Day 297 - The War Corp. - Chapter 3.4 (1009 Words)

©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

THE WAR CORP.

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 3.4

Sharpe did not respond at once, and then slowly began to tell the story of how they had made it through the section of the trap, to unlistening ears. Liam was not interested in the experience of Sharpe’s team, the Acidic cloud they avoided, the swimming section and the sprinting to the door before the hazards caught them.

It was done and there were two more teams to get back to waypoint where they had gathered and would move on through the maze. There were ten more recruits and so far only one of the four minimum required lives had been lost. Of course Brodie and Morris would likely be trying to save them all, but it was a need in Liam, set by the objective and held in check by the numbers, but they had to be culled. They had to zero out.

The door to the rear of the room they were in opened suddenly and in rushed the team belonging to Brodie and his four recruits. All five of them unharmed and unscathed, not a sign of anything bad happening to them. There was a hunted look in the eyes of the leader, but not one injury meant all five were still green on the NINE when Liam scanned them.  Liam did not make any query and it was left to Sharpe and Brodie to start discussing the various traps and obstacles that got in the way.

That left Morris and his four men, and there was no indication on Liam’s NINE that anything was affecting them in any negative way.

“BOOM.” The sound of a nearby explosion made the small room shudder a little and then Liam saw the entry for Morris flicker to Orange and then a little while later go red.

A new explosion, this one louder and closer than the last one had been. This time there was no change in the entries and then one more loud BOOM followed by the scrabbling at the door by the four surviving recruits, piling in and coming to a breathless halt, running at full speed into safety.

Morris was not among them.

Liam pried open the door as it tried to shut and he could see a pool of blood and Morris lying in it a few meters from the door, his legs were a blur of flesh and sinew, no longer forming anything remotely resembling the legs they had once been. Morris was still alive, but the red state he was in flickered.

“Let me go.” He shouted hoarsely and looked up at Liam, standing in the doorway, keeping his body in the gap and forcing the door to remain ajar, constantly trying to push him back out of the gap. He levered a little more space and managed to get through, the door clicking behind him softly despite the force of the motors closing it.

Liam jogged to the spot where Morris was bleeding out and then looked backwards behind him to see what they had come through. The whole area was covered in beige sand and back a few dozen meters there were craters, scorch marks and some shrapnel in the sand.

Land mines, the dunes that were in the middle chamber were littered with them and Morris had obviously been taking the lead and walked right onto one. Like the poor unfortunate recruit that Liam had sent into the firewall trap in the outer corridor. He was the canary in the mine and had taken one for the team.

From the blood and flesh strewn path behind him it looked like Morris had taken the example of his Team Leader to heart and had sacrificed the already injured recruit, in this case himself, to clear the way for the others.

A trail of blood, gore and craters showed the safe route for the team to make it through the sand dune maze to the inner doors. Whatever had forced them to speed up and take on the unknown and obviously dangerous dunes was gone. There must have been something behind them; some threat pressing them forwards otherwise there would have been no need to step onto the sand without checking for mines first.

Survival was preprogrammed and checking the environment when you expected traps was a second nature to them, unless pressed for time.

Morris was flickering on the red, the life in him ebbing away. He was making a whimpering sound, and the top half of his body was convulsing and wracked with shivers and shakes, how much of it nerves being shredded and how much of it mental was impossible to tell.

Liam pulled his knife once more and lifted the torso of his squad leader up and stabbed it through a hold in the upper back of his uniform. The blade slid in between bruises and blood, severing the recruit’s spinal cord and cutting off all feeling from the neck down.

The pain was turned off like a switch being thrown and unexpectedly Liam got a broad smile from his recruit as the relief set in. The blissful feeling was a shared experience as Liam saw the dropping off that he had been hoping would be his. Instead he watched first hand as the light in the man’s eyes dimmed and faded from view, slower and more gracefully than the previous deaths he had seen close up. This was more personal, more grateful and more giving in its intensity and duration.

