Damn. I cast a forlorn look at the dented pot bubbling on the cookfire, then reached over and keyed my own receiver. “Armed?"
“One big rifle, both have sidearms, I think that’s it. Looks like cartridge guns.” Galen was never that good at identifying technology at a distance, of course, so I didn’t completely trust that guess.
I sighed. “Keep clear, I’ll be right up.” Shielding my hands from the hot metal with a bundle of rags, I moved the pot off the fire and covered it before grabbing my lucky axe and heading out of my hut.
Some of the others were already milling about near the north side of the village when I got there. Axe haft resting comfortably on my shoulder, I beckoned for them to follow, knowing that no command that they go home and let me handle this would do. Moving through the group, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was nearly a foot taller than the tallest of them, and broader. Pretty soon, I’d have to go looking for a bigger axe blade again.
I broke into a run when I got into the tunnel, slowing only when the intruders’ light reflected off the walls before me. The winding passage was a sewer in better times, but that was over eight hundred years ago. For the last decade that I’d lived in them, only rarely did I ever think of them as sewers rather than caves or catacombs.
A few of the others kept up - Zeke and Boudan as always, my self-appointed personal retinue, as well as the newcomer that everybody called Ironsides. Everyone else fell behind, not surprisingly. My longer legs could cover more ground than most with each step than theirs.
Slowing to a creeping pace, I held my axe before me and listened. As usual for joydivers, they weren’t being particularly subtle.
“...what I saw in the service, this ain’t so bad. Just old tunnels.” A male voice filled with bravado was saying.
“Okay, I’m impressed.” A second voice, female, slightly nervous, replied. “Let’s go, we shouldn’t be here.”
“You kidding Mera? All the way down here and no sport? That’s stupid?” The male replied. “Let me bag one rooch. Everyone’s better off the less of ‘em there are.” Cowards to boot. Rooches, the duck-sized beetles we ate for food, were about as dangerous as the lichen they lived on.
I grimaced. In the darkness, I tapped on Zeke’s shoulder three times, to signal that we’d run a scare on this lot. They didn’t seem dangerous enough to ambush. Well armed maybe, but more stupid than skilled. Zeke glided away to pass the signal on, leaving me alone.
I stood up silently, balanced my axe on its handle, and folded my arms on top of that, letting them come to me.
The beam of the woman’s wristlight played over me almost as soon as the pair came into view around the wide, sweeping arc in the tunnel. She cried out in alarm and stepped back, tripping over loose rubble and falling prone. The man, hefting a rifle four or five sizes too large for him, turned at the sound, but focused on his fallen companion rather than on me, probably because I wasn’t lit anymore. She stuttered and pointed, finally getting the man to shine his own light in my direction.
This beam of light found only my legs, then angled slowly up. The barbed teeth of my axe drew crazy shadows on my uncovered arms and chest. The shadows did nothing to hide the pallid, cancerous lesions that passed for my skin.
“Augh!” The man choked. I sized him up, unimpressed. He was tall and slim, maybe six foot two and two hundred pounds, but still I towered over him by eighteen inches at least. “S-stay back!”
“Go home, upworlders.” I said simply.
“Let’s get out of here, Kos.” The woman, recovering her feet, pulled on the man’s sleeve.
“No! Some Corrupted freak’s not going to tell me what to do. I have the gun.” He seemed to gain confidence from this. “Get out of the way, mutant, or I’ll shoot you.”
“So you can shoot my food supply?” I asked simply. “No. Leave now.”
The man pulled the trigger, and there was an echoing blast. Impressive sound, and quite an impressive effect - the exploding round punched right through the blade of my axe and deep into my chest, blowing a significant cone of flesh out of my back when, most of the way through me, the charge detonated. It hurt like hell, and damn near knocked me over.
Several seconds of silence passed as the man and woman stared at me, expecting me to fall over, but I knew I wasn’t going to. This was why I hated running scare - it so often required me to get shot. Blood and whitish fluids seeped out of both ends of the wound, but not very much.
“Was that a warning shot, or a first strike?” I asked calmly. My voice bubbled a bit - the man had nicked one of my misplaced, repeatedly-regrown lungs.
The man, forgetting that he was there to impress his companion, knocked her back to the ground in his haste to run away. “Kos, wait!” She called, scrambling to her feet, but he was long gone before she had taken two steps. When she realized that there was nothing between her and me, she whirled, fumbling for the pistol at her side.
“Go home. I’m not chasing.” I suggested to her. It would take some minutes for my leaking lung to seal, in which time I would be winded rather easily. Even if I wanted to chase her if she ran, I couldn’t.
“I’ve heard what your kind does to girls like me.” She said, glaring and stepping backwards.
“From people like him, no doubt. You don’t know the way back, do you?”
She didn’t answer, which was all the answer I needed.
“Boudan!” I called behind me.
He loped into the light seconds later. His contorted spine and overlarge shoulders and arms made him look primitive, monstrous, like the mythical gorilla of worlds past. “Yeah Boss?” Looks, of course, were deceiving. Boudan was as clever as anyone, and he had a good head for finesse. This made him sneaker than he looked.
“Make sure that idiot gets out of here and doesn’t suddenly get brave and circle back.” I told him. Boudan nodded and loped past the woman, down the tunnel. I knew my big compatriot was stealthy enough to avoid the notice of a panicked joydiver with a giant rifle.
