One Minute Ought to Be Enough
Running into a violent criminal in the course of ordinary life is harder than most people think. A garden-variety murderer is rare enough; a serial killer is rarer still. And as for a terrorist — rarer than either, and then some.
Which is why I have always believed that a substantial portion of the violent offenders who end up behind bars are not so much human beings as they are animals. Creatures slavishly faithful to their appetites, fixated on something with the single-minded intensity of a lunatic, and — most critically of all — the products of an education that never once taught them self-control.
In short: ordinary men hunted down by the public authority and stuffed like trophies on a wall. That is the actual state of the violent criminals sitting in prison.
"Y-y-y-you miserable son of a biiiitch...!"
"Whoa, someone's in a mood. If you want to live long enough to see old age, you might want to start watching that blood pressure."
"...I'm going to kill you. That's a promise."
"They all say that."
Not that a single one of them had ever actually managed it.
I could see exactly what the pervert would do next, now that he had retrieved his shredded whip. The common thread among people who cannot control themselves is that a light shove between the shoulder blades is usually all it takes to put them on a leash. And if they can be controlled, they can be predicted.
With a soft rasp of steel, he drew a crude Chinese cleaver from his belt. It was a fashion accessory completely at odds with the image he had been projecting — which meant it was probably the truest thing about him.
Once he had had his fill of tormenting the weak with that whip, slaking every last drop of his perverted appetite, he would reach for something like this to handle the messy cleanup as efficiently as possible. In a certain sense, you had to give him credit for keeping his business and his pleasure strictly separate.
Except now he had drawn the cleanup tool without a moment's hesitation. Which meant the boundary he himself had drawn between business and pleasure had just collapsed.
"First, I'm going to slice that flapping tongue of yours off a little at a time. After that, I'll cut off your eyelids so you can never close your eyes again."
"I'm looking forward to it. And then what — you'll start snipping off my fingers and toes one by one? A little hands-on anatomy lesson?"
"No. I'm going to open up your belly. Then I'll carve out the organs you can live without, one at a time, and let you watch at your leisure."
"Wow. The customer service at this establishment is outstanding."
Instead of answering my mockery, he hurled the whip — no longer a lover, no longer a pet — far off into the distance. Then he began to breathe in ragged gasps, pouring strength into his legs.
Only an idiot would look at that slender frame and decide, on the spot, that there couldn't possibly be much power in it.
A split second later he exploded off the ground with a force so violent I couldn't tell whether he was kicking the earth or the air itself. The momentum behind that charge was considerable. If anything, that wiry, unmuscular build of his might have made him even better suited to a short-range sprint.
"I suppose I ought to start with that smug mug of his."
The Chinese cleaver was as crude a slab of steel as they came, and yet the speed with which it tore through the air rivaled any fine longsword.
But in the Darkzone, you treat your gas mask like your own life. I caught the cleaver's heavy blow on the exo-suit still covering one forearm. It was a piece of gear that didn't scratch easily — and even so, the frame groaned and bent inward with a metallic shriek.
I used the opening of his committed attack to snap a low kick into him from the hip, but that same slender build let him slip out of range as if it were nothing. He knew his reach was longer, so rather than meeting force with force, he answered with evasion.
Still, he clearly had enough skill to go human-hunting alone through a prison in the dead of night.
I shrugged off the cumbersome backpack, tossed it behind me, and drew my machete. I would have loved nothing more than to pull the shotgun off my back and blow his skull apart on the spot, but the motion would have been far too big.
When he had had the whip, I couldn't use the gun for fear of a counterstrike. Now that the whip was gone, I couldn't use it for fear of letting him close the distance. A truly elegant paradox.
Still, I scored a fashion piece out of this, didn't I? I'll drink to that.
The shotgun slung across my back was a style statement all by itself. I had sworn, a full decade ago, that even through a hellish Darkzone survival chronicle I would never surrender my fashion sense.
While I was entertaining that thought, the pervert closed in again like a ghost and swung the cleaver with savage force. I had stripped the exo-suit off the hand holding the machete, which made overpowering him on raw strength alone a little difficult. Steel screamed against steel as the blades locked and ground.