Then the red light around his name went blank and Morris zeroed out in the NINEs for all the team, and the door behind where the central room was and the teams were assembled, opened with a noise of compressed air.

Liam looked over his shoulder to see his team staring at him, and it was then that he realized that tears were streaming down his eyes. It was not sadness for the fallen, it was not the overwhelming emotion of the noble death, it was frustration and jealousy in him.

It should have been me.

Day 296 - Perfectly Executed. - Chapter 1 (1283 Words)

Perfectly Executed.

©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Still working on the War Corp, but I had this idea on the way to work this morning and I had to start it. I may flick back between the two ideas over the last couple of months of writing.

We'll see...

Perfectly Executed

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 1

It was just like any other day and the man who he passed on the street was indistinguishable from any other.

Except.

That man was soon unforgettable, and the acts he took were unforgivable. It was easy to see these in hindsight but hindsight was only any good when you could actually do something about it.

If he had known then what he did now then a way to prevent the whole grisly affair might have presented itself, but that again was easy to see in hindsight. He struggled with the pain of his loss, but he had the clarity of purpose that it brought to him.

The phone call was unexpected; he did not recognize the number and ignored the call, sliding it into the red oblivion of his call screening. Except the person calling was persistent and called back again, immediately perhaps realizing that the call had been deferred and ringing back straight away.

There was that click, the cold feeling that something important or bad was digging into him, and that it would be advisable to front up and face whatever it was. He wracked his brain, had he paid all this months bills? Was there a problem with something? Did he have something on loan that he had forgotten to return? Was it the grant people?

None of these things seemed likely, and the number unfamiliar.

Answer slid to the right and there was the call, totally unexpected and surprising. Answering this call was like stepping in front of a bus, thumping into him like a moving wall and tossing him like a rag doll into the air. The ground beneath him fell away as the reality of what he was being told was hitting home.

There had been an incident at his house and the police were there now, he needed to get home as soon as possible, perhaps someone could drive him there? They would not give him all the details, just that they had been alerted by a neighbor about a break-in, that was the phrase they used, and that he needed to come to the house, now and they would explain it all then.

He called his wife’s number, her cell phone rang and rang and did not answer. Were the police in his house? Why was she not picking up? Would they ignore the phone if it were ringing like that? Would they see it was his ID calling and refuse to answer if Jane could not? Or would not?

Why was she not answering, his fingers fumbled on the phone and he thought in a cold sweat that everyone outside the glass doors was watching him fall apart. He felt embarrassed that it was potentially over something that was not worth the fear and terror, because it was unknown. He had to get out, before someone asked him what was happening, before any one in the lab outside his office, would talk to him. The white coats and glasses of his colleagues, the t-shirted cool of the researcher assistants and graduates ‘interning’ all indifferent to his agitated state as he tottered unsteadily, in his own mind, through the room and finding the door.

He spun and was dizzy in fear, needing to get there fast but barely able to walk straight the fifty or so feet from his desk to the parking lot. The office was on a busy street and taxis were plentiful, and waiting especially this time of day. He waved uncertainly at a driver, standing casually next to his car and then hurriedly stabbing his cigarette into the gutter, sign language ruling the implied contract between the two of them.

His address was given, and instructions flew on every step of the journey home, not waiting or allowing the driver to show his local knowledge or use his GPS system, the urgency in his voice was all the authority required.

The street was calm and quiet, even as his mind raced at the possible explanations, and he had just about managed to talk himself off the ledge, convince himself it was a storm in a teacup, that it was just a robbery and everyone was fine.

Then he saw the lights.

The trees that lined the middle section of Panorama Road, they hid the house from the street but they always obscured oncoming traffic until you were virtually in front of the house. Now when the taxi approached the street frontage, the trees gave up their hidden treasure, a sparkling and brightly colored cascade of bejeweled lights sitting atop a half dozen cars and an ambulance, no… two ambulances.

