James A. Hunter
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Wasteland Warlords Episode 5: Chapter 2 - Supermax Conglomerated
🕑 Added 2023-09-07 17:00:01 +0000 UTCThe passenger window in the seat in front of Clay whirred open, letting in sand and hot air and one sweaty, pissed-off Triple S agent.
“What the hell, man?” he snapped, plopping into his seat. “Just gonna fucking leave me back there?”
“I said ‘abort,’” the jerk in the driver seat said. “If you don’t move your ass, that’s on you.”
Clay snorted. “You Triple S guys have some great teamwork.”
“Hey, fuck you.” Johnny-Run-Lately twisted around and jabbed a finger at Clay. “I’m about this close to saying screw the payday and gunning down everybody in this car. So if you wanna try me, try me.” He let the threat linger in the air for a long beat. “No? Good. Then shut the hell up.”
Clay was happy to comply. The first part of their plan had gone off with surprisingly few hitches. He’d had a bad second there where he didn’t think he could get Bacon Bits’s ZombiePop unhooked from his belt. Thank God it had finally come loose. He felt a little better about leaving Alex and Joe with the Greater Blue Wyrm for protection.
The jeep jounced through the IZ, eventually slowing from Total Party Wipe If We Crash to Multiple Injuries. When the last sliver of sun finally dipped below the horizon, Griff leaned back in his seat and seemed to go to sleep.
Clay kept an eye on the scenery flying by, although it wasn’t gonna help much, he knew. A hundred miles of identical scrub brush and Joshua trees weren’t going to lead him back to Camp Liberty. Still, he kept their heading firmly in mind as they traveled. They’d been going southeast the whole time, with the occasional course correction to take them farther south. They had to be getting close to the containment wall that surrounded the IZ.
Just after moonrise, his guess proved correct. They crested a hill to see the massive hundred-fifty-foot wall stretching off into the distance. From what he’d heard as a kid, when the Merge first happened, the Army Corps of Engineers had built the thing fifty feet high. It became clear to the human world pretty quick that most magical creatures didn’t think fifty feet was much of a barrier. The government had had to throw a bunch more time, money, and muscle into erecting the monstrosity that surrounded the wasteland today.
If I’d paid my taxes this year, I’d be damn outraged,his and Joe’s dad had said.
Well, I’m glad they’re raising it, their mom had said. I read in The Straight Scoop last week that all sorta evil things been coming over that wall—fish people and demons and the reincarnated love child of Elvis Presley’s alien baby.
Woman, how the hell would a baby alien climb a wall?
Lordsake, Ted, it’s like you never even heard of levitation powers.
Clay stifled the urge to smile. He loved his parents, but every now and then he thought it was a miracle he and Joe had turned out as normal as they had. Of course, Alex might argue that point. Especially considering he and Joe were now Incants with magical powers living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and most likely on their way to start a shadow war against the federal government. In hindsight, maybe they hadn’t turned out so normal after all.
A notification that they were coming up on a dungeon swam across Clay’s vision. He opened his character screen and flipped over to the map. It had populated a few hills ahead of the jeep to show a dungeon marked SUPERMAX CONGLOMERATED INQUIRIES AND PRISON.
He hadn’t seen a dungeon notification for at least an hour. This part of the wasteland was as uninhabited by monsters as it was by people. Probably because whoever ran the Supermax kept it that way.
According to the map, the place had a trio of Watchtowersoutside the walls, three concentric rings inside marked Cellblocks Level 1-3, and a single tower at the very center, overlooking them all. As they got closer, the central tower grew a label. Warden’s Office – Throne Room.
Clay closed out of the screen and sat back, staring out the windshield as the headlights skated over the tire-rutted sand. Not exactly the CIA black site they’d been expecting, but close enough.
He saw the light pollution first, orangey-yellow in the distance. Since coming to the IZ, he’d been struck over and over again how bright and beautiful the stars were. Without all the lights of civilization interfering, you could see the galaxy unfurled like some master’s painting.
