Sepulturum
THIS HORROR SET IN A FAR-FUTURE WORLD EXPLORES ISSUES OF IDENTITY, FALSE MEMORIES, AND THE PHYSICAL EFFECTS OF PSYCHIC TRAUMA
Morgravia Sanctus is being hunted. She seeks someone who can rebuild her shattered memories – but as a plague sweeps the city, all hope seems lost…
The juve fell like a sack of dead meat. The gangers had enough sense to post lookouts at the perimeter of their territory but Cristo moved swiftly for a big man and had a keen eye for trouble. He was also supremely motivated. He didn’t kill them. He loathed killing and felt the weight of those who had died at his hands like an ever-thickening noose around his neck. He hurt them though. Broke bones. Rendered them unconscious. Male, female, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the chain-wielding banshee in the fighting pit.
The cordon of flickering drum fires drew closer with every step. As Cristo moved deeper into the gully he realised he knew this place, more by reputation than familiarity. It was Red Hand territory, at the least the very edge of it. The juves he had put down wore patches depicting a crowned skull. Mark of the Death Kings. Such ridiculous names they gave themselves, but the Death Kings were a rival faction to the Red Hand, which only meant more trouble and the possibility of a ticking chrono. Cristo upped the pace to the rattling tune of a chain raking at a drum shield as the fight in the pit intensified. The mob bayed with every lash, urging violence, thirsty for more. Then a horn sounded like a distant war cry, discordant, blaring. Cristo turned, they all did, towards a ridge of refuse and debris that rose up like a grubby cliff. Lights flared, eyeachingly bright spots of magnesium white, and the rumble of engines suddenly eclipsed the catcalls like thunder rolling across a dirt sea. “Shit…”
The ticking chrono was ringing.
The interlopers had bloody handprints daubed on their faces and rode down the ridge on grit-bikes, jinking left and right, kicking up dirt, dust pluming from their tyres. Blades and axes whirled menacingly as they arrowed in on the other gang. An ash-runner, a much larger bike, grunted behind them. Petrochem spewed from its twin chrome exhausts. The rider was leant back in the saddle. His plate armour and the chainblade strapped to the bike’s hefty frame marked him out as the gang leader.
Gun shots rang out. The riders had sidearms as well as blades. The Death Kings gathered around the fighting pit scattered. A few pistols barked back. Someone in the crowd got hit and went down. The girl in the pit with the improvised shield took her chance, and Cristo cried out despite himself when she smashed her chain-wielding opponent in the neck. Heads turned, shocked at the burly bullet-maker in their midst, but they were too busy with the riders to really worry about him.
Cristo barrelled on, hoisting a ganger that got in his way up and over his shoulder. He barged another from his path, swatting the ganger aside, not missing a step as he rushed into the fighting pit to the side of the fallen. “Karina…”
She lay curled in foetal agony, choking for breath and clutching at her throat.
A rider sped past a few feet away, whooping and crowing. He hit something, a hatchet blade slapping into skin. Blood arced. It spattered Cristo’s cheek, hot and sudden, and he looked up to see one of the Death Kings juves fall with her head caved in.
The girl on the ground next to him could barely breathe. Her eyes rolled as a bruise blossomed menacingly across her larynx. She’d taken some licks in the pit too, deep cuts that bled beneath a leather jerkin. Cristo’s palms came away wet and red and he stared at them, horrified, for just a second. Then he swept his massive arms under and around the girl, scooping her up.
She gripped his arm, pinching the skin with what little strength she had, her eyes bright with fury.
“You can shout at me later,” he said, and that was that. They were moving, Cristo ploughing back up the ridge towards the overhang while Karina clutched his bullet-maker’s garb. She need not have worried about him dropping her. Cristo kept a tight grip and nothing but
death itself would see him relinquish it.
He only slowed down when a rider came circling around, whooping and hollering, his grit-bike carving an arc in the dirt. A long spiked chain shrieked around his head, the brutal torturer with his lash. It whipped out towards Cristo, who ducked its bite and kept moving. Swiftly losing interest, the rider peeled off and went in search of better prey in the gully.
Skirmishes had broken out across the entire expanse below the overhang, as fighters poured in from either faction. Cristo had to run through them, though chose to largely skirt their ranks. In the snatched glances he got, he reckoned the Red Hands had the better of it. Their riders cut back and forth, scything through the Death Kings like horse-mounted savages, but reinforcements for the beleaguered gangers were still coming. Crackling gunfire rippled across the gully in staccato starbursts of muzzle flare as gangers ran between snatches of cover, or else fell clutching wounds or simply fell and did not rise again.
