Everything was going well at first. Andrew and Gwen looked generally unassuming with their rifles in hand and nurse in tow. Hannah followed along like a hurt puppy; it was hard for her to stay in proper character.
“Just stay quiet. We just gotta get out of the zone first,” Andrew muttered.
They were almost at the doors. Almost.
The exit electronically closed with slow hydraulic. “Shit!” The three of them sprinted, but to no avail. It shut on them just as they made it. “Damn it, what the hell happened?” Andrew scoffed.
Heavy footsteps came from behind. The group turned to find a group of guards with their weapons to the side. “Hey! You three! The open cell is back here! We need you to help us find the subject!”
Thank God, they didn’t recognize the disguised nurse as Hannah. They probably assumed that she had the clearance to know the shady business here.
Gwen played along. “Understood. We’re enroute!”
Fuck, this was something Andrew didn’t plan for. Though he frankly didn’t plan any of this, he underestimated the failsafes the place had. Sure, he managed to short the power earlier; but that wasn’t going to stop every single failsafe that this place definitely had.
Five minutes.
At this point, Andrew was thinking less and less of the time limit and more of the individual possibility of escape. It didn’t even matter if the camera footage was working; being able to get out of here without a straitjacket was the only objective. With all these guards to the left and right, his odds were only getting slimmer.
Fortunately, the guards didn’t seem to suspect anything. They were back to their usual banter. “This shit is all fucked up,” one of them groaned. “Every one of these freaks we fry is another slice from our paychecks.”
“But I thought this dumb bitch wasn’t one of them?”
“Eh, I could care less. Her operation was due tomorrow, I heard. Would’ve sent her to the same place they sent some of the others. But what does it matter; questions don’t put food on the table.”
One minute.
“Hey! Quit checking your watch,” one of the guards called to Andrew. “The hours just get longer the more you look at the time. Now pay some goddamned attention and help us find this–”
Time’s up.
The lights went red. The doors droned open. Guards stopped their chatter as they turned on their weapon flashlights. “Andrew,” Gwen whispered. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.” Andrew was genuinely confused as he tried racking his mind. Nothing in his nor in Doctor Myers’s memories rang any bells. “This is someone else.”
Unfortunately, they were asking the wrong questions and explaining the wrong answers. Hannah pointed to the cell doors. “Guys, are those supposed to be open?”
The rooms, the ones that held the worst of the possessed demons, hounded open. For a second, the patients walked outside piecemeal—they were wondering if this was some kind of test to destroy their minds. It took a while for them to come to the same conclusion.
It wasn’t.
A guard was snatched into the void of a room. “Help–” His voice was swallowed with the sound of crunching teeth. Blood trailed onto the floor only to be licked up like a trail of syrup.
“What the fuck are we supposed to do?”
“Good Christ, call the CDRs!”
“But they told us–”
“That man was just eaten, and you’re asking questions? Call the CDRs now–”
An arm wrapped around his neck and snapped. The body hung in the air as a vascular beast stepped into the dim-red overhead. His skin was made of a bright red but with the roughness of sandpaper. The glowing red eyes looked like knives stabbing into the dark.
“Fu-Fuck!”
He pounced the nearest man and snatched the trachea from his throat. The bloody thing wriggled in his hand before he slurped the gibs from it like a straw. Needless to say, the rest of the guards—including Andrew’s group—ran the other direction.
“There’s another exit this way!”
The same guard had his skull smashed by a charging demon, who looked more like a rhinoceros than a human. Any semblance of his past life was snuffled by his huffs and grunts. And to think, these were just the ones that weren’t toasted by thermite. The ones who were killed before Andrew’s CDR mission were probably a dozen times worse.
“There! At the end of the hall!”
Everyone fired their submachine guns at anything that moved. Even Gwen and Andrew were fighting to the death, with Hannah cowering right behind them. Bullets worked against a few patients, maybe the ones that didn’t fully turn yet or the weaker demons. Their bodies just spasmed to the side as a .45 ACP splatted their brains on the walls.
“Almost there!”
The guard at the front just barely made it through the doorway. He immediately started shutting it behind him with the manual locks, damning everyone else inside. “I’m sorry! I have to see my kids!”
Someone saw him first. A familiar red hand gripped the back of his skull and squeezed. It looked less like a kill and more like the crushing of a watermelon. Andrew didn’t even think of death as a fragment of skull skipped onto his face.
