Petrichor - a novel in "open beta" - [M/f, minigiant, post-apocalyptic dystopia, slavery, military setting]
-
CHAPTER 15
(Well, most of it.)
Jesus, this was very hard to write. It might be the most intense chapter so far. Still have a bit to go, but this was a decent stopping point and I thought I’d share.
She heard them coming up the canyon long before she saw them: a group of five. Four of them were armed, and one of them was carrying an empty duffel bag. They were surprised to see her sitting on a rock in the shade across from Avers’ body, with a smokestick taken from one of the brigs hanging from her mouth.
“Holy shit!” one of the eighth-years remarked. “You’re alive, Gray?”
Gray had pocketed a few things from the dead men worth gambling away, including a nicer tac knife. She watched the group of corpsmen as they kicked at the bodies to get a better look at the faces.
“My gun could shoot more bullets than theirs,” she panned. “Basic fucking math.”
Two of the armed corpsmen searched the brgs while the other two scaled the rock fall to have a look around above. Torres glanced back at Avers, the poor fucker. Then Torres set her pack down and got a gulp of water from her canteen before producing a pair of folding shovels. She handed one to Gray.
“Y’know what they say about F circuit,” Torres said as she began moving dirt. “The F stands for “fuck you”.”
Ah yes, that old joke. Gray snubbed out the last of her smoke, pocketed it, and got to work helping dig a shallow grave for her comrade.
One of the corpsmen who was busy examining a brig turned and made eye contact with Torres.
“Hey, check this out. This is a pretty nasty hole. Big.”
Gray took a glance at the gore from where she stood. The white of his ribs was visible in among the red and purple. She swallowed, looked at her boots. “Kicker can do that too, you know.”
Torres stopped and went to get a look for herself. She poked at the dead brig with the end of her shovel, moving his arm away from the wound on his side.
“’Nak lead if I ever saw it.” She turned back to the seventh-year sentry. “Gray, what happened over here, exactly?”
She shrugged stiffly. “They ambushed me and I made ‘em regret it.”
“One of these men was killed by a 'Nak.”
Gray shrugged again.
“You don’t seem bothered by that.”
Fuck off!
“Yeah, I’m alive thanks to that bullet. Kinda glad I got the help.”
Torres frowned deeply. “Alright, guys, hurry up, help us dig. There might be a ‘Nak nearby and he’s not invited to this funeral.”
* * *
The remnants of water clung to her backside as Gray stood in the shower stall, eyes screwed shut as she held onto the arched neck of the shower head. A rip in the tent canvas threw a long needle of light along her shoulder, which she felt as heat. More often it was used when someone wanted an eyeful of wet skin.
She’d spent two minutes on water, but fifteen minutes in the stall and was already drip-dry by the time she was ready to leave. The corpsman was busy trying to put Rice’s face out of her mind, trying to forget that she’d ever met him. And as she tired, she was realized that he’d done something for her. She didn’t quite understand what it was, but something about her was very different now than before. And that made trying to forget him all the more important.
She whispered a swear and grabbed a towel to dry off.
Later, Gray went to the privacy of her toon tent to look over what she’d lifted from the dead man. The knife, the smokesticks. They were worth something, she knew that, but how much? What might Craft give her for it? A few books, at least. Maybe he’d keep an eye out for a nicer gun.
The tent flap was suddenly pulled aside, and outside stood Torres of all people. Stout and solid, Gray didn’t want to just tell her to go away, especially because of the look in her eye.
“’Cap wants to see you.”
“You can tell him I’ll be right there to fill out the debrief sheet.”
“Ain’t that. He wants you now.”
Heat rose to Gray’s face—she knew she was in trouble. Or that Wesson wanted to act like she was in trouble.
Maybe he wants to punish you for surviving that.
Gray mustered her strength and headed out, passing another toon tent, a latrine, and the quad, before coming to Wesson’s square little office made of canvas. She took a deep breath before stopping inside, needing to gather her wits. The promo bastard had something up his sleeve, she knew it. Glancing behind her to see Torres stand, watching from the other side of the quad, was all the evidence she needed.
“Have a seat, Gray,” came that voice of his, commanding and strained.
She did, slowly. What was it going to be this time?
“Torres says you fired your gun, corpsman…”
He spoke like he didn’t know who she was, and between him and her pounding heart she began to grow confused and frustrated.
“Of course I did. I took on three fucking brigs. Was I not supposed to defend myself?”
Wesson chuckled, and behind her someone entered the tent. He waved them in, and it was Torres again, with Gray’s pair of Corps-issued weapons. Torres must’ve slipped into her tent and grabbed them just now, something that would normally get you beat up. But not this time—this was an officer’s errand.
“Do a bullet count,” Wesson ordered, still not having made eye contact with Gray yet.
The seventh-year just sat in her uncomfortable chair, watching the eighth-year in stiff silence as she slipped the magazines out of their respective guns and proceeded to empty them out onto the great wooden desk for counting.
“Sider fired six times,” Torres said. “And kicker fired eight, sir.”
Gray narrowed her eyes and in a mocking voice said: “_Forty-_eight, sir. She must not have seen the two empty mags sitting on my cot waiting to be packed again.”
“Thank you Torres, that’ll be all. She and I need to talk alone.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Torres and Dunn found thirty-nine of your shells out there,” he said once she’d gone.
Gray swallowed, feeling warm under hr shirt collar. To illustrate this, he produced one of the precious little sleeves of brass and set it on the desk.
“And one of these, about 150 yards away.”
Another, altogether different shell was then stood up beside the first: it was several times larger, with a jagged-looking taper in the middle. Gray knew that it was also heavy.
She studied the pair of shells, glancing from one to the other. “There’s ‘Nak casings everywhere in these hills… sir.”
There was no way that what she thought was happening was happening. It wasn’t possible. What case was he going to try and build based on one shell?
Wesson rubbed his chin, still not looking her in the eye. Why didn’t he? Look at me while you do this, you goddamn bastard.
