Chapter 27, Part 3: Killer 'Splosion Drones.

As usual, warnings apply: This is the rough draft of a story with adult themes and situations. If you are offended by bad language and grammatical errors, gentle reader, read no further! For those of you who have decided to stay, thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy this week's chapter!




“So, that was scary,” said Dimitri. He lifted a hand to wipe his brow and looked in surprise as it trembled. Sam could feel his own body shaking in reaction to the adrenalin.

“The really scary thing is that unless I can think of an alternative, we may need to end up killing them all, innocent or not,” said Aleph.

Sam felt his throat go dry.

Aleph reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a smartphone. She fiddled with the screen and pressed it to her ear. After a few seconds, she pulled it away and looked at the screen.

“Are either of you getting any service?”

“Sam looked down at his phone, the words “no service” were now displayed in place of the reception bars. Dimitri shook his head.

“Since when is Senak the land of no bars? There isn’t even any wifi,” said Dimitri.

Aleph glanced back into the square and swore.

“I want you two keeping your eyes open. If you even think someone is acting suspicious, call it out.”
She began to lope across the cobblestones and quickly passed the row of short cast iron posts that separated the square from the avenue that ran along its perimeter.

Parked next to the posts were a conga-line of cabs that Aleph completely ignored. When Sam asked her about it, her troubling response was that red lights made it too easy for assassins.

Like the rest of Asphodel, Senak was a dark city. There was no sun, no stars or moon, and no real weather aside from an occasional breeze. Temperature didn’t really work here either, and anyone who tried to measure it with a thermometer would get a random number between absolute zero and one hundred and forty-two decillion kelvin. Despite this quirk, the atmosphere felt universally comfortable to all that visited, regardless of species. It was never too hot or cold, it just was.

All around, monumental architecture soared into the darkened sky like the finest cathedrals of the Old World juiced-up on construction methods that Sam thought had to be magical.

 In the absence of daylight, the original builders incorporated lights into the structures themselves illuminating them to best advantage. Colour, light, and shadow were expertly applied to give their creations depth and form. It was a unique aspect of cities of Asphodel, and the result gave Senak a glowing, multicoloured, otherworldly, aspect.

After growing up in Dublin before moving to Vancouver, not to mention visiting places like London, New York, and Winnipeg, Sam liked to think of himself as at least partially street-savvy and urban. Every time he came to Senak though, he felt like the Country Mouse’s mule-kicked brother the redneck side of the family didn’t like to talk about. It was an effort not to continually crane his head to look at the sights as they slipped by.

Once on the street, the crowds became more compressed and they had to weave their way past beings that Sam had only the most passing familiarity with. There was something that looked like an oblong mound of dough that had spontaneously sprouted tentacles. It was sitting on a bench playing Candy Crush on a tablet. Perched on her? his? its? head was a Christmas tree patterned crocheted hat. Its stubby pseudopods waved idly over the edge of the bench while it swiped at the screen with another.

Dimitri nudged Sam in the ribs as they passed. “There’s a honey for you. Go get her number.”
Sam shook his head in exasperation and sighed.

“What? Got something against BBTs?”

“BBTs?” Sam asked.

“Big, Beautiful, Things,” Dimitri explained, continuing his acronym spree.

“That’s not even a real thing. Besides, I don’t date girls with pseudopods,” said Sam.

“Your loss. Those are the best kind of pods.”

 A goblin-looking something that appeared to have had sprung whole from the head of Jim Henson, marched past at waist level. It looked harried and irritable in a modern silk business suit.

For some reason, the thing that really threw Sam in all the strangeness wasn't the strange creatures or alien architecture, it was the Christmas decorations. Golden bells, red bows, oversized candles, and pine boughs decorated the street lamps. Twinkling lights and painted pipe-smoking snowmen stared out of aerosol snow-bedecked storefronts in all their kitschy holiday splendor. The whole scene was like seeing hot red lipstick, mascara, and stiletto heels on a Bull Mastiff. In their own element, the shoes and lipstick were just fine, on the dog, they were more than a little unnerving.

Dimitri smacked the back of Sam’s head making his hair poof out. “Stop staring.”

“Not staring,” he said a bit too quickly.

Aleph trotted up a side street to a popular coffee house that went by the name Da Vinci’s and paused outside once again poking at the screen of her smart phone. Sam could hear a jazzed up Christmas carol flood onto the street as a collection of spindly crab-like conveyances made from brass and copper scuttled out of the door of the cafe. Each of them had an illuminated glass sphere nestled into their backs where a jellyfish-like Hydrozoan was piloting the construct. The largest had a red Santa hat perched on top of its glass dome at a jaunty angle.

Aleph swore at her phone, and Sam wasn’t positive, but he thought he caught sight of a wisp of blue smoke rising from it as she put it away.

“What’s up?” asked Dimitri, failing to take much notice of the family of Hydrozoans.

“There’s no service, I can’t even get onto the web with Da Vinci’s wifi.”

“So?”

“So, I need to make a call,” she explained slowly.

Dimitri raised his eyebrows at her. “Helloo-o? Technomancer here.” He reached into his pocket, unlocked his phone, and tossed it to her.

“You said you didn’t have any service.”

Dimitri scoffed. “I don’t. Service is for chumps who aren’t Technomancers.”

Aleph glared at him. “We’re going to speak about this later.” She dialled a number and turned away from the two of them to have her conversation.

“Do you ever get the feeling that she doesn’t like sharing information?” asked Dimitri.

Sam looked at Aleph’s back and nodded. “She does keep things close to the vest.”

Sam glanced around at the crowds going past. Even at this early hour people were out looking for last minute Christmas presents.

