Future Winds (26 page)

With tremendous effort, she stretched her artificial arm down his until making contact with his armpit. The jab involuntarily forced him to drop the blade as his shoulder dislocated and snapped.

She spun him around like a spider attacking its prey. For a brief second he was her puppet to control. From his back side, she climbed up and perched atop his shoulders before raining down onto his head with her metal fist.

She entered into an estate of bloodlust as she pounded away relentlessly. She kept swinging, not stopping for the cracks and grunts the ogre of a man let out. He slammed her against the wall like a bull trying to dismount an unwanted rider. She did not let up her grip or cease in her attack. There was no dismounting this girl riding a steer. The pain of being thrown against the wall nor the sound of cracks emitted by her own ribs being fractured, could stop her as she continued pulverizing his face.

They were now on the ground and soon there was nothing left to his head, just the mush of what he once held inside.

She began to cry in realizing that she was tenderizing dead meat. Perhaps for anywhere upwards of ten minutes, she had been pulsating his dead, broken face. Her rampage had taken over and in doing so, her sense of time and self was lost.

With one final thrust into the pile of gore she released his remains and rolled onto her back into a pile of carnage as she succumbed to a well-deserved cry. Her arms were sore, her face was broken, her ribs were cracked, and her chest was cut open. She was covered from head to toe in the human remains of others and still she forced herself to stand to her feet. Depleted both mentally and physically, she just needed to get out of New Horizon.

***

Approaching a locked hydraulic door, Ness kneeled down to one of the dead bodies on the floor. It was a man who was completely missing his face. His brains were splattered on the wall behind his corpse. Ness alleviated the deceased of its security card and slapped it against the door’s keypad which granted him immediate entry.

The room was
covered
in blood. A server room of sorts with bodies split open and scattered about the floor.

Ness poked his rifle into the room cautiously. On making his way thus far he had seen a tremendous amount of gore, so much so that he now felt numb to it.

Tear gas canisters, though depleted, still exerted a faint trail of smoke and the blood that caked the room still dripped from the walls like a thousand buckets of fresh paint. These were fresh kills exerted by his prey. So the man who had abducted his brother had to be near.

***

Leaving her blade behind, Aisha stumbled to the door. It clicked and began to open. Someone was entering the room from the outside and she took cover against the wall just beside the door.

A rifle poked into the room and scanned about as the owner of the weapon was cautious in entering. Aisha could only see the weapon and the arms that wielded it. Aisha knew these people were still in pursuit of blood, as if it were some thirst that simply could not be quenched. 

Her eyes still stung from the gas. Her body sore and broken was controlled by a shattered mind. She had simply had enough. Enough of the killing, enough of the blood, enough of the politics, enough of being hunted like a rabbit with a broken leg by wolves chasing and nipping at her feet for the sport of the kill.

Screaming out in frustration, she turned the corner, grasping at the barrel of the rifle with her natural arm, pushing it off into a safe direction, and with every inch of power that she could muster, she swung at the assailant with her bionic limb.

Before her brain could even begin to analyze who it was she was swinging at, the fist of her artificial arm was clean through the chest cavity of a teenage boy. She had disarmed him with ease and punctured straight through his sternum.

She tried to withdraw her hand from his now open chest but it was stuck. Ripping it out with force brought what looked to be pieces of the boy’s heart, blood vessels, and chunks of random tissue. He was quick to drop to the floor and die, but not before staring into her eyes with a look so horrified, Aisha felt as though the boy had burned through her very soul with his innocent gaze.

She fell to the floor with him in shock for what she had done.

“I am so sorry,” she cried over the boy’s now deaf ears. “I am so, so very sorry,” she repeated as she broke into a severe cry.

The boy was gone but that did not stop her from repeating the plea for forgiveness, again and again, and again.

There was a time not long ago when she looked at the mission to Flare with excited aspiring eyes, in high hopes for doing something of value with her life. To do something for the greater good. To look at life from outside of herself and to make those around her proud. To honor her heritage and upbringing with a life of exploration and adventure. But there was not a trail of hope to be found on this hostile planet, only death and sorrow.

The human race was naive to think that things would be any different on a planet so far from home. Like somehow running off through the stars would leave behind their evil past. Or the interstellar distance would somehow cleanse themselves of the sickness that plagued their demise from the start. Humanity had arrived and brought with them their wickedness. They were the evil that spread through the universe deteriorating everything that they touched.

She felt as though she were the monster. No better than the bugs that came from the ground and claimed innocent lives, the politicians that enslaved the race of man, or Abram and his pointy, pale faced friends who slaughtered the fragmented survivors of Project Salvation.

She touched the boy’s face whose skin was soft like a baby. Though in his late teens, he still wasn’t fully developed or anywhere close to being built like a man.

She closed his eyes, smearing the blood from her hands to his face, then she closed her own as they continued to stream tears.

***

“Lady Kai-Zul,” Kio-Kai said while bowing in her presence.

His body was broken badly and maneuvering the tunnels and caverns to get back to his queen, who resided in her spawning pools, was as difficult a task as any.

He had faced certain death but hours ago. The sky, while known for her violence, had granted Kio-Kai a favor in life, saving him from his demise whilst entrapped a victim to the human’s counter attack. He was not going to spit in the face of the sky who had given him a second chance, a gift in life, and knew he now had to rise to the task of saving the lives of those he called his family.

“We must leave here at once,” he said in exhaustion. “The overlords are using our queens to spread their will across the lands.”

Her eyes shifted to that of disgust. “My child, we cannot abandon the swarm in times of despair. We are a proud and noble family within the empire. Why would we throw that away on the notion of such a conspiracy?”