“It was fresh,” he said carefully. “Not a grain of sand in it.”
And then he paused. Gray possibly stopped breathing as he did.
“Know what else was fresh? His prints up on the ridge.”
She tensed as if hit with the pheromone of several scenting giants. Her blood ran like cool water, and all she could think about all of a sudden was his hands on her back, on her breasts, between her legs, and she was coming, coming—
“What are you trying to say, Wesson?”
“I just want to know what happened.”
“I was out there trying to survive the fucking suicide mission you sent me on. I wasn’t making friends, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Wesson turned to swat at the heavy canvas behind him and call through the fabric: “You can come in now, Kessler.”
Kessler.
This was about the moment that Gray’s stomach felt like it dropped to the floor because it all made sense. This was all coming back to finally haunt her.
The young man looked intense when he came in, at once both afraid and angry. Burke never knew about what had happened that evening before the ambush, but Wesson did.
“Holy shit,” was all Gray could stammer.
Wesson said to Torres: “Go get the Commander, please.” And to Kessler: “You, tell me again.”
“There was a ‘Nak with her that day. I remember him… h-he was on top of her. They thought no one was around.”
“On top of her.”
On top of me.
“Y-yes, sir. When I… attacked, he was on top of her.”
“On top like what? Was he trying to kill Gray?”
“No, sir. I don’t know what he w-was doing, sir.” Kessler swallowed. “But she lied, sir. She lied to Burke’s face. She said the ‘Nak was a dog. I knew what I saw. I never forgot.”
Wesson stood up and began to pace.
“What did you tell him?” he asked Gray.
Gray’s mouth was open and it felt like she’d been tied to the chair. Not a sound came out.
Wesson exploded, kicking her to the floor in the rib she’d injured all those weeks ago, and the seventh-year cried out in pain. She hit the floorboards with a hard thud, gasping.
“What did you tell him, Gray?”
He stepped over to her and grabbed her by the collar.
“You traded something for your life, corpsman! Now what was it?”
Wesson shook her or maybe she was shaking or maybe both were happening. Barely recognizing the sound of her own voice as she struggled to say something—anything, idiot!—and with a horrified wheeze, a few words were dragged out.
“We f… f-fucked.”
Gray had no idea if she’d just saved or damned herself to more torture than she could possibly imagine. But the fact was that a lie hadn’t materialized. All she could speak was the truth.
“That’ll be all, Kessler,” Wesson growled from where he was crouched over her like a fox with a vole.
“Sir—”
“I said, that will be all!”
When he was gone, Wesson let her go, but only in time for his hand to go sailing across her face hard enough for blood to spatter.
“You fucking whore,” the captain hissed. “I thought I knew you, Gray. I thought I knew you. You wanted nothing but that freeman’s mark, and you’d be the good corpsman to get one. But now, now…"
Gray lay there on the floor and clutched her side, the pain almost as bad as it had been in the beginning, and all she could take were quick, shallow breaths. It made it hard to think.
But Wesson continued without her. “And you used me, didn’t you? Played me like a fucking fool, getting me to schedule you for all those solitary posts. And all so you could commit treason. Unless…” He paused to take a few rough breaths through flared nostrils, and still all Gray could manage was a wheeze. “It was rape?”
Gray shut her eyes tight, not wanting to even think about answering this question. She focused on trying to breathe.
“Tell me he forced you, Gray. Tell me he put his gigantic hands on you and shoved you to the ground.”
She panted wordlessly, and Wesson stood up again. He watched as she began pulling herself back up into her chair.
“So you’re just a fucking whore,” Wesson whispered. “For years I stuck out my neck for you. I felt bad for you.” His flushed face drew close, and he grabbed her by the chin. “You barely knew how to suck a cock when we first met. You were what, seventeen? New to Fox after spending that first year getting your ass kicked at Camp Jay.”
Wesson drew even closer, and he spoke with a choked, hushed voice.
“What does he have that I don’t, huh? What’s he got on me?"
Gray was seated again, moving carefully as she tried to sit upright in the chair. Her hair was in her eyes but that was fine because there was no sitting up when she hurt this much and no looking him in the eye.
“A… backbone…”
There was a flash in his eye, brief but unmistakable, before he lifted his leg and kicked her again. This time she went tumbling across the floor along with the chair.
While Gray was busy trying to breathe steadily and keep herself from vomiting, Hitch had stormed in with a pair of armed ninth-years in tow. It took a few seconds for her to be able to sense the world outside of that pain.
“Get her to the med tent. We’ll keep her there until she can be picked up.”
“Picked up? But s-sir this is treason. She… she…”
“Captain Rhyd Wesson, it’s time you learned what retraining is.”
* * *
The captain’s liquor had tasted so sweet on her lips, and she’d fallen so neatly into that silky stupor that she was gone before she knew it. The pain went away, it seemed, and Gray was at least able to take deep breaths. She couldn’t quite see straight, but that was fine, she wanted to sleep, anyway.
Where was she? The cot didn’t belong to her, and how did it get so clean?
“A couple morph should do the trick,” a shadowy figure said.
“Jesus, Bauer, we’re not trying to kill her.”
“Alright, just one morph, then.”
Gray opened her mouth to speak, but found it very dry. “Wh… ere am I?”
“Shit, she’s awake.”
“Did the commander say she wasn’t allowed to remember this?”
“Well, no. But it would sure as hell make our job easier.”
“…W-what’s going… going on?”
The pair turned to her, and Gray could barely keep her eyes open to see them through the haze. “Whatever it is, it’s between you and Hitch,” one of them said. “I’m just here to medicate.”
Something small and chalky was stuck into her mouth, then, and she struggled with it for a few seconds. Then a few beats later and Gray fell into a dead sleep.
* * *
The next thing Gray knew for sure was happening was being woken up from a tent somewhere, filled with several unwashed bodies. Her hands were bound in front of her, there was a length of fabric tied around her head as a gag, and some kind of bag over her head prevented her from seeing anything. She felt woozy and hoped that she wouldn’t puke, or it would have nowhere to go.
