Episode 48, “Orrin”

By Phil Elmore

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Sparks danced across the carapace of the military Og.  Loran and Montauk advanced, triggering their weapons at maximum output, spraying the armored monster with as much firepower as they had.  The Og shuddered, settled lower on its hydraulic legs, and spread its arms in a convulsive motion.  The act caused its weapons pods to extend fully.  Peyton drew in a breath to shout a warning.

The Og extended its arms and drenched the warehouse in flame.

Peyton was blown backward by the wave of destruction.  Micro-missiles, bullets, gouts of flame, and sonic-denial pulses battered him simultaneously, ripping up the floor around him.  He saw Loran blown to pieces, his legs and one arm ripped free of his metal torso.  Montauk, too, fell under the hail of projectiles.

The sheer power of the attack pushed Peyton across the floor of the warehouse, rolling him, ripping him, puncturing him.  He felt countless wounds open on his body, felt shrapnel and bullets and flame cut him and gouge him and scorch him.

Orrin pressed its attack, following him, firing again and again.  Peyton watched his body open up.  He saw holes blown through his arms, watched furrows dug in his chest.  He convulsed with the pain, shook with the attack, felt himself being hammered into the floor.  He tasted ash and hot metal.

He realized he could see from only one eye.  The other was swollen shut or gone forever; he did not know which.  In the dimming tunnel of his remaining sight, he saw a flash of blonde hair.  He saw his daughter.  He saw Annika, standing next to VanClef, clutching her pocket watch in her hand.  She was crying. She was calling his name.  He couldn’t hear her, but he could read her lips.

Daddy.  Daddy.

Orrin stood above him now.  The racks of its weapons pods were empty.  Its electric guns spun, but no rounds came from their barrels.  It had emptied its payload completely.  As Peyton watched through his one good eye, the blade of an enormous combat knife snapped into place, attached to Orrin’s right forearm.  The monster was so close now that Peyton could see flecks of rust on the olive-drab paint coating the machine’s armor plating.

Stand up.  Stand up and fight.  Stand up for Annika.

He felt his eye start to close.  He didn’t want to close it. He couldn’t help himself.  The world, and his pain, began to recede.  Stand up. Stand up…

“STAND UP!” shouted Montauk in his ear.  “STAND UP AND FIGHT!”

Peyton’s eye snapped open.  He rolled aside just as the blade of Orrin’s knife slammed into the floor between his face and Montauk’s. The badly damaged Og rolled in one direction, while Peyton went the other.  Peyton caught a glimpse of the damage: Montauk had both arms, but his legs were gone. He was dragging himself along using only his upper limbs.

Peyton stood.

The military Og advanced, thrusting with its knife.  Peyton dodged the blade, felt it cut him to the ribs on his right side, the side he couldn’t see.  He grabbed the metal arm and, with all his remaining strength, squeezed.

The armor was too strong to give… but the wrist joint as not.  Peyton crushed it, pulled it free, and threw the severed hand far away.  Orrin tried to counter by slashing Peyton open, but Peyton still had the limb.  He drove it into the floor, so deeply that the blade lodged fast.  Then let himself fall to the floor and rammed both booted feet into Orrin’s knee joints, causing the top-heavy Og to lose balance and fall sideways.

The combination of Peyton’s weight and that of the military Og’s snapped the blade off, ripped it free of the floor, and sent it spinning across the room.  The soldier-Og simply rolled out of its fall and came up on its feet again, the fingers of its remaining hand held rigid like a spear.  It again began to advance on Peyton.

It did not see Montauk crawling behind it.  The damaged Og was dragging Loran.  As Peyton watched, Montauk peeled back a layer of metal foil over an opening in Loran’s chest, reached inside, and pulled out a pair of heavy cables.  The Og snapped the cables apart in its pincers.  When it drew one severed end against another, sparks flew.

Power.  Loran had a power source in its chest.

If you’re an Og, well, let’s say your pal here might not walk away from the experience.

Montauk beckoned, holding up the spitting, sparking wires.

The distance was too great, and Montauk could not reach more than half a meter above the floor in his current state. Peyton knew at once what Montauk was asking of him.

The military Og lunged for him.

Let’s do it, Peyton thought.

Peyton balled his fists and started boxing. He could feel his knuckles breaking under the power of the strikes, could feel the skin flaying from his fingers, could feel the armored carapace giving under his jackhammer advance.  Orrin shook left and right as Peyton focused on varying his targets, pushing the Og this way and that, trying to overwhelm whatever governed its equilibrium.  It was working.  He was pushing it back.

What came next would be bad.

He judged the distance very carefully.  This was difficult to do, with his depth perception gone, but the warehouse floor was tiled.  Each square was about the size of his foot.  He counted tiles, using them as a grid, waiting until Montauk was in position.

Peyton dropped to his knees, feeling something break in his kneecap. He ignored the pain, grabbed Orrin’s knee joints, and pulled with all his might.

The military Og smashed into the floor.  Montauk struck, jamming the wires from Loran’s chest into the junction of Orrin’s tiny metal skull and the neck stalk that supported it.

An electric arc traveled across Orrin’s chest.  The military Og convulsed, smoked, shrieked once in a mechanical death howl.  Then it was still.  Montauk collapsed next to it, trembling slightly, still holding the wires.  The smell of burning insulation and roasted human flesh filled the air.

“Amazing,” said VanClef, walking over to inspect the dead Ogs.  “I’ve never seen such loyalty in an Og before. Not to anyone human, at least.”

“He was more human than you,” said Peyton, swaying on his feet.

VanClef frowned and shot Peyton in the face.

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