She walked through one of the walkways that connected the enormous complex’s domes with Harvey by her side. Through the glass, Ratcatcher saw that flowerbeds, greenhouses, and gardens had already been replanted, and a green cover around the facility had been restored. There were no more craters, every single mention of the tragedy that happened so recently was erased from existence to allow patients to concentrate on their recovery.
And yet… Some scars remained. A memorial stone was installed on the square to honor all guards who have fallen in the line of duty to save the patients. New robotic forms walked around the facility. Artificer’s creations, these robotic guards, were fashioned after a humanoid form, the curvatures of their bodies were smooth, they had nice, respectful-sounding voices when speaking if a patient got lost or not. Colored in a soft blue, beneath their armor plates they had an arsenal impressive enough to ensure that the tragedy will never be repeated again. And here and there were cameras, along with increased guards’ patrols. Before, the guards were relaxed, few had even had to wear body armor here. Sure, some of the patients could get violent, but deprived of their powers, they were not a threat to the medical personnel, all of whom were upgraded with some of the best bio technology available in Iterna.
Spying a familiar face, Ratcatcher darted forward, sliding across the ground on her knees, to a boy who looked into the window at the green fields before the hospital.
“Hey there, champ, why the long face?” the explorator leaned her face next to his, ignoring the disapproving look of the nurse. Outside, she saw a couple of kids playing basketball. “Oh, ain’t that cool! Come on, why sit here, don’t you wanna join them, Ricky?”
“It would be nice,” the round-faced boy whispered, no longer trying to run away from her at least. “But… I don’t dare. Not after what I did.”
“Ricky, this wasn’t your fault.” she leaned her tool of trade against the wall and took him by the shoulders. The boy had a bad activation.
Powers, most of them, started working right from birth. At some point, one infant even torched down a nursery, by accident, of course, the kid had a power of a passive flame halo around his body. The Elites saved people back then, and Rho’s medical corporation later developed power suppression medicine, allowing everyone to enjoy a normal childhood. Iterna’s laws, however, were lacking from Ratcatcher’s perspective. They gave parents way too much control over the freedom of their kids.
Take Ricky, for example. The boy had the power to unleash a small atomic ray, potent enough to melt its way through a building wall, from his body. His power was manual, meaning he had to think about using it, and his parents made the decision that Ricky has no need to “live on medicine’. Without telling the authorities, they were throwing away pills assigned to the boy. The problem was, anyone needed to have proper training to learn how to use powers safely. And the boy was too young to apply to a school for gifted abnormals. During a tag game, Ricky got frustrated, and… the tragedy happened.
Iterna’s official removed the kid from his parents, no one blamed him for a slip that he couldn’t possibly control and should have never had to control in the first place. But Ricky did blame himself. And after another accident, the boy was placed here to ensure that he wouldn’t harm himself.
“I am a monster, Ratcatcher,” he told her, looking down at his hands.
“Really now?” She asked cheerfully. “I seem to recall one very serious boy dragging a guard to safety recently, despite the terrorists being nearby. And in my book, this isn’t the action of a monster. Nope, this is how a hero would act. Chin up, Rick, mistakes happen. But this particular horrible accident wasn’t of your making. And you know it, don’t ya? When pressed into a corner, you choose to worry about others rather than run. This is the real you, Ricky, so drop the gloomy mood and get out and play, right now. You can become a doctor. Or maybe you’ll become an explorator. You can even live a normal life working behind a counter. No idea, I am not a fortune teller, and your future is yours to shape. But one thing you won’t become, Rick. You will never become a monster.”
“How can you know?” He looked at her, and Ratcatcher pushed on further. Ricky had never before talked with her for so long.
“Stupid, you have already proved it!” She flicked him across the nose. him across the nose. “There is nothing there to know! What I know is that whatever your future is, you won’t find it here! What happened, happened, you didn’t mean any of that, so spit at all misfortune and live your life to the fullest! Make mistakes that will be entirely your own and decisions that you will be proud of! If you are confused about what to do right now, well, here is my advice. Kids are ought to play, so come on, get on with it! Make friends, then get to studying, and…”
“Elisa!” Harvey raised her by the elbow, gesturing for the explorator to follow after him. “We are not against you bonding with patients, however, try to avoid giving any advice or putting any more pressure on the patients. We have trained personnel who are ready and able…”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ratcatcher put the weapon on her shoulder, following after the man and adoring her birthday’s gift.
They reached the elevator and took it down to where the most dangerous patients were. The staff jokingly called them puzzles, these patients had the most trouble being reintegrated and rehabilitated into human society. Most of them were abnormals, some with badly mutated bodies, but the most dangerous of them all, the one whom the terrorists tried to free… He was perfectly human-looking.
They walked past metal doors, all of them of various sizes. Each cell was custom made to accommodate the inmate. Most cells had TV sets, however, a few patients had an unnatural ability to craft weapons and gears out of almost anything. These ones had to be content with living in mostly bare-looking cells, if TVs were installed in their cells, they were always placed behind a transparent armored screen. Some of the inmates relied solely on the staff for information.
