Chapter Nineteen – Excuse My French

Chapter Nineteen – Excuse My French

“The French Language is under seige!

Culture is more important than corporate profits!”

Translation from ‘The Free Frenchman’ newspaper article, 2032

***

Saint-Colomban of Medicorp was more of a shithole than aerial photography had suggested.

Getting to the town wasn’t all that bad. There was a road from Saint-Jérome all the way over, and it was pretty much cleared of any obstacles. There was one minivan, turned onto its side with a model three ripping someone’s days-old remains out of it, but otherwise the route over was quiet.

Seeing antithesis roaming around did mean that shit was still kind of fucky, though. “How long is it going to take to clear this area out?” I asked.

It depends on the amount of effort put into the task. It’s very possible that it may take decades. There are some Vanguard who specialise in rooting out infections, but there are only a limited number of those. The current world-wide incursion is a result of not properly sanitising or containing previous incursions.

Right, that made sense. Unlike normal incursions, this one was all over and all at once. Old hives coming alive after probably growing real slowly for years and hiding away where they wouldn’t be noticed.

If we didn’t clean up after all of this, then there would just be more of those the next time this kind of incursion happened.

My bet was that there would be a huge push to clean, then the bills would come in and the embezzlement, effort-to-reward ratio, and the lack of urgency would eventually do the whole project in.

It wouldn’t even be a question of shooting the right politicians to get it moving. Just plain old human nature in action.

“Fuck humans are stupid,” I muttered.

Certainly not a top-percentile species. But you’re not so bad. You’re kind of cute. Like a child that’s barely able to care for itself, but stretched out across an entire race.

“Okay, ouch,” I said. “Not wrong, but still, that hurt. Humanity can’t be the only awful race around, right?”

No, honestly, you’re genuinely not so bad. Very middling in many ways. Physically, humanity is definitely in the lower percentiles, but you’re relatively intelligent, have a capacity for empathy, and are moderately adaptable.
Just what a girl wanted to hear, that she was moderately adaptable!

We came into the town limits of Saint-Colomban. I knew because there was a rusty old sign by the side of the road next to a long-defunct tollbooth that read Welcome to Saint-Colomban of Medicorp! / Bienvenus à Saint-Colomban de Medicorp!

I slowed my mech down as I approached the town some more. There was a wall around it. Not a real, proper wall, but a wall made of cars flipped onto their sides. Some of them had… something hanging off the sides on brackets. “What are those?” I asked.

Judging from the serial numbers, those are lithium batteries. They seemed to be acting as an explosive deterrent for anything trying to scale the wall.

Clever, I supposed. There was some barbed wire on top as well, and the line of cars stretched out to the left and right for some ways, wrapping around the centre of the town.

I was pretty sure it covered most of the town, actually, because there were all of twenty buildings here.

Oh, sure, the average civilian probably lived in one of the ancient farm houses I’d crossed, or in one of the mobile homes strung along the road, but the town itself was just a collection of a couple dozen more important buildings all squeezed in around a four-way intersection.

I was spotted, of course, because I wasn’t trying to be stealthy. I saw some distant figures pointing at my mech, and there were a few screams as I leapt over their wall.

Some two-bit eighty-year-old looking farmer jumped out of a seat nearby, spun his big old shotgun around and fired it point-blank into my mech’s side.

I blinked, then carefully checked the damage readouts. “Huh, nothing,” I muttered.