Nightbleed, Peter Fehervari [short story to read .TXT] 📗

was a graveyard of dead machinery. Someday soon such relics would spill out across the entire city, mingling freely with the corpses of its creators.

Will you, won’t you shred the wiles of day and spread the seeds of wild decay?

The Needleman climbed the mound of canisters, picking its way around the runnels of oxidised gunk they’d vomited. The peak was almost level with the top of the fence. Throwing out its arms, the hunter leapt over the barrier and thudded down into the yard beyond, rolling into a crouch as it hit the ground. The impact was bone-jarring, but nothing broke, which was all that mattered. Later there would be pain, but–

Something growled nearby. The Needleman looked up as the growl exploded into a furious barking and a dog hurtled across the yard towards it. The animal’s body was a black-furred slab, bulked out with vat-grown muscles and ridged with augmetic implants. Serrated metal teeth glinted from its muzzle, like the jaws of a trap.

A spike of fear shot through the intruder, puncturing its fugue. Suddenly – horribly – it was mortal again. With a moan of terror, Skreech backed away then wailed as the hound’s jaws snapped shut around his left leg, just above the knee. Swinging its head about, the dog tore through leather and flesh to the bone beneath. Agony drowned out Skreech’s fear, threatening oblivion. He slashed at his attacker wildly, his finger-blades ripping red gouges through its pelt, but it paid no heed. The thing was a damn ward-dog! Its lobotomised brain was wired to ignore pain – maybe even get off on it.

‘Help me!’ Skreech begged the Night Below. ‘Help–’ He kicked out with his other leg and lost his balance. With a yelp he crashed onto his back. The hound was on top of him in an instant, its weight crushing his chest. Hot breath wafted from its jaws, reeking of decay and oil. He kept hacking at its flanks, but couldn’t cut deep enough to do any real damage. Drool spattered his iron veil as the dog snapped at it, trying to reach his throat. Fortunately his mask extended to his breastbone, presenting an impenetrable shield, but if its cord snapped he was done for.

Will you, won’t you tear my bloody throat out? Skreech thought frantically. Yes, you bloody will! He giggled, unable to resist the absurdity of the moment. To die like this, chewed up by a mindless beast, after achieving so much and coming so close to the end of days. It was so damn pointless!

And maybe that was the point…

A blissful serenity suffused him. Letting go, he sank back into the fugue as his severed self arose, eager to be about its business.

‘Will you?’ the Needleman asked the dog softly. With a sigh it flexed its arms and twisted them at the elbows – then again and yet again – contorting them to line up its blades at just the right angle. ‘Won’t you die for me?’

Then it set to work, stabbing and slicing in swift but unhurried strokes, its blades flicking about in perfect synchronicity, instinctively finding and following the fault lines in their subject’s flesh, severing tendons, arteries and circuitry in a symphony of evisceration, delving deeper with every pointed note. The dog whimpered and its eyes glazed over as some vital connection inside was ruptured. Blood and smoke spewed from its jaws; then it shuddered and slumped forward into death.

‘Yes, you will,’ the Needleman purred. Its joints cracking loudly, it realigned its arms and thrust the carcass aside, then rose unsteadily. Organs flopped from its blood-drenched coat. Despite the eloquence of the butchery it had been messy work, unbefitting of the herald’s sublime calling, but that indignity was trivial beside the damage done to its leg. The dog had gnawed deep into the bone. Blood was pumping vigorously from the wound, threatening to bleed the hunter out.

Ignoring the pain, the Needleman cut a strip from the hem of its coat and bound the wound tightly. Without proper attention the leg would likely be lost, but that was irrelevant for now. It was still more or less functional. That would suffice to fulfil this night’s obligation.

Looking up, the herald glared at the smirking totem atop the refinery. The colossal tin-can god appeared to mock it, revelling in the damage its guardian beast had inflicted. They embodied opposing creeds in the secret war for the city’s soul, yet both had arisen from the same primal sickness, albeit from different strains – one seeded by Greed, the other by Fear. No matter how far humanity journeyed from its wellspring, its innate curses would go with it and find fertile soil to fester.

‘You lie to them,’ the Needleman rebuked its rival. ‘I tell only truth.’

Dismissing the crass idol, it limped towards the nearest building. The vastness of the complex would be no obstacle, for the hunter was connected to its ordained prey by an intangible yet unbreakable cord. It simply had to follow the thread.

Chel felt light-headed, yet paradoxically lucid, as though her body had receded, leaving her senses at the fore. The world around her appeared tenuous and transient, as though it were merely one possibility among many, its persistence entirely contingent upon her conviction in it. She understood this was an extension of the state she had been experiencing for days, heightened by the extra dose of the drug she’d swallowed.

I was blind. Now I see.

She was walking the snarl of gantries overlooking Block-D, which housed a sweeping expanse of storage vats. Vita Ephemera swirled languidly in the open-topped containers below, churned by fans to prevent it from congealing. It was all coarse grey gloop, still awaiting processing into the garbage her masters passed off as food. Siphoning pipes protruded from every vat, connected to testing stations above. Part of her job was to conduct regular hygiene checks on the stock. While the company’s nutritional standards were pitiful, actually poisoning its consumers wouldn’t be profitable.

We might kill them,