Saura

the bad ass chick...

Saura

Saura raced out the door as she attempted to hail Gaius once again. Men are all a bunch of childish morons; she thought to herself, they all want to go out like some kind of cowboy in a big shoot out. They want to leave everyone else withe the grief as they take all the glory. She checked her watch; it would take her ten minutes to get to the hotel in old town. 

"Gaius," she said to herself, "please don't die, you idiot." She ran to the lift and punched in her code for the car port. The large metal doors shut tight and the lift lurched downwards. He said he loved her. He was a fucking idiot. But she loved him too. 

The car port was empty as usual, and she hurried to her Black Toyota Motorseed which sat near the back of the lot. He had to pick today, she thought as she slid into the driver’s seat, that fucking prick. She started her period this morning, waking to a Scarlett bead spread and that awful feeling she always got. Some sort of weird remorse and grief, she didn't want to really think about it. At least I know I'm not pregnant, she thought, remembering his sweat and his heat and his lips. Fucking asshole, she thought, it's a bad idea to fuck around with a girls head. She pumped the gas and the Motorseed took off, screeching down the carport exit. She turned up the radio, but it was all static. 

"Gaius!" she said, but he wasn't responding. He must have disconnected his device. Typical, she thought, when push comes to shove, you really were just another wannabe cowboy. She skidded on to the Yankee Division highway with such velocity that for a moment she thought the vehicle was going to loosen its grip upon the earth, but it steadied, landing with an exquisite thud, followed by a harrowing screech as she lit up the engine. Fuck, she thought lighting a cigarillo and flicking the match out the window, is he really going to be dead this time? 

She pulled up Gaius' GPS on her dash computer, and it still read the same location; the Regent Hotel in Floating City. She checked her watch; it had been approximately four minutes. Gaius, she flicked some ash of the tip of the cigar, you're really going to do this to me? She punched a fist against the steering wheel. He was such a liar. He didn't really love her. If he did, he wouldn't die. 

"Incoming transmission!" She nearly jumped out of her skin. The dash lit up in a blaze of translucent colors. Francis. She had forgotten about that one. She clicked in, and Francis' face appeared on the dash. 

"What happened back there?" He was visibly pissed off, his face flushed and sweating. 

"I should be asking you the same question," she jammed the gears to narrowly avoid a Sun Systems oil tanker, "Gaius got plugged."

"I saw that much," Francis was livid, his voice quivered with rage. Saura wasn't impressed. 

"And so you ran away like a fucking bitch?" She pumped the gas again. 

"What the fuck did you just call me," Francis hollered, "you wanna get a bolt too, you dumb cunt?"

"Fuck off Francis," she flipped off the image of his face with a single gloved finger, "everyone knows you suck cock, so don't try to act tough. I'm going after my team member, so stay out of my way if you're not going to help."

"You better watch that smart mouth," Francis spoke soft and low. He knew something he wasn't telling her. 

"Is this all you called for? To yap at me? Or you got something," she was literally twenty seconds away from the hotel, "if you do make it quick."

"The squids brought a new kind of soldier with them," he said through his teeth, "they're big. And strong. And I hope one gets you and rips out your voice box."

"Nice," she said, the hotel was now in sight, "I'll remember that. Bye Francis." She switched off. She was in the lot. She skidded into a parking space and slid out of the Motorseed. She checked her pistols, hanging from two underarm holsters beneath her breasts, one a Smith and Wesson 12.7 caliber man stopper, the other a 9mm with extended magazine. The door to the lobby loomed large before her. Gaius, she thought, I'm here. Just stay alive. She pushed open the door. 

The hotel felt like a lot like hell, and it wasn't just the gold leaf trimmed edging and blood red velvet carpets that made it resemble something from a bad movie, or the stench of death and jissom and shit and lies that fluttered through each hallway. It was the reputation. There were few places in the world quite like this, an axis point to the other possible worlds in this dimension. Literally a portal to another earth, where magic and steel were twain and twixt and forged into weapons, and blah, blah, blah. Sid would drone on and on about that shit, tri-dimensional daemons, dirt wizards, water dragons, the dark lord Cthulhu, boring shit like that. Saura didn't care about any of that, at least, not where these things came from or why. Sid was old, he didn't get that; Saura just wanted to know how to kill them. 

