Monster Salvage Crew [2]
Part Two: A Massacre, Emotionally And Literally
Sara had her face buried in her hands. The embarrassment was eating her alive, how was she ever going to have to look any of these people in the eyes again. She’d cried. She had actually cried. All because she was in a van that had shaken around a little bit. There might have been a little more going on than that. If they had been caught, it would have been bad. More pressingly though her arm was- Normal! You have a normal arm and that is no excuse, she thought to herself forcefully.
“That was pretty scary,” said Vincent. His voice sounded shaky. He was the newest member of the crew after Sara. “I don’t know what would have happened if we’d have gotten caught. Luckily we’ve got the best driver slash navigator duo in the whole city! Isn’t that right, girls?” Sara wondered if he was trying to reassure her or himself.
“Stop trying to talk to me when I’m driving! We’re not out of the woods yet,” snapped Penelope. She continued talking in a whisper to Adeline, who was sitting next to her in the front of the van. “What’s the deal with the new girl? Isn’t she supposed to be an ultra badass from the arena, or something like that?”
“Yeah, I don’t think we should have brought her along,” Adeline whispered back. “She seems, kind of unstable.” The two of them probably thought that Sara couldn’t overhear. She didn’t think any of the others could hear them over the noise of the van. Looks probably could. The tall man didn’t really say anything, but his bearing made Sara think he was experienced with dosing. On top of that enhanced hearing was one of the easiest body modifications, it had barely any risk of mutation. It was the only modification she had, unless you counted her arm.
Images flashed in her mind. A massive pool of blood after a fight gone awry. Staring in disbelief at her shoulder. A horrible numbness all through her left arm.
She slapped herself in the face, hard enough that she could feel a sharp sting on her hand and cheek. “I’m doing alright actually,” declared Sara. “I just got a little carsick, but I’m fine now.”
“Okay, if you need anything, just-” began Maddox.
“Nope! All good,” Sara cut them off. She needed to impress these people. If they wouldn’t let her join permanently she was unlikely to get a position like this somewhere else. Scavenger crews didn’t generally allow women to join and going back to the arena was not an option. The thought of having to use a recovery brew again sent shivers down her spine. This might be her only chance to keep the situation with her arm under control. She nervously placed her hand on the small amount of Dose she still had in her pocket, it made her feel slightly better.
“Can I ask you a question?” Vincent asked her after an uncomfortable silence.
“Please do,” she said, desperate to talk about something so she could stop thinking about her arm or her piss poor performance so far.
“How did you and Maddox meet? I’ve asked them about it, but they said that I should ask you.”
“Uhm, yeah, there’s not much to tell. I was walking to my motorcycle after my fight last Saturday-”
“Ooh, I saw that fight, it was gnarly!” interrupted Vincent. “I’m a fan actually,” he added sheepishly.
“Cool, it wasn’t my,” she hesitated, “best performance.”
“That’s one way of putting it! Both of your arms and both of your legs were broken. I’ve never seen anyone get that hurt before!”
“Okay, it wasn’t that dramatic. Only my right arm and right leg were broken, my left hip was only dislocated and my left arm was totally fine.”
“It looked pretty dramatic from where I was sitting,” Adeline chimed in from the front.
“Was everyone at this fight?” asked Sara.
“Yeah, pretty much,” said Maddox with a sympathetic smile. Apparently their smile was glued to their androgynous face.
“Cool,” sighed Sara. She felt even more embarrassed to know that everyone had apparently seen her worst fight in recent memory. “Anyways, I was walking to my motorcycle-”
“Wait, I’m confused,” Adeline interrupted again, “how is it that you were walking after breaking a leg less than, and this is a guess, but less than an hour beforehand? By the way, we need to take a left up ahead. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“I healed my bones with the remainder of my Dose from the fight.”
“You can do that?” Vincent asked. He sounded impressed. Maddox looked sceptical.
“Yeah, I just kinda filled the gaps in the bone with cartilage.”
