The Bone Puppets: A Hard SciFi Zombie Soldier Story by Doug McGovern

Author:Doug McGovern [McGovern, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGovern Books
Published: 2017-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

*****

Chapter 10

Elias woke up in the Savannah. His living memory had been like a trance, but it had come to an abrupt ending when tormented animals shrieked from the distance.

“The Hell-Cats…Waking up.” Elias licked his lips.

Hell-Cat. That’s what he’d come to call the demented, intramuscularly suspended lion hybrids that roamed this wasteland. He had no good name for them or any clear understanding of what they were in all reality.

The machine sound grew louder.

Elias’s popped his neck. The distant razor tones were blood chilling.

Ouch. Elias felt his eyes ricochet all throughout his conscious being. Before it had been life on the highway, rubber to the road. Now he had a reason to survive this war. Someone who could potentially be his family.

That is, unless the kid didn’t make it out of this.

Damn you, Eli! Don’t think like that.

“Now for the smart money question. How do I ventilate these damnable felines?!” Elias drew a deep breath of the smoky dust as the wind stirred it up.

That’s just it. I don’t think you can.

There was a sudden human voice that broke like water over the rocks in this sandy clearing. Out of a Joshua tree, a massive Hell-Cat sprang. Elias paused.

It had been a lion once. Probably a young female, just old enough to hunt. The elements and cruel mad-science exploits had been no kinder to the wildlife than it had been to humanity. The crude oil that bathed the world was sticking into her, making her once tawny fur now the color of undeveloped film. Her teeth had gathered enough metal grit from the continuous magnetic sand storms to look like saber-tooth fangs.

Yet it was her body that incited the most fear in them. It was far too long for any African lion they’d ever seen. Fused to the chassis of some forgotten vehicle, entangled with carrion bones of all the animals that had once been her food that had died on this plain, the lion’s living death was a constant reminder of the famine that had put her in this suspended state.

Elias had seen many different levels of hunger in his life. There was the hunger of humans that had survived the genetic “life support” and super-science genocide. This was a sad, desperate hungry that was pitiful and fruitless in its every effort. Then there was the hungry of his torment officers, which was gluttonous gratuity like ravens perched on the world’s husk. Then there was hunger like that of the Puppets and Sweepers, cold, calculating, and purely instinct based, killing because they were programmed only to feed, never to protest.

The Hell Cat’s hunger was something far more savage than all of these put together. It shared traits with these and yet it was psychotic, nihilistic even; it killed for spite, the sadistic pursuit of causing pain to scratch the itch at the thing’s own awareness of endless pain.

The Cat tossed her head toward the sky and chirped with the strange gulping chirps that bullfrogs make. She dug her metallic claws into the dust.

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