“Concentrate fire!”
For a second, Andrew had flashbacks of being back in the CDRs. It was the kind of out-of-body experience that anyone would admit to, especially in moments where attention mattered most. In this case, he started feeling more sorry for the cops that he used to cringe at. Fighting demons without machineguns, equipment, or APEs was suicide.
The first guard was lifted into the air. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He was stomped into the ground with a great hole in his chest. One could imagine his heart beating in the opening; if only it wasn’t crushed.
The next guard had his weapon snatched out of his hand. The demon, with bullets still riddling his resilient body, broke the weapon in two with his bare hands. Those same parts were stabbed into the man’s shoulders like spikes.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
It didn’t take long for the rest of the guards to be killed off by this single demon. Andrew made sure to pay more attention to Gwen and Hannah. Every once in a while, he’d smash a demon to the side with his demonic arm. Thanks to the chaos, nobody paid any attention to this.
Not that it mattered. In less than a minute, the last guard had his jaw ripped off before the demon uppercutted his skull clean off. The stump of a neck was more like a waterfountain than anything.
Now it was three against one. Andrew, Gwen, and Hannah facing off against a demon that was never supposed to see the light of day. “Well?” Gwen whispered. “Do you think your powers are good enough for this one?”
In death, Andrew could be honest. “No.”
The red beast charged and tried grabbing Andrew by the neck. Transforming his arm, Andrew swatted the hand away and countered with a proper hook to the jaw. One punch—the red bastard stumbled back.
It wiped blood off its teeth before smiling. It was going to fight a nonhuman.
Suddenly, a figure charged from the side and kicked the demon in the ribs. It must’ve been the same speed as a freight train. Kicking him into a room and manually locking it, the figure managed to buy some time.
It was the same man Andrew had seen meditating in his room. With his straitjacket ripped apart, he looked like a superhuman with great control of his strength. Perhaps a martial artist who had no need for demonic powers.
“Hm. Officer Cheng,” the man said. He had a slight Japanese accent, though years of education and professionalism had refined it to a strong tone. “I’m Sergeant Miyoshi of CDR-2. Well, ex-Sergeant. In any case, it’s nice to meet you.”
The two shared a brief handshake before moving along. They talked as they ran. “You made it out?” Andrew asked. “I thought the CDRs were wiped out in that mission.”
Miyoshi turned the corner and elbowed a minor demon in its three-eyed face before sweeping it to the ground. Gwen finished it off with a burst from her weapon.
“I don’t know about every team, but CDR-2 was wiped out. It was thanks to their sacrifice that I am able to breathe now,” he said. “When our APEs malfunctioned, I knew that this entire plan was a setup. So when I openly stated that I wanted to get to the bottom of the situation, I was labeled as a psychiatric casualty and sent here.”
They kept moving through the facility, bypassing or shooting through anything in their way. It was possible to get rid of some of the minor demons, but it was impossible to fight the really powerful beasts that slaughtered men left and right. For them, Andrew could only look away and keep running.
“How are you still… functioning…?” Andrew struggled to ask. “I mean right now, I’m still trying to…”
He didn’t need to say more; the ex-Sergeant knew that. Miyoshi, with a calm face, only said, “The death of your comrades was nothing of your fault. At this moment here, there is no way we can bring them back. The only thing we can do now is defeat everyone responsible. Justice must be served.”
Now it made sense, why the man had been meditating when Andrew had seen him. Miyoshi probably sat with the loss of his subordinates for the days that passed since the massacre. His guilt, his anger, his sorrow.
It all collided to provide a new purpose. Now, he was passing that purpose to Andrew.
“It’s good that we have the opportunity to escape now. Everyone in that zone is a demon or will become one,” Miyoshi explained. “Even in my cell, one can listen carefully to hear hints of the truth. It is said that the leader of the Pentagramists, the Beast of Pride, has the power to transform men into demons. That tengu that just fought us was one of those men. A former CDR member, in fact. Now he’s just another demon.”
Andrew quickly glanced at Hannah. She looked too shocked to show horror in her face. Had Andrew taken too long in his rescue, she and Miyoshi would’ve already been forcefully transformed. “Too many moving parts,” Andrew could only say. That was without asking who opened all the cell doors.
