The Great Game

If you’re new to the Great Game, please have a quick look at the blurb to your left, where you’ll find a short catch-up introduction.

Riots normally sound like a furious, deafening roar. This one was more like a frat-party. I stood there looking at the command post for a moment, and  a young security officer wandered over. “Lieutenant Taylor, Sir. I’ve been told to take you to your equipment.”

“Is it easy to find?”

He pointed to a couple of crates twenty yards away, in front of a small, empty tent. “Right there, Sir.”

“Fine,” I said. “Thanks. So, officer. Goose fat? Really?”

“Oh yes,” said the guy. “Always, Sir. It, um, Provides complicating organic correspondences that can assist in avoiding the substantiation of presumptive sentience, Sir.”

“Right. And you apply it…?”

“Smeared over the eyelids, nostrils, mouth, ears, heart, nipples and navels, Sir. Nowhere lower to ensure the avoidance of untoward and ill-timed distractions. Sir.”

“Very good.”

He cracked a pleased smile for a whole quarter-second, then nodded formally and left. I rolled my eyes at his back, and then wandered over to the crates. I unpacked them inside the tent, and plugged everything together. I’d asked for an ultrabroad realtime EMF recorder, but he’d gone one better, and included a visualisation dome and several auxialliary receptors, including a gravitometer, a particulates analyser, a Geiger bubble, and even something that claimed to be a colour force reader, although I couldn’t see the point.

I decided to grease up before going out to find places for the receptors. It sounded insane, but Travis had seemed insistent.

Yes, I included both openings below the belt.

Yes, it was disgusting.

I slimed back into my clothing and body armour, gathered up the assorted receptor units, and slipped out of the tent. It took me a few minutes to find someone authorised to clear me to go up onto the barricades, and a few minutes more for them to scrounge up a suitable escort. Travis had clearly told them to make sure I wasn’t shot. Fine by me.

In the end, I settled for spreading the receptors out along the barricade, which was a couple of hundred yards long. There was a chance some jarhead might kick one, even with bright chalk semicircles around them, but I wasn’t too worried. They didn’t look particularly delicate, and I had multiples of each type. The barricade was topped with wire mesh, so as long as the crazies didn’t suddenly produce guns and start shooting, the receptors would be fine.

Once everything was in place, I allowed myself to actually have a proper look at the riot zone. We were in Milton 3, the sort of place that they would house the concentration-camp guards if they suddenly decided to round up the entire East Coast. Nasty little boxes fought their way out of squat concrete towers and wrestled with their neighbours for air and sunlight. You could practically taste the misery and loathing — and that was on a normal day.

A demented artist had reached down from the heavens and splattered the estate with gore and chaos. Blood. Fire. Destruction. Chunks of corpse. Goya would have wept. And the people… they swarmed through it all like flies. Some angry, buzzing and howling, running this way and that. Some lazy, hovering or swirling or meandering back and forth, wailing, weeping, laughing. Some static, resting or weeping or fucking or doing unspeakable things. Some oblivious, as if that were possible.

“It gets to you, Sir,” said the officer who’d met me earlier. “Doesn’t seem right.”

I stared at him.

“Look,” someone else said. Several people flinched, myself included, but we looked.

People — no, Infected — were gathering in a pack fifty yards away, facing us. They abandoned their madnesses, and came to clump together and stare at us. I fought down a shiver, as more and more of them joined the group. Forty, fifty, more, all of them standing there and gazing. All the officers around me were shouldering weapons, and I wished I’d thought to at least bring a pistol up.

“JOHN LEMUEL TAYLOR,” they said, in a voice that would level mountains.

“Fuck. Me.” I tried to force my fists to unclench.

“JOHN LEMUEL TAYLOR,”  they groaned again. “YOU WILL BE UNTOUCHED. UNHARMED. COME.”

 Loading ...

Today’s photo is from the (wonderful) movie Akira, by Katsuhiro Ôtomo.