Weekly Drabble #219: The Chase (Patreon)

And we're back once more in the City of Shadows. What can I say? I have urban sci-fi horror on the brain recently. I blame you all for encouraging me. :P

But this week's prompts are 'better part of valour' and 'retreat is always an option' from Pethrai D'Arkos and Pyro Hawk. We shift viewpoints once more, this time to a recent immigrant to Horrak-Sarn and his encounters with some of the other inhabitants. Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you and some days... well.

Enjoy!

~

The Chase:

Run.

That was the only though pounding through Emmanuel Cortes’s head as he raced through the City’s endless dark, winding streets. His lungs were burning and his heart felt like it was simultaneously going to burst out of his chest, or seize up and stop working, but he didn’t dare slow down. If he slowed, he knew he’d stop. If he stopped, he was dead. At least if I have a heart attack, it will be quick.He was overweight. He knew that. Back home, he’d bought exercise equipment that only gathered dust. He’d start it later, he told himself. After this game, after this movie, after the weekend, at the start of the next month. Later, later, later.

In Horrak-Sarn, there weren’t any more laters and the young man’s fat cheeks were red, his legs howling in pain and the flab he should have worked away was weighing him down with every step. He wanted to stop. Part of him wanted to do that more than anything, just stop and... stop. Almost more than anything. The part of him that wanted to live was louder still and he kept running, kept huffing and puffing and wondering if this was it.

“C’mere piggy!” the thing chasing him shouted. “C’mon out fat-fat-fat-fat!” Adding insult to injury, it didn’t sound out of breath at all.

Emmanuel wished he knew how he’d ended up here. Well, that wasn’t really that much of a mystery. He did know. He just wished he didn’t. He wished a lot of things. What he honestly wasn’t sure about was how he’d ended up here. He hadn’t seen what had happened. He’d been one of hundreds of slaves being offloaded at the docks and then... he wasn’t quite sure. Most of it was a blur, with clear snippets caught in his memory like frames of a movie frozen on screen while it buffered.

There’d been an explosion. Shouting. Guards racing back and forth. Then a lot of slaves from his ship started running and he he’d followed them. There’d the cracks and chatter of guns and everyone around him was falling. A woman on his right just exploded like a popped balloon, covering him with her blood, but he’d just kept running. There’d been people up ahead, shouting and waving. He’d run towards them. They called themselves Turner’s Men.

That was all he’d learned about them. The attack on the port had stirred up a hornet’s nest and the guards had mobilized. More running followed. Not just running; using ‘grav-lines’ to leap from the tower like you were rappelling down the side, only much faster. So fast that the guards and the drones couldn’t catch you before you got to ground level. Emmanuel had nearly refused. One of the other escapees had. Emmanuel didn’t know what happened to him; he’d heard the man scream, the sound dwindling away as he plummeted down from an impossibly-high tower, the City stretching before him from one edge of the horizon to the other.

The Masters hadn’t given up that easily, though. They’d pursued the slaves. Guards on skimmers, hunter-killer drones and even one of the Masters’ chariots itself, a sleek alien aircraft that strafed the fleeing humans from high up.

More than half of the Turner’s Men died getting out of that district, half of the escaped slaves either killed with them or re-captured. Emmanuel didn’t know what happened to everyone else. He’d gotten separated from the rest, somehow getting out of the cordon the guards had erected.

He’d managed to survive a week; mostly through luck. He’d found a small encampment of other free humans. They were wary, but allowed him to stay – if he could pull his weight. Working where they told him, going into the Beneath for fresh water, harvesting lichens and mosses filled with disgusting insects for food. He was new, so he was on the bottom of the pecking order. He got the shitty work – often literally. He hated every minute of it, but he doubted his hosts enjoyed the existence themselves. Without them, he was as good as dead, so he kept his complaints to a dull murmur.

I should have listened more.

They’d given him some simple rules.  The first was simple: don’t get caught out after dark. Horrak-Sarn’s nights were something even the Masters feared, and with very good reason. The young man hadn’t seen any of the nighttime horrors, but he’d heard them. One of rules was: don’t investigate anything you think is strange. Report it to one of us.He should have done that.

