Weary Traveler

“Idiot!” Mitch screamed, smacking his forehead, allowing himself one self-admonishment. “Let’s go, Mitch Henderson, fucking focus.”

“Approaching triple zero.”

Mitch shuffled to the left side of the door and pressed his back flush against the wall. He reached inside of his jumpsuit, fumbled for something, pulled out the slingshot and a handful of pellets, loaded one up.

His cracked lips parted to allow a thin stream of air to spill from his mouth, putrid breath spreading around his body like a bum forcefield, trapping him within a shell of his own stinking rot.

The elevator chimed and a white light above the door flashed, turned solid.

“Elevator door now opening. Please, watch your step.”

Mitch poked his head into the gap just enough for his eyes to scan outside the elevator. A faint fog wafted out of his mouth from his hot breath colliding against an immense chamber, chilled and dark like the inside of a refrigerator. Strips of a faint, blue glow lined the top of the walls in-between the crack that touched the ceiling, illuminating triple zero beneath an icy hue. No sign of movement. Only the distant mechanical buzz of machinery and a droning hum permeated the air.

Mitch crept on the tips of his toes into the opening, slingshot raised, pellet loaded, rubber pulled taut. He aimed left, quickly twisted at the waist, aimed right, scanning the room like a seasoned mercenary orchestrating a routine heist.

Smooth concrete covered the chamber floor. One enormous room like the library, but in the shape of a colossal circle like Jefe’s blueprint. It was populated every few dozen feet by cylindrical, glass domes that looked like see-through shells protecting exhibits at a museum. Sitting at the center of each one, were tables piled with various pieces of scientific equipment, weapons, and technology. Other domes encased raised pedestals and possessed additional light sources that shined upon Crawler tech.

Mitch crouched and scurried up to the nearest dome, stopped beneath a placard above the glass door: Spy Eye. He waved his keycard in front of the scanner on the right side of the door.

“Approved,” a woman’s voice said. “Welcome, Gabriel.”

Mitch slid the card into his pocket and slipped inside the glass case. A perfect circle with about a ten foot height and diameter. The object floated and rotated above the pedestal by way of some gravitational force. It looked like a pair of goggles with the right lens missing. The left lens looked like a large eyepatch illuminated by a transparent, ruby light.

He reached for the tech. A numbing vibration crawled across his hand, squirmed up his forearm, buzzed his elbow and tickled his nerves like he had dipped between two, industrial-sized magnets, plucked the object right out of the air. The field hummed, wobbled, flicked little ripples of energy through the dome. He turned the Spy Eye over, probed its structure, tested the weight in his hands. And then, he slipped it over his head, nestled the goggle over his left eye and settled the straps over his ears.

“Welcome to Spy Eye,” a woman said in a cheerful voice that spread out from hidden speakers that lined the elastic strap. “Name of suspect?” she asked.

Mitch scratched his head, jaw slacked, dropped into a puzzled expression.

“Name of suspect?” the voice repeated.

“Jefe,” Mitch said, adding extra Spanish flair. “Jefe Rodriguez.”

“Locating,” the voice said.

The eye patch flashed and then zipped forward like it was attached to the nose of a Rotech rocket. A swirling kaleidoscope of color zoomed through Mitch’s left eye in a blur of light before stuttering to a stop in the Pearl District, right outside Jefe’s office.

“Holy shit,” Mitch said.

“Would you like to continue?”

“Hell yeah. Continue.”

The camera smashed through the walls and stopped at the center of the room. Rotated clockwise. There was no indication of-

“Stop,” Mitch said. “Go back a few feet.”

The camera reversed.

“Right there,” Mitch said. “Zoom in.”

The camera crawled towards two, augmented asian women sitting on wooden chairs around a large throne with Jefe’s enormous body planted at its center.

“Raise camera angle and zoom in,” Mitch said.

It crept higher, floated closer to Jefe. His eyes were closed and his head tilted backwards onto a headrest. His hands rested on some kind of portable operating table and his bare, gargantuan feet were propped up on a block of padded cushion, toes splayed out from pieces of foam tucked between each one.

Every few seconds, the woman on the left would pluck a piece of skin off of one of Jefe’s cuticles, or use a brush to buff one of his fingernails, while the woman on the right dipped a tiny brush into a vial of glossy pink liquid, coated each of Jefe’s toes.

“What a pussy!” Mitch said, slapping his leg.

“Contact, Jefe Rodriguez?” the voice asked.

“What? No, no, cancel!”

“Cancelled,” the voice said.

Mitch ripped the Spy Eye off and tucked it into the hip pocket of his janitor jumpsuit. He peered outside of the dome and looked around the room towards the nearest glass case. There was one about twenty feet towards his left with a slender beam of blue light hovering over a pedestal.