The hotel was useful in negotiating transfers, which was a hopped up way of saying drug deals. Or in this case computer hardware. The dirt wizards had a fuck of a time decoding magical data when in the vicinity of an axis point, the con joining magical energies were in such a state of flux it provided a sort of cover for their operations. And Gaius had insisted he go alone, in his typical cowboy bullshit mode, stoic and strict, his manner of fact, this is how it is tone. She really wanted to crack him in the jaw. 

Saura wasn't one of the lucky ones either, like Gaius was. He was a "druid" as they were sometimes called, able to mentally withstand the psychosis drain that occurred when casting even low level spells. There was a whole rank and file line to it; Gaius was constantly trying to explain the nuances of magical theory, much to her dismay. He would say something like, "frost magical falls in the tenth bilateral of the fifty fifth movement of the blah blah blah," she would lose interest in about five seconds. But she had to admit, aside from his know it all personality; he was a wonderful spell weaver. 

Saura couldn't do any of that shit, she wasn't born "broad of mind" like the old men said (she called it being "pretentious") and according to the science masters and magic weavers if she tried even reading from a spell book or casting a first grade spell her mind would boil up and then explode. Honestly she didn't really believe it deep down, however, she had shunned magical texts and spell for guns and motor oil, and distrusted anyone who knew of the magical arts. That is except for Gaius, but he was only the exception. It wasn't like she wanted him casting his spells when they were making love. That thought made her stifle. Gaius, she thought, will I ever even see you again. 

The hotel was empty. Not like, oh there were a few people milling around the lobby, I mean empty, empty. Not a good sign. The air hung thick and heavy with blood and smoke, the aftermath of a firefight. She moved down the long hallway, hugging the corner, pistol drawn, until she emerged at an intersection where two corridors came together. There she saw the first evidence, three long and thin marks like some great razor claw, seeping with greenish, purplish energy. Kemling arcana. They made these massive magical claws (usually which dwarfed their own bodies, which were at tallest 3 and a half feet) that could cleave an armored tank in two; another reason why Saura didn't mess around with magic. Giant magical claws and shape shifting dwarves. Fuck that. 

The walls down the left corridor where covered in misfired bolts, obviously Gaius', lodged into the very drywall. She deduced that was the direction the Kemlings had speared from (spearing being a fancy way of saying inter dimensional travel). Further investigation proved this, down the hallway about twenty feet was a crack in the wall, with burnt black edges fuming smoke. It smelled like an abattoir; definitely a portal to the second dimension. That smell never truly left your nasal passages, lingering in the background, under everything, the stench of the dead and decomposing. It was like coming home when she smelled it out here. Familiar. Gaius must have gone the other way, he wouldn't have been that idiotic (or suicidal) to charge headlong into an inter dimensional crack. He's wasn't a coward, but he also wasn't a moron. If only she could have found some sort of evidence, some of Gaius' yellow magic, anything. That's when she felt it; this horrid, slinking feeling of total dread crept over her, like all the hope was being drained out of her. Squid magic. They were still here. She stopped, and strained to listen. She couldn't turn back, Gaius needed her, but Squids were...she didn't even want to go there. If they caught her, the things they would do to her in the name of their twisted sciences, she had heard some terrifying stories. 

It was Twenty Seven years ago, in fact almost to the day, that the Squids came back. There wasn't a sole alive who remembered the last time they showed up, it was approximately two hundred and fifty years ago before the Toyota/Samsung Landross Chemicals War, but the they had done significant damage the earth, especially to the tiny nation of England. For a few harrowing days their bullet shaped capsules had rained down from the heavens and gripped the world in fear. Thousands died, armies were decimated, and humanity waited, huddled in fear, for enslavement. But it never came, for the Squids had weak immune systems and succumbed to the most common strain of virus; the winter cold. But they were intense and fiercely intelligent creatures and they never forgot the defeat in England. After the battleships came down, April 2nd 2112, there wasn't much left to the island. They burned it, massacred the people, and, as the squids put it, reseeded the soil. Now they call themselves "Englishmen," and all the humans who live there "Welsh." There were stories also, from the corners of the human resistance, that the squids consumed the flesh of humans, when they so had the jurisdiction to do so. 

