03: Raising the Dead

My recovery in Core was neither swift, nor painless. On the contrary, it was long and arduous, and there were days when I wanted to give up from hurting so badly. My new legs were a mixed blessing, equal parts of pleasure and agony. But the pain went away eventually; my body became used to its new bits and pieces and decided to cooperate with them, at least inasmuch as my pain tolerance was concerned. But I had a bigger issue – learning to use my new legs without lurching around like some freakish creation of Doctor Frankenstein. After all, it was Doctor Al-Amro that had created this particular monster.

Always with me during the good and bad parts, through pain, frustration, angst, joy and gratitude was Naomy. She had been through a similar time, and as such she had a unique understanding of what I was going through. She, too, felt like a monster at times, as though she was somehow less human because of what had happened to her. We became fast friends through the bond we shared. And we had something else in common too: we had both been given our replacement parts through the actions of the hunter.

Truth to be told, Naomy’s story was much worse than my own, and she had been awake through most of it. She and her uncle had been returning from Wyethfizer Metro with a group of Journeyman Scouts when their convoy was attacked by a pack of Aberrant-Wolves. The Abbies killed half of the Scouts and several of Core’s people by the time the Scouts had managed to take them down, but not before mutilating Naomy’s hands and infecting her with Aberrant-Strain. Faced with the eventuality of becoming an aberrant herself, she had had no choice but to watch Kasim amputate her arms, right above the elbow, with an old wood-axe, in order to stop the infection from spreading to the rest of her body. They’d had no anesthetic with them, so she’d gone without. Needless to say, she’d had a special hatred for all things aberrant, after that.

When I told her about the aberrants that attacked me, she was insistent that they had behaved exactly like the ones who had attacked her. When I told her how the hunter had been controlling them, a cold look came into her eyes. I suspect she developed a special hatred for the hunter, too, that day.

Several months and a lot of difficult training later, I was deemed well enough to return to the Codex and resume my work in the archives, though I left reluctantly after having made several very close friends. I knew Core would always be like a second home to me, and hopefully I would see it again before I died. Naomy decided to come with me, much to my surprise and delight, to work as a librarian, claiming an interest in antique and ancient literature. I suspected the move was more due to an interest in getting revenge against the hunter than a love for The Illiad, though.

Nonetheless, after much cajoling, we went with the blessings of her father and uncle. They even gave us one of their six-seater toyocars, a vast improvement over any thing we had had at the Codex, specially outfitted with all the latest defenses and additionally beefed up with thick armor plating and an ultra-rugged drive-train. We called it ‘the Gravedigger’, after an old-world monster truck by the same name, and even painted a giant flaming skull on the front. Along with the ‘digger came Sal - short for Salvatore - another good friend and a genius mechanic. Sal had little enough interest in books and manuscripts, but the Codex had been short of good mechanics when I’d been there last.

Over months and years that followed, I came to really love that Gravedigger; it always gets us home.

* * *

April 14, 150 AS

Noal geared the Gravedigger down as he rounded the last corner to Rico’s End, a small satellite colony of Exshell Metro, and his crew's favourite fuel stopover point between their base of operations in the Bastion and their excavation site in the ruins of an old-world city ruin once called Winnipeg, in the middle of the Plains of Nowhere, seven hours away. They had been on their current assignment for a month; the latest in a series of history gathering expeditions to various parts of what used to be North America.

Noal's crew actually only consisted of Naomy and Sal, along with an archaeologist named Sid Pinnings, who was the Codex's resident expert in pre-Shift urbania. Since his return from Core, five years earlier, Noal's de-ciphering skills had reached near-famous proportions, and as a result the Curators of the Codex had started giving him the juiciest assignments they could find. His latest feat had been decoding a slew of scrambled charts and maps to various ruined city-sites on the North American continent. He had been rewarded with his choice of sites to personally excavate, document and bring back history from. Noal had been integrally involved in over forty separate reclamations, and had personally scouted out and started at least half of those. Along with Naomy and Sal, always by his side, Noal was becoming a bona fide pioneer, and an experienced adventurer.

