Lurranus 2 (Part 1/4)

2256

 

The truck trudged wearily on.

It was an early model, made in the late twenty first century. It had been a transport for soldiers or the police, often deployed in chaotic areas to try and restore order. It's outer body was littered with scratches, burns, graphite and bullet holes, the windows were covered in cracks, and the doors groaned as they screeched against the metal floor to open. It's wheels struggled to cross the bumps it once tackled with ease and the exhaust pipe coughed out rough, sharp breaths of what little fuel it had left. The outside wore the ugly scars of its long overuse but the inside was arguably worse.

The truck used to take sixteen troops, back before the development of the Slow-Down. It now carried forty mismatched people. Only twenty of them were alive. They were slumped on top of each other, the dead ones thrown in and the rest, the living ones, made their home around them. Almost all of the bodies wore the signs of the post "Population War" world. Scars, disease, missing limbs, most were in appalling condition. The smell of human waste filled the room, and vomit, urine, feces, blood and ragged pieces of flesh ran along the floor, covering anything they crossed. The floor was littered with skinny human bodies, some dead, some breathing what would likely be some of their last breaths. Many were missing body parts. Their chests ripped open, blood and guts spilling out. Their eyes gouged out, pulled out by vicious, determined fingers while their owners tried to stop them. Their legs and arms roughly torn of, nowhere to be seen, with only bloody stumps showing any sign they were once there. Some were too dead to realise this. Those who were still alive, clutched at their bleeding wounds with shaking fingers and screamed out, as they lay on top of the pile of bodies who had suffered similar fates. Only time was preventing him from joining those people beneath them, their faces unrecognisable under mud, the blood of the wounded, both fresh and old, and with all the random patches that had been ripped out, torn out by mere nails and eaten by the starving people around them. People who would eat anything that they could.

This scene was a showcase for man's lowest state. Of what really happened when it was every man and woman for themselves.

Dog eat dog. Or, in this case, man eat man.

Amid this chaos, sat a man. He sat alone, or as alone as you could be, with his dark blue eyes that appeared to be intensely studying the scene around him. He had once had short, close cut hair, which had gone uneven and filthy as he had ceased to care about it. He wore black trousers, which were strained at the bottom by mud and the grit of war. His black hiking boots were covered in dirt. He wore a grey t-shirt, but it was covered by a military jacket, with the left arm ripped off. The jacket was as grim as the other items, and time had started to wear away the words on his top left pocket. The words were difficult to make up but they read:

 

U7U

SQUAD 213

UNIT 67

OFFICER 57

LIAM TREIT

 

Liam's whole look had a military crispness to it. He seemed ordered, precise and at ease.  Everything else around him did not.

His boots sat several centimetres deep in mixture of all the horrible waste of the people in the back on the truck. His "seat" was a long dead body of an obese man, who wore only a shirt and trousers, both strained in hardened red blood. Liam had once had a moral compass, and would've never done anything like this, but, if he didn't sit there, what would he do? Sit somewhere else? Or stand up, and wear his legs out for no good reason? The man was dead, after all. What did it matter to him that someone was sitting on his corpse.

And besides, he wasn't the man he used to be. He had changed since then.

The activity of the people around him was low. Only the occasion groan reminded him that some of them were just on the right side of life. Of the twenty of them, only one was moving. He was kneeling over a dead man, with a thin knife drawn, cutting into his chest so that he could eat. He was making little progress with the poor blade, but blood was pouring out the wound at an abnormal rate. Liam watched, in disgust, as this man leant down and drank up the horrible red liquid as it seeped out, and vomited it right back up.

Suddenly the truck stopped. Liam, and the others around him who had the energy to do so, sat up. The man who was eating the other man hurriedly sat down. A brutal ray of sun made its way in, and everyone shielded their eyes. The barrel of an energy rifle poked its head in through the door, and was followed by a man in an old set of United Seven Nations (U7U) military gear, similar to the one Liam was wearing. But he could tell it didn't belong to him. It was a size to short, at least. But it was the words on the pocket that gave away. They were words Liam was very familiar with.

The man walked in, crushing the wrist of a dead figure. He looked around, and roughly pointed his gun at anyone who showed any sign of movement. Another two men stepped in. One wore mismatched clothes with colours that battled each other for the role of being most noticeable. Yellow sports trousers, pink Hello Kitty hoodie, bright green shoes. The other was naked and covered in hardened blood and markings. They made for a strange, slightly demented trio, like something out of an oddball comedy. If only they were from a comedy. But the blood, piss and shit smeared on the back of the man's Hello Kitty pink hoodie was a stark remind that he wasn't in a funny movie of old.

While Liam was thinking, suddenly the three of them grabbed out and started pulling the legs and remaining arm of an alive man.