They passed near a three-meter-tall iron door that looked more like a bunker door than something that belonged to a mental facility. A number 1646 was written on it. Ratcatcher felt a tingle of dread just from looking at this and tried to banish this feeling. This inmate was brought in here by Eugenia herself, it took quite the effort to accommodate this woman. Her cell was spacious, measuring fifteen meters in length and five meters tall. The inmate herself had to be suspended in a force shield bubble, flying over the ground at a minor distance. This was a necessary choice, the woman spent all day long punching the walls and the door otherwise, and they started to give way. The being inside wasn’t stupid, her tongue had found a way to lacerate a few guards verbally to the point that two of them had a nervous meltdown. For all its savage appearance, the person inside was beyond dangerous.
And Ratcatcher had talked with her. She leaned against the iron doors, chatting with the being inside about just about anything. Sports, video games, geodes, toys, foods… The woman never had a taste of most of these things, but she learned on the fly, immediately understanding everything from Ratcatcher’s descriptions and adding her own flavor. The woman even learned three new languages in a span of a day, speaking with the explorator in her native tongue with ease just for fun. At first, Ratcatcher assumed she was harmless.
Until the attack came.
****
She remembered the moment of pure terror well. Ratcatcher was lying on a floor, a gunshot in her side. The blood pressure was boiling in her ears to the point of a faint sound, but she kept her cool. Only eight armed terrorists were in the power armors around her, all of them armed with armor-piercing rifles. One more person tried to hack into the system, but in vain, the path to that man was properly secured.
Not the worst situation she had found herself in. The bleeding was already stopping, the explorator had to tear at her own skin to pretend to be badly wounded to the point of fainting. Her eyes were wide open, faking unconsciousness, and she was getting teary from a need to blink, but she could live with it too. A momentary distraction is all she needs. Damn it, if only she had her armor!
“Maybe this bitch knows the codes?” Ratcatcher felt a boot on her head.
Calm yourself, not now. She told herself. There are too many people nearby, she’ll be riddled with bullets in no time.
“As if! She is just an explorator,” the man with a portable terminal replied. Wires and chords connected the terminal to a damaged port in the wall, the man’s fingers were flying over the buttons. “Now shut it and let me work. I am not letting these bastards get ahead of us. The bounty is ours and ours alone! Aha!”
His terminal made a sound, and all the lights in the corridor blinked for a moment. Ratcatcher heard the sound of someone heavy falling from inside cell 1646. And in the next moment, the door started to slide aside, revealing utter darkness within.
“Shit, wrong cell,” the terrorist cursed, keeping tapping on the terminal. “Use whoever is inside to distract the guards, no doubt they have a score…”
An arm appeared from inside. Thicker than any of the terrorists’ torsos, the skin that covered the arm was milky white in color. Five-fingered paw cracked the floor, bringing in the upper part of the gigantic torso outside of the cell. And in that moment, Ratcatcher wet herself.
What looked at her now was death. In her life, she had dealt with various dangers, from man-eating insects to killer bots. But what she saw right now dwarfed everything. This was death. Should she want to end the explorator, nothing would impede her approach.
The woman’s jaws could have swallowed the explorator’s body whole, her nostrils were located way up, right between the eyes, leaving the front of the being’s nose to be just a stump of flesh. Each finger looked like an overgrown sausage, with a strange gathering of flesh at the tip. A mangled mane of deep white hair was falling from the head onto the floor, hiding the monster’s body from view, leaving just open jaws with two sets of fangs and eyes.
And these eyes were what terrified the explorator. Two orbs of amber, spilling out yellow light like projectors on the corridor, forcing shadows to hide behind the people. Emotions constantly shifted in these eyes: curiosity, understatement, maddening rage, pure glee, an unexplained joy, stupidity… Drool was coming from the woman’s lips while she judged everyone before herself.
“Ratsy…” the woman breathed out the word, sounding nothing like before. A sniff of predator, the hungry roar of a cannibal, a morning greeting, a mournful loss… So many different meanings and emotions the woman somehow managed to convey in a single word. “Consider this a repayment for the talks. Run along now, lest you want to be a part of my dance macabre…”
The being stood up, and the terrorists shouted in panic, firing at her without any command. Ignoring the attack, the towering body had stepped from within the cage, the ceiling was too low for the towering behemoth of flesh, but the woman refused to hunch. The tip of her head bulged in the metal ceiling, while the hungry eyes judged people before her.
One after another, bullets hit her, leaving torn wounds on her body, turning one of the breasts into a crimson flower of torn flesh, creating whole new rivers of blood coming down the woman’s legs. And just as soon as these horrible injuries appeared, so too did they close, right before the panicked people. The woman moved her fingers, and claws the size of a human body appeared from each finger.
