Free Void Stalker by Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page B

failure,’ the crouching figure told him in a deep, emotionless rumble. ‘The constriction in your chest and throat. The breath that will not come. This would be more amusing if you feared me, but you do not, do you? How rare.’
    Dannicen raised his lasrifle, even through the pain. The figure reached down to take it from his hands, as though stripping a toy from a child. Without looking, the warrior crushed the barrel in his fist, mangling it and casting it aside.
    ‘Consider yourself fortunate . ’ T he figure reached next to lift the ageing man by his grey hair. ‘Your life ends in mere moments. You will never feel what it is like to be thrown into the skinning pits.’
    Dannicen breathed out a strangled, wordless syllable. He was soiling himself, without feeling it, without realising, as he lost control of his body at the edge of death.
    ‘This is our world,’ Mercutian told the dying man. ‘You should never have come here.’
    Tora Seech was seven years old. Her mother worked in a hydroponics basement, her father taught sector children to read, write and pray. She hadn’t seen either of them in several minutes, since they’d run into the street and told her to wait in the single room that served the family as a house.
    Outside, she could hear everyone shouting and running. The city’s sirens were wailing loud, but there’d been no storm warnings before this. Usually her parents gave her a few days to pack and get ready to head to the shelters before the sirens started up.
    They wouldn’t have left her here. They wouldn’t have run away with everyone else and left her here alone.
    The growl started from far away, and came closer each time her heart beat. It was a dog’s growl, an angry dog fed up with being kicked. Then the footsteps followed it. Something blocked the pale light from her window, and she dragged her thin blanket higher. She hated the sheet, it had fleas that brought her out in itchy lumps, but it was too cold without it. Now she needed it to hide.
    ‘I see you under there,’ said a voice in the room. A low, snarling voice with a crackle, like a machine-spirit come to life. ‘I see the heat of your little limbs. I hear the beat of your little heart. I taste your fear, and it is sweet indeed.’
    The bootsteps thudded slowly closer, making her bed shiver. Tora squeezed her eyes shut. The sheet was a whisper against her skin as it was dragged away, leaving her cold.
    She screamed for her parents when the cold metal hand gripped her ankle. The shadow hauled her from her bed, holding her upside down. She saw the brief flash of a long silver knife.
    ‘This will hurt,’ Cyrion told her. His red eyes stared at her without emotion, without life. ‘But it will not last long.’
    Gerrick Colwen saw one of them when he went back for his pistol. At first he thought his street was empty. He was wrong.
    His first clear glance was of a figure almost a metre taller than a normal man, wearing spiked armour drawn from the depths of mythology. A skinless, bleeding body hung over each shoulder, raining dark fluid onto the dark armour-plating. Three more cadavers trailed along behind in the dust, hooked to the walking warrior by bronze chains pushed into their spines. Each of them had been skinned in the same crude rush, the skin peeled and torn from their body in indelicate rips. Dusty soil coated them now like false skin, painting the exposed musculature dark with ash.
    Gerrick raised his pistol, in the bravest moment of his life.
    Variel turned to him, a bloody flesh - saw in one hand and an ornate bolt pistol in the other. A sourceless peal of thunder boomed between them.
    Something hit Gerrick in the stomach with the force of a truck crash. He couldn’t even shout, so fast did all air leave his lungs, nor did he have time to fall before the bolt in his belly detonated, taking him apart in a flash of light.
    There was no pain. He saw the stars spinning, the buildings tumbling, and fell into blackness