James Axler - Distortion Offensive

Domi was a small-framed woman, standing barely five feet tall, with the slender build of an adolescent girl. Her skin was a vivid white the color of chalk, and was complemented by similarly colored hair, cut short in a pixie style. She wore a simple outfit that left much of her unusual skin on display, cutoff denim shorts that sat low to her belly and finished high on the hip, and an abbreviated crop top in a dull tan color that clung tightly to her small, pert breasts. Contrary to her usual style, she had elected to wear shoes while round the refugee camp, a pair of muddy pumps with a gripping, cushioned sole; she would prefer to go barefoot given the choice.

Domi was a child of the Outlands, having grown up far from the protective walls of Cobaltville, where she had ended up prior to joining the Cerberus team. As such, her outlook was quite different—and often less diplomatic—than that held by her colleagues. A fearsome six-inch knife was strapped to her ankle, and she wore a Detonics Combat Master handgun in a leather holster slung low on her bare, chalk-white hip. Overall, Domi looked like a human figure that had been carved from bone. But it was her fiercely darting eyes that added to the feeling of otherness in the people who saw her. In stark contrast to her pure white flesh, Domi’s eyes were a deep scarlet color, like two glistening pools of blood.

Right now, Domi’s bloodred eyes were scanning the street, watching the many figures trotting along it with their meager belongings, their buckets and bowls of water, moth-eaten blankets and clothes. Mangy dogs and flea-bitten cats stepped out of the way to avoid the humans as they went about their business, and the street itself stank of human waste. Domi wrinkled her nose at the stench, all the more repulsed for her senses were unusually perceptive. Where Edwards and Johnson had become used to the unpleasant reek of Hope, Domi remained disgusted and a little nauseous despite being there for over a day.

A group of people was making its way down the street, six in all. Dressed in rags like the others around them, they seemed somehow different to Domi, giving her the impression that they were much more organized. She watched them for a moment, realizing that despite their ragged appearances, they were walking in perfect time, like soldiers at a parade. Not soldiers, she realized—birds. They moved like flocks of birds on the wing, turning as one.

Domi watched as the six people strode past, their faces masked behind the hoods of their dirt-caked cloaks. Weird, she thought.

From behind her, back in the shack where her colleagues were distributing medicines, Domi heard Edwards growl. She turned just in time to see the tall, muscular man lunge up from where he sat, knocking a vial of medicine from the table in his haste. An ex-Magistrate, Edwards was a powerfully built man, dressed in his preferred garb of combat fatigues with shirt open to show the drab-olive undershirt that clung to his chiseled pectorals. Edwards’s hair was shaved very close to his scalp, and the start of a beard was forming on his chin now in what seemed an almost comical imitation. His right ear was misshapen where it had been clipped by a bullet during an escapade on Thunder Isle.

Sitting beside Edwards, Henny Johnson gazed up at him with openmouthed surprise as he lunged up from the table. A little taller with a little more flesh on her bones than Domi, Henrietta Johnson wore her blond hair cut into a severe bob that ended just below the lobes of her ears. She was a freezie from the twentieth century, one of a number of U.S. military personnel who had been cryogenically frozen and placed in the Manitius Moon base before the nukecaust had hit. Awoken two hundred years later, Henny was one of over three dozen freezies who made up the bulk of the personnel at the Cerberus redoubt. Her field of expertise was artillery, but she had a solid working knowledge of medicine so she had taken point on this mission. If they came across anything serious, Henny was instructed to seek local help or to converse with physician Reba DeFore back at Cerberus headquarters.

“Everything okay, gunsmith cat?” Henny asked, fixing Edwards with a stern look as the people who had come for their help scampered out of his way as if avoiding a rampaging bull.

Edwards looked puzzled for a moment, rubbing at his forehead as though in pain. “What?” he asked, his voice strangely distant as if he were just now waking up.

Henny calmed the other people in the open shack with a few hushed words and a gesture before rising to consult with Edwards. “You just freaked out a little there, cowpoke,” she said in a low voice.

Edwards wiped his fingers against the ridge of his brow, playing them along the bridge of his nose so hard that Henny saw white streaks of pressure appear there before fading once more into his natural skin color. “My head’s killing me,” Edwards growled. “Came on all of a sudden, a real pounding bastard of a thing.”

“Do you ever suffer from migraines?” Henny queried.

“Me? No.” Edwards shook his head. “Probably just tired, being cooped up in here for a day treating the locals in their filth. Reminds me of the Tartarus Pits back…” Edwards stopped. He was about to say “home” but realized he hadn’t been a Magistrate for a long time now, and the Tartarus Pits were a thing of a past best forgotten.

Domi watched from her position by the door, checking the street again to see if any more locals were waiting for their services. The strange group of six was gone, departed amid the labyrinthine alleyways that made up the shantytown. In fact, the streets seemed suddenly clear, a much-appreciated lull in the stream of locals needing help. “Why don’t you go for a walk?” she suggested to Edwards. “Clear your head. Me and the Hen can man the fort for a while.”

Edwards nodded lethargically, his head still sore, before brushing past Domi and off into the street of dust. “Thanks, doll, you’re an angel.”

Domi shook her head. “Don’t ever call me that,” she told him with semiseriousness, recalling a rather unpleasant incident in Russia where she really had been mistaken for an angel.

As Edwards ambled off down the street, Henny arched one blond eyebrow as Domi came over to join her. “‘The Hen’?” she asked.

Domi shrugged. “Rule of the Outlands. Adapt and survive.”

GRANT FOUND CLEM BRYANT in the Cerberus cafeteria. The chef was busily deep-frying some chicken in batter, while other personnel rushed back and forth, dressed in white with their hair held back in nets.

“Looks fattening,” Grant observed as he approached Clem at the deep-fat fryer.

Clem glanced at him and smiled, a mischievous twinkle in his blue eyes. “But fattening is tasty,” he said, “and we all deserve a treat once in a while.” Clem was a tall man in his late thirties, with dark hair that swept back from his high forehead, and a trim goatee beard on his chin. An oceanographer by education, Clem was one of the Manitius Moon base freezies who had awoken to a world two hundred years after he had been placed in cryogenic stasis. With little need for his skills in a mountain redoubt, Clem had turned his attention to the culinary arts and found himself quite skillful at cooking, soon taking a permanent position with the facility’s cafeteria staff. Besides being an oceanographer and a chef, Clem was a quiet but personable individual, who enjoyed his own company and revelled in the completion of a puzzle, be it filling in a Sudoku number grid or finding a challenging cryptic crossword among the vast archives of the Cerberus facility. In short, Clem was an obsessive thinker whose mind regularly deconstructed problems to view them from an alternate perspective. “So, how may I help you, Grant?” he asked in his treacle-rich voice.