Gritty Auto Assault MMORPG Short Story

                                    C o n v e r s i o n

..like white hot slivers of jagged steel the screams were piercing the void once again, rushing into my timeless nihilistic hell. An interesting thought crossed my mind, as the rest of it withered and thrashed about in the darkness, "why do I remember a body but I feel nothing of it, shouldn't I just be dead?". A maniacal voice I knew was my own responded "perhaps this is hell, and you know why you would be in hell don't you? You know don't you... Reverend?" The name tore at my sanity, what little of it the screams had not already ripped away. What was it about that name, It was like that chill I use to get rushing up my spine just before the kill, that last second before crack of the rifle, or the blade slid into unsuspecting flesh.. The blade, I could remember that now at least. The image of a man covered in blood running down a broken highway flashed into my mind for a split second, and then was gone. The blade, one of the few things trusted.

I was standing in the ditch beside a long heaved up broken desert highway watching a dust plume far off in the distance. Something was coming this way, coming fast. "twenty maybe twenty-five minutes at most, I warned you crossing the highways was a bad idea in the daylight, To late now though." I said to the twitchy man peering at the dust from where he was crouched down in the ditch behind me. I glanced around at the rest of the ragged band I had come across earlier that morning, a couple tired looking middle aged women, a boy maybe fifteen at best, a young girl about the same age. I still was not real clear on how they had escaped death when the Biomeks hit their village the night before.

"WE have to RUN! Now! RUN!" the twitchy man started screaming at me, spittle flying from his mouth his eyes wide as his head jerked back and forth trying to look everywhere at the same time. "OK listen dreg, that deathpak is maybe forty miles off at best, see that?" I pointed back to the east where you could still make out broken structures and fires burning in the remains of the village. "Whats left of your damn vil is at least twenty miles from here and if a mutie jack ran between us and it you'd see it! You think a Mek can't see as good as you? Calm down and you mite live the day, keep spazin Freak and your gonna go experimental under a biomek surgical drone you get me?" I grabbed him and shook him hard. "You hearin me Dreg?!" I let him go and gave the others a stern look. "We have one chance here, drop all that trash your luggin with ya, get on your bellies and crawl, if we can get far enough from the road and stay still that deathpak mite just pass us by." I grabbed the twitching fool next to me and said very clearly "IF you run, they Will see you, and it's game over then got it!?" I don't know if he didn't hear me, didn't care, or was just to damn scared to register in his sun boiled brain but as soon as I let go of his ratty canvas shirt he started to bolt out of the ditch. There wasn't time to think, no time to chase him, the blade was there, and a bright spout of crimson spattered across my arm and chest as his body hit the dirt with a dull thud, he didn't move, he wouldn't ever again either. Severing the spinal cord at the base of the skull shuts it all off in a blink of an eye.. Wasteland rules, if they where not listening before they would be now.

Something was wrong, they where not still, they looked horrified, eyes shifting from me to the road, to the body near my feet, back to the road. They all looked ready to run now. "If you run you kill us all, Get DOWN!, get moving!" I got down and started crawling southeast, trying to make a line that would put us away from the road but not in the sight path of the burning village. They where not there, the boy was down but not moving just fidgeting glancing back at the others, then forward at me, one woman was urgently whispering to the girl and the other was just standing there straight-backed like a damn flag pole staring at Mr Twitch's remains with her mouth hanging open.

I beckoned to the boy again and he stared moving, edging up beside me in the dirt. "listen kid I don't know what these people are to you , I don't know where you people came from or how you could all be this innocent and have lived this long in this place." He just stared at me waiting for a moment then looked back at the others, then at the body. "To make a long story short we are new to the outside, I see you aren't though" He got a solid look on his face when he said that and his eyes hardened a bit. "I may be a kid but I'm not a fool, I'll do what yah say, I know why you had to kill Ben Matty there" He said nodding his head towards the body in the dirt. I had something worth more than gold, something many men had killed to have I was sure before it reached me. It was a Tarus 9mm Beretta pistol with eight bullets left in the clip. I pulled it from the makeshift holster at the small of my back and handed it to the kid. "you know what that is?" I asked him as he took it with a look of awe. "Yeah man, seen em in some old flicker vid movies, this thing really work?" he asked looking at me sceptically. "yeah it works" I said as I reached across and flicked the safety off. "See that red dot and its ready to fire". I flicked the safety back on. "don't forget it, forget it when you need to use it and your dead, forget it when your not using it and it mite blow your leg off, or something else you don't want to lose." He nodded. Voices where getting loud behind us, the flagpole stare woman had come out of it and was in a heated argument with the other woman. Each had one of the scared girl's arms as they urgently jerked her back and forth one pointing across the road the other pointing at me. I rose up and looked north, the biomeks where closer, much closer, ten minutes, soon they would see these fools even if they didn't run. "why did you give me this?" The boy asked bringing my attention back to him. "I been around a while kid, been through some nasty situations but I know when the odds are low, I'm going to get them moving if I can and YOU are going to get moving now and fast, and your not going to look back" Saying that I turned and started crawling back towards the ditch. He started to say something, but then thought better of it and started moving. Then I did hear his voice as he crawled off thru the dust "I've heard of you you know Reverend, everyone said you where a myth.."