He’d been on scrap duty. The City was old. Emmanuel had been told that it was even older than the Masters themselves and they were just the most recent of its rulers. He’d also been told that they had built it, but some calamity had winnowed their civilization and there were only a relative handful of them left. He didn’t know which was true and doubted that the people who told them those stories did either.

The City was real enough, though. A nightmare urban sprawl built up over countless centuries (or maybe even millennia), layer after layer and more of it was unexplored than was known. Even in areas you knew, you could still be surprised by what you’d find. Garbage dumped from barges and chariots as they flew overhead. Refuse from the Masters and their servants. Things discarded by other survivors – or picked off their corpses. Ancient machines and mechanisms that could be used for power or spare parts. The detritus of entire societies could be found here and less than a tithe of a tithe of it had been discovered by the humans eking out their meager existences within its streets, barren towers and endless darkened buildings.

That’s what he was told, anyways: salvage and scouting was important. It might be, but he didn’t go on those missions. He was too new and too slow, he was told. They didn’t have the time or the people to watch him, so he was given easy assignments and “safe” areas to pick over. To him, it was fruitlessly wandering unnerving streets and picking through trash for things he got told were worthless. At least today, there’d been a break in the monotony. He’s heard someone crying.

Don’t investigate anything strange. That had been the rule. He should have listened, but he didn’t. He followed the sound. He’d thought it was a girl, but it turned out to be a woman. Young and blonde and dressed in stained, tattered clothes with a collar around her neck, on her hands and knees, shaking and sobbing. She’d looked like she was in trouble.

He’d been right, but in the worst way.  She’d looked up when he’d approached, her eyes widening. Hazel, Manny noticed. A vivid shade of hazel. “It’s all right,” he told her. “I won’t hurt you. I heard you crying – are you all right?”

She’d looked at him, then turned away. “I’m sorry.” He thought her accent was East European. Another escaped slave?

At first, he didn’t know what she’d meant. Seconds later, he found out.

Something that had been human – and he thought that only because he had no frame of reference to say what else it might have been– emerged from the hidden mouth of a nearby blind alley. More than six feet tall, with a broad, bare chest, grey leggings and a brown loincloth. Rolls of blistered flesh cascaded from the base of its chin to its hefty gut, giving its upper torso a vaguely triangular appearance. Its arms were thick, each hand about the size of the woman’s head.

The creature picked up the leash attached to the girl’s collar in one boil-covered, meaty hand. In the other it held the shaft of a hooked spear. The weapon looked crude, but the shaft was polished with leather wrappings for handgrips and the blade, though chipped in a few places,was clean

His smile had been much too wide, with too many sharp teeth. “You done good, Masherry,” he told the girl, putting the hand with the leash on the side of the woman’s face, stroking her cheek like a master with its pet. The woman didn’t resist his touch, but she closed her eyes and her facial muscles twitched as she struggled not to show disgust. “He’ll keep us fed for a whole week’r more.” The mutant looked from his pet to Emmanuel. “You like Masherry, my fat friend? Better bait I ain’t ever had. She brings in all sorts of dinners, you see?”

That was when Emmanuel turned and ran. The creature followed, pulling the girl up under one arm like she weighed nothing as he lumbered after his prey. “Come back here, fat piggy!” he shouted as the chase began.

Despite panic driving almost all other thoughts from his head, Manny had presence of mind enough to choose where he was running. The creature was behind him, driving him away from the encampment and there weren’t any other patrols or scouts around here. There was only one chance. One extra rule that he remembered. He kept running, panting and heaving and unable to stop.

Finally, Emmanuel simply couldn’t run any further. It wasn’t his heart or his lungs that gave out first; it was his legs. He made it just past a long dried-up fountain in a courtyard before a tall spire that reminded him of the Empire State Building, only smaller and in more disrepair. He was very far from the encampment by now, with no chance of doubling back around his pursuer. He fell, sprawling through the accumulated dirt and dust of ages, unable to stand back up. As he panted, he prayed that the thing behind him had lost him and he could crawl his way into shelter, then make his way back to the small tent city.

He wasn’t that lucky.

“There’s me fat piggy,” the creature sneered as it caught sight of him from across the courtyard. He set the woman down, but didn’t release her leash and she was forced to trail after him. “People say that when animals spook, it taints the meat, but I find it gives the right kind of spice to it. Nothing like a good meal after a good chase, eh Masherry?”