“Directed healing like that is not an easy skill, it comes with a high risk of mutation and did you say you used the remainder of your Dose?” asked Maddox. “You didn’t use a recovery brew,” It wasn’t quite an accusation, but Sara thought it was close.
“Yeah, that’s what happened.”
“Okay,” Maddox made a gesture that made it obvious they didn’t trust what Sara was saying.
Looks looked at Maddox and gave a barely perceptible smile. It was the first expression he had made since the van started driving again. She could not figure out what the deal was with this guy at all.
“So anyways, on my way to my bike I got attacked by some guys and Maddox saved me by injecting me with a Dose.”
“Wait, that’s it? That’s the whole story?” asked Adeline after Sara didn’t say anything else.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“That story sucks! And you’re terrible at telling stories!”
“Yeah, no offense,” Maddox shrugged, “but you have no sense of dramatic timing.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was here to be entertaining,” she still didn’t know why she was here. She thought Looks might be the only one who could really handle himself in a fight. Maybe they wanted extra muscle?
Not long after that the van stopped and Penelope spoke up, “okay, this is as close as I can take us.”
“Adeline, can you give us a status update?” asked Maddox.
“Our salvage is just a little further, but we’re going to have to climb over some rubble to get there,” said the oracle.
“Alright, look alive people! Dose up and grab some equipment,” shouted Maddox. Everyone piled out of the van in a flurry of coordinated motion. It left Sara feeling out of place and she had to struggle not to get in anyone’s way.
“Uhm Maddox, do you have a Dose for me?” asked Sara after she saw that the rest was dosing up with injectors they already had with them. In her pocket she placed her right hand on her canister that held a small amount of Dose. She kept it in case of emergency and would rather use what everyone else was using.
“Listen, there’s no easy way to say this,” the smile faded from Maddox’s face and Sara could feel her heart sink. They placed their hand on her shoulder and led the two of them a little ways to the side. “I’ve no doubt that you’ve got skills, but salvage isn’t like the arena. It’s unpredictable and it requires a certain disposition. I’ll be honest: today you showed me the exact opposite of that disposition. That’s why-
“Did Vincent show the right disposition?”
“No, that’s why he’s just the lookout and for today I want you to join him. After that, if you’ve come along with us a few times and you can show me you’ve got what it takes, maybe I can trust you with a Dose. Until then however, I just don’t think it’s a good decision.
Sara sank to her knees. It made sense. She’d lost her cool and that wasn’t the type of person you should trust with a Dose. She’d seen it happen often enough in the arena. Some people were sensitive to the mental effects of mutation. They became aggressive and unable to be reasoned with. She could not stop staring at her left arm, if she could not regularly dose up… Her mind went to dark places. Desperately cutting in the middle of the night. Terrified that she would not survive until morning, or that whatever did survive would no longer be her. She placed her hand on the injector. This crew should have enough for her to get by for a few weeks. Looks would be the biggest threat. If she was going to do this, she would have to attack him first. Her hands were trembling, was she really going to do this? Did she have another choice?
“I’m not asking you to trust her, I’m asking you to trust me!” shouted a voice she didn’t recognise. She looked up and saw that Maddox and Looks were staring each other down. What is going on? she thought.
“We’re done talking about this. I’ve made my decision” declared Maddox.
Looks didn’t say anything, but Sara could tell by the way he shifted his feet that he was about to make a move. She wondered if he was going to attack, but he just turned around to continue unloading the van. What was that about? perhaps she didn’t have to take drastic measures just yet.
Ten minutes later Sara was climbing up the destroyed remains of a building. Vincent was climbing next to her and the two of them were a fair distance behind the rest. It was a hard climb, but the others made it look easy. They had equipment weighing them down, but they were also dosed up.
“Man, it’s crazy,” said Vincent out of nowhere.
“I’m sorry what?”
“This,” he gestured around them, “the destruction, it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to be here when it’s actually happening.”
“Yeah, sure,” she dismissed him, but she did take a second look at her surroundings. Most of the buildings around her were destroyed. Debris filled the streets like a giant had discarded gravel. That wasn’t far off from the truth. Many of the buildings were slick with too bright blood. Like the skies had opened up and rained red paint. She wasn’t sure what kaiju the blood came from. She didn’t concern herself with them, only with the Dose that came from them.
