Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Fourteen (3.75/6)
Void Jump
A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Friday! Scroll to the bottom for content warnings.
The greasy bridge surface rippled and bulged as Tattie pumped power from her sternum, pushed it along her arms, and ejected it from her hands in a scalding, full-jet blast.
Melt, fucker.
The fucker melted. Tunneling through her body like superheated steam tearing through rock, Tattie’s magick changed, morphed into a flowing river of searing orange lava that blistered her skin. She pushed more from her body, squeezed the power out like twisting moisture from a damp rag. She didn’t realise she was screaming.
The lava river flowed faster, grew wider, until it ran away from Tattie on both sides. She urged it on, willed it to stretch across the entire width of the bridge. Blazing heat rolled across the neon orange lake, tailed by a rising sulphuric stench that caught in her heaving throat.
“What’s happening?” Brax shouted. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, getting ready to pound on the husks who were getting closer by the second.
Tattie’s larynx was a steel box lanced with spikes. When she spoke, her voice splintered and cracked. “Just stay back.”
The lava river was eating through tarmac, concrete, steel. It surged past the centre point of the bridge and stopped, creating a wide barrier against the husks approaching from the hill.
Tattie swayed on her knees as the bridge juddered with a piercing metal-on-stone screech. The cacophony seemed to go on forever, twisting up and into the night. The asphalt beneath the raging lava onslaught sagged, then fell forward violently, almost dragging her down with it. Brax wrapped his Diamond Skin hand around a warping piece of railing and hauled Tattie to his side.
They clutched at each other while the bridge continued to sway and tip. Girders ground against stone slabs rent with widening cracks. The noxious lava river finally burned clean through and the entire middle section of the bridge fell away in a blinding waterfall of acidic orange. It crashed onto the street below, taking out a N.E.X. van depot. Casting a glance over Brax’s shoulder, Tattie saw the formerly neat rows of clean white vans were now a tableau of jagged metal shards and shattered glass. A cable fell in the orange dark, throwing sparks into the night before sinking into the spreading lake of lava with a diminutive sizzle.
“Bloody hell, Tat,” Brax said. “Don’t you think that was overkill?”
Tattie rubbed her bloodied eyes and turned her head to spit, trying to purge the iron and curdled egg rinse that coated her mouth. “Now the husks on that side can’t reach us. Problem solved.”
The shuddering death throes of the bisected overpass slowed to a spasm before jerking to a final halt. A cold calm descended, punctuated by the steady drip of molten fire rolling from the edges of a precipice that tore across the bridge’s width like a shattered mouth. When a supporting girder fell with a long groan to crash through the roofs of several huddled shops, Tattie startled against Brax’s chest. She pushed away from him and turned to the last of the husks coming up behind.
The stun pike thrust squarely into her unprotected chest took her by surprise. A spreading numbness blossomed into wrenching pain, as though she’d taken a lead brick to the rib cage. Static filled her ears, and the edges of her vision blurred and wavered. Brax needed no prompting. He ripped the pike from the husk’s hands with one Diamond-fisted swipe and pushed its wielder to the ground, then ploughed into the others grouped behind.
Tattie blew out breath, reeling. With a strangled gurgle, she lost her battle with gravity and fell on her backside with a hard thump. The sounds of Brax splintering noses, snapping legs, and scattering any remaining stun pikes across the bridge were fuzzy and indistinct. Tattie squinted at him, his form blurring as he moved. A battery of small blinking lights swung overhead, accompanied by a rush of stale air and a high-pitched burr that pressed uncomfortably against her eardrums.
For a moment, Tattie was sure she was about to pass out. Then she realised, too late, that the lights and the whirring weren’t phantoms conjured by her fractured nervous system. Drones were massing over the bridge. The same big buggers the N.E.X. used to hunt down fugitives. The kind fitted with sonic disruptors and micro-missiles. Some non-husked N.E.X. higher-up was onto them. Maybe all of them were. They’d been dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, and now they were out for blood. Tattie scrambled to her feet, gritting her teeth against a wave of nausea.
“Brax,” she yelled. Her voice was a thin croak. She stumbled against the twisted railing and tried again. “Brax, look up for fuck’s sake.”
Brax paused, head craned towards the sky, staring at the dirty, shredded clouds illuminated by a growing contingent of angry drones. That’s when the remaining husks rushed him. Most of them were twitching on the concrete, but it only took two to overwhelm Brax while his attention was fixed elsewhere.
“You must cease to resist,” one of them said. He was young, barely twenty, but now he had a gash torn across his forehead that would give him a scar to talk about at parties for the rest of his life. His speech was thick and slurred. “You have violated the laws of Noctara, as decreed by the Noctara Executive Xenium. You must submit for processing.”
Brax reacted too slowly. Dragging his gaze away from the brightening whirr above their heads, his eyes widened when he realised the husks were inches from him. Forehead Scar grabbed his non-gargantuan arm, while the female at his side drove a stun pike into his gut. Brax doubled over, attempted to lash out with his Diamond hand, and was pushed back again with a pike to the chest.
“Get away from him, you robot fuckers,” Tattie screamed, launching herself from the railing and running towards them.
She pulled up another surge of power as she ran, balled her hands into slick fists that pulsed with steady blood. When she made impact with the male husk’s face, he shut down, eyes rolling back in his head, face slack, overcome by a mega-charged Scarlet Kiss. The husk toppled straight-backed as a felled tree while Tattie rushed to attack his companion.
She didn’t notice Brax staggering, laid low by two stun pike blows that had dulled his perception and ramped his pain receptors to a scalding flare. Tattie finally turned in time to see him slip in the last slimy vestiges of the cooling magma dump. He plunged over the jagged lip of the fallen bridge, Diamond-hand scrabbling at empty air.
“Shit, no,” Tattie breathed.
She skidded through the thick orange muck, reaching for him, willing her legs to move faster, for her arms to reach further. She almost caught him. His flailing hand gripped the edge of the torn concrete. He dangled, lost his hold. Tattie thudded to her knees on the precipice, too late to pull him back, her hand so close to his she was almost able to lace their fingers together.
Then he was falling, his face frozen and horrified. A long spray of blood followed him down into the twisted molten graveyard of the street below.
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Content Warnings
Description of blood, mild swearing, violence
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