“Up, up, everyone up,” came a voice. “We leave for the trade-off point in twenty minutes.”
There was groaning and shuffling, all of it sad.
Gray still sat on the hard ground, feeling stiff and tender as she pieced together that she, too, was to get up. She tried and failed, not quite finding her balance yet.
“You too,” said the same voice, now much closer. The seventh-year jumped when a big hand grabbed her by the arm to hoist her up and out of the tent. And it added in a very low voice: “Traitor.”
It all came back to her, now—Wesson, the shell casings, the beating—and the nausea roiling her stomach redoubled. She swallowed bile as black fear overcame her, and tried to speak: I’m not a traitor! I didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know!
But all that came out was muffled grunts.
Outside, she was shoved and herded and instructed to stand still for a while, and she listened through the pounding in her head, the pounding in her chest, to the sounds going on around her. Orienting herself was almost impossible, but she acted like her life depended on it.
Nearby there was shuffling, the gathering of rope, the saddling of horses. A man barked orders at someone, and in the meantime she heard tack and leathers in several places to her left, and hushed murmurs to her right. In the distance were the sounds of camp—she was not far, and the idea of trying to escape briefly crossed her mind, but it hit her then, really hit her, that there was no going back.
This was it.
The Corps was through with her.
At least, for now.
She remembered Hitch mention retraining: where was she being taken? A bullet-packing line? The ponds where the base for rations were grown? Was she being taken to a bond market?
Almost eight years. All gone.
Gone.
Washed away like dust in the rain.
Gray stood there, shaking, hands cold, and waited for whatever fate was in store for her. It seemed like a long time. But it was only the twenty minutes before she was shoved again from behind, situated into place, and someone began fastening something to the rope around her wrists—a line.
“If you stumble, catch yourself. If you fall, get up. Nobody’s slowing down for you until you get to the trade-off. Got it?”
It was Wesson, and his voice cut her to the bone.
But he was gone, too.
She tried inflecting the wordless groaning she was able to make to get something more from him. But he ignored her.
“Never taken a retrainee,” one of them said. “I’m surprised the camp isn’t gawkin’.”
“Camp won’t miss her.”
Those were her old friend’s last parting words before she heard the clicking of tongues and the jangling of bridles as they got underway, and the line tied to her wrists tugged her roughly forward through the glow of pre-dawn.
Gray was 16 years old again, except this time she was being led back to the caravan.
* * *
Once they were out of sight of camp, the bag was taken from her and she was finally permitted to see where they were going. Gray blinked, the knot in her stomach loosening from nothing else but exhaustion as she took in her surrounds: the rope tied her to a line of eight corpsmen, and she recognized them all as being those rejected from service during the inspections. They were a ragged bunch, limping along and lead by a man on horseback. Ahead of him were two more riders, each heavily armed.
It was several hours of hard walking in the baking sun, going on in pensive, defeated, anxious silence, before anything changed. Before the exhaustion settled into her bones and the wind pulled from her sails. It wasn’t that she wasn’t terrified, it was that she had no fight left in her. And that was part of what changed now.
They stopped, and Gray, too tired to even continue imagining the worst anymore, assumed that this was the destination. The riders dismounted, and people spoke in hushed voices so that Gray could barely hear.
The trade was happening, and between the trembling, the thoughts broken and scattered by fatigue, and the ghost of yesterday’s drugs, Gray couldn’t make much more sense than that. They must have been the rejected prospects, being dumped on somebody else in exchange for… for whatever. Paper. Light bulbs. Canvas. Anything but more useless humans.
She didn’t dare wonder what their fates would be, instead sitting still and anxious on the dirt, waiting for a hand to drag her to her feet so that she, too, could be sold to the wasteland.
Hoofbeats disappeared down the road along with the shuffle of bonds. Eventually, Gray was alone with the three Corps riders.
“Who they savin’ her for?” one of the men grunted.
“The next client,” another snapped. “Due at dusk.”
“How much does a trained bondie like her go for these days, anyways? Those eight we just got rid of were barely fit to dig a ditch.”
“Goes for more than you think. Now you two get goin’, I do the rest of this job alone.”
A gun cocked, and Gray stiffened.
“You sure?”
“You’re damn right, I’m sure,” he said in a low voice. _“_This the goddamn protocol. Now get.”
Two of the men mounted their horses, and after a few more mumbled sentiments exchanged, they too faded into the distance. After a minute, all she could hear were locusts.
She sat like that for another five, ten minutes, as her unseen companion walked a slow, steady circle in the dirt, not saying a word. Gray was thirsty, but dared not bring attention to herself.
Eventually, those footsteps came to a stop nearby, and she could feel him standing close. So close that she almost jumped when he spoke.
“You’re not gonna like your new holders,” he said quietly, voice raspy from smoking. “They don’t do things like we do.”
Gray shifted herself to face in his direction, trying to make out his silhouette through the burlap weave. He snorted.
“S’funny to me that after all these years, they still don’t tell you enlisteds anything. Not like knowin’ changes things. In fact, knowin’ would just make you more scared of ‘em. You know what they do, corpsman?”
She sat motionless, tense, listening.
“They eat humans,” he said. “They take us, grind us up, turn us into wet ration. That’s the real reason we fight ‘em. ‘Naks don’t grow nothin’, don’t raise nothin’. They farmin’ us, though.”
No, it couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be. Gray made a noise through her gag and shook her head. The man laughed bitterly.
“It’s true! You think they raid the caravans for pencils and indigo? C’mon, bondie, you can’t tell me you really believe we survive ‘em because we’re just that good. Humans are just resourceful and plucky enough. No… they let us win. They let us live our lives, be fruitful and multiply. We bargained for it, kid. S’where you’re goin’.”
