Red as Blood

Chapter VII: Doom's Parade

Captain 'Redslag' Johnson peered out the window of the sunken subway car that guarded the entrance to Undertarnish Fortress. Only a few penniless vagabonds wandered outside its steel-plated walls, plus a few 'scroungers' who were picking through scraps and trash heaps for trinkets to sell. A gunner to Johnson's left shifted his huge weapon to a more comfortable position, leaning the seventy-five pound rocket-propelled grenade launcher (Or RPG launcher) on the sill of a broken window. The half-dozen men had dug a pit to rest the car in and used it as a makeshift bunker, and had even added a computer server below it. The 'sunk bunks' were the first thing that would be hit in a Red wave, but were cheap and easy to build and quick to set up.

Redslag's sunken car had survived for over a month so far, however, and new equipment and weapons were arriving all the time, due to their efficiency. "Lee," Johnson grumbled into the small microphone at the base of his helmet.

"Yeah, Cap'n?" came the returning voice over the low-quality speaker, the distinct crackling sounds coming with it.

"Are you the only one with infrared visual augments?"

"Unless a runner brought one while I wasn't looking, yes. Kenning has one too, but his broke a few days ago."

"Come up here."

A tall man in dull titanium armor climbed out of the hatch behind Johnson, the weight suppressers at his shins hissing as they held up more than two-hundred pounds of armor.

"What's up, Cap'n?"

"There," Johnson pointed out the broken window, and the RPG gunner stepped aside to let Lee in. "See that?" There was a shine and a bit of movement in the trash in a tunnel to the northeast, near an old station platform. The captain turned to glance at Lee with a raised eyebrow.

The Asian man's short, jet-black hair just barely poked down out of the top of his visor, and his verdant green eyes searched outside the car with sharp, jerking movements. A hyphenated last name emblazoned in dark blue on the front of his helmet was partly covered by a sticker that read: "Shoot to ill." He slapped down the reflective visor and pressed a small button on his tech-gauntlet –the sure sign of a technical officer or rich nerd- and the eyeshade promptly glowed crimson.

Looking out at the tunnels and platforms, Lee saw several shapes come up on the small readout. A scrounger digging through trash, a wild dog, a few rats. Then in a trash pile a few dozen yards away, Lee's infrared readout scanned something and outlined it in a sickly orange light. A tiny text message in the top right of his screen read:

'Red Spitter'

Approximate size: Four to five feet long, up to three at the shoulder.

Approximate weight: Seventy pounds.

Carapace plating: Light

Speed: Very fast (Forty miles an hour at top sprint)

Danger level (1-10): Slight threat (4)

"Spitter, Cap'n."

"Right. Lee, you get the rest of the crew up here, then give me your rifle and do a sweep of the area. Bents," Johnson glanced over at the gunner who had been standing at the window, and the man raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement. "Flush him out."

"You got it, Cap'n," the large man said, and gently leveled his RPG launcher on the window frame. Bents loaded a phosphorous round into the clip and cocked the weapon and looked at the captain for the fire confirmation. Seeing the captain nod his head ever so slightly, the tall, heavily armored soldier checked the kick-sight and sent a small explosive into the air. When the projectile first popped out of the barrel, one might have likened it to a fledgling bird, not quite sure on its wings. The grenade began a slow arc into the air, flying about fifty feet before its engine kicked in and rocketed it into the heap of garbage.

Trash is strange stuff, and post-apocalyptic even more so. Amidst the damp, ragged towels and aluminum cans, there is always one or thirty extremely volatile substances. This trash heap in particular had plenty, and the shiny creature that skittered out just barely managed to escape a melted pair of hind legs as the entire pile exploded into a storm of napalm and burning oil. Leaping behind the old station ticket window, the creature poked its head out and was immediately met with a hail of gunfire from the subway car nearby. Two shells flattened out against its head plating, and it dazedly slunk back behind the ticket booth.

"Okay crew, stop using dum-dum rounds. Switch to armor piercing, and Benson, load up a shrapnel grenade."

"Two grenades for one measly spitter," the grenadier complained.

"I think there's more, sir," Lee's voice came from the portion of the bunker that was not part of the actual car. Rather, it was simply dug out of the ground beneath. Lee had dubbed it the Squat, not only because it was cramped and tight, but also a large septic pipe ran straight through the center of the tiny room. Its walls were lined with hand-me-down hardware and cracked monitors, but Lee had repaired, reconstructed, and upgraded it all to the point of functioning as well as any Mercy Hunter outpost. The roof-mounted turret he had installed had been recently destroyed in a particularly large wave of Red, when the six men were reduced to actually stabbing through the ceiling of the car with their knives to kill the Red surrounding it.

"Cap'n," said one of the men with heavy-issue Guardian armor, a very large and bulky suit with steel armor three or four inches thick in some places. Guardian armor was the heaviest class given to the Militia, and it turned a man into a veritable moving bunker. It was mica black, with the same kind of golden sheen found in the stone. The trim around the shoulder plates was a brimstone red, like glowing coals in a power station's bellows. The name 'Proct' was emblazoned on his helmet, and he had spray-painted a silver cross on the chest plate. Though religious, David Proct was known as a bit of a ladies' man, and committed 'adultery' about as much as he prayed. In the last few weeks, however, he hadn't had many chances for the former and he'd gotten many reasons for the latter.

"Cap'n," he repeated, this time attracting the officer's attention, "listen."

There was a soft rumbling sound which, when coupled with a stampede of soft clicking noises, was unmistakable to all six of the men in the car. Lee's voice drifted out of the Squat:

"The Red in the ticket booth is using the radio to call in reinforcements! Cap him, let's go!"