The boy was moving at least and making good progress I saw as I looked back over my shoulder, I was busy moving back towards the two crazy women fighting over the girl in the ditch. I saw something then as I looked north at the the dust cloud coming down the road, it was Biomek vehicles as I had feared. The one I caught a glimpse of through the haze was the most chilling, it was an AMB-07 tractor pulling a Biomek Implantation Specimen Collection trailer. You get put on ice, then when they get you back to their outpost you get put under the drone knives which I've heard are a little careless in their work as over ninety percent of the "specimens" don't survive the conversion process. Maybe this was why there where survivors around the blown vil, they where coming back to collect. When I reached the women they stopped yelling at each other long enough to both stare at me like scared rabbits, not sure what I was going to do. "there is no time, they are almost here, you have to get down and get moving!" I said to them urgently, looking down the road at the fast approaching convoy.

"MURDERER!" one woman screamed in my face. "how could we trust you, we know who you are.. Reverend" she said accusingly, the other woman nodding slightly then retreating a step and shifting her eyes away from me to the dirt at her feet. "Thief, Mercenary, Scoundrel perhaps , what kind of sick joke is it that you call yourself Reverend anyway?!" the accusing one said, so caught up in her scolding that she seemed to forget there was a dead guy near her feet. "Lady, people change or they die in this world, you can't stay here, you have to come with me. They will catch you and you will tell them that there where more of us out here to collect, you mite not want to tell them, but they are not going to give you a choice. For the last time ,get down and get moving!" I turned and started to crawl again, but not before I saw the woman turn defiantly and step onto the road as she shouted at me "I can reason with them, we will be OK."

I had seen this before, seen people walk calmly to a fireing line where they knew they where going to be shot. I have seen men stand unmoving in the middle of heavily shelled building as it caved in around them, it was a pure delusional state brought on by terror and we where out of time. I glanced at the other woman, she was still starring at her feet eyes glazed. the girl was just sitting in the dirt crying, sucking air through sobs she was trying to keep silent. I glanced again at the caravan, it was over, to close, they would see us any minute now. No time to crawl away into the dust, no time to talk, one woman standing in the road, one starring at her feet and a child to scared to move just crying her eyes out. That cold shock hit my spine and I knew I could save one, it wasn't going to be pretty, and it wasn't going to be me I could save.

I moved fast, pommel of the blade striking the girl on the temple hard, she fell over in a heap. She would be out cold for at least an hour maybe as much as three or four. I glanced quickly behind me, the boy out of sight, he must have crossed a hidden rise in the terrain, I couldn't see him at all. "Well maybe it will be two then after all." I said to myself as I moved quickly past the girl, the blade reversing in my hand. The glazed look never left her face, and the other looked more shocked than scared. I closed her eyes as the blood pooled around me on the road. I dragged the bodies as fast as I could, the one the boy said was named Ben, the two woman, and piled them on the unconscious girl. The biomeks didn't have any use for the dead... I felt the bile building in my throat, "You do what you have to." a cold voice said in my head.

I started running down the road towards the convoy, it didn't take long until I saw one of the front running Xr-11 Armoc fast attack vehicles hit the gas. They saw me. I ran off the road west, sprinting all out across the flat ground. They would be on me like a pack of wild dogs before I got far, or they would just run me over and not even bother to stop. I thought about what the AMB-07 truck was pulling and knew I wouldn't be that lucky. I forced myself not to look back and run harder, I had to get as far as I could from where the girl was hidden safe under the bodies. The ground was shaking under my feet, all I could hear was the deafening roar of engines. I was flying through the air, something had hit me hard in the back, so hard I looked down at my chest expecting to see a gaping hole. There wasn't a hole there to my relief, I looked up just in time to see the earth heading for my face in a blur, everything went silent and black.

I was in the darkness again, bodiless, the scream was closer now. I thought for a moment how it was impressive how passionate the screaming was, I mean who ever it was was really serious about being in pain. I felt like laughing then, but there was a jagged edge there, I knew if I started I wouldn't be able to stop. The screaming was suddenly drowned out by a loud mechanical whirring sound, something familiar, I had heard it before. It was all around me now, closer than the scream, wait it was only on the left.. And then I knew what it was , it was a drill. The left? I could feel myself now, lying on something cold and hard. I couldn't see, I couldn't move. I tried but nothing responded it was like my arms and legs where just unplugged. "Like if some demented freak cut your spinal cord with a combat knife?!" a voice screamed at me in my head. Then I really felt like laughing, and there was a terrifying feeling of my sanity stretched to a very thin line. The Drill was grinding away at something now, I could feel my head shaking and banging against the hard surface I was lying on. There wasn't any pain.
The screaming started again, much closer. This time I recognized the voice.





G. A. Ray, Aug 2005