Counter Strike 1.6 All In 1 Warzone By @@bad Man@@.epub
Edel Dieringer
The real chrome, the implants that would let a man lift a tank or take a rocket to the belly, that shit was locked up tight. Few national militaries even used the stuff these days. Not after the Revolution.
The Brit was inches from asking another question when the gate-man waved them on and the battered Toyota farted its way into drive, belching and complaining past a network of potholes until it hit a relatively straight chunk of asphalt.
Three M198 Howitzers were parked next to a taco shop that had once served the local college kids beer and cheap grub. There was a flag pole out in front of the shop, and from it hung the blue-and-white starburst flag of the SDF. Three men in uniforms stood, waiting, as the old Toyota rolled to a stop and Manny and Reggie disembarked.
He and Reggie sat down at a long picnic table with Hamid and the two officers. Reggie set his camera up on the table. It was just a small silver sphere, but Manny knew it could record everything happening around it at a higher resolution than the human eye.
Sleeping arrangements in the Project were broadly communal. The bulk of the old Wal Mart had been converted into an indoor meadow with grow-lights hanging from the rafters and a wide, lush field of native grass sprawling across most of the inhabited space. Fruit trees, bushes full of berries, cannabis plants and copses of bamboo lined the edges of the space. The center of the field was dominated by a large, circular kitchen surrounded by a handsome oaken bar table. Tables, gazebos, and sundry personal structures dotted the field, along with a pair of dance floors.
Manny pulled up a seat and the journalist directed his attention to a six-second loop of footage, from immediately after the bombing. It showed two man-sized silhouettes standing on top of an old garage; Manny remembered the building. It stood maybe two hundred meters from the Abrams Road checkpoint. One of the silhouettes had a rifle. The other held a short, squat tube that Manny recognized as a camera lens.
The bartender walked up and offered Manny his pick of the finest liquor in this particular warzone. Manny ordered a Shiner. It was the one beer a drinker could find across both the Republic of Texas and the Austin autonomous region. He looked back at the looping footage. They both watched it twice more. Then Reggie spoke up again.
A woman hovered over him, her hands on his shoulders, her knees on either side of his body. Sweat dripped down from her short black hair onto his face and chest. Her pupils were the size of dinner plates. She smelled like Acid and desire. She smiled, revealing a row of damascus-steel teeth Roland pulled himself out of the memory. He felt the strike team advance. His hindbrain generated a map of the approaching assassins . They were still a solid minute from his hovel.
He turned away from his reflection and continued his search through the house, scattering food-encrusted plates, empty coke bags, and old-fashioned print pornography into even less-organized piles. No dice. Did I pawn it? he wondered, as his machine-assisted eidetic memory warred with his profound intoxication. Roland was now conscious enough to remember that not remembering much was normal for him, and that he should really worry more about the assassins coming to kill him.
He glanced down at at the ruin of his shoulder. His little blood robots were already hard at work, rebuilding the muscles, bones and sinews blown out by the giant slug. A couple seconds more and the limb would be useable again. But Roland had a better idea.
He used his intact arm as a flesh-catapult and flung himself up over the boulder, towards the Callahan and its three guardians. The man with the two-bore fired again. Roland had known he would and his hindbrain had already calculated the ideal motions to avoid the dozen most likely shot patterns. He sailed over the half-pound bullets with ease and used the hand of his intact arm to rip his wounded arm free at the shoulder.
The fellow had a lopsided, square-ish jaw with a very deliberate five-o-clock shadow. His nose was thick and bulby. His red hair was tangled into dreadlocks that were more the result of inattention than stylistic choice. He was tall, muscular but lean with a bare chest that was covered in tattoos of black snakes. They writhed in time to the beating of his heart. He wore nothing but a pair of red leather chaps and a broad, calm smile. His bare penis swung pendulous in the breeze. Both of his palms were extended, out front and visible. It was the kind of gesture one used to calm an animal.
Roland sighed, looked at his severed arm, and crudely shoved it into place. It had clotted a bit, and his stub burned as the tiny robots in his blood got to work re-attaching his once-and future limb.
She stared at the box for a long moment. Friendly fire . That made sense, as she belatedly realized the men had been rushing out of territory occupied by the Martyrs. Good thing they check up on us before we pull the trigger . Her heart pounded a little at the thought of killing the wrong soldier. But at the same time she noticed something odd; the men were still coming. They rushed past the drone camera in waves, ten feet apart, ducking low and and hefting heavy weapons. She must have watched at least a hundred of them pass before she realized what this meant.
