Chris Randolph - Stars Rain Down

The residential area gave way to a market, and Jack’s howling madman routine turned heads wherever he went. Crowds parted before him like the sea before Moses, and he sprinted on, driven by an endless surge of adrenaline.

Jack decided to explore a bit. He cut between two buildings and loped up a ramp to the suspended catwalks. It was a whole new part of the city made of branching beams, with its own set of store fronts and signs scrawled in unfamiliar characters. Yet more levels waited above.

Then the game got interesting. This level was too tight for flyers, and they stayed high up above, but now every corner held a set of rhinos stampeding in his direction. Escape routes closed off all around.

Jack heard a skittering noise behind him and instinctively hit the deck just in time for a jackrabbit to go flying overhead. The small creature yelped when it missed him, and clawed at the floor as it slid away.

He turned his head back and saw two more of the fast creatures bounding his way. Both leaped into the air at the same time, and with a spin, he dodged one and flung the other off the catwalk onto the ground floor below.

“Toro!” He shouted, before sprinting off once again.

Option after option disappeared, forcing his choices until he found himself on a long bridge with no offramps, and nothing nearby but empty air. Enemy forces moved into position on either end. They’d snared him.

He fired a couple rounds toward the far end as a warning, and the enemy ducked back. Then he turned and opened fired on his pursuers, sending them scattering. He stopped when the magazine ran dry.

“Now what?” he asked himself.

The alarm on his watch went off, and an idea sparked in his head. It would require pinpoint timing, and it was the most dangerous and stupid thing he’d ever considered. He worried that it might just work.

Jack pulled a second demo pack out, drove a detonator into it and set the timer for fifteen seconds then dropped in the middle of the catwalk. The whole process took him no more than five seconds.

With his rifle quiet, the enemies at either end of the bridge started moving forward, and Jack flicked his head back and forth, watching both groups advance. When they were thirty meters off, a loud, hollow boom registered in the distance. His signal to move.

All eyes turned toward the explosion, and Jack made good on the opportunity. He pulled his climbing hook out and hurdled the guard-rail, barely managing to latch onto it as he flew over, then plummeted toward the ground.

The arrestor slowed his descent, and when he reached the bottom, he released it and dove across the ground. At the same time, the catwalk above exploded, and the entire bridge collapsed in a billowing cloud of dust. The shock wave struck him like a wrecking ball, driving him another ten meters across the smooth floor, where he slammed into a wall and stopped.

Bruised, bloodied and disoriented, he wobblingly tried to stand, but only slipped and fell back down. The cool ground felt so nice against his face that he couldn’t imagine trying ever again. In his dizzy head, he drifted between the blue alien city and the memory of a terrible hang-over, when he’d lain on a cool, smooth bathroom floor.

During one of his fits of consciousness, he thought he heard rhino troopers grunting, and when he opened his eyes and looked around, the ugly bastards were standing over him in a circle. They spoke back and forth, probably trying to decide what to feed him to.

Everything was dim, and Jack realized he didn’t have long. He couldn’t think straight. He numbly pawed at his chest and found what he thought was a gun. He pulled the weapon out of its holster, fumbled at the hammer until it clicked, then aimed upward and fired. With a thump, a bright red-orange flare arced into the sky.

“Damn,” he said. It wasn’t the first time he mistook the flare gun for a weapon. After a moment, his frustration disappeared and he slipped into heavy darkness. None of the dreams he found there were pleasant.

Jack was confused when he woke up. Really confused. He’d been confused before, like when he got to the analogy section of his college entrance exams and couldn’t figure out how “dispatch” might relate to “sluggishness”. This was worse. If anything, he was roughly as confused as the time his roommate gave him a funny mushroom, and he spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how walls worked.

The most confusing part was that he was still alive.

His whole body hurt, and it felt like someone was trying to pull his arms out of their sockets. Worse, the room around him didn’t make a lick of sense. The walls were in the wrong place and made of green webs. There was something oddly like a door nearby, but it was attached to the ceiling. Everything was completely wrong in ways he couldn’t understand.

Jack wanted to throw up, but the empty pit in his stomach told him it’d be uneventful.

He couldn’t move. Cold metal shackles had every part of his body pinned, and struggling against them was useless. He didn’t bother to call for help, since something terrible might respond.

So he lay there, breathing and aching, waiting for whatever the hell would happen next. Time melted away without any way to measure its passage. He might have lain there for hours, days or weeks for all he knew. It was all the same. A single, unending moment, punctuated only by the procession of mangled memories, and the short fits of sleep that interrupted them.

He thought back over the strange journey that brought him to that room. He remembered the life he used to have, all of the weird and wonderful places he’d seen, and the grateful faces he’d helped along the way.

That life existed once upon a time in a storybook that had since been burnt to ash and scattered to the wind. His life was gone, replaced by a world he hardly recognized. A world that had been crushed, eviscerated and torn limb from limb. In its smouldering remains, Jack had changed as well. He became someone different. Someone harder, who killed efficiently and without remorse, over and over until it became clear the killing could never sate him. It would never heal the wound, or quiet his mourning for the lifetime left behind.

Of this new life, which had hit a dead-end in some screwy alien prison, Jack knew only one thing: whatever changes might come would be for the worse. And after an eternity alone with his thoughts, Jack’s prediction came true.

The strange door in the ceiling opened like denim unraveling, revealing a blinding light behind it. Three silhouettes walked through the portal, and continued down the opposite wall. Jack stared at the visual puzzle for a few seconds, until his head straightened out and he figured it out. He’d been hanging from the ceiling all this time, and his captors were on the floor beneath him.

Two rhinos stood with their massive autocannons at the ready, on either side of a new kind of alien. This species was much more human-like, but in gangly, funhouse mirror proportions. He wore a form fitting uniform that covered him from head to toe, made from some slick material in midnight-blue and slate grey. The double-breasted jacket reminded Jack of fascist armies, and the leathery mask looked like something from a kinky sex shop. A white crescent crossed one eye.

The fascist alien’s movements were pin-point specific, and fluid without excess. He stepped to the center of the room and stopped beneath Jack, then looked up at the prisoner and carefully examined him. Apparently satisfied, he raised his right arm and tapped commands into some kind of wrist computer.

He looked back up at Jack and began to speak. The sounds were familiar, and Jack realized the alien was speaking a human language. It was a form of Arabic, one of many languages that Jack hardly spoke a word of.