Dernière Volonté

February flash fiction

A shot at Bradley Ramsey February flash fiction thingy.

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I couldn't feel the rocks under my back, the slight gust that rippled the standing water forming in craters. I couldn't feel the rain across my skin. My eyes strained to fight against a complete system failure and my lungs fought for every wheeze and hiss. Every bit of data raced across my sight, struggling to stay longer than a few seconds.

Massive hemorrhage detected among internals.

Host integrity compromised.

Lungs lacerated.

They repeated in dull green text across my retina. I could lift one of my arms in small intervals as the muscle assisted rotors whined against the load. Every noise around me was muffled, garbled through the metal plating, no audio was being sent to me from the outside. It was just what was left of my real ears straining to hear through my war sarcophagus.

The crumbling sky scrapers around me loomed like 500ft tombstones. The names of millions recorded in every bit of crumbling stone, bent rebar and shattered glass. The clouds swam into one another in great grey and black waves. Churning, the nest of our doom.

Dots of light flashed within the corpses of buildings, eyes of perched atrocities peered down to me chittering. Me, a simple stain amongst the canvas of horror, a mass grave of every human that followed me into their final resting place. I was a prize kill. One who was responsible for countless deaths.

I didn't regret it. I strived to be this. Every child did.

I ran my last working arm across my metal chest. I could hear it scraping against it from inside. My hand stopped at a hole just above my pelvis. I ran a single digit around the perimeter of the flesh crater.

I could feel it.

A searing pain that didn't leave when I stopped, just thrummed on continually. I couldn't remember the last time I felt anything. Not pain, not pleasure, no happiness or anger. It was all replaced with a purpose. I was the butcher sent forth unto the waiting masses of meat. I was the gun, I was pointed and fired.

We didn't need to sleep if we were told. Nor eat. We were the host as much as the host was us. Us mortals, it our coil.

I breathed in as deep as I could. Savoring the wheezing and hiss of my damaged lungs. I knew this day would come. I just had hoped to see the sky again. Not clouds, not greys and blacks and flashes of cloaked lightning. Clear blue sky. The kind my parents told me about.

I ran my fingers across the suit along the seams where metal plates fit together. The data still struggling to maintain itself in my vision. I pushed against the seam, a desperate attempt to separate them. It was never meant to come off.

Not by us.

I couldn't find purchase and with only one working arm left I had limited choices.

I wanted to feel the rain one more time.

I pushed two fingers into the crater in my abdomen. Lightning as bright as our long shrouded sun shot through me, I could feel my fingers finally finding a grip on the inner edge of the wound, where flesh met shredded, ragged metal. I pulled to my right flank as hard as I could, for the first time feeling my own muscles strain against it. I felt the plate give way and pull forth like a feeding tick. Leaving remnants of itself behind.

I tried to lift my head, but the helmet was locked at the neck. Nothing to assist. A new vigor was filling me. A last dose of adrenaline dumped through me. Or just a purpose I felt was my own. I pulled on the upper chest plate. As it began to lift I could hear a terrible tearing, a horrid pulling of flesh from its metal nest. It released, my arm raising it high enough to see my own internals. A metal rib cage, with teeth marks of bullets that made it through inches of metal to pierce through my flesh at its core. It dripped with diluted reds and yellows and browns.

With a heave I flung the plate to the side. I was determined to feel the rain one last time on whatever skin I might have left. I pulled at my neck, when that didn't work I tried my face plate. Each tug I felt a pressure behind my eyes. Fighting against my own increasing pain, the mask raised with a sickening sound of wet meat on bone. My vision followed the mask as I lifted it. I could see more of what was left of me.

Legs were gone, they weren't mine anymore anyway. Only one of my four arms obeyed me as the other three lay against the rain soaked, cracked asphalt. My internals still pulsed, even as the cavity filled with blood and rain. synthetic organs replacing most of the important ones; and those deemed unnecessary, discarded.

I pulled at the face plate again. trying to move it out of the way of the rain. I felt that same pressure and my vision left me as I threw it to the side. The adrenaline was wanning, the pain was waxing. Despite it I could finally feel it. The biting cold rain. I used to stand out in it as a kid. Looking up to that swirling sky and beg for the clouds to part. To show the sky lost. Sometimes my parents would join me. They would tell me of the sun and stars and moon. That which I could only dream of and they could only grip tight to.

I could hear the creatures moving across rubble, they still watched me patiently, cautiously. Disassembled, what's left of a human laid bare in front of them and they still fear me. Fear the host.

We were deified amongst our cohorts. A god made flesh and metal to fight the changing people the derelict brought. And to those changed, a god of death, a shield as big as two men in one hand fury in the others. I lifted my hand one last time and ran two fingers delicately across my face. Where the soft flesh hung before, now rigid bone. empty sockets with wires hanging loosely from them.

No human was left to show.

I could feel little bits of cold and wind.

I forgot what the cold felt like.

Forgot what the pain felt like.

I could finally feel the rain.

If only slightly.

Photo by Geetanjal Khanna on unsplash.