ABC - Penance

Preston Gang Camp, Wasteland Area

“Luisa, run!” screamed Minke, spitting blood from her crimson lips. She was tied to a chair, her face covered in blood, with Sam Preston winding back for another blow.

It was only later I pieced together what I actually saw, reviewing the image files from my Smart Goggles and comparing it to my memories.

The space I entered was once a junction room, where the power and water lines converged. It was about five meters square and three meters high, with two exits – the one I had come in through at high speed and the other leading away at ninety degrees, covered by a hanging curtain.

The room was lined with rusty shelves and metal cabinets, their green paint peeling and bubbling away from the steel beneath. All sort of cans and plastic containers filled them, with one wall showing a newer cabinet filled with guns and ammo.

All I registered at the time was Minke being tortured and Sam being the one doing it. My machine pistol lifted of its own accord and I saw Sam’s eyes go wide with terror as she watched the barrel track across her body.

The short burst as I pulled the trigger lit up the space and filled it with the staccato blast of five millimetre Suppression rounds. The curtained doorway twitched violently as Victor fell backwards, my bullets ripping through the thin material to hammer into his flesh.

Sam shuddered and fell to her knees, the Jacker’s control on her released for the moment. I shouldered past her and flung the curtain aside, seeing Victor wheezing on his back after taking three rounds to the chest.

“You’re mine, fucker!” I spat at him and pulled the Jangler from my belt. His eyes focused on me and I knew I had taken too long. My left hand slowly and resolutely lifted the open PCD and clicked it around my own neck.

I desperately tried to pull the trigger on my weapon, the barrel still pointing in roughly his direction. It was like my mind was stuck fast in concrete, my body refusing to listen to my demands.

Victor laughed at me from the tunnel floor, then got back to his feet. A black silk shirt fell open and I could see the impacts of my rounds on his light armour vest, the same kind I usually wore under my suit.

“A good try, Inspector” he grimaced at me, “But not good enough”.

His reached over to my belt and drew the remote controller for the PCD. He examined it by the LED lights shining from the roof of this little storehouse, then set the unit to the maximum power level of Ten. I was certain his control over me was about to lapse, but that was irrelevant.

As he held it up to show me, I felt his control slip away. Then he triggered the Jangler and I screamed and convulsed like I was being electrocuted.

When I was doing my Police Auxiliary training, every one of us got to experience five minutes wearing a Jangler. It was set at level five, usually considered the highest setting needed to subdue a prisoner. Level five was also deemed the minimum setting to stop an Awakened using their Ability.

The pain is excruciating, as the jolts are delivered right into the top of your spine. Most people can’t function with any degree of pain, yet some of us know all about pain. When I fought in the Arenas, pitting my body and my Ability against the best and worst fighters, pain and I became constant companions.

It was never my friend but it wasn’t my enemy either. Pain was something I had to learn to endure, to deal with even as I forced my body to follow my commands. To keep standing, to keep fighting, to keep drawing that fucking cosmic energy into my Kinetic Enhancer so I could use it.

I was yelling hoarsely, my voice cracking with the agony as the Jangler fought to subdue me. Sure, it might knock that poor bitch Luisa Alvarez to the ground but I let her go take a nap. Punching Judy was in charge now and she was fucking pissed!

The look on Victor’s face was priceless as I stopped shuddering and stood upright. I had lost the machine pistol somewhere in the tunnel, yet that didn’t bother me at all. My fists were right where I had left them, ready and waiting at the ends of my arms.

My first punch was a straight hammer to his jaw, spinning him away from me and back into the room. He crashed into Minke in her chair and the pair of them flipped over to land heavily on the concrete floor. The blow had been lighter than I wanted, the Jangler stopping me drawing as much power as I needed.

I stepped forward to hit him again when something warned me to spin around. My left arm raised in a block, the curved knife that Sam slashed at me skittering off the Ceramite vambrace of my composite armour.

It was one of the pair of Bonded Ceramite knives that Minke had ‘acquired’ from the Arena, now wielded by a blank faced Sam. I didn’t need to look at Victor to know he had taken control of her again, desperately throwing her against me to save his own skin.

The knife had no chance of penetrating the Ceramite plating I had strapped over my body, but it was not a full Tactical suit like the Guards wore. This armour had sections covering key locations with only standard Armour weave over the rest of my body. This knife could shear through the weave without any resistance at all.

“I haven’t got time for this, Sam!” I shouted at her, an exercise in futility I knew. With her pressing the attack on me, I couldn’t take the time to wrench off the Jangler or kill the asshole controlling her. All I could do was take the fight to her and subdue her with as little damage as possible. To her or to me!

She stabbed again, the wicked point of the knife scoring across the armour plate on my right arm, then gouging a shallow cut through the weave and my skin. Blood splattered the blade and my arm as she drew back for another strike.

I closed in on her, locking my left arm around her right and snugging the deadly blade up against my chest. Before I could deliver a strike to her stomach she spun us both and we crashed into a section of shelving. Cans and assorted containers rained down on us, then the whole shelving unit collapsed and we were both driven to the floor under an avalanche of canned food and supplies.

With a curse I pushed Sam off of me and rolled on top of the girl, knocking the fighting knife away with a pulse of power. I pulled my arm back to punch her senseless when she looked me in the eye, that same wide eyed look she had when I first entered the room.

“Sam!” I yelled into her face. “Is that you in there?”

Sam fell limp and I did not need her silent nod to know she was free from Victor. For the moment at least. I turned to look at where the guy had fallen and of course he wasn’t there. Minke was on her back, her bloodied face turned towards me with some weird expression in her eyes. It threw me and that was why I was too slow turning to face Victor.

