Wasteland Warlords Episode 5: Chapter 3 - Fun Time with War Crimes

“I can’t believe our stream isn’t blowing up,” Joe grumbled, face lit with the gray-blue glow of his suit’s arm screen. “I filled in all the keyword slots—big government conspiracy revealed, cool squad saves the day, David and Goliath fight of the century… We’ve only got one viewer, and I think it’s a bot.”

Alex dug through Clay’s rucksack for his rangefinder. “It’s not like two people sitting around watching nothing happen is super compelling.”

Joe’s shoulders slumped. “And Clay’s not even here to tell you that made no sense and was a grammar violation. Could this day get any worse?”

Alex opened her mouth, then bit back the acerbic reply. As often as Joe annoyed her, they had been through a lot together while Clay was deployed. She was an only child, but Joe had become like a brother to her, distracting her with ancient anime and his own redneck brand of various mishaps throughout those long, gut-clenching, nerve-racking months without her husband. She hadn’t seen Joe this down since the day after Clay boarded the plane for Jordan.

With a sigh, Alex took the rangefinder over to the berm and sat down beside the big lug. Down below, the floodlights from the Supermax lit up the chilly desert night.

She held out the rangefinder to him. “Want to see how far it is to stuff?”

“Hell yeah I do!” He stuck it to his eye and scanned the prison. “How far do you bet that first watchtower is?”

“A thousand yards.”

“Pfft. Not even close. Two thousand fifty-one.”

“Bullshit, give me that.”

“It’s my turn, Alexandra,” he said, stretching so the glass was out of her reach. “If you’re good and you wait patiently, maybe I’ll let you look next.”

They spent the next half-hour making the recon into a bickering match, which kept them both distracted from the Clay-shaped hole in their world. Getting into this place wasn’t going to be easy. Deadly as Bacon Bits was, the Greater Blue Wyrm was built like a bird of prey—hollow bones, aerodynamic angles, and deadly talons—not one of Tolkien’s transport-ex-machina eagles. She couldn’t fly while carrying a full-grown human. Joe and his rockets would have to launch them over the Mad Max fences while they were under the Camera Obscura’s invisibility.

Once the Obscurement wore off, they were in for a world of hurt. Every guard she saw was at minimum a level 17—over Alex’s head by four levels—and they were all jacked up on permanent stat boosts. Clay had left them a ton of temporary enhancement potions, all of which thankfully stacked infinitely, but he wasn’t able to craft permanent stat potions yet. They were going to have to get as far as they could before they had to fight.

“We’re gonna have to do this fast,” Alex said. “Most of these potions will only give us thirty seconds to a minute boost at most.”

Joe shrugged. “So we blast the doors in and run around flapping like chickens with our heads cut off.”

“No, not like chickens with our heads cut off. Fast doesn’t mean haste, it means speed and efficiency,” she said, quoting her sensei. “One, Camera Obscura. Two, you fly us in. Three, crash in through the doors. Four, find Clay and Griff and Griff’s daughter. Five, get the hell out. We don’t slow down to fight anybody unless we have to. Tonight is strictly a smash-and-grab.”

“Maybe we’re going about this all wrong.” Joe tapped the rangefinder on his chin. “We need to rethink this.”

Alex braced herself for the crazy and let out a ragged sigh. “Okay, there are no dumb ideas in the brainstorming stage. What do you got?”

“‘World’s sickest lawnmower versus jacked semitruck—who will win?’” Joe said.

“Excuse me?”

“Or maybe it’d be better to go with the human-interest angle,” he said. “Oh! And the cute pets! ‘Adorable mechacoon plays flaming bagpipes while sexy lumberjack juggles souped-up Poulan Pro Classics.’”

Alex dropped her face into her hands. “You’re back on the keywords, aren’t you?”

Joe was too busy entering them to answer. He chuckled to himself.

“‘IZ Mechacoon eats chocolate granola bar so cute try not to laugh.’ I’d watch the hell out of that.”