They caught up with the rest on the roof of an apartment complex that had mostly remained intact. The crew had set down their equipment in haphazard piles. This was her first real look at what they had brought. Most of it was cutting implements: swords, knives, modified bolt cutters and they even had a chainsaw. Beside those they carried two small barrels and a confusing mess of cables. She didn’t know much about kaiju scavenging, but she did know that the most important thing they would be looking for would be fresh blood. It was the main ingredient in Dose.
She squeezed her left arm to feel for irregularities. Near her elbow was a lump, it felt like a hard piece of plastic embedded just under the skin. She knew from experience that it would be attached to the bones in her forearm with a series of tendons. These facts clinically floated through her head, like it was happening to someone else. She had spent too much time thinking about her arm, which always accelerated the mutations. If she didn’t get a large Dose soon, there was nothing she could do. Her small injector wasn’t enough.
“Okay, Looks and I have surveyed the scene,” Maddox approached the rest of the group. Sara hadn’t even noticed when the two of them left. “It looks like there is some good salvage here, but we’re not the only ones to have noticed,” after a while they added, “can I have a quick word with you, Sara, before we get started.
“What do you want me to do?” asked Sara. She was trying to keep a lid on her desperation. She probably wasn’t going to be given a Dose, but the possibility had her feeling electric.
“Looks has convinced me that it is,” they paused, “safe, to give you a Dose. Please don’t make me regret this,” they handed an injector to Sara. “This is the same type as I gave you last week. It’s not as hardcore as you might be used to-”
“Yeah, I remember, it’s Omicron type. It gives a moderate increase to strength and endurance, its healing is, above average, but not great. Secondary characteristic is pyromancy, but I’m not crazy enough to do that shit,” the words fell out of her mouth in a tidal wave of relief.
“You can tell from using what type it is?”
“There’s only 19 different types, once you’ve used all of them it’s not that hard.”
“Okay, that gives me a bit more confidence.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, thank Looks.”
“Not just for this, but for the other night as well.”
“You’re welcome. Do you need help injecting?”
“No, I’ve got this,” she unzipped the makeshift hazmat suit she was wearing and exposed part of her chest. The metal of the canister felt cold in her hand. She took a deep breath. “Let’s do this,” she said with a smile and plunged the needle into her heart. It felt like liquid fire had been poured into her veins. The first part of dosing up always felt like this. She squeezed her eyelids shut. Her eyeballs felt like they had been replaced with burning coals. Tongues of flames were dancing under her fingernails. Her teeth felt like they were going to crack in the heat.
It was terrible and wonderful at the same time. When the pain faded the entire world came into focus. She could hear the heartbeats of everyone around her. They were a cacophony of mismatched rhythms, drums playing to music that wasn’t there. She opened her eyes. All the colors of the world opened up to her in complexity. Nothing she could see was the same hue anymore. The faded yellow of the hazmat suits everyone was wearing expanded into an infinite array of color.
“How do you feel?” asked Maddox.
“I feel ready,” Sara plucked the canister from her chest.
“Alright then, what would you do next?”
“Ten minutes ago you were ready to drop me, and now you ask for my opinion, why?”
“Looks vouched for you.”
“That’s all?”
“Yup!” said Maddox with a smile.
“I really do need to thank him then,” she muttered while moving into position to survey the site where the group was supposed to salvage. It was a courtyard of 20 by 20 meters, all of the ways in or out were blocked by rubble. In the middle lay a gigantic hand, severed just above the wrist. It was too big to fit in the courtyard and the fingers leaned up against a ruined building. Sara blinked hard. She hadn’t realised it before, but she recognised that hand. The first time she saw it was two years ago.