“Holy fuck.” He whispered to himself and pressed his face against the window, one hand on the glass as if he were a child in awe of a fireworks show seen from a bedroom late at night.

“Here? I don’t think I can stop here man?” The Taxi driver rolled to a halt as the policewoman who was directing traffic around a hastily erected cordon prevented him from pulling where the passenger had been pointing.

He did not look at the total on the machine, the clicking on the meter had been like a clock to him, it did not represent money totaling up but it was time slipping away that he was paying for, time was too precious a commodity, a physicist like him was all too aware of it’s fickle nature.

Time was not the constant that people said it was. Time was a bitch.

The money in his hand could have been any amount, he blindly grabbed notes and receipts, pieces of paper in his wallet and one lengthy scribbled equation he had been keeping there since he had thought of it. The wad of paper flew across the gap between the backseat and the driver in the front.

A flutter of wispy and unimportant things that made a mini storm in the car, and the driver exclaiming as they flew omnidirectional in the cab.

He did not wait, did not want to know and just opened the door even as he was throwing money and paper at the man, his gaze on the flashing lights, the orange red tape that cut off the pavement, part of the road and sectioned his house from the rest of reality.

The policewoman was trying to get the attention of the driver who was head down in the wheel well looking for the money, becoming aware that he had been given over fifty dollars for a less than twenty fare. He scooped it up and was going to object, half-heartedly that the man had overpaid but he was gone, the rear door left open in his haste to get out. The other side of him was the angry face of a woman in a hi-visibility police jacket yelling at him to move on, while he spluttered his confusion back at her.

He, the man whose home this was, ran stumbling over his own feet in an effort to find out what was going on, and right into the arms of a waiting officer. The wall of uniform and orders to not let anyone breach the barrier came up in front of him, and he dashed against it like the sea. Urgent and insistent, pushing at every possible way to get over the wall, but still rejected from his approach.

He had to come to a complete standstill in that moment, and faced the fact that since he answered the call he had not stopped moving for even a second, his legs and hands pumping even while seated in the taxi.

Now he was at a dead stop.

Day 295 - The War Corp. - Chapter 3.3 (1311 Words)

©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

THE WAR CORP.

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 3.3

The growl, which started in the middle of the room, not far from where the yelp was, grew outwards like a wave and the entire area was filled with the noise of these creatures, whatever they were carrying on this now feral sounding cry. It intensified and echoed in the confined and sightless space, the walls and ceiling wherever they were causing the noise to fold back on itself.

The creature he had thrown was still making the pathetic noise, and it was getting steadily more plaintive and fearful as the growling rose to a roar. Then there was scrabbling sound as the creature at the center of this sound attack moved rapidly, trying to get away.

The avalanche of noise that fell, cascading into a cacophony of movement changed the tone of the aggression, escalating to a vicious snarling maw, one group fueled sound of violence and intent as they all raced to the point where the poor unfortunate lobbed beast had been thrown by Liam.

These once placid and unmoved creatures, now zeroing in on one of their own, buffeted his feet. This did leave the wall free to be explored though and Liam took the opportunity to find the door, locating it quickly and easily with nothing in his way. A button was easy to find, it was in the position that he expected it would be based on the other doors he had seen in the light, and a push of it opened the door, flooding the area with light.

The creatures were ringed about the one he had thrown, it was backed against the wall and the semi circle that formed around him was pressing in closer and closer. The NINE processed the sight and gave him the information as the pack broke formation and went in for the kill.

He had an excellent view from a slightly elevated ramp was the creature in the middle, the yelping one was torn apart bloodily by the pack it was a part of. The door closed automatically as the NINE registered the creature as deceased, a fact made obvious by the state it was in, strewn and eviscerated by its brethren. It was no longer even a corpse as the body had been shredded by the multitudinous attack.

The creature was Sugar Wold, an innocuous sounding name by first look but it had been named for the diet on which it subsisted, living off a plant native to it’s home system that closely resembled the cane sugar that once grew on the human home worlds.  It was thought to be a placid and docile creature and it was by a series of unfortunate accidents that led to a few deaths that the true nature of the Sugar Wold was discovered.