Of course, any sort of venture outside of the Metros and their various satellite colonies came with a great deal of risk. Most people never traveled even on established routes because of the naturally threat of the elements, and the frequency of aberrant attacks. More and more people were being killed by the mindless abbies, or even worse, infected with aberrant-strain themselves. Stories were becoming increasingly common about victims hiding their infections, out of denial or fear, and closeting themselves away while their bodies became twisted, hulking parodies of nature, and their brains were bombarded with aggression hormones, fueling anger, rage and violence. At some point, these secret victims had convinced themselves that they could fight the infection and somehow hold onto their humanity. They made promises to seek help – which meant being euthanized – at the first sign of lost control, but by then it was far too late. Entire populations had been lost that way; more often than not, it took only one victim to decimate an entire satellite colony from the inside.

Noal’s crew had seen their share of aberrants – more than their share – and he had personally dispatched more than a thousand of them. It was an impressive number, considering he had done it not with firearms, but his trusty zweihander. Sal, on the other hand, was a firearms man, and a crack-shot at that. Naomy also used guns, but even without one she had proven very handy in a pinch. And then there was Sid: an eccentric man, at the best of times, and completely obsessed with old-world music, especially a 21st century rock outfit called ‘The Black Orchid Rebellion’. Sid had a few pistols that he used in times of need, but he much preferred to make his own weapons: bottles of various unstable liquids that he called ‘molotov cocktails’. He had burned up a lot of abby flesh with those cocktails, and the others liked him all the better for it.

This latest assignment to the ruin of Winnipeg had been their most exciting mission to date, starting with the revelation that the entire area was being over-run by aberrants of every type and description. Their first order of business had been to clear out the area, at least enough so that they could work without looking over their shoulders every waking moment.

The first wave had been a frontal assault in the Gravedigger, which always made for a good time had by all. Noal had become quite adept at using the massive toyocar’s defensive features as weapons-of-mass-aberrant-destruction. First he would sweep through heavy abby concentrations, using spinning blades set around the exterior, and underneath the vehicle, along with tire spikes at maximum extension. He likened the experience to driving a zamboni – he’d read about those in the archives – cutting swathes through an ice rink made of mindless aberrant zombies.

Invariably, the abbies kept coming on, no matter how many of their numbers were sliced, diced and mangled around them – they were tenacious like that. It was a predictable pattern that Noal had used to his advantage on numerous occasions. Once he could no longer easily keep the toyo moving forward through the masses, he would stop the Gravedigger, right in the middle of them. He would wait, patiently, until there was nothing to see out of the ‘digger’s windows but a sea of aberrants swarming all over the vehicle, trying to smash their way in. Then he would flip a blue switch on the dashboard that charged the skin of the toyocar with a massive current, electrocuting (and often immolating) all but the most stubborn offenders. If anything was left after that, it was on to the red switch, and the Gravedigger’s flamethrowers, a personal favourite of Sid’s. A battery of two each, on the front and rear of the vehicle, and three on either side, made short work of anything left alive. No aberrant could stand up to that kind of abuse; they hated fire. Fuel was limited, so they were reserved only for the toughest pests, but when that red switch flipped off, there were no abbies, nor anything else for that matter, left to tell the tale. That is, if aberrants told tales, which they didn’t.

After two days and a trip back to Rico’s, to re-supply, the crew took the fight to the streets. With the aberrant perimeter culled, they were able to move into the city proper, spot-clearing an entry point to allow them room to expand their exploration through the ruins. It was a well rehearsed and often-used formula that they used, but it worked. Noal would sneak into an aberrant-infested area – a building or side-street – and take out as many enemies as he could with his zweihander, before the bulk of them noticed him. Once he had gotten the aberrants’ attention, he would run back toward his crew, where Sal and Naomy would pick them off with high-powered rifles and auto-recoilers. Those that got too close quickly found themselves engulfed in oily flames, thanks to Sid, and if they managed to get closer still, Noal was ready for them.

Once they had cleared out a decent radius, the real fun of exploring began in earnest, starting with high-rise buildings and similar structures. Many of those were not yet completely cleared of aberrants, so the crew would take a cautious walk through, killing pretty well anything, aside from themselves, that moved. Once the location was clear, they began the work of identifying and collecting anything of historical or cultural value that they could find, cataloguing, labeling and packing their finds at night in their camp.

Every two or three days they would travel the seven hours back to the Bastion to dump their payload and stock up on food and ammunition, stopping first at Rico’s End to refuel. After a month, they had covered less than a quarter of the city, and Noal had turned that last corner before Rico’s at least a dozen times. But this time was different; it was burning.

