It made me want to kill.
I cannot remember everything I did in there, how many I slaughtered; how I slaughtered them. It all passed me by like a surreal red dream. All I know is that the others didn’t look at me the same afterwards — not even Hell Razor — and they did their fair share of killing that day, too.
The laser rifles worked beautifully. Horribly. Their bolts glowed in the darkness and the angry light revealed the Guardians’ hiding places, then burned their lungs out from the inside. A shot through the eye would boil a brain in the skull — and the venting of the molten ejecta made the Guardians dance like decapitated chickens. Robes burned, makeshift armor melted, and the greasy stink of roasted flesh and the sharp sourness of singed hair filled the place. There wasn’t much blood, since the lasers’ heat cauterized wounds, but that didn’t make the holes any easier to look at. Luckily for us, the corpses usually stopped burning by the time we reached them.
Every now and then the Guardians would mass for a charge. I couldn’t tell if they couldn’t understand what kind of death we were dishing out, or just didn’t care, but they’d swarm out of some dark corridor chanting pre–apocalyptic slogans like, “Leggo my Eggo!” and “I’d walk a mile for a Camel!” Right into our lasers.
I fired the meson cannon from my hip, sweeping right to left and back again like I was turning a hose on them. The cannon’s bolts came thick, long and slow, and glowed with an unearthly purple light that burned fist–sized holes through anyone it touched. Ace and the rangers fired searing bursts into whoever I missed. The place smelled like a cookout wherever we went.
We found a third key in a small chapel, hidden inside a bronze triptych that seemed to show some kind of allegory. In the first panel, a happy young man was holding hands with a beautiful girl. In the second panel, the young man had broken out in pimples, while the beautiful girl walked off with a muscle man. In the third panel, the young man’s face was clear again and he was ascending toward heaven with the girl on his left arm and a bottle labeled Acme Acne Cream held aloft in his right.
“What a touching story,” drawled Vargas.
“It’s the Guardians’ philosophy in three easy steps,” said Angie. “The rise, fall, and redemption of man through the wisdom of the ancients.”
“Pffft!” I said. “Like killer robots are gonna make my zits go away.”
“Sure they will,” said Hell Razor, stuffing the key into his pocket. “Decapitation is a sure–fire cure.”
Finding the fourth key almost cost me my life, and I have no one to blame but myself. We were clearing a bunk room, pulling back the blankets and overturning the mattresses when a piece of paper fluttered from under a pillow. Thrasher bent to look at it.
“Rosebud?” he said, and reached for it. “What does that—”
With a squeal of fright, a Guardian rolled out from under the bunk next to him and started blasting at us with an assault rifle. Fortunately, he was too crazed to hit anything other than the ceiling, and Thrasher burned a hole through his intestines . The Guardian curled up, hissing.
But he wasn’t quiet dead, and as I kicked the gun from his hands and raised the meson cannon to finish him, he looked up at me with wild eyes and beckoned me closer.
“You…” he whispered. “You are… different from the others. Come closer. I must tell you…”
Yes, I know I’m a sucker, but I knelt down and turned my ear toward him… and the son of a bitch grabbed me around the neck and started choking the shit out of me!
“Die infidel!”
The old man had a grip like iron and I was way too close and bent over to bring the meson cannon around for a shot. I punched at him as best I could with blood pounding in my ears and throbbing in my neck.
Suddenly there was a bang and his hands went limp. A hole had appeared in the middle of his forehead and Angie was holstering her side arm and walking away from me with a disgusted look on her face.
“What the hell, Ghost,” she said. “Were you born yesterday?”
I coughed and cleared my throat. “Last week. Sorry.”
I was so embarrassed I almost walked away without searching him, but then I saw something peeking out of one of his pockets. I pulled it out. The fourth key. I handed it over to Vargas, who had the other three.
“Nice,” he said. “We’re set.”
“Does that mean we can get out of here?” asked Ace.
Angie shook her head. “These guys are too dangerous to let live.”
“Besides,” said Vargas. “You don’t hurt a gang as bad as we’ve hurt these chumps and not finish the job. The survivors will come back and kick our ass one day. We’ve gotta erase these bastards. Every one of ‘em.”
Ace made a face like he didn’t like the taste of that, but he fell in with the rest of us as we stepped back into the main hall and started toward the gigantic iron portcullis set into its north wall. There were no buttons to push or levers to pull, but through a door to the left we found a crank wheel.
Thrasher didn’t have to be asked. He stepped up to it and started pulling on the arms with smooth strength We heard the rattle of chains and the groaning of iron above us. A minute later the chain thrummed tight and Thrasher locked the wheel with a cotter pin, then stopped to mop his brow.
We went back into the hall, then passed under the portcullis and started up the broad marble steps into the inner sanctum. Gave me a funny feeling in my shoulders, passing under several tons of iron held up by a pin thinner than my finger. If anyone was to pull it…
At the top of the stairs we found a pair of massive gold doors rivaling the big bronze ones out front in all details save for their height, and this time the walls on either side weren’t falling apart. There wasn’t going to be any blowing our way in this time. There was, however, a keypad off to one side.
“Hmmm,” said Angie. “Looks like we need another password.”
“Try 1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7 — 8 — 9,” said Vargas.
“Try 1 — 1 — 1 — 1 — 1 — 1 — 1 — 1 — 1,” said Ace.
She did. They didn’t work.
“Try ‘password’,” I said.
That didn’t work either.
“Try ‘rosebud’,” said Thrasher.
We all looked around at him.
“Huh?”
“Just try it.”
Angie typed it in. There was a click, and then the doors started slowly retracting into the ceiling.
“Well, whaddaya know,” said Vargas. “Beto, you never cease to amaze—”
He was cut off by the chattering roar of machine gun fire. The Guardians were firing under the rising door.
– Chapter Seven –
We all jumped like scalded cats as bullets sprayed into the hall, chewing up the marble floor and ricocheting off the gold banisters of the broad stairs. Thrasher and Vargas dove left and Angie, Ace and Hell Razor dove right. I tried to follow them, but a bullet hit my pseudo–chitin shin guard and knocked my feet out from under me. I rolled for the stairs with bullets sparking all around me and bounced down half the flight before I was out of the line of fire. I think more bullets must have glanced off my armor before I got clear, because I left like I’d fallen out of a three story window — onto a rock garden.
“Ghost!” called Angie, as the doors finally recessed into the ceiling. “You okay?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say okay, no.” I checked myself head to toe, all in one piece. “But I don’t have any holes in me.”