“And this one?” Zeke said, suddenly at my side. The light did nothing to make his huge, bulbous arm and leg joints look any less bizarre - he looked as much like a bipedal spider now as ever.
“Apparently lost.” I shrugged, mind already on my dinner, which if I was lucky would still be salvageable when I got back. “Who’s on bag lot?”
“Err, you are, Boss.” Zeke smiled nervously.
Dammit again. “Someone better have a meal waiting for me when I get back.” I told him before turning back to the upworlder woman, who was still holding her gun pointed in my general direction. “Oh, put that thing away. You haven’t hurt anyone yet, but things go bad for you if you do.” I might be relatively bulletproof, but that was unique to me. Zeke, I noticed, was keeping himself from presenting a target, staying behind me. Upworlder or no, our rules were simple - murderers died.
The woman, named Mera if the other idiot could be believed, seemed dumbfounded, and her aim dropped. “You’re smart.” She said simply.
“No, I’m a moron. I come out here to let idiots like your boyfriend shoot me.” I pointed down the tunnel. “Come on. Let’s go.” I limped forward slowly, mindful of my bubbling lung, hefting my axe and trying not to let on how much that explosive shell had hurt. Not enough to pose a threat to my life, of course, but a lot. Zeke meanwhile started herding the rest of the group, which had been waiting in the wings in case something went poorly, back toward the village.
“He’s not my boyfriend. I just met him last week!” She protested. “...How are you not dead?” She asked after a few seconds. “Kos said that gun will stop a tank.”
“Regrows too fast.” I said simply, and turned my back to show the now-itchy, depressed pink blotch which had been a giant chunk of missing flesh ninety seconds before.
Mera looked away, shuddering. I got that a lot, so it didn’t bother me. It had been some time since you could call me easy on the eyes. “What are you?”
“The loser of a genetic lottery.” I replied hotly. Of course I was Corrupted. Why else would I live in the old sewers? Did she think a physique like mine was something normally found in humanity’s natural state? “That’s all we are. Most of us even have all the education you do. But of course it’s easier to think of us as savages.” Given that the vast majority of us were sterile, Corrupted were almost always those whose genetic defects had manifested in childhood or early adulthood while they lived above. There were no infants in the village.
“You’re practically immortal.” She replied, cautiously.
I stopped, and turned around. “At what price, this immortality?” I shot back, annoyed. When I thought of all the things I’d lost, and it made me angry just at the idea that she would think me superior because of my handicap’s fringe benefits.
“Uh, sorry.” My charge backed up a step. “I didn’t mean...”
“I know you didn’t.” I dropped my shoulders. “Come on. This way.”
Mera was silent for the rest of the walk, and within the hour we stood at the base of a rusted ladder leading up. The bottom two rungs were missing, but the rest were pretty solid. I’d dropped joydivers at the place several times before, but I usually did it after they were rendered unconscious.
“There, up you go.” I rapped the ladder with my knuckles.
She stepped up to its base, looked up, then turned back to me. “What’s your name?” She asked.
“The others call me Boss Troll, or just Boss.” I shrugged.“Most any of the Corrupted you’ll ever meet will know my name.” I’d been around, traveled most of the labyrinth of sewers years before, back when I was still small enough to use the crawlspaces.
“No, I meant, what was your name?” She pointed up. ”When you lived up there.”
I hesitated, not wanting to say at first. My disappearance, owing to the position I’d held at the time, probably caused quite a stir, assuming the authorities didn’t fake my death or something. Still, ten years was a long time. I sighed, and told her.
Ten years was not enough time that I had faded from memory. Mera’s eyes widened. “Really?” She gasped. “But you - he - was...”
“I don’t want to know what they said happened to me.” I cut her off. “That’s not my world anymore.”
Mera nodded and undid the clasp attaching her holster to her belt. “Here.” She held the firearm out to me. “It’s not mine, it belongs to Kos. But it’s better for everyone if you... keep it for him.”
I reached out one oversized hand to let her drop the handgun into my grasp. “I... I don’t know what to say... Thank you.”
“Should be better than that axe anyway.” She grabbed onto the lowest available rung, hanging at about her shoulder height, but didn’t ascend quite yet. “What does your family know?”
Family? It had been some time since I’d had anything like that, so I assumed she meant my relatives in her world. “Nothing. And I’d rather you didn’t change that. Whatever story they were told is better than the truth.”
Mera looked doubtful, but agreed. “All right.” She turned to the ladder. “You come here often, Boss?” She gestured to the way up.
“One of us does every time we have to ditch a fool joydiver.” I agreed. “Like Zeke said, it’s just my turn."
“All right.” She seemed to be planning something. “I’ll get out of your hair then.” Mera hoisted herself up to put her feet on that first rung. “It was nice meeting you, Boss.” She said, then began climbing in earnest.
I waited until I heard her step off the ladder high above, then headed back. My metabolism was screaming for calories to replace those lost patching holes, but my mind was elsewhere, high above, remembering the world I’d lost all those years before.
When Ironsides dropped off the next joydivers at that exit, he brought me back a letter, addressed only to “Boss Troll”, that had been stuck to the bottom rung. Despite having had my arm nearly blown off by some yahoo with a rail rifle, I smiled as I broke the seal.
This story written based on a prompt from Klazzform's Short Story Competition on rpgcrossing.com.