But as they rolled up on the prison, the desert sky disappeared in blinding halogen floodlights. Electrified fences gleamed under their glare, topped all the way around with rolls of razor wire and fortified with lead-ups of triple concertina fences inside and out. Vicious-looking monsters roamed the corridors between perimeter fences, just in case anybody survived with enough limbs to make it through the wire. Armed guards patrolled inside that, most of them on two legs, some on three or four, and at least one on eight.
As they drove up to the front gate, spotlights flooded down from the closest watchtower. A guard stepped out of the little booth, and Clay did a double take. This wasn’t your average good old boy who’d gotten a job down at the local prison. This was some kind of crawdad-human hybrid, with wiggling antennae, chelicerae where a human’s mouth ought to be, overlapping armor plates, one human hand and one big ol’ pincher. He walked around on two legs, but a crawdad tail curled up behind him so it wouldn’t drag in the sand. His shell glittered with some kind of stardust pattern, and his skin was crisscrossed with strange symbols.
Clay tried to read the markings, thinking he remembered some of them from his alchemy skill trade tome, but looking at them too hard made him feel sick to his stomach.
The tag [Inconceivable Cosmic Security Officer] hovered over his antennaed head.
The cosmic crawdad glanced at the Triple S guys’ credentials.
“It was a setup,” the agent in the driver seat said, “just like Cassidy warned us. Better let the Warden know there’s two more rogue Incants out there.”
The crawdad answered in a series of whistling, clicking sounds, nodding his head. He made a loop of the jeep, checking the undercarriage with a mirror on a long stick.
Satisfied, the crawdad waved his claw at the booth.
With a loud buzzing sound, the gates rolled open. They drove through the fences of slavering attack monsters. As soon as the jeep crossed into the yard, the hair on the back of Clay’s neck prickled. He could swear he was being watched. And it wasn’t Griff or the Triple S agents; they were busy staring out their windows.
Clay glanced up at the white tower at the center of the prison with its 360-degree bank of blacked-out windows. The Warden’s Office. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew that was where the sensation of being stared at came from. Who or whatever the Warden was, he’d be able to see the whole prison from up there in his lofty perch.
He felt that merciless gaze on him while he and Griff were being hauled out of the jeep. And while they had their Inventories emptied and their outside clothes confiscated. And even while they put on their complimentary prison-issue seafoam green jumpsuits. The constant pressure of the gaze was unnerving.
Clay sawed his jaw. It wasn’t gonna be easy to execute a prison break while they were under a relentless all-seeing eye.
“The old one’s an NPC,” the Triple S driver told the Inconceivable Cosmic Security Officer—this one a cross between a regular-looking squid and a seahorse from hell, with little flames coming off of its gill fronds and crest, and a hole saw of teeth in its cylindrical snout.
“What about this one?” the squidhorse asked, his voice a strange burbling whinny.
“Rogue Incant.” The Triple S agent eyed Clay. “No idea what his power level is.”
The squidhorse’s beady eyes gleamed. “Processing’ll find out.” He whistled, and another guard came shuffling over. “Stuff this old geezer in B-29,” he said, then hooked a tentacle at Clay. “I’m taking Tall, Dark, and Ugly here to the brainiacs at the lab.”
Griff’s eyes met Clay’s for a split second—a warning and a question. Then the old weed was shoved in the opposite direction.
Clay clenched his jaw. They hadn’t had much of a plan for once they were inside—basically see what they were up against and reformulate from there—but as nebulous a strategy as that was, split up had for damn sure not been part of it.
“Let’s go, Ugly,” the squidhorse whinnied, giving Clay a warning thump in the kidney with his baton. “You just won a hot date with a dissection table.”
***
As the squidhorse guard led him through the levels of the prison, Clay studied his surroundings. Every wall was see-through, some kind of high density, unbreakable glass tinged a pale almost unnoticeable green. He could see cells three stories high, some of them with four or five humanoids and wasteland creatures to a little eight-by-twelve room. It seemed crazy to cram so many to a cell, but it wasn’t like Supermax Conglomerated was getting regular inspections from prisoners’ rights organizations. They could stack the bodies in like cordwood and nobody but the inmates and guards would ever know.
