and tan shades of sandstone, perfectly shaped as a sphere.
Though she never turned the wheel or veered off course, the boulder kept revealing itself from the side of the road. Same side, same boulder, over and over again. When she slowed down, she seemed to have passed it for the final time, the rock fading into the red of the Apache’s tail-lights and the dark of the night.
Then came the lights. At first, she could spot the garage on the horizon, further beyond the distant neighbors Eric kept; small homes and the odd shack, all lit in alternating shades of bluish white and orange. What began as no more than three or four distant lights before her ballooned into dozens, hundreds, thousands. Lights growing out from every bush, from the tops of the hills, rising to the heavens themselves to meld among the stars. It was as if the City had come to envelop her.
And then there came the stars themselves. A speck of orange or blue wasn’t uncommon, they were just planets as they hung in the sky.
Except they weren’t.
More and more, they grew red, green, purple, yellow, burning bright and dimming in pulses and patterns. Like the heavens were dying and renewing, all at once, all before her. Hung above it all, rising from the hills; an eclipse. Like the sun was kissing the sky of Earth, it rose with the moon firmly affixed to it. Two celestial bodies in perfect unison, forming a radiant black disc with flaming light whipping and sparking around it.
Alive and alert, Valentina jammed on the brake and clutch, the Apache grinding to a halt, the dust of her short-stop growing from a thin cloud to a blanket of fog around her.
Then, from out of all lights came a figure. As if his back was made of these strange colorful stars. Upon turning around to face the truck, the lights vanished, leaving only the figure of a wolf. Dressed in layers upon layers of ragged coats, black jeans and boots, and a flat-top cowboy hat.
His fur was strange. A dark gray around the mouth, black almost everywhere else, with a single streak of white right down the center of his full-coated face, from beneath the brown hat to the tip of his nose.
Slowly, he walked towards the truck.
Part of Val wanted her gun out and firing so fast the hound’s hat would spin, but part of her held off. Part of her was arrested by the sheer spectacle of it all. With a hand on its grip, she rolled down the window as the stranger strolled up.
“Catch anything?” he asked in a rich English baritone.
Val shook her head. “Wasn’t hunting.”
“You seem to always be though, aren’t you? Hunting?”
She nodded; no sense arguing that. The stranger pushed the brim of his hat up, the veil of shadow lifting to reveal eyes the lightest shade of gray she had ever seen. They were a shade bordering silver, her own jades lit up by proxy.
“Want to add these to the collection?” the stranger quipped.
Another shake of the head was her answer. “That’s not why I hunt.”
“Why do you then?”
“Peace of mind.” Val replied sagely. “Knowing it’ll never happen to anyone again.”
“What makes you think you can stop it?”
“Because it has to stop!” she shot back. “It takes all the sense out of you, makes you a walking atom bomb of rage and death. I wouldn’t wish that on the head of anyone.”
“I thought that’s what we wolves are.” the stranger smirked. “Our fangs drip with blood as we dive into our prey, the mouth written in red as we feast upon the flesh of the beast under our claws. I thought that was all part of the hunt.”
Val dead-eyed the stranger, who looked back to her not in anger, offense, or relished glee. He looked at her dryly. No glower, no emotion as he pulled the brim of his hat back down, the shadow shading his eyes away from her once more.
“When you say ‘feral,’ know what it means. It isn’t just a hand-me-down slur, or a pure madness. It’s what was fighting what is. You’re at war with those who wish to wield what was in the name of conquering what is. Keep the balance if you can. There’s a gray out there fighting to keep his. A gray you know well.”
She absorbed the words slowly, as if they had been poured over her and left to sink below her fur and into her skin. And as she savored the last phrase, horror jolted the white wolf awake.
“BRENNUS!”