“What fun. Oh, the joys that I will ripe… How much of your bodies can I take before you can function no more?” The woman moved forth, turning into a blur, accompanied by the tearing sound of metal at the ceiling, one of her claws caught a screaming terrorist, leaving behind a bisected body. The military grade power armor, a power armor meant to endure armor-piercing fire and explosions, provided no defense against this rapid burst of movement. The woman stopped, leaning back to the point where her back should have snapped. Her head has touched the back of her knees, and she has looked down on the mortally wounded terrorist. “I left you your lungs. So sing louder for me.”
One of the terrorists fired an under-barrel grenade launcher at the woman, and she disappeared in place, snapping back and swallowing the grenade. The giant face spread in delight when the grenade went off, the explosion contained within a jaw. More and more gunshots followed.
The walls turned crimson. And then the woman ate a guard’s body, and Ratcatcher knew a new horror.
****
Ratsy… I want to eat you, Ratsy… A feeling of fangs closing on her neck and…
She shook her head, banishing the memory.
“How is Margot doing these days?” the explorator asked.
“Sleeping, mostly.” Harvey looked aside, and Ratcatcher cursed to herself.
She should have forced herself to come over and talk like before. No matter the fear, no matter what she saw, Margot, the name that the staff gave to the woman, saved everyone on this day. Sure, it was a miracle that Margot didn’t kill any patients or staff. But at the end of the day, they all owed her the fact that he was still locked up in his cell and that the terrorists were either captured or killed. Margot saved Ratcatcher’s life!
“If you ever feel the need to talk about what has happened, my door is always open.” The doctor offered.
“Thanks,” she really meant it, “But I am a tough girl, Harvey. Do keep up this sweetness, and all girls around the block are yours.”
“Heaven forbid, Elisa, I am married!”
She laughed a bit with him, feeling a weight fall off her shoulders. Throwing one last glance at the metal door, the explorator walked to her own apartment. Her place wasn’t fancy: a small bed, a shower and a bath in a separate room, the terminal instead of a TV, an armory, and a kitchen. Leaving the weapon and tools behind, Ratcatcher spread her arms, feeling tingling sensations all over her body. Thousands of thousands of little ‘legs’ ran across her body when the nanomachine armor started to gather around her waist, forming a blue belt. Never again would she be left without her armor.
The woman went to the shower for a short time and put the geode in her collection. She admired a line of 400 different colored geodes. She had first started to collect them back at the Scrapyard, at a pile of junk that served her family and the fellow abnormals as home. Little Ratcatcher saw a glowing stone one day, lying in the underground caverns, and sneaked after it, evading deadly spiders and insectoids. This stone had no special properties, but it glowed so pretty that she immediately decided that it will be the cornerstone of her collection of various junk. A few years later, after her people joined Iterna, Ratcatcher was sent to a school, where she shyly showed a teacher her precious stone, asking what it was. And this is how her hobby was born. Find a pretty geode, grab a pretty geode, place it on a special tablet, and make sure that the colors around it contribute to the overall picture.
Grabbing a whole bucket of hot chocolate, Ratcatcher got into bed, wrapping herself in sheets, and seeping chocolate through a straw. Her eyes rolled, instead of gray fabric, she saw utter darkness, filled with countless ‘stars’. All of the important ‘stars’ were silver-labeled and clustered together in the ward. With a smile, she slipped out of the mind-map and reached for the terminal.
There was a reason Ratcatcher came to work here. Aside from liking to help others and having easy money, of course, her abilities allowed her to contribute greatly. Ratcatcher had the power. It wasn’t something great or powerful, she simply marked certain people and, from that moment onward, knew their approximate location. The closer they were, the clearer she could ‘see’ them. This was how she found Ontrel so soon.
The map of the area called the Desolation came up on the screen of her portable terminal. According to the general information, the place was ruled by a group of abnormals known as Naturalborns. Located east of Iterna, north of the Ravaged Lands, the place had a somewhat cooler temperature than the Ravaged Lands. A normal person would not have his or her skin burned away like in the Ravaged Lands, but the place was still hot. Most of the population there lived in a circle around what was known as the great desert, a fifty-kilometer-wide crater left from the impact of some weapon during the Extinction. Now this crater was fully filled with sand, but nothing grew there, and water sources were almost nonexistent.
The Naturalborns sent raiding parties against their neighbors, gaining slaves, food, and water to keep up their brutal reign. All abnormals with visible physical changes were drafted either into the Changed, a caste below the Naturalborns, or into the Naturalborns. The rest were out of luck and were forced to toil for the sake of their masters.
Due to the lingering effects of the weapons used there and the unnatural weather, it was almost impossible to map the entire region from the satellites, and the explorators sent in there were either eaten alive or killed outright. Upon entering the region, drones soon started to malfunction, forcing Iterna to accept the decision to abandon the region for a while. For all intents and purposes, there was nothing of value there at a first glance, and the locals were still too hostile to start working relationships. The Ravaged Lands thought so too, and they built a massive defense line to separate themselves from the Desolation.
Hm, looks like a nice place. Ratcatcher emptied half of the bucket and kept on reading, enjoying the softness of her bed and a sense of safety after all her travels.
She had to leave her room in the evening when the other explorators working for the ward called her. Against her wishes, there was going to be a small party in her honor.
