Archive for the ‘Jason Fischer’ Category
Mermaid Cull
Monday, October 19th, 2009
‘You cheating bastards! Open the bloody gate now!’
Erickson was standing in the back of his jeep, yelling up at the castle walls through a megaphone. Five mermaid carcasses swung from a purpose-built rail, hung by fat iron hooks through their tail-ends.
Those time-crazy sumbitches holed up in their fortress did not say anything, and made no move to open the enormous gates. He was mad now, madder than a cut snake dipped in warm piss.
‘I took out your mermaids!’ he yelled, the megaphone squealing with distortion. ‘If you folks mean to cheat me on the bounty money, I will bring you pain. Oh yes.’
Someone shot an arrow at him, and with a curse that would have made a sergeant-major crap his dacks, Erickson threw down the megaphone.
‘Enough talk,’ he said, and got behind the minigun, mounted on a swivel behind his seat. He’d stripped it from a junked copter, back when time started to get whacky.
He opened up, and the spinning barrels spat lead kisses across the top of the palisade, biting out chunks of rock and punching right through the stone in one or two places. He took out the offending archer, and a few others who didn’t duck in time.
Erickson gritted his teeth and painted the gates in a figure eight of howling bullets, splitting the wood in dozens of places. The clanging of bullets as they ricocheted against the portcullis showed that he was wasting ammo, and there was no getting through that gate.
Not without a lot more firepower.
‘I’ll get you mongrels!’ he said, no megaphone this time but the shaking of his fist passed the message through loud and clear. He swung forward into the driver’s seat, just in time to see the large arm of a trebuchet swinging up above the castle walls, releasing a chunk of some building that flew at him with uncanny accuracy.
Thankful he’d left the motor running, Erickson jammed the old jeep into gear and floored it, fishtailing through the mud as the enormous block of stone crashed into the spot he’d just been.
A second catapault launched another load of medieval fire-power, and it was only Erickson’s experience as a rally-car driver and an ex-Blackwater operative that saved his arse. Yanking up the hand-brake and spinning the wheel, he launched into a power-slide, narrowly missing a peat-digger’s shack. It exploded into a fountain of shit and stone.
‘I’ll be back for you lot,’ Erickson growled. He thumbed a cassette into the tape-player, and blasted the lonely moors with his AC/DC mix-tape, turned up as loud as it could go. ‘And when I come back, I’m gonna ruin your shit.’
What Comfort There Is
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Old Syd disproved the rumour with one mad dash; it ended in a bloody game of cat and mouse, those bastard machines chasing him from street to street, finally cornering him in a neatly presented cul-de-sac. They toyed with him for hours before his screams stopped. Wet weather does nothing to dull their sensors.
So yes, we are in the end times. Our species fails, huddled indoors, dreading each sound. My frightened cadre are hiding in an opulent mini-mansion, though we haven’t eaten properly in days. An old suburb lies just within walking distance, and it’s a race between us and humanity’s killers. We do our best to scavenge from the old places, even as the suburbs are recycled and turned into neat streets, freshly painted town-houses, acres of immaculate lawns.
It seems ironic that we are being wiped out by a cliché. An uprising of artificial machines, sure. But these are not the instruments of war, rather those of peace. Construction crews, serving a purpose that our laziness corrupted, simplified. Build. Gather. Build more.
What seemed a great solution to the housing crisis turned into unguided madness. Materials gathered from existing structures. Whole forests razed for lumber. When the builders began to destroy suburbs and cities holus bolus, these mad machines were destroyed. This achieved little, given the machines’ instructions to “generate sufficient crews to achieve the task”, and those left built themselves quicker than we could take them out. They looked upon our actions as a genocide, and the best we could do simply raised their madness to apocalyptic levels.
With intelligence came survival traits, so they’ve done their level best to grind us out of existence. But still, they continue the task, and one by one we die surrounded by perfectly designed streets, neat commercial hubs, empty warehouses and marinas.
Our enemy is simple, but amazingly efficient. They prowl the old highways, pouncing upon those cars which brave our dead nation’s asphalt veins. Nowhere to go anyway. Forklifts and dozers lurk in each street, blood running from their tines, while the yellow necks of diggers and cranes lurk overhead, watching for us. Waiting patiently for runners.
Our final creations have outdone us, yet in our twilight hour we are as gods. For our killers are truly alive, and we have created this life. I have seen them mourning the machines which our partisans have destroyed, metal buckets clanking together sorrowfully as the construction crews give comfort to each other. They attend their dead, dismantling them reverently, engines and sirens roaring into the night.
Whenever they hold a funeral, we know it’s time to leave the neighbourhood. They get really vicious afterwards, which tells me they’ve discovered revenge and are more human than we.