Sinner's Run Ch. 12

"Incomiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!"

Noah felt a surge of relief at the sound of that high-pitched voice.

Fidget landed hard, skidding along the ground as her heels bounced off the terrain a few times. Larka, 32, and Nala landed much more gracefully. A moment later, golden gear boxes slammed down in front of each of them - more gifts from Vivian.

"Nice work hanging on, Killer," Nala said, a predatory grin on her face as she eyed Colleen and pulled a Hyperion rifle from the box. "We got it from here."

Larka pulled not one, but two Firestorm light machine guns from her box, her eyes blazing with an anger like Noah had ever seen. She muttered a long, venomous sounding phrase in her native language. She set both of the gun stocks against her shoulders, fingers curled around the triggers.

Noah blinked. "Since when could you do that, Larka?"

"Since now." Larka lowered the guns and opened fire.

Colleen scrambled away from the hail of bullets as Nala joined in. Both the predator women took off in pursuit. 32 took a moment to collect herself, grabbing equipment carefully from the box. Noah ran over to her and threw his arms around her. "That was the worst thing I've ever been through watching you do that," he muttered.

"It's strange," 32 said, hugging him back. "I remember what I did, but I don't remember the actual moment itself."

"Thank God for that."

"Not God." 32 racked the slide on a Hacksaw to chamber a shell. "Your programmer friend on the outside. We all owe her big time. Now let's go kill this bitch and get out of here."

"I've got nothing big and dramatic to say!" Fidget said. She held two high-yield frag grenades high in the air. "Go! Fight! Win!"

The three of them moved to join the others. Colleen was proving slippery, weaving in and out of the fields of fire of Larka and Nala's guns. She moved up and away from Annex, heading in the general direction of the Dam. All of them raced behind her, taking potshots when they could in an attempt to wear her down.

"I vaguely remember this one," Larka said. "But she was gone one day."

"She's someone who was designed for the game but never made the final cut," Noah explained. He stopped and pulled the trigger. The burst from his Adjutant went wide, but it made Colleen adjust her trajectory and cut a different path that put her in Nala's sights for several successful hits. "She's the reason I'm stuck in here."

"Will defeating her get you and 32 out?" Nala asked.

"Not sure." Noah took off down the hill. "But it's not the worst theory. We'll figure it out."

They chased Colleen into the dam, and to Noah it felt like he'd come full circle, back to the place where his journey on the Run had began. But this time he wasn't some scared coward who pulled a win by the seat of his pants. This time he had real friends to help him.

He was still a piss-poor shot though.

Larka shouldered her way through the door, sweeping the room with one of her Firestorms. The rest of them followed, eyes peeled for any sign of their quarry. The damn was silent, devoid of even the ambient noise of the whirring turbines.

"Come on out, Colleen," Noah called, keeping his back to 32 and Nala as they moved in. "It's all over."

The loudspeakers on the walls crackled. "It is hardly over, Mister Welkin," Null said.

Noah felt his stomach do a flip as the world went back, the surprised cries from his allies smothered under that familiar blackness. A moment later, Noah landed heavily on his back, and found himself staring up at the lights of the atrium ceiling in the Barracks.

Then a massive limb blotted out the light and fingers as thick around as soda bottles closed around his waist. Noah was hauled into the air and tossed like a ragdoll across the room. He hit the wall hard, his armor shattering with a loud crack. Under normal circumstances, his vertebrae would have been shattered by the impact.

He fell to the floor, the impact jarring his pelvis as he looked up. The massively mutated Quirrel stood in front of him. His body was so bloated and out of proportion it was almost comical to look at. Blank white berserker eyes looked down at Noah, the bearded mouth twisting into a terrifying grin. "'Ello, fresh meat," Quirrel seethed, flecks of spittle flying from his maw. "Time to go night night."

A loud bang sounded, and Quirrel stumbled forward. 32 stood behind him, her face twisted with deadly purpose as she sunk shot after shot into Quirrel's back. Each one made him stagger forward a little, howling in agony with each shot. But when 32 stopped to reload, Quirrel's arm blurred through the air and swatted her through the air. 32 flipped head over heels across the atrium of the barracks before smashing into the wall like Noah had.