“It is true, my queen. They have asserted themselves to power alongside all, including yourself, I fear. They whisper echoes of greed and madness into your consciousness. We must liberate ourselves from their maleficent grasp,” Kio-Kai pleaded.

“What you speak of is treason, my child,” she hissed. “After all we have built and achieved, you wish to brand our family as traitors and rebels? Have you not learned what it is that becomes the fate of an outcast band of rebels?!”

“Please, my queen. I just want what is best for my family,” Kio-Kai said.

“It is not up to you to determine what is best for anyone, little hunter. You are a sword that pokes through the night in exerting my will. Not the other way around.”

“Please,” he cried, beginning to tear up. “Please trust me.”

“Leave me, my child, and may we never speak of this ever again,” she warned, turning her back to him to walk away.

He rose to his feet and approached her from behind with tears in his inkblot eyes that began to subtly flow down the front of his sharp face. “I am sorry,” he sniffled.

Grabbing her by the head, he stuck her through the back of the neck with his blade. “If you will not see reason, I cannot leave you breathing. I cannot lead our clan to freedom with you alive, constantly spreading the will of our masters into our minds.”

He turned her around, looked her in the eyes and held her arms, so to prevent her struggle to cover the hole in her neck, that poured forth red, with her hands. The ninety-seven seconds that it took for her to choke away her final breaths on her own blood, felt like eons for Kio-Kai to sit and watch over. Even in such a violent death, she was beautiful. Truly one of the best queens to have ever served within the hive.

Kio-Kai immediately became overwhelmed with guilt and confusion as she faded away. His whole life he lived to serve the will of his queen but now, in her dying minutes, he began to feel relief. The nerves in his brain that linked him to her were quickly dissolving and breaking away and for a brief second, he had the suspicion that this is what she had wanted. Maybe she knew that turning away from the overlords was never really an option for her, that her children freeing themselves of them by cutting out the pestilence rot linking them together through her was the only true way of breaking away. He wasn’t sure if there was any truth in that suspicion or just something he had conceived in his own head to cope with murdering her. With her now dead, he would never really know.

Delicately folding her arms and placing her hands on top of one another and across her chest, he leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead before standing. Now with her blood on his lips he looked down on the corpse of his once noble queen.

“What!? What have you done?” a twitcher squeaked in entering the room to find his queen motionless and dead on the floor.

“I have freed our clan. You and I are now bound to no one,” Kio-Kai said calmly as he continued to stare down at his lifeless queen on the ground.

“She was our mother!” the twitcher screamed as he dived to the floor to hold Lady Kai-Zul.

“It is true. She was once our mother but she died long ago, long before I ever stuck her.”

“You are crazy,” the twitcher moaned with a cry while continuing to cradle his queen. He intensely wept as if in doing so would somehow bring her back to life.

Kio-Kai turned to leave. It was clear that he could do nothing to ease the heartache of the twitcher drone. Losing his queen was a sadness the drone would have to cope with on his own.

He left the chamber which lead back to the now late queen's spawning pools where he limped his way up and down a lane of rehabilitation tanks until stopping to burst one open.

Falling to the floor unconscious and covered in red goo was Lai-Kai. Her body was scrapped up, but she was mostly healed from her fatal wounds that otherwise would have killed her from the bombing of Val-Meul.

Kio-Kai raised her from the ground and wiped away the sticky lifeblood from around her eyes and mouth as he cradled his still friend back to life.

“Kio-Kai?” she mumbled in regaining consciousness. “What? Where are we?”

She was confused and took her time in recuperating sensibility as she shook her head about. Looking around the spawning pools she seemed to gain a better understanding of where it was that she resided.

“What has happened?” she stammered.

“You were injured in an assault on the city where we were having drinks a few days ago. Hell, I thought you were dead,” Kio-Kai choked out with a smile. “But here you are alive and well.”

Hunters, twitchers, and grinders all belonging to what was left of the clan of Kai began to make their way towards Kio and Lai.

“What are they doing?” Lai-Kai questioned out loud.

“Kai-Zul is dead and it is time for our clan to leave the swarm,” he answered, wasting no time in moving things along.

“Dead?” she repeated, squinting her ink blot eyes in disbelief. “Well, what are we supposed to do then?”

“You tell me, Lady Lai,” he said bowing down before her with his family who soon joined in with the symbolic gesture.   

Regaining her strength to stand, she looked to her sore body to see an extended abdomen had ruptured from her backside while she was asleep suspended in the lifeblood. She wiggled her extra sets of feet and toes to life that bore the weight of the large abdomen then looked back to Kio-Kai in astonishment.

“This is not the end of our family’s saga, Lai-Kai, this is only the conclusion to a very long, very dark chapter. Today we must preserve so that tomorrow we might embark on writing the first page of what is next for our once great family. We are now destined to serve as the pillars of foundation for a wondrous new clan, a new chapter in the Vai-Zik empire. The clan of Lai!”

In the hours that followed, twitcher drones dislodged lady Kai-Zul’s eggs from the ground. In doing so the veins that carried blood across the dirt made squishy popping noises as they spewed the liquid off into the air.

A hundred and six twitcher drones, carrying ninety-four eggs, led by sixty-four hunters, tailed by forty-two grinders made way to the surface of Flare. Though other clans and queens of the Vai-Zik empire were still alive,
this
was all that was left of Kai-Zul’s once powerful noble family. They would have to go on to be the rock that shields a fresh and dynamic family with a progressive set of new ideas. One no longer bound by the will of the overlords or doing what was best for the Vai-Zik hive, but rather a clan returning to its roots in the vast and wondrous wilderness of their sacred planet, Flare.