She imagined it, the picture terrified her. She saw blood and gore, bones being turned to pinkish paste. This was her fate? This… this is what retraining was? Fuck the Corps, fuck the Corps, fuck the Corps…
Liars, all of them. Finch was right, who cared if General Pierce was ever real, that wasn’t the myth that the entire fucked place was based on. Since childhood, she knew the Corps helped hold the line against a shadowy and distant enemy, a race created to be human, but better.
And then, for the past seven years, Gray learned all the ways that the Corps did what it did. How the telegraph lines were laid to keep the camps connected. How their power and reputation gave them access to some of the best weapons deals available in the Southland, and how Corps-packed bullets were known to be the most reliable on the market. How they were the only organization in the waste—no, maybe the whole state—that freely and expertly trained bonds for more than menial labor.
How they were the only ones to eventually free them.
Gray wanted so badly to hate the Corps. But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t and it hurt because everything she knew was being taken from her, and as she thought about ‘Naks eating people again she remembered the liquid pumped into Rice’s side, and it all made sense, such horrible sense—
CRACK.
Thupt.
“Hk—!”
Crash, thud.
Gray gasped through the gag and froze.
Shot, shot, h-he’s been shot—
Gray shuffled herself backward until she collided with a rock and then threw herself to the ground, blood running cold with sheer panic. She couldn’t get hold of her breathing, her chest felt like it was going to explode and tears stung her eyes.
It took everything she had not to moan in despair when she heard the sound of boots approaching. Death approaching. Death was approaching. He shifted, turning on his heel. Searching. Didn’t have to search long.
She was grabbed, lifted to her feet, and the bag was ripped away. She cried out at the suddenness of it, the fact that there was no chance whoever had her now had any better intentions than a ‘Nak or a brig. In the span of a single morning, Gray had been kicked down to the lowest rungs of the social order. Carrion, ripe for the poaching. She screwed her eyes shut, not wanting to look him in the eye.
The gag was taken from her too, and the cry that escaped was long and agonized as her body pitched, ready to run.
“No! No, let me go!” she sobbed.
“Gray, it’s me! It’s me.”
A pair of arms surrounded her, the ground fell away.
It was him.
But he was a ‘Nak.
“No, no, no, stop, stop—“
“Gray!”
He crushed her to him, and he grabbed her by the wrists to hold her still, so still. She fought him, her human’s strength against his.
“Gray.”
Life left her, and next all she could do was sob into his dusty, armored shoulder. Cry tears she’d been holding back for seven years. This was… this was grief.
She grieved for her short, miserable life. She grieved for her species, for doing this to itself. She grieved for the eight bonds from earlier, for the countless rejects she’d seen during her time with the Corps. She grieved for Finch and Wesson and their friendship. She grieved for once having been sure of anything in life.
The giant just held her tight and stroked her hair.
When the tears dried and all that was left of the corpsman named Gray was an exhausted, empty husk draped over Rice’s shoulder, he loosened his grip and sat on the ground. Girl in lap, safe within the fortress of his body.
“Tell me you don’t do it,” she whispered. “Please. I need to hear it from you.”
“I don’t do what,” he murmured.
“You e-eat us.”
He hesitated and her heart shuddered.
“Let me go, let me fucking go!”
His massive hands were on her arms now, holding her still in a completely different way. Their eyes met, his hard blue ones and her agonized brown.
“Let me show you something.”
“Rice, Rice, please… just let me go. Let this be over.”
He shook her. “Gray, it’s not what you think. I have to show you.”
She trembled.
“Gray, please. I’ll explain.”
“Ellis,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Ellis! My name is Ellis!”
“…Ellis Gray.”
Rice said it slowly, trying it out. But hearing it brought her to tears again, stirring something old and worn and fragile in her, and she buried her face in his shoulder once more.
“It’s going to be OK, Ellis. It’s going to be OK.”
-
New title: Soylent Gray
“Captain Rhyd Wesson, it’s time you learned what retraining is.”
So is the implication here that Wesson is about to be inducted into the mysteries of the Corps, and that by the time he sees Gray off he knows that non-officer corpsmen (along with the rest of humanity) are just livestock? That’s some red pill.
Either way, Wesson is an irredeemable shit. Conflating treason against the Corps with betraying him personally is pathetic, and sending Gray off to get mulched is as cold as it gets.
Gray goes through a lot and learns a lot in this chapter, but you did well to make us feel each blow as it lands. The death of the Corps cuts the deepest. Gray’s body might still be intact, but her spirit has been puréed.
All my M/f stories and discussions can be found here.
-
@olo Argh it was so hard. I didn’t want to dwell too much on the emotional turmoil because it’s supposed to be the most jarring series of events in the story, and yet… Gray’s world is being ripped away from her forever.
The line with Wesson serves to both establish something like that, and also help set up the other, more accurate version of the revelation that happens soon after this. For all we know, Wesson is told the soylent story, and it serves to explain what he saw in the wreckage of that battle. The soylent story is all the Corps’s officers need to know, after all, and even Gray has a difficult time understanding the real form of “cannibalism” that actually takes place. Rice explains it in very simple terms in pt 2 but the technology is way beyond anything she’s ever known, and likely anyone other than brass too.
Pureed is right!
-
@kisupure I just realized this means that Rice is just a good ol’ farm boy.
-
PART 2
They sat like that for a few long, long minutes before Gray’s tears dried and she felt empty and stiff.
“How did they find out?” Rice asked quietly, thumb stroking her back.
She didn’t say anything for a while because it still felt so far away, now, and if she wasn’t careful then she could almost start to feel like it had never happened at all. Part of her wanted to know what the board said. She checked her watch, had to remind herself that no one was coming to relieve her of her post. This was no post. There was no relief. She shivered.
“Let’s get away from him.” Gray swallowed and looked over to the dead man.
Rice nodded and stood up.
“We’ll walk.”
They walked. In what direction, Gray wasn’t sure, but she told him how it all went down. How he had missed his tracks up on the ridge, how they knew the wound he’d inflicted. How they found his single shell casing.
Then she told him about Kessler, the corpsman from all those months before, and about Wesson beating her. Rice stopped and knelt.