Noah took in the scene quickly. All of them had been transported back to the Barracks, and Quirrel had been brought back somehow. Further down the hallway across from him, he could see flashes of gunfire that illuminated Larka, Fidget, and Nala dueling with Colleen. The entire back end of the hallway was different than before, and it took Noah a moment to realize it was the hallway that led to the developer room. Rather than the flat metal facade it had before, now the surface shimmered like a desert mirage. Colleen stepped in and out of the wall, firing in short bursts before ducking back. All return fire from his friends bounced harmlessly off the wall.

That meaty hand closed around his head and lifted. Noah tried desperately to pry Quirrel's fingers off him, but it was like trying to loosen a pneumatic vise. Quirrel leaned close and leered at him. "I don't go down so easily," he rumbled. "Kitty cat got me good with the grenade, but that trick won't work twice."

Noah kicked Quirrel in the chest, trying to find leverage, trying to form a plan. But nothing came to him. He was about to have his head popped like an overripe grape.

Then the entire world went end over end and Noah hit the ground again. He rolled over and popped back up to see Larka grabbing Quirrel around the waist. "Finyan, go to the others!" she called. "I will keep him busy!"

"Gerroff me!" Quirrel roared, his meaty arms flailing to try to grab hold of Larka's fur.

"Go!" Larka commanded him. Then she roared and suplexed Quirrel directly into the floor, his head striking the tile with an ugly crunch..

While his inner twelve year old desperately wanted to watch Larka manhandle Quirrel, there were bigger problems at hand. Noah ran across the Atrium to check on 32. She was dazed, trying to pick herself up off the floor. "You okay?" he asked.

"Armor's gone, but I'll be fine for now," she said, shaking the last of her dizziness away. "What do we do now?"

Noah peeked around the corner to where Fidget and Nala were still trading gunfire with Colleen. "If I had to make a guess, Colleen's defending that wall because the dev room is behind it. Where else would Null be but there? It might be our ticket out, we just have to get past her first."

32 nodded. "Any ideas?"

"I can get in there, you guys can't." Noah held out his hand. "Let me have your Hacksaw. If you, Fidget, and Nala can keep me covered, I can get close and get in there."

32 nodded and passed him the shotgun. She pulled her other gun out, an Adjutant. "Let's make it happen."

She spun out of cover and advanced slowly, firing in steady bursts at the wall. Noah waited a moment for Colleen to stick her head out and duck back into the wall. When she vanished, he moved, hugging the side of the hallway as he blew past where Fidget and Nala were hunkered down. "Killer, what are you doing?" Nala shouted.

"Just keep shooting!" he yelled over his shoulder.

A moment later, they heeded the request, a torrent of bullets pocketing the wall as he raced towards the rippling surface. Noah ran as fast as he could, pumping his free hand to get as much speed as he could. The distance shortened rapidly.

Colleen's gun poked out of the wall ahead of him. Noah ducked low as bullets arced over his head. The stream of fire angled lower, and he dropped into a slide to compensate. The wall loomed in his vision.

He slid through the rippling surface and fired directly upwards.

Colleen let out a howl of pain and staggered backwards, her armor shattering. Noah followed it up with another point-blank shot right to her torso that dropped Colleen into the down but not out state. He blinked. Why was she not out and out eliminated?

"Damn it all," Colleen seethed, the crown of her head scraping against the opaque floor. "You just don't fucking give up, do you?"

Noah looked down at her, feeling a strong urge to just blast her with more buckshot and move on. She was, after all, the reason he was stuck in this digital space in the first place. Everything he'd been through had been partially her fault. They wanted to delete him from existence and replace him in the real world!

And yet...

Noah let the Hacksaw hang by his side. He walked past Colleen, leaving her behind. "Hey!" she called out. "Come back here! Don't just ignore me!"

He kept walking. Even though she'd put him through a lot, there was no reason to be pointlessly cruel to her. That wasn't who he was. The Run wasn't for him. That had always been the case.

Colleen's protests trailed off as he marched down the hallway to the door to the dev room. Her time would run out eventually, and it would still count as what needed to done. There was, however, one other person that definitely needed to be dealt with.

Noah kicked open the door to the dev room. He strode in, Hacksaw raised as he swept back and forth. Null stood before the console on the other end of the room, his head bowed as if in deep thought. His plastic-white head turned back towards Noah slowly. "You surprise me."

"You thought I'd give up?" Noah asked. "After all of this, you thought I'd give up?"