The fight was supposed to have been over, but her opponent had held a grudge. Maybe he had been angry at being beaten by a girl, or maybe he had succumbed to mutations and lost his mind. She would never know why, it didn’t really matter. He had attacked her from behind, kicking and biting. He had attached his jaws to her left arm like a pitbull. He hadn’t let go until after he had ripped her arm off. There had been a massive pool of blood around her arm. She had stared at the stump on her shoulder in disbelief. The numbness in her left arm had been so intense it nearly became painful. She didn’t remember much about the fight after that. Later she had been told that she had killed the man. His name had been Kyle. She had seen him at the gym sometimes, he had always been obsessed with his biceps.
The ‘doctors’ at the arena had given her a healing brew Dose to recover, as usual. You were supposed to take it and let it do its work. She had woken up in the middle of the night and found that her arm had grown back with profound mutations. Her hand had four fingers with vicious claws. Up and down her arm were hard lesions of some kind. She later realised that they were pieces of kaiju carapace. She had spent the entire rest of that night cutting out chunks of the hard armor. She had needed to repeatedly saw off her hand before it grew back with five fingers.
She took a few deep breaths to bring herself back to the present moment. She felt along her elbow, where the little chunk of carapace was growing. There were now several more, some of them felt like they were already poking out of the skin. It always progressed quickly when she fixated on the event, especially if she was dosed up. She flexed her left hand a few times. The lumps slid back and forth along her arm as she did. She could actually feel them growing. When she was dosed up they grew like a wildfire, but she could also control the mutation to a certain extent. She flexed her hand one more time and forced the mutation to stop. It wouldn’t go away, but at least she could prevent it from growing further. She would have to cut out the mutation later, but she’d done it before. It wasn’t really that big of a deal as long as she could dose up once a week or so. It wouldn’t have been a problem, but every time that she’d been using healing brew lately it became more difficult to restrain the growth. One way or another she had to stop using healing brew and that meant there was no way she could continue fighting in the arena.
“Are you okay?” the suddenness of Maddox’s question startled her.
“Yes!” she replied quickly.
“Because you looked like you were-”
“I just spaced out for a second, because I’m getting used to this type of Dose. That’s all!” she lied, hoping that it would sound believable.
“Okay,” they replied and looked back to Looks, “are you really sure?”
“Yes, I’m positive,” she said.
Looks nodded.
“Alright, what is your assessment?”
“Right,” she said, remembering that that was what she was supposed to be doing. She saw four guys, some ten or more meters below them. Based on the way they were hauling equipment around they were obviously dosing, but they were uncoordinated. They kept stumbling and were clearly not accustomed to the increased strength of Dose. “I can take these guys!”
“By yourself?”
“Oh, yeah, easily. Are you kidding me?”
“This is not the time for bravado and that’s not how we do things. We don’t send in one person alone.”
“I’m not going to try and tell you that I’m good at this anymore. I’m going to show you,” she jumped down to the courtyard. For a moment she was suspended in the air, just long enough to have second thoughts. Fighting more than one opponent at a time was hard. Not being accustomed to Dose didn’t mean that they had no fighting experience. She banished these thoughts from her head, it was too late now. She had to commit. She impacted on the ground next to one of the scavengers. In the time it took her to stand back up the scavenger had turned around to face her.
“What the fuck!” he exclaimed in surprise. His voice was muffled from behind a gas mask. He had been using a saw to cut into the gigantic hand. He looked at her in confusion and tried to hit her in the head with it. She ducked under it and swept his feet out from under him in a single fluid motion. She grabbed him by the face as he was falling and slammed his head into the ground. Before he had a chance to get up she ripped his mask off and hit him in the face three times in quick succession. She licked some of his blood off her fist. The three other scavengers looked at her like she was insane. It was an intimidation tactic, but mostly she wanted to know what Dose these guys were using. Behind the coppery taste of blood was an acrid stench that had an intensity to it. She recognised it as epsilon type Dose. It gave an unremarkable boost to strength, but users had a phenomenal capacity to heal. If she didn’t put these guys down hard, they would get back up. The best way to deal with Dose like this was to bleed someone until the Dose left their system.
