Mask of Humanity

As Nicolai slipped towards them, knife-rat dropped the body and went for the knife while club-thug pasted on a fake smile and said: ‘Slow down, hey—‘ still apparently operating under the belief that words could have any effect on Nicolai.

By the time his words cut off Nicolai was already threateningly close, and he saw the wheels turning in club-thugs eyes then the man raised the club, face twisting into an aggressive snarl as he took a step forwards and swung down at Nicolai’s head. A clumsy blow. After what they’d been up to, any typical self-defence chips they possessed would have switched off, demanding they report themselves to law enforcement for investigation.

Nicolai slithered out of the way, brushed the man’s arm aside and saw club-thug’s eyes widen as all of a sudden they were in hugging distance. Then club-thug’s eyes went up as Nicolai slammed his palm into the bottom of the man’s chin and drove forwards to push him off balance, his leg darting out to get behind the man, and with a shove from his hand and a pull from his leg club-thug went spinning towards the ground where he impacted noisily, a pained ‘oof,’ bursting from his lungs.

Nicolai kept ahold of club-thug’s arm and stripped the baton from it in that moment, stepping back to avoid a lunging stab from knife-rat and flicking the baton out to catch the man on his forearm, hearing the satisfying crack of a bone fracturing.

Knife-rat reeled away, yowling like a burned cat, dropping the knife, and he tripped over his friend who was mid-rise. That gave Nicolai an opening to raise the baton with both hands and smash it into club-thug’s forehead, sending him limp back to the ground.

Knife-rat was on the ground, too, staring up at Nicolai who hopped over club-thug. Knife-rat tried to scrabble backwards with his legs, his good arm raised defensively, placatingly. Nicolai smashed the baton into it and knife-rat screamed, flopping over and flailing his way into a space between two sarcophagus.

‘Hey, hey!’ knife-rat gasped. ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he gibbered, getting himself further into the dark.

Nicolai let him go, turning back to club-thug who wasn’t entirely dead yet, rolling around and moaning, clutching at his bloodied head. Nicolai made him stop moving with a rain of vicious blows that didn’t end until the man’s face and head were just a big bloody mess with shards of bone and brain poking through.

Finally he returned to knife-rat—now just rat, he supposed—who was still in the same place, his eyes wide and pale, shining orange with reflected light in the dark. Nicolai considered him a moment, the only sound that of his slow breaths and rat’s panicked gasping.

There was something horrible rising inside of him and it needed to be let out, to be vented, lest it consume him. He had the feeling that the process would take some time and require his full attention, which meant that first there was something he needed to check.

The exit from the crypt, a short stairway through the stone into darkness, pricked at him. There could be anything up there, just waiting for his back to be turned, and his paranoia was almost as strong a force as the dark urges, equally as demanding.

After a lingering look at the rat Nicolai stepped away and slid warily up the steps. He looked left and right into a dark corridor, seeing darkness to the left, but a lit area some distance to the right. He paused in the stairway, quiet, listening.

‘Hey…’ It was the rat.

‘Shut up,’ Nicolai turned and hissed viciously at the man, and he was silent.

After a couple of minutes Nicolai heard nothing but the rat quietly scrabbling around, so he returned.

The rat looked up in surprise at him, as though he hadn’t expected Nicolai’s return. He was holding the knife. Nicolai’s gaze bored into that knife and the rat dropped it, guilty, then he slumped back into his corner.

Nicolai sank into a squat before him and put the baton aside to pick up the knife then stared at the man. The rat licked his lips, nervous, not sure what was happening.

Nicolai smiled at him. ‘Tell me something useful.’

‘I-I… what?’

‘About this.’ Nicolai gestured around them with the knife. ‘This place, and this knife; where did you find it? What is up there? Do you have any friends?’

The man’s eyes darted around, realising he wasn’t going to die just yet. ‘Let me up, and I’ll speak.’

Nicolai frowned at him, then lunged forward to grab the rat by the leg and drag him out of his hole. The man thrashed and yelled, but was unable to resist. Nicolai dumped him then raised the knife over him. The light sparkled on steel and blood. It was a weird, curvy design, but the edge looked sharp and it ended in a vicious point.

‘No!’ screamed the rat, raising one of his fractured, swelling arms, mottled purple with a big bruise already. The ad-tat on his upper arm sparkled. It read: Jim Jorges organic cricket protein shakes, on sale! Visit TheOriginalCricketProtein-dot-com!

‘Tell me something useful, and I won’t kill you,’ said Nicolai.

‘Really?’ Desperate hope in the rat’s eyes. He didn’t believe Nicolai, not really, but the hope made him want to.

‘Sure. I get what you’re doing here. There’s nothing personal about it, right?’

‘Yeah, yeah, nothing personal.’

‘So. Tell. Me. Some. Thing. Useful.’ Nicolai bit the words off. Then he smiled and it was a smile more vicious than the knife.

‘Okay, alright, uh, we found the weapons up there.’

‘Friends?’

‘N-no, it’s just us two.’

‘Just you,’ Nicolai corrected him, staring at the rat’s hopeful, falsely innocent face, deciding whether or not he was lying. ‘Go on.’

The rat licked his lips. ‘It’s pretty big. There was a locked door. We didn’t go far.’

Easier to stay here and murder those freshly risen, Nicolai guessed. Part of him thought it a pretty good idea, but he reminded himself he was trying to get away from that sort of thing. The thought made him laugh, a sudden explosion of mirth that bubbled out from his lips, coiled around the room, rose into a howl as the rat gaped at him and Nicolai gnashed his teeth in the man’s face, then the sound abruptly died as he reasserted control.

‘Wha-what?’ said the rat dumbly.