The cleaver — a blade that had no doubt sheared clean through sturdy human bone — was every bit as durable as it looked. Realizing he wasn't being pushed back as easily as he had expected, he let a nauseating smile leak through the goggles of his gas mask.
"I've been targeting you from the start. You've burned through a serious amount of stamina lugging that heavy pack all the way here. So which of us do you think is going to tire out first, hmm?"
"You've got that backwards. I burned through that much stamina — and you still can't overpower me."
"...All mouth, aren't you!"
Had he honestly forgotten that we Ugly Koreans hold an undefeated, unprecedented record in trash talk and keyboard warfare?
As he pumped more strength into the hand gripping the cleaver, even more worked up than before, I lunged in with a surprise headbutt. Gas mask goggle slammed into gas mask goggle. For a brief instant, noise crawled across the delicate display and chewed up his vision.
"Ghk?!"
"A little dizzy, are we?"
The mask had a weak self-repair function, so the display would stabilize soon enough — but he didn't know that. If he had, he never would have shoved his face in that close while wearing the thing in the first place.
A sudden smear of vision hits people with sharp senses the hardest, tanking their physical performance in an instant — the same way a focused athlete can have their entire condition collapse over something trivial. He was no different.
"Son of a biiiitch, I can't see...!"
He had been locked onto me with an almost pathological intensity. Now he shuffled backward in an awkward crouch, tapping at the gas mask goggles with his fingers. Of course, even in that state he would have his ears pricked, ready to swing the cleaver the moment he heard a thing.
I can't see either — but with his type, that's exactly what they'd do.
On top of that, we were high up on a lighthouse. On a helipad no bigger than a futsal court even if you were being generous, with a sea wind howling across it, keeping your footing was no small task.
Which meant I needed to do this.
The shotgun's deafening report rolled across the platform. The sudden gunshot would have made him flinch — even after he realized nothing had hit him, a muzzle blast that close will do that to anyone.
"Haha! Looks like you missed!"
There you are.
Another shot rang out. He still wasn't hit.
"That gun was a break-action double-barrel, wasn't it. Both shells spent... now it's my turn!"
Right on cue, the view through his gas mask goggles cleared. The pervert, who had been staring obsessively at the spot the shots had come from, cracked a grin and coiled himself to charge.
What actually entered his field of view, however, was a single shotgun lying by itself in an otherwise empty stretch of platform.
"I figured you'd take the bait."
"...!"
I hit him from behind, seized the arm holding the cleaver, and wrenched it with everything I had. Bone gave with a wet, grinding crack.
"GAAAAAH! H-how are you behind me?! The shots came from the front!!"
"The cheaper the homemade gun, the easier it goes off if you so much as breathe on the trigger. So I tied a tripwire to it and pulled remotely."
The more bloated the ego, the more delightedly they react to a missed shot that failed to hit them. I had counted on exactly that. Instead of picking up the gun and firing it at him, I had put a little distance between us and pulled the trigger remotely a second time — burying my footsteps under the gunshot so I could loop around behind him.
"With guys like you, it's more satisfying to take you apart by hand than to just shoot you."
"Nngh!"
In a last desperate thrash he spun, trying to drive an elbow into me, but I was faster — I caught that thin waist of his and threw him over my back. He hit the ground head-first. A concussion took him properly; his limbs twitched and shuddered as he rolled across the deck in a thoroughly undignified heap.
"What was it you said? Something about starting with the tongue?"
I picked up the Chinese cleaver — which, much like the whip, had been dramatically liberated from the pervert's hand — and walked toward him at an unhurried pace.
"We've got about a minute left. That should be plenty of time for both of us to enjoy ourselves, don't you think?"
"...!"
I ripped the gas mask off his face, forced open the mouth that was already drooling foam, and set the crude cleaver dancing across his slack tongue like a gleeful little guillotine.
"Goddamn it! Where the hell did these bastards even come from?!"
"Somebody help me over here! These sons of bitches just keep coming!"
"Peel them off yourself! More importantly, where's the exit?!"
"The exit is not this way! You can't go out through the ocean!"
"There's a boat over there! If we take the boat—!"