“Dammit, Joe!” She shoved him. “We’re trying to figure out the best way to get in there so we can actually do something when Clay gives us the signal.”

“I am doing something, short stack, I’m showing the world the truth.” He squinted down at his screen, then whooped with joy. “Hot damn! Fifty-eight viewers already! Maybe there’s something to all this meta data stuff after all.”

“Fifty-eight viewers who think they’re going to see Chonk eat a granola bar,” Alex said.

“Well, it’s not like he’ll never do that. He loves those things. Hey, it’s up to seventy-nine… eighty… a hundred and four!” Joe grinned and pulled her into a one-armed hug, still watching his screen. “You can’t argue with numbers like that. The moral of the story is that lying on the internet works.”

***

Clay figured it was about an hour later when a fishlike Incomprehensible Cosmic Security Officer finally dragged him out of the pod and through the prison. And a hell of an hour it’d been. Turned out Saurian, the Dungeon Lord Clay had inherited his Incant powers from, didn’t have a lot of natural resistances. He could drop or raise his body temperature to adjust to his surroundings, which was pretty neat in an academic sort of way. Less cool was finding out that he couldn’t do shit about poison, plague, electricity, water, fire, shadow, sonic, psionic, or brute force attacks. If not for the scientist’s health potions, antidotes, and Cure Disease potions, Clay would’ve been dead ten times over.

They left the tower and passed through the centermost ring of cells. Clay scanned the cells, but he wasn’t sure exactly what he ought to be looking for. A younger woman who looked like Griff? At a glance, close to half the prisoners were female, but he couldn’t say for sure that any of them resembled the old weed.

At the second ring of cells, they took the stairs up a level. Some of the prisoners watched Clay pass with a sort of bored curiosity, but most seemed indifferent.

“Open B-29!” the fish guard yelled.

The light over the cell blinked to green and, with a buzz that echoed throughout the cellblock, the glass door slid open.

A fin slapped the middle of Clay’s back, shoving him into the cell. A scar-crossed leathery hand caught him by the arm to keep him from crashing into the bunks. The door buzzed shut behind him.

“Steady there, lad,” Griff said, making sure he was stable before letting go of him. “Ya all right?”

“Fine.” Clay scowled at the retreating ICSO. “I can’t recommend their hospitality, but their healing potions are top-notch.”

There was a snort from the corner. Clay had to do a double take. A heavy-set guy covered in bark and lichen and sprouting a couple hickory branches from the sides of his head like a twelve-point buck wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d seen in the IZ, but he also hadn’t been prepared to see one up close. And definitely not outside of what Clay would’ve guessed was his natural deciduous ecosystem.

“Just wait ’til they start the chemical weapon trials,” the bark-covered man said. “Now those are a party.” He offered Clay a mossy hand. “Shifty Shagbark’s the name, and druidic magic used to be the game. Realm of the Woods and Streams, specifically.”

“Clay Jaeger.” Shaking Shifty’s hand felt like squeezing a fistful of sausages wrapped in dry brush. “I guess you already met Griff?”

“We had a while to get acquainted,” the old weed said with a terse nod. “I was starting to wonder whether they put you in a different block, lad.”

“I told him it takes time for humans to go through the Meat Grinder,” Shifty said. “Isn’t that right, Hermie?”

“I told you not to call me that,” muttered someone from the bottom bunk. “It’s Herman. And don’t waste your time getting friendly. These mooks won’t last a week before one of them hangs it up.”

Shifty snickered. “Well, if you do, try not to get any of your death-throe fluids on the sheets. They don’t change ’em that often. The room service here is terrible.”

Clay backed up a step so he could see the speaker on the bottom bunk. Unlike Shifty, there was nothing inhuman about this Herman guy. He looked like your garden-variety average joe who’d had about a decade’s run of bad luck. He could’ve disappeared into any crowd on the planet except for one identifying feature—a faded tattoo of an eagle, globe, and anchor sticking out the bottom of his jumpsuit’s left sleeve. At one point, he’d been in the Marines.