Glancing back at the booth with the built-in binoculars of his helmet, Captain Redslag could just barely see the claw of the spitter holding down the old walkie-talkie. There would be no way to get a shot in without riddling the entire thing with bullets, and even then it might escape. "Lee! What's the distance on those Red?"

"About three clicks."

"And the radio signal, is the Red just using a walkie talkie or is it going via the booth's comm. system?"

"He's hooked up to the booth?"

"Good," Redslag pointed to a fighter in Guardian armor, "Gimme your rifle."

The man obediently handed over his HAP (Hyper Accelerated Projectile) rifle, commonly called a 'happy gun'. Johnson flicked up the kick sight, then unhitched the safety at the side of the rifle and fired two rounds at the ticket booth. One went a bit wide and punctured the cheap wood near the glass window, but the second smacked dead-on into a small green box near the tunnel wall behind it. The HAP armor piercing round cut through the thin aluminum of the box like a tank through a runner's ribbon, or a child's greasy hand through a flimsy napkin. The high-velocity shell clipped the power regulator inside, a large amount of electric arcs flashed between the both and power box, and the ticket booth exploded quietly into flame.

"Takes care of him," Redslag allowed himself a small grin. Captain Johnson didn't smile much, but it wasn't because he was a grouchy person. As dental hygiene wasn't what it used to be, he found it more polite to keep his mouth constantly shut, and when he did need to speak it was around the corners of a large cigar.

"Okay," Lee said slowly, "we got two dozen Red's worth of clickety sounds, one and a half kilometers northeast."

"Right. Benson, at first movement knock a shell into the northeast tunnel. Proctor, get us a firewall going, and you two gunners take those two windows," the captain pointed to the broken window facing north and the opening in the door at the back of the car, which faced east by northeast.

"What're you gonna do, Redslag?" Benson asked as he rested his RPG Launcher on the window.

"I'm gonna make coffee. Here's yer gun," he said, and tossed the HAP rifle back to the gunner, who muttered a quiet thanks in return.

Loki tapped in another string of code on the keyboard and glanced over at Cayt.

"Why are we hacking the Granite Skulls again, exactly?" he asked for the fifth time that hour.

"For money, because we're poor," she said simply. "The Midnight Wasps are giving us eighty grand for a weapon blueprint in their database called a Wraith Cannon. We could use it too, I think. We could make one when Linn gets back, she knows where to collect the components and how to put it together."

"What do they do?" the vampiress' older brother peered over her shoulder at the section of printouts they had extracted so far.

"Sort of a concentrated sound wave burst, but the waves are so close together that you can't even hear them. Then it lets it go at-"

"Oh, let me guess. The speed of sound?"

"Right," she said, then realized she was being mocked and smacked her brother on the back of the head. "It stuns and can mess up the hearing capabilities of anything it hits for a good while, then a good headache afterwards."

"Stun? Headache? That's it? It can't blow stuff up or make your organs melt?"

"At a low frequency. At a high frequency, your molecules fall apart."

"And that does what?" the skeptical vampire raised a black eyebrow.

"It turns you into a puddle, Loki. Sadistic and gruesome enough for you?"

"Yes, quite," Loki tapped in a final line and turned to the stairs. "Waif! It's your turn!"

"All righ'!" the younger undead bounded down the concrete steps which had all but crumbled away, nearly fell and snapped his neck, and finally stumbled in to stand next to Loki. The elder vampire sniffed quietly, and turned his cold stare to the teenager.

"Have you been drinking, Waif?"

"I ain' bin driggin nuffin'," he slurred incomprehensibly and plopped unceremoniously into the small swivel chair.

"Do not lie to me, young one," said Loki, and he seemed to grow four feet bigger and seemed more menacing than anything Waif had ever seen. The young vampire considered the elder and said:

"I ain' bin driggin' nuffin'."

Loki sighed and levitated above the ruined steps to the old refrigerator and kitchen, where he tipped the four dozen beer bottles into a large trashcan. He leapt down the fifty or so steps in a single jump and landed a few feet away from the computer wall.

"Waif!" he barked, and the teenager turned a bleary (or as bleary as is possible when your eyes are just black pits) gaze towards the elder. "Sober up!" Waif grunted, and all of his pores opened to let the ridiculous amount of purified alcohol in his blood flow out. It trickled down off the swivel chair in dripping rivulets to form a large puddle on the floor. "Good. Now you may hack away."

"What? I was going to play Quake V!"

"Tough. Hack first, play later. You can have ten percent of the cut."

"For a third of the work?"

"Cayt and I hack much faster than you do."

"Eh. Fine."

Loki rolled his eyes -you couldn't tell of course, just a habit he had never managed to drop from life- and approached the large table at which his sister worked. "How much blood do we have left?"

"That red spitter in the fridge should keep us for at least one more feeding each."

"Ah. I'm going hunting anyway."

"Why?"

"I need to kill something." It was their personal message that he was going out for his own reasons, ones which weren't meant for Waif's ears. The teenager may have been completely absorbed in his own little hacking world, but Loki did not doubt that he took in every concealed whisper that passed through the air in that room.

"Be careful. Are you bringing the HOPE?"

"No, just my sword and a few pistols. Maybe the combat knife. I'll hit Viceran's old warehouse."

Ah, Cayt thought. You mean to scavenge about for leftover weapons. "Very well. Good luck."

The vampiress blinked, and Loki was gone.

(Fog: Short chapter, I know. Yeah, yeah, it wasn't as good as Phantom's last one. Okay, stop yelling, jeez. I didn't want to move the plot before me and Phantom worked out some important stuff in our e-mail correspondences, so I'm giving you guys a cotton candy chapter. I thought Redslag's segment was better, personally. Okay? Out.)