Black smoke billowed from the open ramp into the underground settlement, and the tell-tale blue flames of burning hydro-fuel could be seen flickering inside. Nobody spoke as Noal maneuvered the Gravedigger onto the ramp and slowly rolled down into what had been Rico’s main entry-way and fuel station; all it was now was a mess of fuel canisters, broken piping and… corpses. A lot of corpses, maimed, mangled and strewn about the garage. Some had been partially eaten and left to sit like yesterday’s leftovers.

Noal stopped drove the toyo as deep in as he could and then shut it down. Sal jumped out of the back with a growl, brandishing a snub-nosed auto-recoiler in each hand. Noal was right behind him, zweihander at the ready, along with Naomy, carrying a shotgun, and Sid with his pistols and a belt full of molotovs.

“Let’s look for survivors,” said Noal, “Kill anything that doesn’t look human.”

“With pleasure,” said Sal, his stocky frame practically quivering with rage. “After you.”

Noal nodded and headed through the service corridor and down into the central atrium of the ‘End’. Lights flickered from the ceiling, more off than on, and more bodies were strewn about the place, accompanied by bloody smears and handprints all over the walls and floor. It was aberrant work, clearly, and it appeared as though no one had been spared. The heat coming off of the burning hydro-fuel reservoirs was almost overwhelming, and the smell was even worse. A gurgling snarl came from somewhere ahead, and a big, white wolf-aberrant leaped out of the darkness, only to have its head sliced off by a quick swing of Noal’s blade. Aberrant blood was one of the most repugnant smells known to man.

“Goddamned abbies,” muttered Sal.

The group made a slow circuit from the living areas down into the central offices, finding a few hundred mutilated bodies and no one left alive. They didn’t encounter any more aberrants, though. That was something, at least. By the time they reached the administration offices they were unsurprised, if not unaffected, by the carnage laid out before them, and no longer expected to find survivors. Their new objective was to find clues: how had this happened? And why?

As they walked down a hallway outside administrator Rico’s office, they heard something tapping from inside it, which almost sounded like it might be human. As they entered the office, the smell of death was particularly pungent, and there were a lot of bodies.

“Rico must have been holding a meeting when it happened,” Noal commented. He stopped to listen for the sound, which had grown significantly quieter, following around to the back of the administrator’s desk. A man lay underneath it, tapping on the desk’s metal underside. “It’s assistant Hugo!” Noal exclaimed, “And he’s alive!”

“Please…” the wiry man whispered, clearly near death from multiple wounds. “I’m sorry…” With his last breath he pushed a ragged piece of paper into Noal’s hand, and expired.

“Hey, I found Rico!” shouted Sal, nudging a gorily lain corpse with the toe of his boot. He turned toward the others, a disgusted look on his face, “Something’s been chewing on the poor bastard. I always liked ol’ Ric—hey!” Sal yelped as the body suddenly came to life, grabbing at his ankle, and gunned it down with dispatch. “He wasn’t dead – he was a goddamned abb…oh shit!”

Suddenly the room was alive with the movement of the corpses come to life – not corpses at all, but aberrants, all of them. Noal sprung into action immediately, slashing off heads and limbs with the zweihander, while Sal laid down a full-automatic suppressing fire with his auto-recoilers, weaving back and forth between targets and proving himself quite nimble for a man with such a heavy frame, all the while screaming “Eat it! Eat it! Die! Die! Stay dead you arseholes!” at the top of his lungs. Naomy, meanwhile, while was steadily taking abbies down, one shot for one kill, and Sid was quietly doing his part with the high-powered pistols, as the fight was in too-close quarters to use the cocktails. The fighting was hot and heavy for a few moments, with everyone scrambling around, all working in different directions.

“Get it together, people! Tighten up and work as a group!” they heard Noal shout. Suddenly everyone was working in unison, and before long every aberrant in the room had been put down.

The crew stood panting for a few precious seconds, nobody saying a word, until Sal piped up. “So what the hell was that?” he asked, incredulously, “Why would they just lie there, waiting for us?”

“It was a trap,” said Noal. “They set us up.”

“Set us up?” Sal replied, “Can somebody tell me, since when do aberrants set traps?”

Noal looked at Naomy, guardedly, “When someone is pulling their strings.”

“He's right,” said Naomy, “these were no ordinary aberrants. They were under the control of someone, or something. I don't like it.”

Noal slammed the zweihander back into it's sheathe with a clatter to get everyone's attention. “Alright everyone, lock and load. We're getting hell out of here, right now!”