She could feel them, their presence was like that of some grim specter; cold, wet, empty, Devoid of life or love or reasoning. They were on the floors above, hovering amidst their Zhatif guards, calculating the event outcome of the fire fight. But it was good news, because the fact they were still here meant Gaius' chances of being alive had just gone up. They haven't found him yet, or they're torturing him, but if he was dead they would be hanging around. She realized then she was frozen with fear, bent down on her knee, clutching her pistols and praying. I've got to go, she thought, I've have to save to him. She pushed herself to her feet, and breathing a deep sigh, took a few careful steps forward. The room spun, she felt the sensation of drifting into the deep black nothing of dream, tugging her down with a great invisible force. No, she thought, it's the Squids. They fuck with your head, their magic lingers everywhere it is used, and the aftermath is this lost and distant feeling. It's akin to hallucinogens; this sort of leak from between dimensions can cause intense sickness and even death from prolonged exposure. They left it everywhere, in the form of grey and foul smelling mucus. Apparently this was a side effect of their magical hovering, using so much energy and force on such a simple device caused a massive load of waste, and so the energy had to be displaced somehow. It was everywhere, and in her haste to leave the office earlier she had neglected to grab a mask. Shit, she thought, I can't go on like this. She staggered to her feet, backing away from the corridor back from where she came. The room kept spinning, faster and faster, like some demented carnival ride, churning her stomach until she collapsed on her knees and vomited. I'm gonna fucking die here, she thought, covered in vomit and weeping like a little bitch. What the fuck? She wrestled her limbs into a sitting position and wiped the vomit from her face. It even got in my hair, she thought, yup, I look real fucking classy right now. The end was coming, she could feel it, but she felt strangely at peace with it, which was probably an effect of the poisons. The Squids did try too hard to make everyone happy, she thought, they thought logic would win out in the end. They were always fucking wrong.

There was a burst of light that startled her so, she leapt with what strength she had left to her feet and aimed her pistol. 

"Put that shit down," it was a very familiar voice, "before you shoot somebody."

"Is that..." She strained her eyes in the light. It couldn't be. No, not him. Anyone but him. 

"It's been a long time, Saura," said the familiar voice, "I've missed you."

Shit, she thought, it is him. Out of all the mother fucking times she could have ever seen this shithead again, it had to be now; fucked up, dying, covered in vomit, and on her period. 

"No way," was all she could manage, "you gotta be a ghost man." His laugh made her skin crawl and her stomach turn. 

"Yea, I guess I am," he said, "but then again," he was moving closer, "what the fuck are you?" No, no, no, no! She thought, not now, you fucking asshole. It's been ten years and now you show up?

"Stay back," she lifted up the pistol, "don't make me use this," he smiled; she could see it through the lights. 

"Again," he said, "you mean don't make me use this again. You already shot me once, my sweet."

"So you know I mean business then," she pulled herself up, using the wall behind her for support. 

"You're fucked up," he said, with a snort, "you ain't gonna make it."

"Oh yea, is that the case, Yaakov?" She used his real name. 

"Yea, that's the case kid," he was smirking like a schoolboy with a nudie mag, "you're gonna die without some help."

"Fuck you," she said, "I don't want your help. I know what kind if a price it brings. Now tell me," she stood up as straight as she could, "what the fuck are you doing here?"

"Just looking for you, my love," that smirk, she wanted to punch it right through his thick skull, "it was your beauty that led me here."

"No shit," she said, "that's a fucking laugh and a half. Why are you really here?"

"Francis mentioned you were on your way to this," he raised a hand to cover his mouth, "place...and I knew you'd need our help." 

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," she said and added, coldly "It's nice to know you care so much."

"Of course I do," he said, motioning to his men, "get her." The next few seconds were harrowing, and as two of Yaakov’s men rushed at her with inhuman speed, and she tried to raise her pistol and fire, but where their movements were swift and deliberate, hers were like she was surrounded by flowing water, fighting her at every turn. Needless to say, she was far too slow, and the roughhewn hands gripped at her wrist like a vise, sending the infecting bullet harmlessly against a dark corner. She was forced to the ground, and though she struggled with all her might, the man was stronger. Yaakov laughed, and knelt down in front of her face, twisting it up toward his with a vicious smile. 

"You're coming with us whore," he said, and a menacing feeling crept over her.

"Cunt," she breathed, "you NEED these fucking cyborgs to take me down? You're a pussy." She barely even felt the but of his rifle smash against her forehead.

"Shut up bitch."