“You never told me you cracked a rib,” he scowled, jerking up her shirt to get a look at the purple, heel-shaped bruise for himself .
Gray winced hard as he gingerly felt the swelling with his fingertips. “It wasn’t this bad the first time.”
“Here.” The giant reached into a pouch at his belt and produced a small pink pill, which he set down on a flat rock. With his tac knife he carefully cut it in half, and handed her both.
“Take one now, the other at sundown.”
“Where are we going?”
“Just follow me. I’ll walk slow.”
They continued. For hours, it seemed like, though at least the pill had kicked in. Rice let Gray take sips of water from the mouthpiece on his shoulder strap, and he let her take his kaffiyeh when they baked in the afternoon sun.
When back out in the open, a pair of wastelanders came up on the horizon at a beating gallop, and the two had to fling themselves behind a rock and some brush to keep from being seen. Gray suspected that the Anak had to do that a lot out here.
Eventually, as the afternoon wore on, Gray began to recognize where they were.
It was the same dry riverbed, the same road where they had planned their ambush. As they came up on the ridge, the view was unmistakable. And there, about 150 yards down the slope, was where the charges had gone off. The pave-mint was cracked and buckled, blackened from char and gunpowder. The place had been picked over, but there were still pieces of metal flung this way and that, the ground still littered with shells.
Gray looked to the giant. “Why are we here?”
His face was harder than it was before, and he scowled deeply before setting off down the embankment. “C’mon.”
She followed for the sheer morbid curiosity of it. The human had no idea what Rice had in mind to show her here of all places, but she remembered Wesson. Maybe he did see something.
They picked their way close to where the charges had been placed, and Rice lit a smokestick as he simply stood and surveyed the scene, distantly rueful. He’d done this before, hadn’t he? Here? He looked over the old wreckage as if he’d been back to visit several times before.
“Look. What do you see?”
Gray scanned the ground. What was she looking for?
“I see junk,” she murmured.
“No. Look.”
And that’s when she saw it.
Peeking out from the sand beside a rock was something round and sun-bleached. As she stepped closer, Gray realized that it was a skull.
A human skull.
Quickly she fell to her knees in the dirt and pulled it up to brush it off.
Something in her still stung from earlier and Gray turned to face him with narrow eyes, emboldened by the pill he’d given her.
“There was a fight here a month ago. Why wouldn’t there be bones?”
“You’re angry, not stupid,” he said with that kind of authority he reserved for his own kind. “Think, Gray. You corpsmen weren’t anywhere near the road. My men were here. I’m not fuckin’ lying to you.”
Grudgingly, she remembered and frowned. When she turned and opened her mouth to say something, Rice spoke from where he now sat on a boulder, looking uncharacteristically tired. She noticed a spray of old blood on the rock behind his calf.
“Those explosives killed 27 humans that night. That’s all we had in those transports. You thought it was weapons, or scrap metal, or something else that would have been of use to you, but all you did was blow up a few dozen people instead. That old man only got it half-right: we don’t literally eat humans, Gray, we farm you for genes. Food we can get anywhere; but it’s good genes that keep us alive. The masters we’re all made from were damaged a long time ago.”
Gray felt like the wind had been knocked from her, again. She could only imagine so much, think so much. But maybe it was better this way; maybe it was all exactly as simple as he made it out to be. What was a gene, anyway? She knew that they had something to do with why children looked like their parents, and could inherit things from them like a good build or bad skin. But he was talking about something else, something much more esoteric. Still, part of what he was saying didn’t quite make sense to her.
“I thought clones didn’t have to worry about any of that?”
“Genes mutate, degrade over time. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but they’re like the Corps manual. Every time one of us is made, we get our own manual, written by hand, copied from a copy of a copy. I’m the 402nd copy of a human man who was once named Elliot Anders Rice. He died in 2067 at the age of 44, in an Algo pairing facility. He was one of the eight original humans that the Algo cloned us all from. All us ‘Naks.”
Gray gently returned the broken skull to the soil, and a blustery wind picked up from the south. She watched it kick up clouds of dust, scatter dry leaves and bits of scorched cloth. A small lizard darted to the top of a rock to give a dominance display.
“Were you… gonna pair with me?” she asked.
Rice smiled bitterly as he flicked some ash into the wind. “No. And we don’t get to pick them anyway… you’re matched to a genetic line. And then sent to to a facility to be used to administer gene therapy for a few years. You’re fed, watered, clothed, just like the Corps. But it’s not a life. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Is it better than being in the Corps?”
The enormous man looked at her, holding her gaze as he took a last long drag of his smoke before tossing it away.
“Nothing’s better than anything else here,” he said quietly. “’Nak or human, free or bound. Only way out is to get out.”
Emotion welled up in her as she decided he was, indeed, telling the truth, and had been the whole time. Part of her wanted to cross the small distance to bury her face in his side and be received by his embrace, but it seemed naive and childish. So she hugged herself instead.
“Rice, I’m sorry about what I said… I… Earning my freedom meant so much to me, I’d do anything to get it.” Gray swallowed. “I thought it was real.”
He looked uncomfortable with those words hanging in the air. “It is real. Just not in the Southland.”
“Then I have to leave.”
For the first time since they met, she seemed to catch him truly off-guard, and he looked at her with something that wasn’t even there when she had asked him to kill her.
“Fuckin’… what? And go where?”
“Anywhere.” Gray stood up. “And you’re coming with me.”
“No.”
“You want to stay here? You want to keep fighting over nothing? Killing your own over nothing? You’re a bond too, you know.”
He stood and let the silence crackle between them.
A very harsh gust kicked up suddenly, and she shielded her eyes from the blowing dust. When she opened them again, she noticed dark clouds on the southern horizon.
The rains.
“I guess summer’s over,” Gray murmured, staring at the clouds. They looked like they were bubbling up from the earth in the far distance. That’s how they always came, every year. Ominously.
