Chapter Seven – Hummingbird

Chapter Seven – Hummingbird

INT. LIVE STUDIO

The camera pans away from CRAZY CLIVE who grins back at it. Audience applause, cheers.

— REDACTED Episode of Crazy Clive’s Truth Talk. September 2027.

***

I ran.

No, I didn’t just run, I sprinted.

It felt as if I was as light as a feather, as if every gasping breath filled my lungs with a hundred times more air than I had ever had. Every nerve along my skin tingled, every scent I caught told a story, and every twitch of my eye showed me the world with an amount of detail I had never seen before.

When Myalis had said that Mind Krank Ultra was addictive, I thought it had been chemically so. We’d gotten our share of warnings about drugs at the orphanage–drugged up kids were harder to adopt and strained the orphanages insurance bills when they inevitably ODed–so I knew a bit about chemical addictions.

This wasn’t that. Or maybe it was. I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

I pushed myself to run just a bit faster and the runner’s high, even after only crossing half the museum, was nearly orgasmic. “Oh, damn,” I said.

I would advise some caution. As good as you may be feeling, the drug is mostly suppressing your body’s reactions to your injuries. You are still in very poor health.

“Right, right,” I said.

I heard screams again. Many of them, and from down the corridor where the shelter was.

My shitty sneakers squeaked as they bit into the faux-marble floor and I shot ahead. My grip tightened around the hummingbird, finger hovering over the trigger. I was ready. I felt ready. I also felt as if I could punch a cement wall for an hour and still have energy to spare.

The little intellectual bit still chugging away at the back of my mind was ringing alarm bells, telling me how stupidly dangerous this all was. Still, as much as I feared the drug I’d already taken, it was too damned late to do anything about it, and right then I needed that boost.

The corridor stretched out before me, long and, to my horror, bloody.

Two things jumped out to me right away. The first, the body of one of the adults, mangled and ruined and left to rot off to one side. Even a dozen meters away I caught the scent of flesh and blood and shit.

The second thing was the alien, the Model Three. It had been stalking ahead, blood dripping down its split jaws. Something, probably my damned shoes, had alerted it to my presence and it had turned halfway around to stare at me.

I raised the Hummingbird.

The reticle in my HUD janked upwards, I was able to actually see the framerate dropping as the crappy little computer in my gear tried to keep up with the way my arm sprang up. Then the reticule was on the alien. It turned red.

I pulled the trigger.

The bullets moved far too fast for me to see them. The thin trails of smoke they left behind, on the other hand, those were easy to follow even as they spun through the air. I winced a second after pulling the trigger as the loud humming of four projectiles going off echoed through the tight passageway.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The Model Three slumped to the ground, four holes, no bigger than a disposable pen, buried in its head with blackened edges where they had entered.

Target Eliminated!
Reward… 10 Points

“What the hell kind of bullet was that?” I asked.