He was in the doorway to that second tunnel and he had my Machine Pistol in his hands. The bastard aimed at my face and all I could do was watch as he pulled the trigger. Lucky for me I got my arms raised in time, the Ceramite plates on my forearms taking the worst of it.

Victor emptied the magazine into me, just short of fifty rounds of Civilian Suppression into my arms, chest and groin. I fell backwards, landing across the open entrance from which I had first entered this party.

Between the Jangler still kicking nine kinds of shit out of my nervous system and the impacts of all those bullets, I was well and truly screwed up. I hit the dusty floor and lay there, waiting for Victor to finish me off. He would have done too, if my own wall of armoured muscle hadn’t come charging down that service tunnel, his massive booted feet shaking the earth like an elephant was stampeding at us.

“Alvarez!” Ghost was shouting and Victor heard him too. Maybe he could have stayed and tried to control the half-machine clone, however I guess he took the safest option. Chicken-shit Jacker turned and ran, followed soon after by Ghost as he vaulted my prone form and set off in pursuit.

I may have blacked out for a few minutes because when I came to, the Jangler had been removed and Minke and Sam were both looking worriedly into my face.

“I’m sorry about stabbing you!” Minke blurted out, tears shining in her eyes. “I didn’t know how to resist him” she sobbed.

“Hey, it’s Okay” I assured her, lifting an arm slowly to caress her bloody cheek. “What’s a little stabbing between friends?”

In my darkest days, I had fought many of my friends in the Arena. We had shed each other’s blood, cracked a few bones and every so often ended their life. If I held a grudge for every time that had happened, I wouldn’t have made it out of there alive.

Sometimes you have to turn the other cheek, as my Mama used to tell me. It was not something Punching Judy believed in, but right now Luisa Alvarez was back in charge.

=====

Four Sentinels clanked into the room, making it feel very cramped. I was pressed back against one of the walls, Minke next to me and Sam Preston huddling against the opposite side.

“That way!” I commanded the mechanicals and they trooped off down the second tunnel, following Ghost and Victor. Their stomping feet echoed loudly as they went, assault rifles held at the ready.

I wanted to go with them and ensure they caught the Jacker. Problem was my ability to give a fuck was severely compromised right at this moment. For now I needed to catch my breath and wait for the nausea that filled me to subside.

Fighting while wearing a Jangler was not a new experience for me, sad to say, and it left me feeling like shit. I righted the chair Minke had been seated on and parked my butt, hanging my head in my hands for a bit.

“You’re bleeding, Luisa” Minke said and crouched at my side, trying to wipe away the blood on my arm. I turned my face towards her and pushed the Smart Goggles up, letting my eyes look her over.

“I think you’re in worse shape, kid” I told her. With my left hand I fished out a small first aid kit from my belt, mostly filled with pressure bandages and a couple of single-shot painkillers. I put the first one against my own neck and fired the injector. Sweet coldness burst into my body, taking some of the edge off the ravages I had endured.

I handed the second painkiller to Minke, who fumbled it and dropped it to the floor.

“Let me do it, Minke” Sam declared in a flat tone and strode across the room. She picked up the disposable hypo-injector and dispensed the pain-killer into the younger woman. Minke sighed in relief and laid her head against me, her body warm even through my armour weave.

Without comment, Sam used the bandages to bind up the more obvious wounds on Minke. She was dextrous and knew her first aid, which I complimented her on.

“If you hang around the Arenas, you need to know this stuff” she replied. “I had to patch up Louis lots of times when he first started out in the ring. He got cut up real bad one time and I thought I was going to lose him. There was blood and chunks of flesh everywhere”

She paused and looked me in the eye.

“I saved him” Sam said. “I saved him but I knew deep down, one day he was going to die in the Arena. Just like Trent did”

Sam had the knife in her hand before I realised it, the razor sharp edge against my bare throat.

“Why did you have to come back here, Judy?” she demanded. “I was holding it together, staying out of your fucking way like you asked. Then you had to come charging back into my life, trying to fuck me over once more!”

My eyes didn’t waver as I looked deep into her haunted face.

“I came here for Minke” I said evenly. “And to kill Victor. He’s a Jacker which means he’s been under a death sentence from the first day he used his Ability on anybody. You know that, Sam”

The first time I met Sam she had been tough and wild and in charge of her destiny, protecting her people as best she could. She had been broken since then and I was a big part of that. It left her vulnerable to assholes like Victor, even if he hadn’t been a Jacker.

“I’ll do what I can for you and your crew, Sam” I told her honestly. “But right now I have to deal with Victor and a whole other bunch of shitheads. Can we park your revenge on me for a bit?”

I felt the tip of the knife lightly mark my skin, the pain barely noticeable after all the other abuses on my body. A warm wetness, a bare trickle, ran down my neck and onto the raised collar of my armour weave.

She had cut me and made me bleed, her honour satisfied. Sam rocked back on her heels and laid the knife down, just as Trixie and her Guards stormed into the tiny space.

“Back away from the Inspector!” Trixie demanded, her pistol pointed at Sam.

“It’s fine, Trixie” I said tiredly from where I sat. “Sam and I have come to an agreement”

The ex-Guard shifted her eyes from Sam to me and back again, her aim on the young woman never wavering.

“And what is this agreement?” Trixie insisted.

“Sam will tell us everything she knows about Victor and help us track him down” I replied. “In return there will be no arrests and no repercussions on her crew”

“Is that right, Ms Preston?” Trixie asked, her pistol still aimed at Sam’s head.

“Yeah, that’s right” Sam agreed, looking up at the tall clone woman without fear. “Plus medical treatment for my people, maybe some spare food”

“Very well, Ms Preston. You have a deal” Trixie affirmed.

Then we felt the pulse wash over us. Somewhere at ground level, there had been an EMP burst.