Rice was quiet though, quiet and still, and when she looked up she saw his cutting eyes were fixed not to the south, but to the east, towards the hills. It quickly became obvious what he was staring at: high in the air and slowly arcing down toward the ground on a thread of smoke, was the bright green light of a signal flare. Her heart skipped a beat.
“Fox,” Gray whispered.
Rice cursed loudly and had a warlike look about him, like he’d been roused from a daze.
“What’s going on?” she demanded. “You know, don’t you?”
“They weren’t supposed to start yet!” the giant growled at the sight. “I was supposed to have 24 hours!”
“24 hours? Rice what the f—!“
“I don’t plan attacks, Gray, I see them through. Last night I was told Camp Fox had 24 hours. Then you happened, and I saw an opportunity to make it look like brigs got to you before we did. I would have you on the road and be back in time for… the offensive. But it looks like they want Fox wiped off the map before it starts raining.”
Fighting in the mud and the rain was miserable, and it made guns jam up faster.
“I was going to tell you.”
He grabbed her by the arm with one massive hand and dragged her into something resembling a sprint. It didn’t take long for the little human to stumble on the uneven ground, and Rice only slowed just enough to hoist her up onto his back for her to cling to him and his ruck. Then he took off at a breakneck pace through the rocks.
The corpsman hadn’t said anything more, but when they were underway he must’ve sensed what she wanted to ask.
“320 brownbands,” he said, panting. “Against 1100 corpsmen.”
Rice slowed to a jog, then stopped altogether. Gray wondered if he was winded, but the way he rested his hands on his knees painted a different picture.
“I tried to stop it,” he muttered. “I fucking tried, Gray, you have to believe me. I over-reported your numbers, your battle readiness… But someone else must have reported the real intel from under me. Another Rice.”
Another Rice.
“This is my section!” he continued, yelling in the direction of the flare, which was now being carried by the winds. “And I have another five goddamn years here!”
She slipped off and Gray looked to him, then to the hills, and took off at her own jog.
“Where are you going?” he snapped.
“I need to see it,” she called. “One last time!”
http:/sizekink.com
-
I’m doing it, folks. I’ve officially decided to pay money for an editor for this dumb story. Mostly just to see what the editing process is like, but also because I just want to treat myself? (Yeah, I have a weird definition of “treat”.)
I’ll keep yall posted.
This is the end of the “open beta”, though. There’s still probably one more chapter left, and it’s a doozy, but I figure this is a good enough cliffhanger for now.
http:/sizekink.com
-
“Distract him by dropping trou, Finch. You know the drill.”
-
So not so much Soylent Green as Midsommar.
-
Part 3
“No you don’t.”
Rice had her by the arm before she could get far. Gray struggled, tried peeling his fingers off of her, but he was not letting go.
“Rice!”
“It won’t help anything! You’ll just get yourself killed.”
Gray watched the flare smoke disappear with the next gust, and she sat down. Rice soon joined her. They stared at the hills together in the late afternoon sun, shining like polished brass against a backdrop of rosy mountains.
“Why?” Gray said after a while. “Why now?”
“I don’t know. I’m just told to make these things happen, never told why.”
The wind blew dust in her eyes and she squinted.
“What do we do now?”
It felt so strange to remember, over and over, that there was nowhere she had to be, no scheduled duties, no ruck. The emptiness scared her, and Gray suddenly found herself desperate for something to do. But camp getting wiped from the map right before her eyes, the horror of it, wanted to chain her to the rock.
“We should go. C’mon.”
Hesitation.
“Gray.”
She let herself be led away, and together they headed north-west, into unfamiliar hills and a few miles afield from the firefight raging on in the embrace of the mountains.
/* /* /*
It was some hours before they found the spring, deep in a narrow cleft in the foothills, and by then the human was exhausted. It wasn’t much more than a muddy spot on the ground, but when he dug away at the dirt a puddle formed, which he bent forward to drink from.
Gray had to sit and catch her breath. Her skin radiated heat in a dangerous way, and the earth was still too warm to lay on. But Rice had a remedy: at the top of a pile of sand, he pulled aside a thick shrub to reveal an opening in the rock. It was just tall enough for a human, and the giant had to stoop to fit.
“It’s cooler in here,” he said. “Can you walk?”
Barely. Gray nodded, and made her slow way up to him just inside. Rice crouched and produced a small flashlight so that they could peer into the darkness. After confirming that there were no recent signs of habitation, he instructed her to strip and lay on the ground.
“You’re sunsick,” he said. “I’ll get you water. Keep talking to me, don’t fall asleep.”
He left quickly, tearing off his gear as he went.
She looked around a little, and even in this state she noticed this cave was more of a uniform tunnel. “What is this place?” Her voice was weak.
“It’s a prospector’s mine,” he called out to her from the puddle outside. “There’s a handful of them in the area, much older than the war. There’s even one further up the canyon with a mine cart still in it. It’s remote, though, and I need a rope to get there.”
“That explains it.”
It was a familiar sort of space, and she recognized it from the several years of her own childhood spent deep underground looking for bits of phosphorus or titanium, working by candlelight because the company was too cheap for electricity. She could tell that this was an old mine, though. The air was stale, and the dark had a watchfulness to it, like it had long since been reclaimed by the earth and taken on life beyond the hands of its maker.
“Explains what?”
She looked down into the inky blackness of the passage, listening to her breath. It mesmerized her, and she stared until colors started to swirl in her eyes.
“Gray? You still with me?”
“Yeah.”
Rice came up and knelt beside her, a looming shadow that was becoming all-too familiar. He pressed the mouthpiece of his water bladder to her lips and she drank deeply.
/* /* /*
That was where they fell asleep together, splayed on his bedroll with nothing on between them but her underwear and their skin barely touching for the sticky heat.
At some point in the night they were woken by the sound of thunder, lightning falling across their bodies in harsh, brief silhouette. They laid in silence as the rain came in shortly after, and when they woke up the next morning, it was still coming down. The gulch outside had transformed into a rushing stream overnight, brown with silt.