The convicts who had swarmed the logistics warehouse chasing a quick fortune were having a truly wretched time of it. The instant they had yanked open the mountain of shipping containers with greedy delight, what came boiling out was a long-condensed cloud of toxic gas and a host of bizarrely shaped monsters.
The occasional decent item did turn up, but most of them never even made it into a backpack before the chaos swallowed whoever had found it. The toxic gas leaking from the containers, in particular, chewed through gas-mask oxygen filters in moments — and the convicts too busy fighting to remember a filter change simply started dropping where they stood.
"Oxygen filters! Anybody got a spare oxygen filter?!"
"You idiot! That's why you manage your gear!"
"Just lend me one! I'll pay you back once we're out — double!"
"Get lost! I barely have enough for myse— ghk!"
"Th-that's on you! All you had to do was lend me one!"
Even convicts thrown into the Darkzone with the same objective did not hesitate, the moment it became convenient, to put a knife in one another's backs.
"Look at all these packs the morons dropped. We walk out with just these and we've already made our score."
"Let's slip out quiet. Staying here any longer doesn't look like it'll do us any favors."
"Yeah, but where's the actual exit? How are we supposed to get out of this circus...?"
There were opportunists, too, circling like rats rooting through garbage in a sewer, eyes fixed on other people's leavings.
"A r-red flare just went up from the lighthouse! You think that's the exit?!"
"Let's move!"
"I said help me, damn it!"
"Sorry! Just die for the team!"
A naked, rampant selfishness that would throw comradeship overboard without a second thought the moment a life or a payday was on the line.
But even in the middle of all that, the most terrible thing of all was the way the monsters — the Native Species — slid into the gaps between those human beings with surgical precision.
A tentacle like an octopus arm lashed out, snatched a convict in a blink, and dragged him down into the sea. Guard Dogs that had run all the way from the Apartment Complex prowled the warehouse with amber, lantern-like eyes, hunting down the strays one by one. A mass of flesh too twisted to be called human crawled out of a container and spat viridian toxic gas and acidic body fluid without restraint.
The only ones who survived that slaughterhouse were the ones who had gotten their bodies out of there the instant the situation broke — and the ones now flooding toward the lighthouse, desperate to grab the last ticket out.
"The lighthouse door is open! Get up there!"
"Last one in shuts the door!"
"Wait! Is that a helicopter? That's a helicopter!"
"Run! I said run! We cannot miss this!!"
Among the pack of convicts pounding up the lighthouse's narrow spiral stairs, the ones in the lead allowed themselves a smile, tasting the possibility. If it was them, they could almost certainly make the helicopter.
They took the next step on that belief — and a web of wire traps carved through the soft meat of human bodies like a butcher's lattice.
"AAAAAAAGH!"
"W-wait, stop! There's a booby trap—!"
"Don't push! Don't fuuuucking puuush—!"
The ones behind knew there were booby traps on the stairs. Of course they knew — the screams were coming from above, and blood and scraps of flesh were already running down the steps in rivulets. They shoved the people in front even harder anyway, using them as human shields to force the traps clear.
If the leaders died, the ones behind them would be the ones who made the helicopter.
I don't know who set the booby traps, but it has to be the ones who called the helicopter. If we can, we kill them too and take everything they've got.
Nobody talks once they're dead in the Darkzone! We can do whatever we want! Heh heh.
They ran on with those ugly thoughts burning in their heads. The result was that seven convicts from the trailing group finally, barely, reached the helipad at the top of the lighthouse.
Two people were already on the helicopter. Fortunately, there still looked to be plenty of room.
"Wait! Take us too!"
"We're all going together!!"
"We'll pay, even! Whatever you want!"
One after another they flung out empty promises and raw, dripping pleas, running as hard as they could.
"Of course we're all going together! Come on, this way — hurry up!"
The one already on the helicopter seemed dumber than expected; he actually waited for them. The convicts smiled inwardly, grateful for the fact — right up until the man on the helicopter yanked a mounted machine gun down from the ceiling.
"You lining up in a nice neat row like that works out perfectly."
"Wai—!"
A split second later, a colossal bloom of muzzle flash filled their entire field of view.