Zone Run

[Cybrludite]

A little something inspired by a weird dream I had earlier this week.

This was supposed to just be a quick scouting of The Zone. Of course, that went out the window when we ran into the refugees. Almost literally. Normally, we’d report them via burst transmission to SAR, and maybe leave some ration bars ahead of their path, but we’d walked around the corner right into the spot where they’d stopped to collect both their breath and their remaining stragglers.

It seems they had at least one Hunter after them. Possibly more, but it could just be that this one was particularly creative with their kills. Bad news. As a general rule the crazier they are, the more they’ve been boosted. Some say that this theory reverses the actual causality, and the crazier you are to begin with, the more the Zonegov can boost them. Either way, until we can get our hands on a live one (or on one of the mad docs who make them), we’re just spitballing.

Anyhoo, we called for SAR to go on alert and began moving these folks out far enough that it wouldn’t be suicide for them to come get us. We were cutting through the offices of an abandoned factory or warehouse in what was a crappy part of town even before all this when the Killer caught up with us. She sprang from an office cube as the middle of the crowd was passing. She gutted two, nearly beheaded a third, and was crashing through the walls of the office across the hall before Tony & I could bring our guns to bear. He put half a mag of .223 through the wall, and I sent a slug downrange with nowhere near enough lead to catch her. I had a glimpse of a black-clad blur with average height and a lot of dishwater blond hair, surrounded by the arterial spray from her victims.

Tony decided to shift floors, figuring that no matter how crazy this bint was, she probably wasn’t going to gnaw through solid cement to flank us again. And if she was that crazy, it’d take long enough for her to do it that we could get some distance while she did. Seemed a good idea at the time. Only problem, of course, is that she could sit on the landing and drop grenades on us if no one bought time for the rest to get away. I loaded a round of buckshot into the mag to replace the one I’d jacked into the chamber, then passed my shotty and my bandoleer to the likeliest looking refugee. “I’m going to want these back when I catch back up to y’all. For fuck’s sake, don’t shoot me when I get back. Unless I say things are ‘peachy’. Then someone’s got a gun to my head, and you should blast away.”

“Dude! You’re nuts for staying!”

“Someone’s gotta do it. Might as well be the guy with no family. Go!”

Come to think of it, that’s the same reason that Before I used to work night shift, overtime, and on the holidays. I gots to get me a family one of these days… I prop the stairwell door open and pull my AK pistol from under my field jacket with a ripping of Velcro. It was years ago that I’d built this thing as part of a group buy & build night with a local Kalashnikov club. Remember the internet and being able do stuff like that?

I popped the last of my glowsticks and scattered them around the room and waited in the dark of the fire stair doorway. I pulled the rear mounted sling tight & centered the red dot sight on the hallway door. I was going to blast whoever stepped through, and had cover (well, concealment if a sniper-bot joined the fun) if they came from any sensible direction. The one thing I wasn’t expecting was to know the psycho chasing us.

“Tiffany?” Ok, at what point did my life turn into something written by Niven & Pournelle? She was a good friend of mine from college out west. None too stable to begin with. (Point for theory #2!) Her father had been one of the first batch of Navy SEALS in Vietnam, and her upbringing had reflected it. She was one of the few folks I could talk guns with on an even footing back in the day. Now she was standing there in form fitting armor, flecks of blood on her face, and what I could swear were a bloody Hil Gibben Warbird bowie knife in each hand. She had certainly aged better than I had, and most folks wouldn’t guess that I’m in my mid forties.

“Phil? Hey, long time, no see!” Her eyes were certainly crazier than I recalled them ever being, even when she was doing ‘shrooms. (Point for theory #1. Of course, they aren’t mutually exclusive…)

“Hold it there, Tiff. I’ll end you if you keep after us.” She smiled, and I was thankful that even back then I knew better than to put my dick in the crazy. It was a smile that would give Jack Torrance and Bruce the Shark screaming nightmares. The giggle that went with it didn’t help matters any.

“No, you won’t. Unless you become One Of Us!” Again with the giggle. Fucking creepy, it was. “I think you’ll fit in well.” That’s when she made her move. Time seemed to slow down, and she still was moving like Jesse Owens on meth, and screeching like a scalded cat. First shot went wide left, the second not quite as wide right. She dropped, knives scattering, on the third. The tunnel vision faded and my arms began to shake a bit as I stepped out of the doorway and edged to my right, wide around the desk she’d partially fallen behind. She was cursing & curled up cradling the left side of her torso. I don’t know if my shot got through her armor, or if the blunt trauma had cracked her ribs. Either way, I wasn’t getting close enough to find out. She looked up, grimacing and with blood at the corners of her mouth, (her own blood, that is) and hissed, “One. Of. Us.”, at me as I lined up the sights and shot her between the eyes. I was just turning around to go down the stairs when Tony or one of the refugees tripped the claymores.

[moose42]

Interesting start. I'd try to be a little more "in the moment."

Anyway, what happens next?

[Cybrludite]

Interesting start. I'd try to be a little more "in the moment."

Anyway, what happens next?

I was writing it more as a debriefing or a "No shit, there I was" point of view, because, frankly, that's easier to do. A more "in the moment" POV would draw the reader in better.

Not sure what happens next, because my alarm went off ending the dream/nightmare this was based on before the coup-de-gras shot. Most of the details about the setting & most of the dialog are pretty bog-standard cyberpunk/post-apocalypse tropes I used to fill in the blanks from the dream. If whomever the narrator is talking to has authority and is the least bit genre savvy, the narrator's going to be spending a lot of time in the lab getting probulated to see why a Hunter would consider him to potentially be one of them.