“That’s a hell of an accent you’ve got, Herman,” Clay said. “Brooklyn, right?”

The man turned over to raise an eyebrow slashed with a scar at him.

“There was a guy in my unit from Bedford-Stuyvesant,” Clay explained. “He had a pretty heavy accent, too. We used to call him Buckie, you know, like in Captain America, since Buckie and Steve Rodgers were from Brooklyn.” That, and he’d had some big-ass buck teeth, though Clay kept that part to himself.

“Fuck Bed-Stuy,” Herman said. “Red Hook’s where the real Brooklyn’s at. What unit were you with?”

“The Second Marine Regiment, out of Lejeune.”

“You were in Jordan during Hellgate?”

Clay shrugged. “The Blind Oracle was the reason I enlisted. Never got close enough to actually see him, but we spent most of our time taking out the monsters he summoned and left running free.”

“OP son of a whore, wasn’t he? He coulda wiped this whole side of the IZ off the map if he’d wanted to.” Herman sounded almost wistful. Then he turned back over to face the wall. “Unless they brought his stupid ass inside. Then all that power woulda been about as magical as a fart in a wet paper bag.”

“That’s the nullifying runes at work,” Shifty volunteered, pointing out the nearly invisible lines of sigils in the glass. “Like I was telling our old buddy Griff here, they built ’em into the bones of this place. Can’t use a drop of Magicka, no matter what level you’re at.”

“Meaning they built this place with the intention of containing powerful magical creatures and Incants,” Clay said. “It wasn’t an afterthought. So who’s running the Supermax?”

“It’s a joint effort.” Shifty put up a twiggy finger on each hand and drifted them together. “Big Pharma and the government, working in concert. Word around the cellblock is they built it at the beginning of the Merge as a handy place to stash any of my type of folk they caught trying to cross the containment wall—NPCs and mobs, various handsome devils like yours truly. When Incants started popping up a few years later, they used the Supermax as a place to lock up the ones who wouldn’t play ball.”

“Play ball how?” Griff asked.

Shifty shrugged. “Oh, go on state-sanctioned killing rampages, do TV spots, pose for superhero cartoons, that kind of thing.”

Clay frowned. Superhero cartoons? Maybe pinning all their hopes for intel on a guy named Shifty wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done, but it wasn’t like reliable narrators were lining up around the cellblock to help them.

Griff grunted. “Seems kinda dangerous to stick a buncha folk this powerful all in one place, don’t it? Why not kill ’em outright soon as ya capture ’em?”

“Three good reasons: money, money, and money.” Seeing their blank looks, Shifty explained, “One, the corporations funding the government want to keep the Incants around until they can find someone who will do their bidding to kill ’em and take their powers. Two, them and Big Pharma are trying to find a way to isolate and replicate our powers so they can be given to anybody they want without the muss and fuss of finding and killing a Dungeon Lord or Incant. And three, the biggest of the big enchiladas, Big Pharma can do whatever sorts of unethical tests they want for diseases, procedures, drugs, and chemical warfare, because we’re less likely to die from complications. Plus, we’re not technically human, so they can avoid any sort of legal backlash if they’re ever found out.”

From the way he said it, the druid clearly thought reason number three was the worst of the lot, but it was that second one that put Clay on edge.

If that Soul Overload experimental potion he’d seen in the Processing room worked, then Big Pharma was succeeding at isolating powers. If they ever found a way to replicate that without needing a supply of magical beings to slaughter, the world was in for a real apocalypse. The Merge would look like a kid’s prank compared to armies of unstoppable spell-slinging super soldiers running roughshod over the globe.

Finding Griff’s daughter and breaking out of this place was still priority number one, but it was looking like they needed to add “destroying Supermax Conglomerated” to their to-do list. If they didn’t, Big Pharma and the government might finish what the Merge had started and actually destroy the world.