He poked his head out of the open door, checked for Crawlers, and then tiptoed on top of fast feet over to the next cylinder, glanced at the sign above the door, Lightsaber, scanned the card and crept inside. The dome rumbled from the vibrating force spilling out from a blue beam like an enormous electrical wire had been cranked to its maximum energy surge.

Mitch licked his lips, eyed the lightsaber’s chrome handle spinning slowly in the air over the platform. His hand crept over the edge, gripped the handle, and yanked the beam from its perch of levitation.

The weapon was heavy. Handle, cold in his firm grip. He brought the beam towards his face for a closer look. Heat from the blue energy singed his skin, sizzled the thin hairs atop his sweaty head. There was a circular, black button on the lightsaber’s handle. Mitch brought his thumb around the side and pressed it. The beam dissolved into nothingness, sucked into its handle. Vanishing with a buzzing hum like an electric Glider sliced through the air.

He tucked the lightsaber into the left pocket and wobbled out the door with bulbous chunks protruding from his hips like they were stuffed with rocks, weighing his skinny body down against the force of gravity. The tech slowed his pace over to the next box, which held some kind of black jumpsuit similar to his janitor uniform.

Mitch shuffled around to the front opening, glanced at the sign above the door: Chrono-Suit.

He took a half step towards the opening, stopped, looked around the room. No sign of any creepy Crawlers. But just beyond the backside of the Chrono-Suit dome, were two more glass cylinders. One about twenty feet further on the left; the other about the same distance on the right.

Mitch closed his eyes and clenched his jaw so hard that his decayed teeth started to creak.

“No,” he mumbled through his teeth, shaking his head. “No!”

He glanced at the dome on the left again. The rotating platform at its center levitated some kind of gun with an enormous muzzle like a megaphone.

Mitch sprinted towards it without recognizing a conscious decision to do so. It was like his unconscious mind possessed an overriding dominion over his conscious brain, as if it forced control over his body whenever he was about to make a sensible decision.

He scanned the key card and glanced at the GravGun sign above the door, sprint inside and snagged the bulky weapon from its hover field.

“Whoa,” he grunted, as his flimsy arms dropped towards the ground, nearly ripping his shoulders from their sockets. He grunted, heaved the heavy weapon close to his chest and wobbled over to the adjacent dome.

The GravGun weighed him down while the chaotic voices in his head battled for supremacy. They tugged at the tethers of his consciousness, ripped his thoughts to shreds like a mech-dog chomped on his brain and ground it into a million pieces.

Save yourself! Drop everything and escape!

Steal it all!

Kill Jefe and his buffoons!

Blow up the Crawlers and their false Paradise. Burn it down and unmask it for the demonic inferno that it is.

Drink booze. Eat bonzos.

“Shut up!” Mitch screamed.

He hobbled over to the next cylinder. His beating heart and panting breaths filled his ears, echoed through the chamber, silenced the voices in his head for a moment.

The sign above the door read: Ghost Cloak.

He scanned the card, stepped through the doorframe, and yanked a round disk from the rotating platform. Then took off through the door and back towards the Chrono-Suit dome, pockets and hands filled with the Crawler’s weapons and tech, shaky legs swinging wide, feet pounding atop the smooth concrete.

He stepped through the opening and peered up at the Chrono-Suit. The material was an infinite obsidian, absorbed all sources of blue light from the room as if the Crawlers had captured a black hole and packaged it into a jumpsuit.

Mitch set the GravGun and Ghost Cloak on the floor and then reached for the Chrono-Suit. He tugged it off of its pedestal, setting off a screeching wail that exploded across triple zero.

He winced, dropped the suit, plugged his ears with the tips of his index fingers. Red and white lights dropped from the ceiling, burst out from the walls. Rotating, flashing. Screaming, screaming. Louder, faster.

“Intruder in Advanced Tech… Intruder in Advanced Tech…” a monotone voice repeated until the sound burned into the folds and ridges of Mitch’s mind.

The blinding sirens blasted through his savage eyes, sending tiny jolts of electricity through his body, consuming his vision within a piercing luminescence, loud and bright enough to shake the equilibrium from his soul and drop kick his consciousness into a dark abyss.

The chamber swirled around him. The central axis point of the Universe. The place where worlds collide and galaxies spawn. He peeked outside of the Chrono-Suit chamber. Crawlers had yet to slither their way onto triple zero to capture and exterminate the synthetic rat janitor that would dare infiltrate their angelic Paradise.

Mitch stared at the three objects strewn across the floor, analyzed his bulging jumpsuit pockets. A battle between the value of life and the value of tech on the streets of Rosenfell.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” he screamed, pulling at the remaining hairs on his head.