Cristo felt a sharp pain in his arm and looked down. Karina had dug in her nails, drawing blood. “Down…” she rasped. “We need to keep moving.” They were out of the worst of the fighting now, just a few fleeing juves flanking them at a distance, but they wouldn’t be safe until they reached the overhang so Cristo ignored the pain and carried on.
She stabbed harder and he had to clench his jaw to keep from crying out. “Down…” He put Karina down. She immediately snatched a knife dropped by a dead juve, whose eyes were fixed upwards to a sky he would never see, a bullet hole gaping in his forehead. Karina barely noticed him. She started to head eastward across the gully, cutting back in a diagonal line from the fighting, but Cristo put a hand on her shoulder to stop her. She whirled on him, her expression furious.
More gunfire snapped from below, pushing them into the shelter of a broken piece of the old bridge. Shots pranged off the granite chunks before being directed elsewhere.
Cristo shook his head. “Not that way.”
“East is Death Kings territory. Red Hand won’t risk approaching the border.”
“Like you didn’t with their territory.”
She frowned at that. “Where then?”
Cristo pointed to the arc of the sundered bridge and the shadows beneath it. “The overhang.”
“And then what? Back to Meagre? I don’t think so.” Karina continued in her original direction but Cristo stopped her again. She snarled, lashing out with the knife, but Cristo caught her wrist.
“I can make you, Karina,” he said, his voice harder than he meant it to be before it softened again, “but I don’t want to.”
He saw in her eyes that she knew he could do it.
“You won’t take me back,” she swore. “I belong here.”
She looked to her gang, but the fierceness in her expression slowly turned to despair as she saw the Red Hands literally taking the Death Kings apart.
“Here is about to become nowhere,” said Cristo.
She turned on him, savage and snarling. “Then I’ll be nowhere.”
Cristo held her gaze, knowing she had to climb down from her anger on her own, and anything he said now would inevitably be taken in exactly the opposite way it was intended.
Seething, still fighting for breaths, Karina relented. “I was winning,” she said, stifling a sob.
“You were fearsome,” said Cristo, and meant it, though it went against every instinct to say so.
There was a short moment of silence between them, filled by the sounds of gangers fighting and dying, before Karina relented and they made for the overhang.
“Why did you come for me?” she said after a few paces.
“I don’t know how you can ask that.” Cristo risked a look back, making sure they weren’t being followed. He had been about to elaborate further when he thought he saw something in the skirmish below that made him slow down. And then stop.
“Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind,” said Karina, stopping too. She was a little way ahead – even injured she was faster on her feet than him – and looked back down the ridge.
Cristo didn’t answer. The overhang was close, but he was drawn to the battle as if his mind couldn’t reconcile what he was seeing and therefore refused to let him look away.
“Something is happening…” he began, but couldn’t finish.
Karina snapped irritatedly. “What is it?” The skirmishes had coalesced, devolving into a massive brawl. Either the gangers had run out of ammunition or they simply wanted to hack at each other hand-to-hand. But this wasn’t just bloodlust or territorial anger. Several gangers, badly wounded by the look of them, were fighting frenziedly. They had abandoned their knives, cudgels and other weapons, and went at their foes with bare hands, nails… and… teeth?
There was screaming. Not the kind of screaming to fire up the blood, or even the mortal scream of death or severe pain. It was terror, pure and abject.
Some of the gangers were trying to break loose but got snarled up. Cristo couldn’t quite make out why. He did see the leader of the Red Hand. His ash-runner had got snagged too. Something had tangled around the wheels. They looked like… limbs. Stood up in the saddle, he hacked around himself with the chainblade. Gore and matter flew wildly. Then he was dragged down by dozens of grasping hands, and his last stand ended.
Cristo’s eyes narrowed. “Bloody Throne…” He quickly turned, suddenly aware of Karina behind him. He didn’t want her to see this. “It’s nothing,” he said.
“Damn it, Father,” she shouted.
Cristo got in her way, making sure she wouldn’t see. “It’s nothing,” he said again. “Please…” he added, and in the use of this simple plea he saw understanding, if not full comprehension in her eyes.
She relented but asked in a quiet, almost fearful voice, “What is it?”
“Nothing we need be a part of,” he said, and gently turned her away.
No father would want his daughter to see this, assuming he could even say for certain what he had actually seen.