They attacked in packs, and they only attacked when in great numbers and even then only when they could sense the fear in the prey. The one that Liam had hurled at the wall in frustration had apparently been scared by the sudden flight and lack of ground beneath it, slamming into the wall opposite and giving it more of a shock on top of that.

The creatures picked up on the fear, the sole Sugar Wold knowing what would be coming dragged itself to a pit of fear for the pack turning on it and exacerbated the problem, making itself more of a target. Then the pack turned and Liam saw first hand what the little creatures could.

He felt nothing, no sorrow and no concern for his own safety. The creatures were what they were and if they attacked him in the dark he doubted he could have fended enough of them off to survive a sustained, frenzied attack like that. He was walking through the valley of death, quite literally if he had enough information to be scared. Others in the same position may have felt something in the unknown of the dark.

Liam felt nothing.

He still felt nothing even as the door separated him and the horde of ravenous creatures. By the sound of the pack they had subsided now that there was no prey left to tear to shreds and the bloodlust had been sated. The sound had carried through the low walls of the under passage at first, when the door auto closed and slowly petered out, rather than faded.

Now he was on the other side and the goal, the exit was a short distance away, he had traversed some way through the underground tunnel leg of the Gauntlet. If he had taken the others with him they too could have survived, but it was also possible that one of them would have reacted in fear to the encounter with an unseen and live organism in the dark, which would have led to a confrontation, an event with the Sugar Wolds and then, fear would have been an outcome.

Liam did not fear death, he welcomed it and so as he stared back at the now silent wall he wondered if the creatures would ever have attacked him, when he had no fear of them. He was happy to find the great black exit hole and sink into it, but he could not do it voluntarily, it had to be as brought on the by the game. What he wanted, desired and was hoping for were all secondary concerns to the pre-programmed need to complete his objectives.

Liam looked about the rest of the course, but he could not see or hear any sign of the other fifteen members of his team. The NINE had not registered any deaths, no injuries and no completions, they were all still in their own paths.

He had to wait, and so he moved to the exit door and opened it to find Sharpe and his four recruits waiting on the other side all in one piece, but looking a little weathered, their clothes steaming with a fine mist and a scent of chemicals in the air.

Sharpe registered the arrival of the Team Leader with a nod and then shot an inquisitive look at Liam, not saying anything but clearly wanting to know what he encountered on his path.

“Sugar Wolds. In the dark. They… attacked each other, they were more scared than me.” Liam told him, not realizing yet why he felt a need to share the information but getting a tiny thrill at being blasé about the encounter. In his service to date in the league this was possibly the longest string of words he had put together. In the shuttle trips and the drop ship missions, the team communicated via the NINEs and only really about strategy and tactics. Reports and status updates were key to a flow of information and keeping people on the same page, but they did not converse.

Now he had no other thing to do but wait for the remaining ten recruits to exit their mazes, and there was a pull to the man who had helped Brodie pull his damaged, pain wracked body over the wall in CBT. This man had probably seen what Liam had seen, the light going out, the wall between the mind and the pain of the body being raised and bliss setting in.

He would have no basis for comparison of course, but he must have seen something like that in Liam when he was on the verge, when he made the trip from victim to corpse and back to the Pod, just in time to be ‘reset’. What had he seen, what did he know of the Nirvana that was on the other side of that thin line?

“What did you see?” He said aloud, before the words had registered properly he heard them coming out of his mouth, sounding like a hollow echo in the small room. 

Day 294 - The War Corp. - Chapter 3.2 (1072 Words)

©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

THE WAR CORP.

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 3.2

Through the doorway at the end of the fire wall corridor there was a wide open and well lit space, one that rose higher than the ceilings of the drop ship and the corridor that led to this wide space. It was hard to see all the way across the space, as there were walls and doorways in between the entry point and the exit, which was well lit and beaming at them some distance away.