“Do it, Mitch Henderson,” an ominous, all-consuming, voice whispered.

Mitch jolted upwards, looked left, turned right, searched for the source of the voice.

“Who’s there?”

No response.

He looked down at the loot.

“Fuck it.”

He grabbed the Chrono-Suit, unzipped the seam that ran down its torso, and stepped inside, pulled the skin-tight, glimmering, obsidian fabric up to his waist, shimmied, and yanked the top layer over his shoulders. He zipped up the torso until it covered his body all the way up to the bottom of his neck, then pulled the skull-squeezing hood over his head, turning his pale pink face to a fiery red spotted with warm beads of sweat like he gulped down a vat of beer within a few seconds.

The bulging wrinkles from the bunched up janitor uniform, Spy Eye, slingshot, and Lightsaber in his pockets gave the appearance that the Chrono-Suit was warping the space around his body. He lifted his arms, examined the suit. There was a control panel that lined the inside of his left forearm and extra padding over the torso to protect internal organs.

Mitch hefted the GravGun off of the ground, tucked it in the nook beneath his left arm and swiped the Ghost Cloak disk. Shook it, pressed the sides, slid his thumb over its smooth metal. No sound nor flashing lights appeared. He made a motion to tuck the Ghost Cloak inside of the Chrono-Suit, when the disk shot from his hands and smacked into the center of his chest so hard that it forced a grunt from his mouth. A series of melodic dings chimed, followed by a circular dot of blue light that rotated around the edge.

“Ghost Cloak paired,” a voice said.

A solid blue circle about the size of a large jawbreaker replaced the rotating light. Mitch lifted his hand, pressed it. He gasped, coughed, pounded his chest. It felt like the air had been sucked out of the room, trapped within a vacuum of empty space.

His eyes focused on the vanishing act his thumb just conducted. He blinked rapidly, shook his head, brought his right hand in front of his face and wriggled his fingers. But there was nothing there, his arm vanished. His entire body transformed into a shell of nothingness, a veil of invisibility.

He peeked out of the Chrono-Suit chamber towards the elevators just as the doors slid open and spit out a group of Crawlers. They dispersed, light rifles raised, sweeping, heads swiveling.

“Exterminate on site!” one of the Crawlers screamed.

“Annihilate the janitor!” said another.

“Obliterate the human!”

Mitch looked down, confirmed his invisible body, and then tiptoed out of the cylinder. He shuffled around the outside with his back flat against the fiberglass and stared straight ahead towards the concrete wall at the back, opposite the elevators. Beneath one of the flashing lights, was a steel door, appearing and disappearing with every siren rotation.

He sucked in a breath and then launched off of the Chrono-Suit chamber, burst into a slow-moving sprint, weighed down by the weight in his pockets and grasped in his grip. The pitter patter of his invisible feet tapped through the room like a specter scurried across an abandoned asylum.

“Over there!” a Crawler cried out, voice echoing through the chamber like it morphed into a dozen copies of itself.

The Crawlers’ light rifles shined scarlet beams across the room. They pierced and reflected off of the glass domes like a kaleidoscope of fiery laser points, searching for the criminal, human intruder.

Mitch’s invisible body slogged along the back wall over to the steel door. He shoved a hand into the Chrono-Suit, stretched, fumbled though the stuffed pockets of his orange janitor jumpsuit, pulled out the authorization card and waved it in front of the holo-panel until it flashed and turned solid white.

“Approved.”

Pressure released from the door’s locking mechanism. Mitch lowered his shoulder, nudged the door just wide enough to shuffle through sideways, sliding his back across the cold steel until the door shut and locked.

A long, narrow corridor stretched in front of him. The walls were constructed with smooth concrete. A trail of white lights shined down from the ceiling, illuminated the path to the end about fifty feet ahead, where it veered off towards the right.

Mitch slogged froward. At first, a slow wobble, picking up enough speed to stumble into a stomping jog and then an awkward sprint. White lights whirled overhead, turned individual points into a single blur.

When he reached the turn, he slowed just enough to keep from colliding with the wall, planted his left foot into the ground, and then launched, smacking flush into a Crawler sprinting in the opposite direction.

They grunted, dropped into a heap on the cold, hard ground.

Mitch gasped for the breath that escaped from his lungs, tried to steady the swirling lights that whipped around his dizzy head.

“Intruder!” the Crawler screamed. He raised his light towards Mitch, fired a beam of hot energy that tore through the air just above his head.

Mitch leaned sideways, fell onto his elbow, and fired a single shot from the GravGun.

A sonic boom burst from the weapon’s muzzle like an air cannon exploded from Mitch’s hands, trapping him within a bubble of dense energy.