***
The team barely evaded the clutches of a major demon. Its fingers had been replaced by slender tusks that could crush steel within its grip. With its teeth being the same length as a sword, it grabbed anything to sink its sick teeth into.
Miyoshi shut the door behind them and manually locked it. That was another zone they just escaped.
“Good Christ…” Andrew mumbled. He looked around. Part of him wanted to verbally ask how everyone was, but he knew the answers wouldn’t help. “What I’d do to just have my old CDR suit back…”
Miyoshi chuckled. “Tell me about it. If I had it on, my kicks and punches would do a lot more than just surprise them.”
“Some real power, those things had. Sergeant Yang was always the bad ass,” Andrew reminisced. He took a quick breather as he rested his back against the wall. “I remember when she would fight hand-to-hand with demons. She’d only need a knife, or maybe even her bare hands.”
Andrew sat with silence as memories of his team flooded like a stream of temporary euphoria. He wished they were here right now. Smith would crack some shit about how this all sucked, Gutierrez would smack him around with a jabbing joke or two, and Singh would yawn before popping another pouch into her mouth. Kang would keep them in check. Sergeant Yang would lead them through hell and back.
“Miyoshi, did you hear anything about her?” Andrew finally asked.
The outcomes didn’t seem good. Fighting the Beast of Wrath surely meant death at the hands of a God-like demon. Even if she did survive, more likely-than-not they already shut her in another cell in this institute. Bionic arm or not, she didn’t stand a chance fighting against all of these demons.
“I’m sorry, Officer Cheng. I was captured before I could learn anything,” Miyoshi sighed. “She is a strong woman. She’s probably alive.”
Fat chance. More likely, she earned herself a quick death. Andrew had seen how the Beast of Wrath easily killed Singh and Gutierrez. No matter how he thought, he couldn’t imagine an ordinary human beating a God.
“We should get going,” Gwen said. “I think we’ve all caught our breaths enough to get out of here. It’s only a matter of time until someone gets called into here.”
Andrew nodded. Hannah sighed. “If the CDRs are dead, who can they even call?”
That question put their spirits in silence. They had forgotten that the CDRs were the primary bastions against the demons in New Changan. The massacre didn’t just mean the death of comrades. It meant the death of humanity.
“They probably converted police into CDRs,” Gwen figured.
“It won’t be enough,” Miyoshi replied. “The amount of training required for manning the APEs, alone, takes at least a couple months. The replacements will be nothing but dull shadows of what the CDRs once were.”
Ouch. The truth hurt. “Let’s stop thinking about that,” Andrew ordered. “Right now, we’re in the middle of a prison with hordes of demons running around. Now isn’t the time to discuss–”
The door behind them hounded. Something big banged on it.
“Shit! Something caught up to us!” Gwen growled. It didn’t take long for the whole team to race down the hallway. The door burst open just as they turned the corner. “Don’t look back! Just run!”
Tile cracked as the demon behind them thumped around. It was like something that could be quiet decided to be loud. A terror. To give its prey a moment of utter horror before it slaughtered them.
Andrew made the mistake of glancing back. It was the red demon that Miyoshi had locked up earlier. With the power still out, those manual locks were nothing on their own.
“The tengu refuses to resign,” Miyoshi chuckled as he sprinted. “It reminds me of this yakuza bastard I fought a very long time ago. A bully that killed with his bare hands. Nobody could run from his iron grip.”
Suddenly, Miyoshi stopped. “There is no use in outrunning a hare. I will buy you three some time to escape.”
Andrew’s eyes widened as he tried stopping too. “What the hell are you talking about? You won’t stand a chance against him! We can get the hell out of here now!”
But Miyoshi’s eyes didn’t change once. Instead, he awaited the coming of the beast as if he were awaiting the patience of death itself. “I had to infiltrate the ranks of the yakuza to kill that bully. It was the hardest battle I ever faced, but it was something I needed to do. Even if it meant exiling myself from the police who were on his payroll.”
The Japanese cop raised his hands into fists as the red demon reared its head around the corner. The two of them stared at each other as Miyoshi said his final piece. “I told you that you needed to find justice for the CDRs. I apologize that you must do that mission without me.”
Gwen grabbed Andrew’s hand as the two forces came to a head. There was nothing Andrew could see as he turned his head and ran. Only the thwack of bone and blood echoed down the hall as man gave its final defiance against God.
Defiance against death.