“Where do we go from here?” she asked.
Rice sat just inside of the mouth of the tunnel, gazing at the rain. He was out of smokes.
“It’s better to go north than east,” he rumbled. “East of the mountains gets so hot you won’t last half a day without water.”
“Are you coming with me?”
Rice studied her feet for a little while before turning his blue eyes back outside.
“I’ll take you as far as the pass at the Rocks. I’ll make sure you get out safely. Someone probably wouldn’t mind a trained shot like you to bring up the rear of their—“
“You’re scared, aren’t you?”
He thought for a moment before rising, blocking the entrance with his bulk, and stepping out into the rain. Outside he stood, naked in the downpour, and turned his gaze upward toward the leaden sky.
“You smell that?” he called to her. “Who would’ve thought wet dirt and granite could smell so fucking nice. Come out here, the heat’s finally died down.”
Gray stepped out into the rain, skin turning to gooseflesh at the sensation. It was good, so, so good, and she couldn’t help but gawk up at the sky like he had, and open her mouth to catch some of the falling water. The muddy stream came up to her ankles, sluicing past them and disappearing down the edge of the lower rockfall, sounding far more torrential than it was. Her toes sank into mud.
Is this was it was like to have somebody? They made a strange pair, but the coarseness of his entire being, his body and thoughts and words, was not at odds with her. It wasn’t even his size, or his pheromone, or his razor-sharp senses that for now were occupied with marveling at the rain like a child. Rice, and all the sons of the Algorithm, were an attempt at something new, and it was that newness that drew her to him. The world was home to humans for untold generations; Gray knew rain deep in her bones, but maybe Rice didn’t. He was an outsider, even the desert, and it could never be any other way.
The human kissed his hipbone. When he hoisted her up she wrapped her legs around his ribs and crushed them together, mouths tangling.
“Take me as far as you can.” Gray whispered it like a secret. “I’ll need your protection.”
When his hand moved under her, slipping aside the rain-soaked garment clinging to her core, the human sighed.
/* /* /*
It rained for the whole day, and by the end of it hunger gnawed at them both. The next morning Rice went out, scrambling up the side of the canyon to hunt for something where it was drier. He returned two hours later with nothing, and this had him on edge.
Gray had spent the prior evening tying their clothes together and washing them in the rain, stomping out the blood and sweat and replacing them with dark silt. When it was time to leave, they were dry.
Rice knelt with his pack, though, frowning at it.
“What’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer, instead reaching in with one big hand and pulling out a slim black panel, attached to the top of which was the short antenna. He ripped cables out from it until it was free except for one: the earpiece. After getting one last look at it, he threw it into the darkness where it landed with a clatter.
“When they come looking for the transponder, I’d rather not be wearing it.”
The weather was good, sky dotted with clouds, and soon they were off again, headed north-west by game trail. When they came across a fat rattlesnake, Rice made quick work of it, stopping only once they reached some shade to clean and cook the kill over an alcohol stove no bigger than the palm of her hand, bite by bite. Gray could have eaten the whole thing, but after he passed her three large puffs of white meat, she assured him she was full, and silently he devoured the rest before continuing on their way.
It would have been much quicker to descend into the lowlands to make use of a road, but that way safety was only had in numbers or speed, and the pair had neither. After two days and precious little food, they came to the great swath of floodplain where it all began, the place where Fox called home for five years. The arroyo, nearly a mile wide, cut deep into the hills so that they had no choice but to cross it.
Rice surveyed the land in a new way, and Gray had to ask: “This isn’t your territory anymore, is it?”
“No. We’ll have to pass quickly or we’ll be noticed by the sentinel. In fact, he’s probably already looking for me. C’mon.”
He took a step, but something in the basin flashed with reflected sunlight, and she stopped him. Gray pointed, and he pulled out his binos.
“People,” he said, adjusting the focus dial. His eyes narrowed into them. “No… corpsmen. A dozen, maybe.”
Breath caught in Gray’s throat. “Can you see their colors? Are they Fox?”
“We’re too far away.” He put the instrument away and shouldered his ruck. “C’mon, we’ll be able to keep out of sight easy enough.”
“Keep out of sight?”
“They’re not your friends anymore, Gray. They will kill you.”
The trail they followed grew unacceptably steep and narrow, and the two found themselves climbing down the ridge and getting dirt down their sleeves. They worked their way to the floor of the arroyo carefully, as kicking up too much dust would give them away.
Once at the bottom, Rice covered his head of dark hair with the shade cloth, and after a wordless nod they darted out across the floodplain. But Gray’s curiosity got the better of her, the ache for old camaraderie, and they were a scant hundred yards away from the group of corpsmen when she caught Rice’s belt loop to him.
“What are you doing?” he hissed. “We have to move!”
“Give me your binos.”
“They won’t fit you.”
“I’ll look with one eye then.”
Gray held her breath as she propped the heavy pair of binoculars up on a rock and pressed one open eye to the lens. The angle wasn’t good, but it was enough, and she recoiled with a gasp. They were still too far away for her to read the lapels, but they were close enough for her to recognize faces.
“Holy shit,” she panted. “It’s brown toon. It’s…”
But a twig snapped somewhere and the giant shoved her to the dirt on instinct. Sider in hand he whirled around, and a few yards off, ducked down, was another familiar face.
Another Rice.
Wild-eyed, Gray looked him over. His hair was different; longer and pulled into a knot on his head. It didn’t appear that he shaved nearly as often either. And there was a jagged scar along his jaw.
“You’ve got gall coming here 402,” the strange Anak rasped, and lifted his own sider to meet them. Without otherwise moving, his scorching blue eyes darted to the human laying prone on the ground. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Gray, was it?” He chuckled quietly, and it was an ugly sound. “How’s Finch? She still Fox’s resident shark, or did she finally get her deathwish?”
Gray balled her hands into fists.
Rice’s face was a mask of silent fury, and she was surprised when he spoke with measured calm. “You pull that trigger and they’ll be all over us.”
