Refraction | Part 1 | Darwin's Steroids
17) Phase 2
So my epic journey through the underworld continues without a pause long enough for me to catch my breath. These sons of bitches are nothing if not efficient in their doling out of one fucked up, miserable nightmare after another. The Head Usher of Torture, a slight, be-spectacled, nipponese gentleman, (I've have taken to calling him Homer, as he seems to be my guide through lo, these many circles of woe), enters my chamber of horrors. He is followed by a hulking slavic fellow in full combat dress. Armor, helmet, and a pre-war era enhancement frame. The servos whirr and buzz as he clomps into the room, moving with the grace that only a practiced hand can manage inside the formidable metal exoskeleton, and stands at parade rest directly across from me. He is outfitted with a Sig S-20 light machine gun augment on his left arm, and has a 100 year old Colt .45 pistol in an incongruous leather holster slung across his hips. He is obviously a combat veteran, as the 30 year old frame has been customized to accommodate the holster, and though well outdated, appears to be in flawless working order, buffed and gleaming, ready for parade.
I am not looking forward to this.
The Head Usher turns toward me, and I see his eyes are flashing rapidly. He seems to lose focus on the room for a moment, as if daydreaming. Then says, to no one in particular, "Subjects vitals are all in the green, initiating Phase 2. Sgt Ivanov?"
And without further preamble the soldier removes the .45 from it's polished leather pocket and shoots me square in the chest.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Pain, my now near constant companion, shudders through my body. It feels like the biggest horse in the universe, like God's own show pony just kicked me in my diaphragm. Like big, fat Buddha himself is sitting on my costal cartilage. I fly back across the room and slam into the wall behind me. On my knees I watch as precious blood gushes from the ragged wound on my sternum. None of which makes sense.
I work to put two and two together. Bullets don't push things back, they fly through them. People get shot, they drop like a bag of sand. I am not dead. This is the thing that's really niggling me. I have seen a number of people shot in their chests, and not a few with weapons similar to the monster that was just discharged into me. These people died. Man, did they die. Right way. None of this hands and knees, gasping for air with a two ton rail spike stuck in them crap. I try desperately to pass out, go into shock, die, anything. Instead I pull in a deep breath.
And another.
And another.
My vision blurs and clears. I taste the metallic tang of adrenaline. Energy flows through me suddenly, weirdly. The pain, as though hooked into a light switch, turns off. The alternately hot/cold feeling washes over me, and I roll over onto my back. I risk a look at my chest, expecting spectacular gore, and am rewarded with just that. I sit up, confused as a newborn baby. I note, beneath the slick of blood, where a hand sized flap of my integuementary system has been flayed away, a mirror shine. Then the Head Usher Homer says, "Excellent sergeant, now the stress tests."
I look at the oversized soldier, and he gazes back at me with emotionless blue eyes. He moves rapidly across the room and picks me up off the floor. With the frame on, he can do this as effortlessly as if I were an infant. Grasping my left arm at the elbow and wrist he begins to apply pressure, intending to break my radius and ulna like kindling. Instead of the dry stick snap I expect to hear, I am rewarded with only the sound of his battle suit's mechanisms being pushed to their maximum. I look at my arm, and it is as straight as an arrow shaft. Soldiers in enhancement frames can bend tube steel, but the enormous man gripping me has no apparent effect at all on my forearm. As if in frustration, but with the same complacent look on his face, Sgt. Ivanov suddenly twists his body away from me, pushing his hip into mine and throws me across the room. I smash into the wall at around forty-five miles an hour. Physics does not generally allow for people to survive this sort of abuse. I slump to the floor, suddenly exhausted, as confused and muddled as I've ever been, and strangely, as hungry as I can remember being since the war. I am blood soaked, perplexed, and at my wits end.
"That will do for now, Sergeant.", says Homer the H.U. of T. "You are to fall out and de-brief in D-Section command at oh-seven-thirty hours. I will escort the subject back to his quarters when he recovers."
Then he turns, gazes past me at something no one else can see, and smiles.
"Now then," he says in a gentle, grandfatherly sort of way, "That wasn't so terribly bad was it? Let's get you something to eat, I bet you're famished."
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