"No, please, not me!" he began to plead, realising his fate. The three of them yanked him out, pulling him across the strained metal floor and the bodies. The man in the pink hoodie smiled a demonic smile at him, licking his lips.

"Oh, god no, please not me!" There were tears in his eyes. Tears of desperation, fear. He knew what would happen to him next. They all did. 

He looked at the others, his eyes pleading that they help him. But there was nothing they could do.

"Please help me!" The desperation in him was clear in his eyes, and the tears that gently rolled out of them. "Help me please! They're gonna fucking eat me! Please!"

The man fell out of the truck and landed on the ground outside. As he tried to stand up, the man who was covered in blood pushed him back down, and drew a sharp blade. The blade was aged and dirty, but nothing would stop it from cutting through flesh like it was butter.

"Help me!" His voice was hoarse, ragged, desperate. "SOMEONE FUCKING HELP ME!"

Another figure pushed the door closed, trapping them once again. Outside, the man continued his screaming, and the people around him, the cannibals, began to howl.

"Oh god, oh god. What are you doing? What is that thing? Oh god, oh god...Get of me you bastard, GET OFF ME! Get that fucking thing away from me, you..." The man released a scream, as the sickening sound of metal piercing flesh made its way into the truck.

Suddenly, the cannibals starting screaming, covering up the cries for help that the man continued to let off. Cries and screams that were slowly swallowed by the rising shrieks the cannibals were letting of.

Some of them were completely crazy, like the naked one. The definition of madness. They stripped themselves of their clothes and wore only the blood of their victims. Some were just trying to survive. They were doing what they had to. You could clearly see who these ones where. They were the ones that stood at the back, didn't chant, and had to force a smile when the truly crazy ones looked their way.

But they were all cannibals, whatever their circumstances. Deep down they were all the same.

They listened while the screaming continued, rising to an almost ear shattering pitch as they presumable ripped him limp from limp, taking away his legs and arms until he was nothing but a head and a body covered in bloody stumps.

They raised their heads when it stopped. The man had either passed out from shock, or had died. It hadn't matter. Either way, the cannibals would make sure he didn't wake up again.

And they looked up while one of the naked ones, a tall, imposing one, coated in a fresh layer of dripping blood, entered the rear of the truck and dropped the a pile of dripping red ribs on top of a dead body, with a small number of small pieces of flesh still attached. This was their meal. They weren't allowed the other bodies. If they got caught eating them, they didn't get killed. They wouldn't do that. It was too easy, too quick. It was escape more than anything else. They would do something else. Something longer, more painful.

The cannibals eat almost all of the man's flesh, leaving just enough for their prisoners so that they could survive, if they had the strength to drag themselves over. It wasn't out of care, or some faint glimpse of humanity. They said they were better fresh than dead. So they did what little they had to to keep them alive.

Care was a long dead concept in this long dead world Liam lived in. Long dead, along with all the people, cities and the liveliness they brought. Long dead, like everything else.

Everyone who had the energy scurried towards the body, pushing and shoving to get the biggest share possible, including Liam. He felt no pride, stuffing his face with tiny pieces of human flesh, but, in his life, you took what you could get. You just had to ignore the fact that ten minutes ago, these ribs were inside a living, breathing human. You had to ignore the fact that you were a cannibal too. You get to get rid of your emotions, put them to one side. Liam had done this a long time ago.

Another man stood up and walked over to the naked man, who pulled out a loaded weapon. Liam's military knowledge told him it was a Rickard Beta 6, a weighty semi automatic pistol with an extended magazine that took forty rounds. They normally came in black, with two parallel blue lines on the grip, but this looked to have fallen into the heads of many graphitises, with conflicting visual styles, and was instead a blur of colour.

"Please, give us more."

The naked man raised the pistol, warning him not to come any closer.

"Please..."

He turned off the weapon's safety. The angry man, coming closer to the doorway and the naked man's imposing figure, raised his voice.

"GIVE US SOME FUCKING FOOD!"

The bang that followed his words stated his fate clearly enough. His lifeless figure jolted with the impact of the shot and began to fall, ready to take its place among the rest of the dead.

The bang also set Liam into action.

He leaped forward, pushing against the angry man's dead corpse, reversing its momentum to go into the naked man. The three of them all fell out the truck, with the naked man getting trapped under the dead angry man and letting go of his gun. Landing on the ground, Liam scrambled towards the weapon, while the naked man pushed the dead corpse on top of him away.

Looking outside, it appeared they where in a grassy mountainous area, high up and with the sky obscured by mist, and with a hint of rain to come. They were surrounded by wet grass and a single path, made of dirt and covered in rocks, running off in both directions until the landscape dropped away. Liam briefly registered this as he moved forward, but it quickly left his mind.