“Yes,” she agreed enthusiastically, though her expression was anything but. As Emmanuel gasped with burning lungs in the dust, he met her eyes. She was like him, another captive taken from Earth. Maybe even another escapee from the same raid, only she hadn’t found anyone willing to help her. Only this thing who used her as bait.

The mutant strode forward, pointing the tip of its hooked spear at Emmanuel. “Hope you enjoyed your stay in the City, but you’ll be more useful as a string of sausage. Any last squeals to make?”

High above, Emmanuel saw a flicker of movement and he hoped – he hoped – he hadn’t just found a different way of dying. “Yes,” he gasped. “‘Don’t go near the Cracked Fountain Courtyard’.” It was too exposed, he’d been told. Exposed to what?He’d asked. The answer he’d gotten was direct and unsettling. Above.

So fast that Manny didn’t even see it happen, a mottled blur fell out of the sky and slammed into the creature with a meaty impact. The mutant and crashed to the ground like a sack of meat being dropped. He thrashed about on his stomach, roaring in pain.There was something on his back, a faceless woman with pale hair and white-tinged wings. Her feet were like an eagle’s claws and she’d driven them deep into the folds of the creature’s flesh as she stabbed him viciously with a pair of knives.

The creature howled even loudly and rolled as if to crush his attacker underneath his bulk, but she leapt backwards, wings beating furiously as she drew out of her victim’s reach.

The girl was screaming incoherently, her face a mask of terror as she pulled at her leash to get free, but the mutant still held it tight in one fist.

Alighted on the edge of the dry fountain, blood dripping from her feet and her knives, the attacker tilted her head as she sized up her prey, red eye lenses staring blankly back at the creature. There wasn’t any fear in her posture, a she-wolf wondering how she was going to kill a lone stag.

The mutant was panting. His wounds were deep, but he was so massive that they probably weren’t even life-threatening. His wide eyes glowered at the other mutant and he raised his spear but he didn’t attack her. Instead, he started looking around. Too late. Much too late.

A second winged woman, this one with bright red hair and glistening black wings fell from the skies like an eagle onto a sheep.The creature was too slow to bring his spear up to defend himself and the other woman rammed a spear of her own – slender, sleek and sharp – right through his chest the force of her strike drove the blade clean through his torso and out his back. The mutant’s last words came out as a sputtering, frothy red mist and he fell to his knees, his weapon and the girl’s leash falling from his nerveless fingers. Even before it hit the ground, she was off and running. The white-winged killer watched her go. Her companion planted one foot on the mutant’s chest and pulled her spear free. It came out slick with blood and gore caught in its serrations.

Somehow, Emmanuel managed to get back onto his feet. Both the women turned to stare at him, blank red-eyed helmets watching. The white-winged girl leaned over to her companion and whispered something. Manny’s blood ran cold. He didn’t know what she was saying, but he could guess. What about him?

The second woman looked the young man up and down, then back at their current prize, making sounds that Emmanuel thought were dismissive. The white-winged mutant made a crackling huff through her mask. Apparently, they had enough food for now. Rather than give them time to reconsider, Manny fled as fast as his exhausted body would allow. He didn’t make it far beyond the courtyard, ducking into the first suitable crevasse he could find, a stairwell under an abandoned building’s atrium. There was a squeak as he tried to wedge himself inside, finding that he wasn’t the only person who’d chosen this hiding spot.

The East European woman was here, too. She was pale and shaking in terror. Emmanuel opened his mouth, but she put a finger to her lips. He didn’t know how long they stayed there, but every time he tried to leave, she grabbed him and pulled him back. Finally, she left him go. He peered out through the building’s broken doors. The courtyard was empty, a bloodstain soaking into the dust and stone – or what he thought was stone, he didn’t even know if this place had actual ground. Wedged into the masonry was the creature’s spear and impaled upon its tip was his severed head. Maybe a warning, maybe a territorial marker or maybe even a trophy. He stared at it for a few seconds before he lifted his gaze up to the skyline and the circle of towers surrounding the large plaza. Ice trickled down his back.

“Don’t go near the Cracked Fountain Courtyard,” he repeated. “It’s too exposed.”

He he looked over his shoulder. The woman was still next to him. Without a word,she lifted up her leash and offered the end of it to him.