Chorus

Hummmmmm

Gaela’s eyes flicked rapidly around the dirty bar, noting unimportant details as she always did when she was nervous–peeling wallpaper, orange fluorescent lights, old liquor, warm beer, two patrons half asleep beside their empty bottles, a bartender with plastic rims on his glasses. The plastic was a bright red, clashing with his pale skin and oddly visible blue veins around his forehead.

She also spotted her two usual partners, Rix and Martina, both nervously tapping their feet as they waited on their mark. The three were small-time thieves in one of the few areas of the Shatterdome that had something approaching a “community.” Barely thirteen years old now, their whole lives had been spent within a six-block radius in that district of the city, only three of those blocks inhabited by themselves and twenty or so others who called this abandoned stretch of Vargos home. Today, they were to kill what they ate.

“Kill what you eat.” That’s what the humming told them.

Kill what you eat.

Kill what you eat.

Kill what you eat.

Gaela was getting nervous again. Rix, Martina, and she had robbed plenty of passersby unlucky enough to get lost in the Shatterdome since they were kids, but they’d never taken a life before, at least, not that they knew of. This was a first for them all. But the humming was constant, maddening, insistent. Kill what you eat. The big man with the arm. 

Kill what you eat.

The door to the tiny bar swung open just as the humming screeched to a halt. A sharp, metallic shriek erupted through her skull like a bull tearing through a glass shop. It hurt to hear it stop almost as much as it hurt to hear it every second of every day. But it had stopped as she laid her eyes on the man in the doorway.

A Gilded Teeth gangster wandered in, his expensive cybernetics on full display, along with the submachine gun strapped to his hip and the enormous knife affixed to the end of its barrel. It was a killer’s weapon, one with black char near the tip and dried blood on the blade, like it feasted only on Vargos elites. His right arm jutted out, glowing faintly blue from subtle lights beneath the skin, an impressive cybernetic buried deep in flesh and muscle.

He was the one.

Hummmmmm

Gaela looked to Rix and Martina. The two youngsters met her eyes and nodded as they walked out of the bar, brushing past the gangster. They’d planned their method as best they could beneath the deafening hum that had plagued them for five months now. Gaela would find a way to lure the man outside, Rix would get hold of his gun, and Martina would throw a plastic bag over his head, hopefully suffocating him quickly. They were too small to fight him one-on-one but the directions from the humming were clear. This was destined. They could not run in fear even if they wanted to. This was written.

The three of them were malnourished Vargos scum. He was a well-equipped and likely bloodthirsty Gilded Teeth member. Sure, he was on their turf, alone for whatever reason, but the humming was clear: his destiny was written too.

Kill what you eat.

Gaela stood up from her seat in the corner of the bar and wandered toward the bartender as the man tapped his fingers against the counter. The metallic digits clicked loudly as they struck the scrap metal surface, drawing the bartender’s attention toward him and away from Gaela.

Her thoughts were moving rapidly, as if no longer her own, as she glanced behind the bar for some way to begin the plan. She had to lure him outside. She stood idly and waited for him to speak.

The bartender leaned against the counter and looked the gangster up and down. He was handsome, his dark skin lit by golden teeth smashed into the center of his face like an idol to some false god. He wasn’t blessed like Gaela, Rix, and Martina. He was a chunk. A husk once human. A stain on what Vargos could be.

Hummmmmm

“Little lost there, mate? Don’t see a lot of grilled-out guys here.”

The bartender spoke with quiet indifference, the kind that betrayed his view of the world. His establishment could have burned to the ground right then and he’d have done little more than sigh.

The Shatterdome was all she’d known, at least since Gaela had been born. She couldn’t remember his name now, even though he was one of the few people she’d seen regularly her entire life.

It didn’t matter. He was a victim of what she could cure. She, Rix, and Martina were going to change things. The Shatterdome, and those that “lived” in it, would only be the start.

Hummmmmm

“I got a little turned around. I’m waiting on a ride from my boys. Give me some vodka.”

“No personal chits here. Place barely has power. We trade things though, got anything to trade?”

The bartender hardly had a chance to finish his sentence before the gangster reached across the bar and grabbed him by the back of the head, slamming his forehead into the counter.

Gaela leapt back, her eyes wide at the sudden display of violence. Vargos was always like this, but she’d never seen something like that. No gangsters ever wandered into the Shatterdome. It was where digital ghosts came to die, and dead tech spelled your end like clockwork. Was this how the rest of Vargos was? Plagued by people like him?

