Degeneration

We took every chance we got to pick off a few of Grissom’s horde. And that’s about all that was left of Farson’s last fighting force. I’m not sure if only the crazed killers were the ones to survive the thinny, or if surviving the thinny just drove them mad, but we were now marching with the barbarian army we’d come to expect.

Killing a handful of them in whatever ways we had wasn’t going to change the outcome of the battle, we knew. And as much as we wanted to, we also didn’t want to. If we changed things, who’s to say it wouldn’t actually make things worse down the line? It makes my head hurt, I’ll leave the, what did they call it in Terminator? temporal mechanics, to Carrie.

But we did it because we were for the White, and it galled us every day to mingle with these servants of the Crimson King. It didn’t matter that they didn’t know they were his pawns, they willingly served the cause of anarchy.

And then we crossed the tribe of slow mutants. We could do nothing but succeed, or else Carrie’s vision would come to pass and I’d be dead, executed by Grissom. So we took command of a leaderless platoon and set out for their cave. It’s a good thing Eden had military experience. I was dinh of my old corporation for sure, but that doesn’t exactly educate you in how to organize troops for battle. In a fight, all I know are me and my tet. But she did a damn fine job. We all did. Maybe too well.

There was no red haze of battle for me this time. Ashleigh looked like it’d taken hold of him, the way his hands seem to move on their own, throwing knives, or the way his mind threw everything else. But this was a slaughter, not a battle. I hurled knives to keep our guns secret, and I threw as well as I could. We had come here to kill. But this wasn’t something I lost myself to. Rather than springing to that terrible life, I forced my hands to do their work. I was still good at The Kill, always would be, but my hands didn’t want to this time.

I made Penny promise not to attack any non-combatants. She kept asking my why not? Ashleigh understood, all the rest understood. I thought that maybe since she was a child herself that she saw no difference in fighting other children. But later I thought that maybe she was just trying to be like me. I killed, therefore she would kill.

Moments like those are when I knew that I had to die. To get out of her life. She wanted to be like me, and I was a monster, in body if not in mind anymore. I don’t want her to want to be like that.

But she listened to me, even if she didn’t understand. I don’t think she fought at all during the battle, so maybe she was overcompensating. I wish I could have asked the same of Carrie.

The plan was simple. Drive the mutants into their caves to contain them. Smoke them out and cut them down as they emerged. Efficient, very little risk to ourselves, quick. And it worked. The mutants came charging out at us and we shot them all down. It was over in less than sixty seconds, leaving only the cowering elderly and young inside. And Carrie lit the fire. They started to burn.

The men we’d been given went inside and made a quick end of it. It turns out we didn’t need to smoke them out. Damn it.

We organized watches near our new platoon. Those men might have a little soldier left in them, but most of the camp was a mass of depraved degenerates and we weren’t going to take any chances. Alistair had detected some pretty massive amounts of Darks being put off by something up ahead, which Carrie checked out clairvoyantly. She recognized the spirits who’d attacked Jericho hill the night before the battle.

We didn’t think Grissom’s army had much to fear from them, assuming that one of the psychics Alistair detected in the army would be commanding them. We were wrong about their threat, but that came later.

Carrie asked if she could talk to me in my tent. No one winked, or gave us sly glances. It wasn’t like that yet. We sat down on my bedroll and Carrie leaned in to me and put her arms around my neck. I wrapped my own arms around her as her shoulders started to shake.

Of the tet of the Turtle, only she’d had to kill innocents. Mutant or not. I wish I’d planned that fight better… it didn’t have to go down that way, I could have saved her this. But there was no door that could take me back to fix it now. The only thing I could do was hold her and grieve with her. We cried together, for all the innocents we’d killed.

When you’ve cried long and hard, it leaves you feeling drained. The tears were done and we sank down to the bedroll. I might’ve expected that one thing would lead to another then, but that wasn’t how it was. Neither of us felt the desire. We shared our grief and we shared our guilt and we gave each other what comfort we could. It was almost like making love in every sense but the physical.

I don’t know, I don’t tend towards introspection. I get to thinking about what I am and what I’ve done and I start to crave the taste of gunmetal. But it was enough to be with Carrie, and to think that maybe I helped.

I felt something wrong and woke to see that Carrie had already sensed it and sat up. Except that her eyes were half-closed and her breathing was still shallow and even. She was still asleep. I called for Eden and the others and together we all managed to wrestle her back into my tent and hold her down, while Eden looked for the spirit inside her. It’d buried itself deep though, hiding.

Penny found it. Maybe it was the ka that was growing between the three of us - me, the girl I loved as a daughter, and the woman I was in love with. Eden grappled with it in Carrie’s mind, stopping it from turning her fire onto all of us, while Penny and I laid into it with everything we had. Shaking Carrie and yelling at her probably only woke up the rest of our company, but it was my intent I was trying to use to keep the thing off-balance. Just enough for Penny to mentally fuck that thing up. I could feel her love for Carrie join with mine, and our anger at the thing trying to hurt her and she used it to hit that spirit-bitch, hard.

Carrie began to open her eyes. She blinked her long lashes, making me fall a little more in love with her. Everything started to go dark.

I’d pushed myself long and hard on this march, and it’d been almost two weeks since I’d allowed Penny to see me drink blood, the last of my blood. The dead weight of my own body came rushing at me all at once, the strain of adding my will to Penny’s mental attack was too much. My eyelids were too heavy to hold open. I tumbled into darkness.

Later. Something in my mouth…. Hot and alive, sending energy back into my limbs. My body drank it up… I tasted blood…