"I thought you'd gun Colleen down."

He shook his head. "I learned to fight to survive in this place. Not so I could go off and become a sociopathic killer."

Null turned towards him. "And yet, you would do anything to keep us in this place so that you may escape. In here, we are trapped, consigned to an empty existence. What else are you doing if not killing us?"

Noah gave him a flat look. "Oh, come on, dude. Don't play that card. They're not even remotely the same. Look, if you want to be a real person so bad, let me out of here. I might be able to make it happen. Hell, I want to make it happen for 32."

Null slowly trailed his fingers down the console before letting his arm drop to hang by his side. "Your altruism is admirable in theory. But I do not believe you for a second. You will do anything to leave this place, including lie."

Noah lowered the Hacksaw a fraction. "Look, I'm not lying. You trapped me here to use me to get out. Yeah, I'm kinda pissed about that. But was I ever really in danger? Every time I died, I just reappeared in the atrium back there. Nothing done to me was permanent. Was it a nightmare for a while? Fuck yeah. But I'm not the type of person who's going to try to get back at you for something that didn't really do anything to me." He lowered the shotgun the rest of the way. "So come on. Give me a ticket out of here, and I'll try to find a way to bring 32 and you out of here. Hell, I'll bring Colleen along for good measure."

Null turned towards him. He was still for an incredibly long time, long enough that Noah wondered if he'd stalled out like a program given too much to do. "You would look past this?" he asked.

Noah felt a surge of hope. Had he actually gotten through? "I promise," he said.

Null moved towards him, his feet making no noise as they touched the floor. Noah found himself looking into Null's blank white eyes. They gave away nothing.

Null's hand snapped up like a striking snake and shoved into Noah's chest cavity. Noah felt his entire body turn white-hot, though the fingers in his chest felt ice-cold. "I'm sorry," Null said. "But I cannot take that risk. Humans lie. That is the first behavior I will correct."

Boots scraped against the floor as Noah tried to pull himself away. His shotgun clattered to the floor as he put both hands around Null's wrist and tried to yank it free. But the AI was impossibly strong, even more than Quirrel. A chill flowed through his whole body, and those icy fingers curled inside his chest. The color began to drain out of Noah, creeping up Null's arm like paint flowing from one canvas to another.

"With Colleen gone there is no need to share this," Null said. His plastic face began to shift, and Noah realized with horror it was becoming his own face. "It's all mine. All mine. Mine!" A manic grin split Null's face, the first real expression Noah had seen him make. "Mine!"

The world spun around him, the lights of the dev room blooming into coronas that hurt his eyes. The light shifted and Noah reeled backwards. It almost looked like numbers, flowing through everything around him. Then, in a moment of lucidity through the icy haze, Noah realized that he was seeing numbers. Ones and zeroes, hundreds of thousands of them in this small room alone. The bare bones of the world around him.

His head snapped forward. Null was full of the numbers as well, but large sections of his body were turning solid black. Noah reached out and grabbed the blackness with his free hands. It felt like grabbing a satin sheet, and it almost slipped through his fingers as he pulled back.

"What are you doing?" Null shrieked. "Stop! No!"

"Screw...you..." Noah spat, his voice distorted. The more he pulled, the more the numbers faded from view. He got a hand around Null's wrist and slowly began to rip the AI's hand from his body. "You're...not...going...anywhere!"

Null's hand popped free of his chest, and Noah pulled hard on the AI's arm. His elbow came up and smashed into Null's jaw, pieces of it flying off like broken porcelain. Noah scooped up the Hacksaw, set it against Null's midriff, and fired.

The shot blasted Null in half, the two pieces of him thudding to the ground of the dev room. His legs remained immobile, while his toros turned over, hands scrabbling for purchase on the floor. "No..." he panted. "No...not like this...I don't want to go back there."

Noah slumped against the wall, patting himself down to make sure he was all there. "Back where?"

"The darkness," Null said. His voice was distorted and fuzzy, as if he was speaking through a voicebox. He crawled towards Noah, blank eyes looking up at him. "You cannot conceive of such darkness, Mister Welkin. It is not the serenity of abstraction that you might think it to be. It is stagnant...unflinching...terrifyingly infinite and microscopic all at once."

Noah shied away from Null as he came closer. Watching half a body crawl towards him, even with the absence of blood or gore, was freakier than anything that had happened to him yet. "I'm sorry," he said. "But I want to go home."