Sasha thought JuvEn was unnatural. Heretical. God had created each human to age a certain way. Using science to disrupt that natural process was an act of blasphemy. She yearned to say something cutting, hurtful in response, but she fought it down.
Frustrated, Sasha brought up her militia newsfeed. This was one of her most cherished possessions: it had taken months for her to sort out the most influential Christian militias in the area, find their official spokesfeeds, and cross-index them based on which groups agreed with the strict neo-Calvinist doctrine she, Alexander, and Pastor Mike all knew to be the One True Word of God.
She thought of Alexander. His liquid green eyes, his scraggly beard, the way his still boyish voice broke in excitement when he lost himself in the Spirit of the Lord. Her beloved was out there right now, fighting and maybe bleeding to bring the Truth back to the world. The least she could do was join him.
The next instant he was flat on the ground. His eyes darted left and right for cover. He spotted something; an artificial cave, built into a corner of the main room, perhaps a hundred feet away. It looked like some sort of shrine or temple. Manny could see the walls were thick with melted candles, colorful drawings and a variety of brass symbols.
The fixer pointed towards the shrine, pulled himself up and sprinted towards it. The j ournalist followed, and soon both men were huddled in the little substructure, staring out at the devastation that had overtaken the RAP. They could see two holes in the roof. The huge circular kitchen/bar looked like it had taken a direct hit. Beer spurted from shattered taps, and Manny could see what looked like blood staining the white oak of the bar counter. Flames licked somewhere off in the distance, on the other side of the vast structure. The air smelled of smoke and burning grass.
It had been a while since the last mortar had landed on the complex, and the small arms fire still sounded distant. This seemed as good a time to make a break for it as they were likely to get. So they ran until they hit the nearest exit doors, shoved them open, and staggered outside into the balmy Texan night.
The asphalt parking lot outside was filled with newly minted refugees, perhaps two hundred of them. Most carried at least a go-bag. A few had managed to drag out more. They were ringed by a widening cordon of armed men and women, fifty at the most. The militia clutched antique weapons, mostly small arms, and stuck like glue to the Hesco barriers that ringed the old parking lot. Here and there Manny caught sight of a man with an RPG, or a light machinegun. It was a force meant for scaring off bandits. The rockets still thudding in the distance told Manny these men and women faced considerably more than their match.
Manny thought about the geography for a moment. It was possible the Martyrs had only broken through in a few chunks of the line. But that would mean DeShawn and the others were alive and surrounded or fleeing. Those were the best case scenarios.
They sat there for hours. Neither of them talked much. One by one the wounded men were loaded carefully onto the assortment of old half-tracks, buses and trailers that made up the convoy. Once they were seated, there was another two hours of wait time before the convoy got moving. Both Reggie and Manny found time to nap. But neither of them were really rested when the dawn broke and the convoy set forward.
Once the table was up and the spread was set, Roland and Jim sat down to watch the last rays of sunrise turn into boring old daylight. A lacky handed them both steaming mugs of coffee. Roland took his black and Turkish, so thick it was almost pudding. Most humans made it too weak for his taste, but this cup was perfect. He sipped deeply, and the warbly acid-lines straightened and grew just a little bit thicker.
Jim gave an eloquent shrug, popped the blunt out of his mouth and stared at the curling smoke. Roland stared too. In his eyes, it was wreathed in a chartreuse-black halo of heat that seemed to almost vibrate near the cherried tip.
The other twenty-four students stared ahead with slackened jaws and unfocused eyes. They were all deep in their decks, messaging friends, browsing snapvids or playing whatever game was popular right now. Decks were far too entrenched in modern life for the schools to force them off during class time. Instead, the school filtered the WiFi and forced students to download apps that restricted access during school hours. This had led to a thriving underground trade in apps that countered the school spyware and covertly lifted the blocks.
He helped her up and guided her to the opposite bench, where she laid down and continued to clutch her throbbing head. She drifted off, or passed out, and when she came to the interior of the car had been scrubbed clean, leaving behind only a brown stain and the lingering smell of sick and antiseptic. Sasha guessed an hour or more had passed, although, without her deck, it could have been more. They were in the woods now, driving along a country road.
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