IP: 69.113.245.145
Posted on August 31, 2015 at 07:09:59 AM by Shyaza
| A shot split the chill morning air. Shyaza stalked towards her now still prey, leaf litter crunching under heavy black boots. The crumpled figure was vaguely humanoid, but the face is contorted to resemble the mouth of a leech with no eyes. A harceleur. She nudges the body with her toe, looking for signs of life, mouth in a grim neutral position. Only when the body stays down does she holster her weapon. She puts a black tag marking the body attached to the right hand. Destruction. The street crew would probably get around to it... someday. She sighed. There was so much work and not enough competent people left to carry it out.
After a busy night of hunting Shyaza headed back to her flat. It was a dinky one room ordeal, but much better than living in the crowded barracks like when she had been a new recruit. Les Rebelles were a last ditch effort at protecting the city. Perhaps the only city left inhabited by humans. She hoped Earth's other break off colonies had fared better than this one or perhaps the whole race would be extinct soon. That was a depressing thought, considering her group's mission of taking back the planet and exterminating the harceleur, a predatory creature that had arrived out of seemingly nowhere after 200 years inhabiting Ipstam. Humans must have seemed like delicious and wonderful prey, since they quickly had set up shop and became a mainstay of life. Shyaza undoes the locks on the front door, letting herself through the thick metal door, then redoes the chain and bolts from the inside. She heads into the bathroom, stripping out of her light armor and clothes on the way. She glances at herself in the mirror: slim, boylike figure, blue-black hair pulled into a tight braid. A scar cut across her left cheek, a ragged line from her eheekbone to the middle of her upper lip. She traces it with a finger, feeling the ridge. It still bothers her, how close she came to death, seeming to stare it in the face. She turns around and starts the water running though only cold water runs through. Hot water is a rare luxury in a world too far gone to have normal infrastructure and repair men. She washes quickly and climbs onto the bed between old soft sheets, sighing with relief as muscles relax. Her mind drifts towards the movies of life that had been, before anarchy had become law and death by age fifty a reality for many. She could still hum the bars from children's movies. Happy themed music that followed the story. It is a distant dream. Almost as if it had never existed at all. She furrows her brows, making herself remember the history, the dates, the chaos. Lack of memory would lead to ignorance. If people did not remember how it used to be, this would becoome the norm, this half existence. Shyaza could almost feel everyone forgetting, living just how things were, and dealing with them permanantly. It made her fists clench so hard, the running, the zombie people just continuing on, the scattered talk of who died this week or that week, and it being a way to mark the simple passage of time... Shyaza rolled over, shaking her head to clear it. It would not happen, not as long as she was alive to change it. She woke at noon from a hard sleep to knocking on her door. It was a fellow agent. No one else would dare knock on her door. She readies her gun in case, and looks through the peephole. Grant. She places the gun down on the table and pulls on a bathrobe to answer the door. "What are you here for?" she says brusquely, if not unkindly. Having less than 5 hours sleep tended to make her a bit impatient with those knocking on the door. His face looks grim, and obviously she knows her schedule, so she knows he would not normally disturb her before she had even had a chance to sleep. Grant has brown stubble showing he has not yet been to sleep, or even returned to his apartment, and his green eyes are still. "Geoff's been taken." Shyaza goes still. Geoff is Grant's brother. Probably the only family Grant has left. She puts a hand out to offer comfort but he jerks back, suddenly angry. "No, damn it! I have to go after him!" Shyaza pulls back, confused, questioning. "You cannot. There would be no point." The harceleurs were not interested in bargaining with their food, and rarely kept them alive past capture. Except to take them back to the nest... which walking in there, with current depleted numbers is suicide. He is at a breaking point, clinging to false hope. "Even if they keep him, it will be a day at most, and it is impenatrable." She speaks softly, but firmly, trying to dispel any crazy plans or death missions from his head. He was a logical man on most days, and if she could just reach him at that level, if not on an emotional level, it might help. He walked past her and collapsed onto a stool, not ready to relinquish the plan, but not foolhearty enough to decide he could carry it out alone. "I've got to try" he pleads, eyes searching. Already he seems just an empty shell, like the dragonfly larvae shells left to rot on docks while the beautiful occupant flies away without a care. Did the dead know the pain they inflicted on the living? She went to the kitchen, pulling out some alcohol. It was cheap stuff, designed to get the user drunk, not to taste good. Good alcohol was an artform that had disappeared shortly after the monsters had arrived. She poured a generous glass and offered it to him. He chugged it in one sip. She took a chair across from him, perched lightly, as if choosing whether to flee the impending sadness. He puts the glass down on the floor, not having a table available in the sparsely furnished apartment. "There is a way," he intones softly. She looks at him like he has grown two heads, but he continues, without asking permission and without meeting her eyes. "There is a new weapon being developed. It would obliterate them." She stares, realizing how little she knows of the science developments since she has started hunting. "They won't release it yet though... something about it not being tested on humans." His voice is bitter, as if the thought of caution is equivalent to sucking on a battery. "If it has not been tested enough yet, it is probably best it remain within the lab" Shyaza reasoned. If every new weapon had been tested in the field rather than a controlled setting the whole planet might be a cinder by now. And despite how much she hated this failing planet, with its monsters, she wanted to live. She wanted her friends to live. And this was currently the only conceivable place they could live, considering the obliteration of their space travel abilities with the uprise of the harceleurs and following panic and corruption. The rich had thought they could buy themselves out of their fate, and had hoarded all the shuttles, trying to take off with too many packed in. The harceleurs had somehow heard of the take off, and arrived to feast on sweet meat in tin cans as they overran the launch pads and disengaged the set up. Grant gives a weak nod, then heads to the door. She thinks for a moment. It was too easy, he had not even fought with her. She changes into street clothes quickly, packing on two guns, and sets out to follow him, discreetly. At first, Shyaza cannot find Grant. She curses her luck, and then decides to camp out the main exit from the city towards the nest area, telling her informants to keep her posted. She yawns as she stands sentry like in the shadows. The lack of sleep is starting to catch her, despite her fear for her friend. She is about to give up when she sees him walking. He has what looks like an all black gun with loops of gold around the barrel, and a tip too small for a bullet. She calls to him, catching up. She is about to reach out, coax him back to company base, and forget the whole silly thing when he whips around to turn the weapon at her. "I'm going to do this with or without you" he states coldly "but I can't have you getting in the way. We've been good colleagues, but I cannot let our work together get in the way of me getting my brother back." He pauses for a moment and then adds as a small plea "I have to try." He is nuts, as far as Shyaza is concerned, but she is unwilling to risk him using the weapon on her in his current state of mind. She backs off to a safe escort distance. He continues towards the nest. Her concerns start circling. Would it be better to shoot him than let him discharge the weapon? What about anyone else from the company? But she vetoes that idea, as most people are either sleeping or far away, and she is not sure she would get back in time. She holds her silence, not trusting herself to speak or him not to shoot her if she did. The nest looms ahead, and her palms are sweating. To her surprise he aims the weapon. She is about to say something along the lines of "Aren't we too far away?" When he explains. "It has a big range. Using it right on top of the targets is like using a nuclear bomb to kill one person." That makes her even more nervous and she starts to double back when he shoots it. At first, there is nothing but then a bright flash engulfs her and an inside out sensation is whipping her about. She lands hard on the sand. Wait. Sand? She looks around, taking a sharp gasp. This was not where she had expected to be, and she had no idea how to return. It would be her luck to have the weapon backfire on her, if that is what happened. |
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