In the last century, Christmas had spread across the Aether like oral herpes at a kissing booth, infecting world after world with its peppermint-scented contagion. Since Asphodel was the only realm accessible from every other part of the Aether, it took the brunt of the holiday madness.

Members of the arcane community jonesing for their yuletide fix of deferred credit consumerism would descend from every known place in the Aether into the cities of Asphodel, the reward centres of their brains alight like a lab monkey with a banana of solid crack. It would only be in the post-season January doldrums that the financial and neurological hangover would arrive with the bills.

 The sheer commercialism of the holiday with all of its many attendant financial perks had accomplished what nothing else before it had had. It brought together beings, irrespective of background, beliefs, or species from all across the Aether for the single purpose of fleecing holiday shoppers for all they were worth.

It was from one such crowd of these shoppers that Sam noticed three people split off and begin moving purposefully toward them. As best he could tell, each was human, though one was markedly broader than the others with a more pronounced brow ridge. Sam tugged on Dimitri’s coat to get his attention. “KSDs!” he hissed.

Dimitri flinched when he noticed them and tapped Aleph on her shoulder. She looked around, still continuing her conversation and sighed.

“I need to go,” she said into the phone while eyeing on the approaching trio carefully. “Tell the main gate to look for me. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” She ended the call and tossed the phone back to Dimitri who nearly fumbled it before putting it back in his pocket.

“These three are probably the distraction,” Aleph said to them. Keep an eye open for the sucker punch.”

“Hey, Knox, not sure if you can hear me in there,” she said, walking briskly toward the three. “But just because I’m a bit conflicted about hurting the innocent, doesn’t mean I won’t kick your drone’s asses so hard they’ll need to part their hair to take a shit.”

Dimitri chuckled nervously as he looked around for threats.

“Not this again,” Sam groaned, beginning to summon Gobshite to his hand. He pulled back the sleeve of his jacket as heat waves began to ripple away from his palm.

Around them, the crowd, sensing trouble, began to pull back from the action.

The first two drones, a man and a woman dressed for a night out on the town, crowded in close. In their eagerness to attack, they blocked the final drone’s path to Aleph. Aleph kept her promise in realigning asses with a snap kick at closest of the drones, connecting right between her legs.

Sam could actually feel the thump of impact as it travelled from the foot buried between the drone’s thighs, down Aleph’s leg and into the cobblestoned ground. The drone’s expression shifted from blank, to what Sam could best describe as, “straining pug.” She took flight from the force of the kick, describing a nearly vertical line, launching a good five feet into the air before falling into a jelly-kneed heap on the street.

No man who had ever suffered a blow to the crotch could see a kick like that and not feel a twinge of sympathetic pain. A kick to the nethers, even one directed at a woman, activated a primitive part of the male hind-brain that didn’t differentiate between sex, race, or culture. There is a universal solidarity among all men when witnessing a hit like that and both Sam and Dimitri involuntarily clenched their thighs and groaned. Theirs was not the only groan as other men in the crowd joined the chorus.

Alerted by the sound, Alpeh risked a glance back at them and called out, “Stop watching me and keep a look out!”

Sam looked around guiltily. There didn’t seem to be anyone twirling a handlebar moustache in his vicinity and his eyes were irresistably drawn back to the fight.

While the crotch-shot had been impressive, the kick had given the drone’s partner time to close on Aleph. He got off a quick kick of his own, attempting to kneecap her. Aleph turned her leg in time to absorb the blow and caught an arm that had been swinging a haymaker at her head. She continued the momentum of the strike and began to swing the drone around, lifting him off the ground with the centrifugal force.

If Aleph’s strength hadn’t been obvious before, it was on full display now. She swung him in a full 180 degree arc and brought his dress-shoe-clad feet into contact with the final KSD’s face. It struck with terrific force, smashing him to the ground. The shoe went spinning off, but Aleph wasn’t finished. She continued to rotate faster and faster, the rush of disturbed air from the drone’s passage becoming audible as the speed increased. The crowd, including Sam and Dimitri, instinctively ducked below the level of the swinging drone’s legs. Sam was sure he heard the pop of a dislocated shoulder before Aleph gave one last grunt of effort and let go of the drone letting it impact halfway up the side of a nearby three-story brick building. Even from thirty feet away, Sam heard a definite crunch as the drone hit. He winced as the limp body toppled to the ground.

Wiping off her hands, she calmly walked to the drone who had taken the foot to the head and was just now regaining his feet. He had a heel-shaped crescent on his temple and blood was seeping freely onto his collar. He growled at her and actually bared his teeth as she approached. Aleph rolled her eyes and swept his leg in a move so fast and violent that he nearly flipped over in midair and hit the ground face first. In the near-perfect quiet of the shocked crowd, she dragged both of the weakly struggling drones to a nearby bike rack, passed a set of handcuffs through the metal rack, and clasped their wrists together.

With a pop of sparks, Gobshite appeared on Sam’s palm and the nearby crowd let out a collective gasp and drew away.

He grinned sheepishly. “Whoops.”

Meanwhile, Aleph had pulled a badge out and was addressing the crowd, "I don't have time to answer questions. Go home and stay there. The city isn't safe."

Predictably, people in the crowd began to shout questions at her, but she'd already turned her back on them and was making her way back toward them.

“Wow, you can really kick some ass!” said Dimitri, trotting up to Aleph.

“Come on, we need to get the Armoury fast.”

“How come?” asked Sam, joining them. He’d decided to keep Gobshite around for the time being.
 Aleph began a quick lope to the south.

“I called the Armoury. There’s no phone or Internet in all Senak, it’s gone dark. Knox has somehow shut down everything. It wasn’t a bluff, he’s going for the whole city.”