“I didn’t say, ‘I’d like to pay for some vodka.’ I said, ‘give me some vodka.’”

The bartender collapsed, clutching his forehead and wincing under his breath, too afraid to rise and risk getting hit again.

The humming was loud now. Gaela looked at the hulk of a man in terror. He spotted her and gave a shark’s grin, golden teeth gleaming.

“Hey girl. Why don’t you reach over that bar and give me that bottle? The clear one. Think you can do that?”

He took a step toward her. Gaela’s breath caught in her throat, only a tiny squeak escaping.

“Nah nah, don’t be scared. Just hand me that bottle.” He spoke with anger in his words even as his mouth stretched into a too-wide smile. She was losing sight of his eyes as his face warped into nothing more than a grin.

Another step closer.

Gaela wanted to reply, to say something, anything to quell the rage she felt pouring off him. But she couldn’t form a single thought. The humming was too loud–coming from everywhere now. From the buildings. From the electrical currents. From the rain outside. All part of a humming chorus intent on crushing any coherent thought she might have.

“Come on now, I don’t bite. Hand me that bottle.”

He was close now, so close she could barely see the door behind him.

She reached a shaking hand over and grabbed the bottle by its neck. As she lifted it toward herself, a lump formed in her throat. Her gut dropped out from under her.

She didn’t want to get hit. She had to get away. Gaela burst out past the man and into the street darkened by pouring rain and filled with ankle deep puddles in the ancient pavement. She ran from the door way only to spot the man wandering out from it and splashing his onyx boots into the water. His grin was the only bright thing she could see, and it made her skin turn to goose flesh. He was a shark and she was a minnow. 

Hummmmmm

From the shadows, of which there were too many in the Shatterdome with its weak electrical access, she spotted Rix flying out, grabbing the gun strapped to the man’s leg and yanking hard. It had no give.

Gaela’s heart dropped as the man smacked Rix away with a brutal shock of his metallic hand. Rix’s cranium burst in a spray of red as he hit the pavement and moved no more.

Martina came next. She leapt upward, screaming loud enough to drown out the humming Gaela knew she could hear too. It was deafening now, a steady hum of the whole universe filling their heads until their skulls could hardly hold it in for another moment.

The plastic bag wrapped securely over the man’s head as Martina pulled it tight, dragging him down into the puddles littering the street. Gaela was frozen, watching Martina struggle to keep the bag sealed as the man’s boots splashed and scraped in wild kicks.

And then she saw it: his golden teeth. They were flashing. He was biting into the plastic. He was going to make a hole. He was going to live.

Kill what you eat.

Gaela ran toward them just as the man tore a hole in the bag and gasped in a desperate breath of air. He wasted no time as his hand shot down to the gun at his leg and began pulling it upward toward Martina.

Martina’s eyes went wide as she saw the charred barrel and the shining knife leveled at her face. But he wasn’t fast enough.

Gaela was there.

The bottle she’d taken slammed into his skull with a rapidity she didn’t know she had. Again. And again. And again. The only noise she could hear over the humming was the crack and squelch of glass meeting bone. It made her stomach turn. She saw Martina’s mouth wide open in a scream, but she couldn’t hear it.

Then the man went still. Rain poured around them as the puddle beneath turned a deep crimson. Gaela and Martina sat shivering in the cold.

Hummmmmm

Gaela looked up from the horrific sight and saw several hooded figures emerge from the shadows lining the street.

So many shadows. The Shatterdome had never felt so dark.

One figure, its feet scraping against the pavement with imprecise, metallic sounds, led the group as they circled the girls and their gory handiwork. The figure lifted its hand slightly, then dropped it.

The hooded figures began humming in unison.

Hummmmmm

It was different now. Quiet. Soothing. Nothing like the noise they’d endured these last few months.

It made Martina stop screaming. It made Gaela’s nervousness wash away, like dirt in the rain they now sat in.

The lead figure knelt and took the weapon from the fallen gangster. Without hesitation, he plunged it in and out of the man’s shoulder, severing flesh and synthetic fiber alike until the high-end cybernetic arm was gruesomely detached.

Then he turned to the girls. Red cybernetic eyes flared inside the shadow of his hood, just enough to illuminate a metallic jaw caked in blood.

“Kill what you eat, children of the Carrion Choir.” He spoke in a robotic timbre unfit for any human being.

Martina burst into sobs.

Gaela licked her lips.

Hummmmmm