Nicolai ignored the rat while he let out air through his nose, disappointed with himself for his own reaction. I am trying to get away from that sort of thing, he told himself as firmly as he could manage, but his features spasmed and he had to tense his body and face to throttle the laugh in his throat before it could sneak out again. Once he’d won he resumed his smile, refocusing on the rat, who had made use of Nicolai’s loss of composure to wriggle even further back into the corner he was hiding in.

‘Continue,’ Nicolai said.

‘We… uh... I…’ mumbled the rat, his eyes wide and very worried.

‘You were saying what’s up there,’ Nicolai reminded him.

‘Yeah, uh, yeah. Ok. Um, there’s lots of dead out there. Long dead, long, long dead. Skeletons.’ The rat was babbling. He paused to lick his lips, staring at Nicolai with either terror or confusion or perhaps some combination of both, Nicolai struggled to work it out. ‘Most of the weapons are too old, no use, but we found a couple of good ones.’

Nicolai stared at him expectantly.

‘There’s also… oh, yeah! You can get a reward, for passing the Trial.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Nicolai, actually interested now.

‘Look at your Mark, it’ll tell you.’ The rat was speaking faster, Nicolai’s interest feeding his hope. ‘Then this, like a statue will come out of the ground. You can choose a reward.’

‘What was your reward?’ asked Nicolai.

‘I got a radio, he got a water bottle.’ His eyes darted to the bloody remains of club-thug. ‘We both got crystals and these little metal things.’ He gestured to Nicolai’s right. ‘It’s all over there.’

‘What about all the people you killed?’

The rat stared at him. ‘What?’

‘The people you killed. What about their rewards?’

‘Oh. We just killed them.’

‘You didn’t give them time to get their rewards first?’

The rat chewed at his lip, upset, defensive. ‘No. We just wanted the Seeds.’

Nicolai pouted his lips sadly at the rat and shook his head, pretending disappointment, but he was struggling not to grin, the dark urge inside of him squirming, eager and hungry.

‘That wasn’t very smart,’ he said, and then he stared at the rat as though waiting for more, and the rat was pressed by his gaze, expression wavering as he tried to think of something else, struggling.

‘Come on, rat, what else you got?’ Nicolai hissed, leaning forwards, the nastiness in his voice contrasting with the smile on his face, a sick excitement crawling through his veins. Everything around the rat seemed to twist and fracture slightly, stone melting together, sparks of phantom light jumping about, and Nicolai felt a momentary vertigo but he rode it, was fuelled by it. The shadows were pulsing and whispering.

‘I… uh… uhhh…’

‘Come on!’ Nicolai roared at him, and the rats skin bubbled as though insects roved beneath it.

‘Let me think!’ screamed the rat, trying to squirm backwards but his shoulders were already digging into the wall and Nicolai lunged forwards, a cat pouncing, grabbing him by the leg, and when he pulled the rat seemed almost weightless, like a child.

The rat’s terror was a soothing balm and as it peaked Nicolai started stabbing, plunging the knife into the man’s stomach, who squealed as Nicolai ripped it out leaving a big dark bloody hole and the rat tried to keep him off but he was weak with broken arms and Nicolai kept on stabbing him, his demented laughter ringing off the stone walls and the shadows danced and laughed with him.

Some time after it was done he found himself stood above the torn, punctured mess of bleeding flesh he’d turned the rat into. What was the point of all that? He let out a sigh, rubbing tiredly at his face, irritated and faintly disgusted with himself. He’d lost control. Again. Though, at the very least, now it had been vented he was calmer, the ugly impulses descending to leave him in peace.

What he should have done, he told himself as he stared into the quietly twisting darkness, was calmly and kindly ended the rat’s life as humanely as possible. Perhaps a single stab right through the eye and into the brain. It wasn’t so much for their sake as for his, as they drew no sympathy from him.

He was relatively sure a normal person wouldn’t feel bad about their deaths, they were guilt-free kills, like Nazis or… zombies. In a way, he felt that the fact they’d encountered him was a type of karmic justice.

But even so, he also felt that the theoretical normal person, a not-crazy-psychopath, would have killed the rat as painlessly as possible and without terrorising him first. It was the Right Thing To Do. Nicolai nodded to himself. That was what he needed to be doing. Human things. Being a Better Man.

After checking the exit again to sate his paranoia, Nicolai performed his next actions with an attempt at meditational calm and quiet. He removed the clothes from the two men he’d killed then placed their bodies into two of the sarcophagi, alongside the corpses already there. On a human-like whim, he closed the rat’s eyes as he did so, but couldn’t close the club-thugs eyes because he’d smashed his face into bloody white splinters.

The rat’s face, and the club-thug’s splinters, seemed to writhe under his gaze as though they might start speaking at any moment. The dancing of the shadows had shifted into a slow, malicious winding. The walls pulsed and it felt as though the room was getting smaller. The whispering rose and now he could almost make out words.

He recognised all of this as a hallucination. The first of his new life. It had been a long time since he’d last experienced such but he knew he needed to act fast. He had to perform some type of act to put a cap on what had just happened, and then distract himself, or it would get worse.

‘I’m sorry,’ he told the corpses, speaking not just to the two men he’d killed but all of them, ‘for… for your loss.’ He chewed at his lip. ‘I mean, for what I did. No, for, uh,’ he frowned, searching for the right words. ‘I’m sorry,’ he finished lamely, even though he wasn’t. Except for Carl. Sort of. A little? It was him or me, though. So, not really.

The dead were silent in response, but with a disapproving air that pressed down on the calm Nicolai had wrapped himself in and almost shattered it but then he found the rat’s Seed in the dead man’s clothing, also dead now, but shimmering brighter than his own. That prompted him to dig around until he found the club-thugs Seed, and he felt his own squirming eagerly in his mouth, hungry.