This was an obstacle course of some nature, and the assumption had to be that it would be deadly and deceptive. A number of different ways to reach the other side presented themselves, some riding high above and some going into a kind of sublevel below the level of the doorway and into darkness.  There were also doors that led to sections made from boxes that were randomly interspersed across the room, and no clear path directly to the other side.

Each door had a number on it, and when the recruits scanned it directly, the NINE would give them the clue that these numbers were the maximum occupancy for recruits. If they were to take a particular path then they would be limited to how many could go down each road.

This was going to force them to split the team, and take different ways to the same end. There were five doors and now sixteen recruits including him, so there were options open to him for distributing the groups. Liam’s priorities were somewhat out of tune with the team and he could not think of a good approach that would address what he saw as the major problem with splitting the team.

Once he had chosen a door, he was blind to the actions of the team.  He had no control over the choice of who would live or die, and that was what he wanted, that was what he needed. That was what set him apart from the others, he had three deaths up his sleeve and he wanted to use them most effectively.

What he had to do was appoint squads and send them to the luck of the draw, whatever it was on the other side of the doorways and whatever traps the Gauntlet had for them.

He looked at the doorways one last time, he could effectively split the team into three groups and send five recruits at a time into three different paths and then if they were canny, which the team was quickly becoming, then they could potentially lose one recruit per set, which would be the remaining three allowed, but then that would leave him no leeway for the obstacles to follow. There would be more than these, he was sure of it.

The team was broken into three groups of five, Brodie, Sharpe and Morris each taking four recruits apiece and that was only Liam left standing. There were two doors with fives on them and one with six, but his plan was still to send five through it. It was a maximum occupancy, not the minimum to enter. Instead he would take a road alone, the one that looked the safest was undoubtedly the worst and it stood to reason that the one looking the most dangerous should be the easiest to traverse.

They could potentially all be equally vicious and impossible to complete without a loss, but it was a chance he had to take in some form to complete the Gauntlet objective, so he was happy to risk himself, by himself.

The dark doorway that was set in the floor was the most ominous looking and he left it to the Squad leader to pick the path they wanted to take between them, then he just walked away and down the black square to meet whatever fate the Gauntlet had for him.

It was pitch black and he could not see anything at all in the complete absence of light once the door closed behind him.

Liam walked on in the pitch black and made no attempt to feel his way or to try and find any kind of advantage, the adjustment to low light that he got in the corridor did not happen in here, there was no light to adjust to, it was completely cut off from all external sources.

His foot brushed something and it moved under the motion of his leg. The thing, whatever it was moved and was alive, it scooted away from his position and made a curious little noise that sounded confused or put out by the intrusion. Liam took a few more steps and encountered more of the same creatures in there with him, each time they made a startled noise and moved aside, as he picked his way through them as much as possible in the complete darkness.

He stopped and tried to pick one of the creatures up, feeling for its girth and weight as he tried to lift it. It struggled and wriggled in his grasp before it broke free and ran away.

Liam could not tell what kind of thing it was, and despite the intrusion he was making into their habitat it did not attack or seem to care that he was there. Liam was disappointed, he expected more from the Gauntlet.  The floor must have been littered with these beings; he started moving them aside with every step and as the floor began to rise and he moved up hill the thickness of them increased. Each step was moved from a lateral position and swept forward rather than raised and placed downwards, wading more than stepping.

Eventually he reached the end of the under floor section when a wall presented itself. The creatures were still layered on thick and they became a hindrance as he tried to feel his way along the wall to find a door. He moved back and forwards across the wall looking for the exit but found nothing, possibly because of the animals that crowded the space so completely.

Frustration overtook him on the third pass and he picked up a creature and before it could get out of his grip he threw it angrily in the opposite direction of the wall, sending it sailing into the dark air unseen.

The creature yelped like it had been attacked, and an odd growling sound rumbled in response from the floor. The rumble grew to a growl