The night went black once more as the Apache skidded off road, her paws slammed on the brakes. The strange visions evaporated, with only the dust of her short-stop dancing around the truck. Shuddering all over, Val got the truck back in gear and floored her. The blood-red Chevy hurried towards the garage, the desert made a blur. Pulling into the truck’s berth, she leapt out, frantic as she saw Eric, Sabina, and a now awake Marcus staring into the workshop. The scene within was chaos incarnate.
The body of the android was desecrated beyond recognition, wires littering the room, the metal spine bent in half. The head remained, but with its black eyes plucked and crushed on the floor. Lying there on the floor, reeling in spasmodic fits of verbose revolt and spluttering coughs, was Brennus. His face bloodied, the claws of his hands jammed against the concrete floor, toes knuckled against his sandals. It was as if he was trying to get up but couldn’t.
“I be-rid of you once!” he roared, head raised and brown eyes glowering towards the head on the work bench. “AND I HAVE AGAIN!” His own fell with heavy breath, eyes fluttering in a delirious state, before erupting again. “‘OUT! Out are the lights—out all! And over each quivering form, the curtain, a funeral pall! Comes down with the rush of a storm.’ Those are the words of your final CONQUEROR! WORM!”
He spun himself over, clutching his gut, the agony met with a howl no one had ever heard from him. Marcus and Sabina clutched each other, Eric furiously trying to undo the door of the garage, but the lock seemed to always slip the key.
“GODDAMMIT, DON’T STAND THERE!” Val shrieked. She slammed herself against the door, Eric joining her before the two burst through. Eric went for his first-aid kit while Valentina dropped to her knees over the gray. She picked his head up and pulled him into her lap. “Dear God, why you?”
Brennus looked up from his bloodshot haze to see her. That pure white-furred face of hers seemed to do the trick alone. She could feel his heartbeat settle, the pulsing slowed. He looked up to her, and sighed.
“It knew,” he said, hushed but plain. “It knew me. And I knew it. He was mine. Dear God in heaven, he was mine. The one who brought me to the ring.”
She did her best to quell her shock. She shuddered slightly before pressing on. “How did you know he was the one?”
Those brown eyes of his flooded with rage before it drained into her arms. “Said he remembered my struggle. He remembered how my body felt. Remembered the stripping, the sedation. Remembered locking me away. Wouldn’t tell me how long I was out, where I was hidden between the day I was abducted to the day I was in the ring. But he knew me. Knew my match, knew my number. He knew me. And that was the only thing I had never thought about.”
Eric returned with a syringe. “You trust me, Brenn?” the old red mechanic asked softly.
“Someone set a record on.” the gray replied. “I need to recenter myself. Meditate. Yes, I need to meditate.”
“You got it.” Val whispered. Eric administered the sedative. Once the needle was taken care of, he helped Val lift her lover up and rest him down on a cot. Eric leapt for his tape deck and pulled out a white cassette. Sure it was rewound, he put it on. It was a delicate cascade of old electronic pianos and the dulcet tones of a Native American flute, an earthy and fluid sound that seemed to fill the air. Brennus drifted off into sleep instantly.
Val looked back to Marcus and Sabina. Her reformed red-furred gladiator was shaken by the display, but came rushing to the white wolf’s side as she went to pieces.
“It’ll all be okay.” he soothed. “He made me fine. Now we’re gonna make him fine. I think it’s all been one big shock, that’s all.”
Sabina walked past the two and towards the work bench. “Is…it still working, Eric?” the Latina asked innocently. The mechanic picked up the head of the android and examined it.
“He pulled a helluva number on it.” he said. “But once we’re all back in order, maybe I can solder those wires back. See if there are any answers left to get.”
Valentina stared blankly at the whole display. At once she thought herself all together, ready to face the greater horrors of the road ahead, only to find the one anchor of her team in the sorriest state he’d ever been in. What had plagued Marc now rended Brennus. And as she sat there, distraught in the gentle red wolf’s leather-cuffed arms, the words of that mysterious hound echoed through her mind.
Keep the balance if you can.