Liam grabbed the gun. His military instincts took over and he steadily lined up the naked man in his sights. He pulled the trigger.

The man's brains exploded outward, covering the grass in a grim red-pink mess. Blood began to leak out the wound, seeping into the ground and the grass. His muscles slacked, his arms fell down and the angry man's body landed back on his chest. The blood he covered his body in now had a new addition, at the base of the dripping wound, where the bullet had made its way through the brain. His own blood.

Liam watched as the other men, to his right and the right of the truck, turned around. Six of them were dead before they could even react. Two more were dead as they began to reach from their weapons. Liam took out a ninth man before ducking for cover behind the left side of the truck.

He gathered quickly that these men weren't professionals. The way they held their guns when they came into the truck made them look like gangsters. Like men who knew not how to use their weapons, but held their guns high like it symboled their superiority over others.

The other ten men ducked down behind whatever shelter they could find, and scrambled for their weapons, flipping of the safety. Their weapons consisted of aged mid-2000's weapons, U7U standard issue RTL-37 assault rifles, a huge electronic Cyb-Cannons and some small 69T energy pistols, as well as anti-riot shields from the 2070s, a mix of explosive and electronic grenades, and a pile of blades, of all shapes and sizes. These weapons were mostly piled together, in the middle of all the tents, with some already sitting next to their owners.

However, the pile was now being disturbed as the weapons were pulled away, into the hands of one of the bloodied savages. Most went for the assault rifles, of which they had collected at least twenty, one reached for two handfuls of the grenades, and the leader went for the Cyb-Cannon. The leader was a huge block of a man, and the weapon fitted him perfectly. He was a huge, a two metre slab of muscle, with a tight brown vest and a bald head, and the massive, silver Cyb-Cannon perfectly suited his structure.

Liam breathed in. Fights were nothing new to him. He'd been in so many over the years, from fights in the playground to heated gun fights in the War, he did think anything of them anymore. He didn't take satisfaction from them, nor did he feel any guilt at taking a life.

He knew that when he fought, he would only be a passenger. He knew that, when he raised his gun, or gave at his enemies with his fists, he would only be watching as an emotionless body fought against his oppositions. Making decisions without any kind of emotional baggage.

He knew he would win. He had been lucky enough to get this far, and he doubted ten men with guns would be enough to stop him.  He survived the War, against all odds. It wasn't his time, he could feel it. He didn't believe in crap like "odds" and "fate", but he knew he wouldn't die. Or not yet, anyway.

He breathed in again.

And as he did, he thought back to the series of events that had brought him here.

 

 

2182

 

The five men sat quietly, the atmosphere around them devoid of its usual relative cheeriness. Liam sat, spinning a dirty golden bullet in his fingers. He let his mind drift off for a second, but a suddenly jerk from turbulence snapped him back to attention. He slotted the bullet back into his near empty magazine and loaded that back into his gun. They were running dangerously low on ammunition. His pistol had only five shots in a magazine made for seventeen, and the assault rifle had only a single magazine fully loaded with twenty five bullets. The others were likely in a similar situation. But with the heavily guarded facility they were about to attack, he knew he was unlikely to come out with any spares. He remembered what his commander had said, back at the base, "just use what you've got to take out who you can and pick up whatever anyone drops. Be that the enemy's weapon, or your comrades."

He reached to the side of his helmet and pressed down firmly to turn the target system online. He watched as it booted up and leant back.

 

SYSTEM START UP...

>DATE: 18/11/2182

>TIME: 12:34:57

>USER: OFFICER 57/LIAM TREIT

 

CURRENT MISSION [OPERATION TERASTION STAGE 6] OBJECTIVE: CAPTURE OAKTRUS BASE, TERMINATE ALL HOSTILES AND CONFISCATE ALL WEAPONS. TEAM WILL BE LEAD BY CHRIS STEEP. TEAM WILL LEAVE AT 1200 AND ARRIVE AT 1240 APPROX. 

 

"You good?" he looked up, into the weary green eyes of his leader, and friend, Chris Steep.

"Yeah, I'm alright." Liam replied, failing to show conviction.

There was awkward silence between the two, filled by the hum of the engine.

"I'm sorry," Chris said. "I know he was the only one you had left."

"He wasn't. I've got you four." He stared at his gun, not looking up to make eye contact, the weapon twirling around in his hand.

"Well, he was the only family you had left."

"This war is bullshit." He blurted out, in anger and misery. "A load of shit. And it's screwing us all over. Taking everything that we have and that we love. My mum, dad... and now my brother. All dead." He starred down bitterly at the grim metal floor. "Let's just kill all of these bastards and finish the mission so we can go home."

 

(Continued in Part 2)