“Get her!” screamed one of the three standing scavengers. He held a large knife in one hand, that might be her best bet at taking these guys out. The three guys rushed toward her at the same time. Saw guy was still at her feet, but he was starting to get back up. She kicked him in the head to keep him down a little longer and ran at the man holding a knife. She feinted a grab and he took the bait. He swung wildly with his knife, not expecting to have as much explosive power as he did. She moved in, grabbing the wrist of the hand holding the knife. She spun the two of them around. It was critical she kept all of them in her sight as much as possible. Saw guy was still dazed and the other two ran to try and surround her. The man she was grappling with tried to punch her in the face, but she ducked down and bit him in the other arm. He dropped the knife and she caught it. He kicked her in the shin, but didn’t have enough strength to do any real damage. She slashed at him with his own knife. He tried to block, but she was too fast. She cut his throat and could feel the knife make contact with bone. Blood sprayed out. She crouched down below it. She kept cutting. She sliced his inner thigh and swept up through his armpit. He became a red fountain and fell to the ground. Behind her she heard a crunching on the ground. She’d been too busy dealing with knife guy and hadn’t noticed someone had got so close to her. She spun around just in time to see a giant saw come down on her. Saw guy had gotten up faster than she expected. She tried to dodge to the left, but it scraped all along her right arm. For a moment she thought she had managed to hold on to her knife, but the saw had chopped off her thumb. It was now lying on the ground next to the knife.
“Take that you bitch! You whore!” the man kept swearing, but she didn’t pay him any attention. She jumped up three meters into the palm of the kaiju hand. She didn’t think the others had the strength to join her quickly. She would have a quick second to collect herself. The wound along her arm looked severe. In a long strip her skin had been scraped away, revealing bloody muscles underneath. The bleeding was limited however. Her missing thumb was a bigger issue. She was spurting blood profusely. She forced the arteries in that part of her hand to contract. Ordinarily that would have been easy, but she wasn’t quite as used to manipulating an omicron Dose like this. She could feel her control of the mutation in her left arm slipping, but blood loss was a more pressing concern right now.
She could see saw guy climbing up the side of the hand. She ran at him. His head was just poking up over the side. She kicked him in the face, hard enough to send him flying. She jumped after him, flying some ten meters before she landed on top of him. Looking behind her she saw the other two were also trying to climb the hand. They were a fair distance away from her now and she would have a little time to deal with the saw guy. He had let go of his saw midair and it had gone flying somewhere. A shame because she had hoped to be able to use it. Even if it was large and clunky, she’d rather use another knife. She didn’t have either. She stamped on the head of the man underneath her. Over and over until his skull cracked and finally his head exploded.
She swept her gaze up at the last two men. They stopped advancing and took a step back simultaneously. One of them had picked up a gun and the other had found a sword. She ran for the man with the sword, he was the bigger threat. The man with the gun shot at her, but most of his shots missed. Two of them hit her in the stomach and one in the chest. Nothing that would stop a person who was dosing. The man with the sword slashed at her. She slapped it out of the way, but it still cut along her left arm. She barreled into him and he crashed down to the ground. He let go of the sword and she caught it. She slashed him across the torso three times and he was bleeding out. Her right hand was in no state to hold a sword, so she had to use her left arm. It would make the mutation worse, but she had little choice.
She made eye contact with the last remaining scavenger. He turned and ran. She thought he was fleeing, but he picked up a chainsaw. Now that he had a weapon in hand he dashed at her. She felt calm. He screamed in fury. She maintained eye contact. His eyes darted to her right, that was where he would attack. She parried his wild swing. The man’s eyes went wide in surprise. She wanted to cut him across the chest, but her left arm gave an unexpected surge of strength. The sword cut through skin and flesh. It broke bones and cut the man in half. It left Sara stunned. She examined her arm. Her suit was torn open from when it was cut with the sword, but underneath her arm was uninjured. It was covered in rust brown scales and brass carapace. The mutation had never grown that fast before. Some scales were visible along her hand and the armor nearly went all the way to her shoulder. It had never been this bad before.
“Fuck,” she whispered as a realisation hit her. The mutation was clearly visible. No-one in their right mind would allow her to join their crew if they could see this.