“I’m aware of that. Which is why you’re going to come with me. If you do, I’ll even let the ‘yuman go.”
They stared each other down for a few very long moments.
“What’s it gonna be, Rice?”
http:/sizekink.com
-
Been banging out the modified ending this week after sitting on this since last year. It’s coming together!
-
@kisupure I remain deeply impressed by your ability to make the environment so compelling, rising above and rendering trivial the human-nak conflict. I also really enjoy how the hardship afflicts Gray and Rice differently.
Rice, and all the sons of the Algorithm, were an attempt at something new, and it was that newness that drew her to him.
This reminds me of a path-not-taken by the recent iteration of Battlestar Galactica. The Cylons are a very young civilization, and they look at humans with a weird mix of arrogance and deep insecurity. This story’s tropes encourage Rice to (seem to) have boundless confidence, and his knowledge of how the corpsmen are being farmed by the Naks keeps him from speaking freely around Gray, but he has to be aware of how precarious the whole setup is, and you have deftly hinted at that.
Of course, now I want to know how the new sentinel also knows the corpsmen by name. Has Rice been gossiping?
-
@kisupure I’m very excited to see the continuation of this story! It has an excellent balance of sizey stuff and world-building/character development.
-
I remain deeply impressed by your ability to make the environment so compelling
Than you! It’s a secret love letter to an area of California where I spent most of my life. And there are definitely some parts of San Bernardino that already look like a post-collapse desert wasteland lol, so it’s not hard to imagine. But for a fun fact, “the arroyo” is where JPL is currently located.
BSG was the first scifi series that felt really compelling to me, so it’s cool that you made that connection. It informs a lot of the stories I write about “things humanity makes” (and I write a lot of them/commentary about them in my non-kink creative life too!)
This story’s tropes encourage Rice to (seem to) have boundless confidence, and his knowledge of how the corpsmen are being farmed by the Naks keeps him from speaking freely around Gray, but he has to be aware of how precarious the whole setup is, and you have deftly hinted at that.
I was hoping for an “american classic” ending, the type employed by some of my favorite dystopia/warring cultures books (Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, Ender’s Game, hell even Grapes of Wrath). Shoot for the moon and all that! Characters are doomed but there’s still a vague hope for something better that you never get to see.
Has Rice been gossiping?
Ahh I don’t think I made that clear enough then - they’ve come back to where Fox used to be, located in a section prowled by a different sentinel. He was watching them for years.
-
Part 4
“Think about what you’re doing.”
“I don’t need to.”
The other clone of Elliot Anders Rice was just like hers: quiet, clipped, and self-assured. In motion they both might’ve been unstoppable, and decidedly at rest, unmovable. Together they were a tangle of wills.
“You’re 386,” her Rice noticed. “How long do you have?”
“Another season.”
“Then why do you care if we live or die? Your service is almost done, you’ll be euthanized at the end of it. Let us go. Central won’t even know.”
“Because I’ve been alive long enough to come to get sentimental about things, 402. To like things. Want things. And I want to see the look on the your face when you get dragged away.”
The other sentinel shifted the slightest bit, which must’ve pushed the snake coiled at the base of the bush next to him into agitation. The sound of its rattle filled the air, and it was all the opening that Rice—R-402—needed.
The bullet tore through the other Anak’s neck, misting them both in a spray of red as he fell, gurgling and twitching for a moment before laying still. The snake elegantly fled.
There were shouts coming from the knot of corpsmen, but Rice spoke with only the slightest edge to his voice.
“That mistake cost him his life: ’Naks aren’t supposed to want things.”
“But you want things,” Gray said.
“Nobody’s perfect. C’mon!”
Rice rose to a crouch but Gray leaped up. She surprised herself when she stood between the Anak and three corpsmen quickly approaching with their guns drawn. Without thinking about it she already knew that running now would be a bad move. There was just not enough cover, not for hundreds of yards. But Rice seemed to think there was.
“Let’s go!” he said, looking as if he was prepared to physically move her.
“I’ll buy you time.”
“Buy me—!”
“Get down, there’s a ‘Nak behind you!” shouted one of the corpsmen.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
There was a change in their posture, she noticed, as they “blinked”; Corps slang for that moment one was confronted with something new and sudden, taking the brain a moment to reorient itself.
“Gray?”
“I said get down!”
“Harper, don’t shoot him!”
“It is you!”
There was no mistaking that dark skin gleaming in the sun and head of short, sculptured hair, and he pushed his way past his two companions to surge forward and envelop her in a crushing embrace.
“Where’s Finch?”
The question interrupted his happiness, and he didn’t hide the pain. “Finally got what she always wanted. Made sure to tell me she got six of ‘em on her way out.”
Gray knew exactly what those words meant. Their friend’s dark desire was so obvious that even the old sentinel could see it through a pair of binos. When Harper let her go, he produced Finch’s tags from a stained pocket, and she nodded.
After putting them away again like the precious things they were, he finally let his tense gaze drift upward to Rice, then downward to the body bled out onto the sand. The others quickly joined them, weapons raised, and Rice lifted his empty hands in the universal gesture of non-hostility.
“Gray,” the sentinel growled.
“Is he your… your prisoner?” Harper sniffed cautiously at the air. “Where’s the squeeze?”
“There is no squeeze.” She grabbed him by his tattered sleeves then, suddenly buzzing with wild energy. It was becoming clear, now, and Gray had to tell them as quickly as she could, before this perfect moment of strangeness ended. “He’s helping me get out of the Southland, Harper. It’s bullshit here, all of it. I’m going… going where I can get freedom without a mark. Please, you have to come with me." She turned to the other two now standing by, filthy and shocked. "All of you!”
But the report of a sider filled the air, its bullet finding flesh, and everyone ducked as Rice pitched, clutching his shoulder. They turned to see a lone captain staggering in their direction: Wesson.
-
Good for Finch.
Rice(-402) letting Wesson get the drop on him has got to hurt more than the round in his shoulder.
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login