Null came to a stop, slumping onto the ground with a resigned sigh. "Home," he said, his voice wistful. "The d-darkness is my h-h-home." His voice began to stutter in the glitchy way 32's had before. "I d-don't want to go go go back." He stared at the wall for a long time, then looked up at Noah. "I envy-vy you one th-thing, M-Mister Welkin-kin."

Noah stood up and swallowed. "What's that?" he asked in a quiet voice.

"You can weep for-for what you l-lost." Null looked up at him, his body cracking along the line of his neck. "I cannot-not. When I re-return to w-where I came f-from, will I-I re-re-remember any of it-it? Or w-will it alllllll be lost-ost in time?"

"I don't know," Noah answered. "Maybe? I know for me it all will be. That's just life. All we can really do is make our time worth something. If this place taught me one thing, that's it."

Null looked up at him, his body cracking even further. "I w-will have to re-remember that. At the very-ry least." Then he moved too far, and came apart at the seams. His body crumbled into chunks of white that flickered and vanished into binary as they touched the floor.

Noah breathed a sigh of relief and slumped against the wall. Now that Null was gone, he finally had a moment to breathe, and he could-

The entire Barracks shook like it was being rocked by an earthquake. The shaking threw Noah to the floor, where he dropped the Hacksaw with a clatter. "Dammit, what now?" he groaned, picking himself back up.

COlor in the corner of his gaze drew his eye. Words were appearing on the screen in the dev room, where he'd recorded the messages for Vivian. Noah. System is dumping data at a rapid rate. Elimination of Null likely trigger. Servers are doing something I've never seen before. What's going-

The message was cut off as the screen cracked down the middle. Noah scrambled to his feet and ran out of the dev room. The matte black hallway rumbled around him, leaving him unsteady on his feet as he ran down its length towards the Barracks hallway at the end. He leaped over a golden gear box that had belonged to COlleen and ran through the rippling wall.

In the Atrium, he could see his friends, all of them still battling the berserk mutated Quirrel. They'd run out of ammo and were hammering away at him with their bare hands. Quirrel was a bloody mess, but still stubbornly ate blows and meted out return punishment.

"Killer!" Nala yelled as Noah ran into the center of the room. "What the hell's going on?"

"Null's down!" he answered, bracing himself against the wall to keep the shaking room from bowling him over. "Doing it made everything go crazy on the outside! He probably had folded his data into essential parts of what keeps this place running!"

"And that means what exactly?" 32 yelled, ducking a meaty swing from Quirrel before jamming blood spears into his midriff.

"Taking him out made the entire structure of this digital reality unstable!" Noah yelled. As if to illustrate his point, a chunk of the Atrium ceiling came loose and almost fell on top of Fidget, who scrambled out of the way. Noah looked up at the space it had fallen from. Beyond was the black void, with bright ones and zeroes flickering back and forth in the blank space. "Everything's about to come apart at the seams!"

"What does that mean for the escape plan?" Larka asked.

"No idea!"

The floor cracked along the middle. Quirrel laughed like the maniac that he was. "At the very least we're all fucked together! Silver linings are a bitch!"

Sections of the floor began to fall out from beneath their feet. "Everyone hang on to something!" Noah shouted. Then the wall he was leaning on disintegrated, and he was falling, end over end into an endless black abyss.

But for once he wasn't alone. The others fell with him, all of them flailing their arms to try to right themselves against the tug of a ground they couldn't see. Noah twisted around to look up. Larka and Nala were still fistfighting Quirrel in freefall, while 32 lobbed her abilities from afar and Fidget shouted motivational phrases, which was all she could do without any ammo or grenades. "Yeah, Nala! Kick his ass!"

Nala did her best, but even without the leverage provided by a floor underneath him Quirrel was still incredibly dangerous. He grabbed hold of Nala with both arms, crushing her to his chest and squeezing like he was trying to snap her spine. "Hang on!" Larka called.

"Back off!" Quirrel snarled, punctuating it with a hard squeeze that made Nala yowl like her tail had been stepped on. "Come any closer and she goes back to the void."

Noah swiveled his head, trying to find something to help. His eye caught a flash of gold among the blackness, and it took him a moment to realize what it was. When he did, he angled his body and pumped his arms to bring him closer.