Every cell had two lights over its door, one red and one green, but only the red lights were lit. As they crossed the floor and his viewing angle changed, runes and sigils became visible scrawled across the glass.
The squidhorse caught him staring.
“Keeps you assholes from doing magic,” it whinnied. “Doesn’t matter what kind, it’s nullified in here. Can’t use a lick of it. And don’t even think about trying to scratch them out. They’re an ingredient of the glass, same as the interstellar silicates and starfire—they’re melted right into it at the heart of a distant sun. Can’t get to ’em, so don’t even bother.”
The guy was being such a douche that Clay couldn’t hold back the smartass comment.
“Yeah? What if I do bother?”
A tentacle-wrapped baton slammed into Clay’s gut. He doubled over, choking on what he hoped was just vomit and not a piece of his liver.
“That,” the squidhorse guard whinnied.
They passed through each level of cellblock to the tower at the center of the prison. The nondescript white walls were the only ones in the prison you couldn’t see through. They passed through a heavy metal door at the base that opened on silent hinges.
For the first time since arriving, Clay felt that all-seeing eye leave him. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
They hooked left down a narrow, curving hallway that wrapped around the inside of the tower until they came to an unmarked door. Beyond it, a set of steel stairs spiraled up out of sight.
Squidhorse raised a tentacle, hesitated, then pushed the intercom button next to the door.
“Uh, new arrival,” he whickered nervously.
The door cracked, swinging inward a couple inches, and Squidhorse flinched.
“Send them in,” came a flat, toneless female voice from inside.
A shiver tried to wiggle its way down Clay’s spine. If the guy who wasn’t going in was scared, what did that mean for him? Hopefully that shot about the dissection table had just been the standard guard-to-prisoner bullshitting.
“Well, go,” Squidhorse said, giving Clay a shove.
Clay bumped into the door, knocking it open farther. The room inside was something out of an alien abduction movie. The room was round, its walls hung with state-of-the-art monitors, panels, and beeping instruments.
At the center stood a thick pillar with empty body pods coming off it like petals. Most of the pods were closed, an angled glass lid locked down tight. Thumping and shouting came from one, and Clay saw a fist covered in oozing black welts slamming against the inside of the glass.
On the far side of the room, a white-coated scientist bustled around a counter covered in alchemy ingredients and potions. From the looks of her, she was just a regular ol’ run-of-the-mill human. No magical attributes or abilities, no assigned class, no augmented stats. She could’ve been any pharmacist he’d gotten Alex’s meds from back in civilization.
One by one, she picked up vials, slipping them into a carrying rack.
With his Snakeoil Slinger level in Brewing, Clay could not only identify potions at a glance, but see their ingredient breakdown as well. Most of the ones she selected were ones he already knew how to craft—poisons, health potions, plague draughts, and antidotes.
“Load him into Bay Four,” she told Squidhorse without looking up from her work.
As the guard pushed him toward the body pods, Clay caught sight of the brewing station at the end of the counter. Sitting next to the calciner was a flask full of an unfamiliar glowing green brew.
╠═╦╬╧╪
Soul Overload (Experimental)
Infuses drinker with distilled essence of all souls who went before.
Effect 1: Increases all skills and abilities by 150%, duration 15 minutes
Effect 2: Increases all stat attributes by 150%, duration 15 minutes
Rotating Effect: Lends drinker one skill from selected essence per minute, duration 15 minutes
Uses: 1
╠═╦╬╧╪
Clay frowned. Something about all this “essence” stuff was creepier than most of the poisons he’d learned to make.
He had to crane his neck to keep reading as he climbed into the body pod.
Ingredients:
6 Distilled Essence of Incant (stackable per number of deceased added)
46 Distilled Essence of NPC (stackable per number of deceased added)
98 Distilled Essence of Mob (stackable per number of deceased added)
With a whoosh of pneumatic struts, a glass lid hissed down, forcing Clay to lie back on the hard cushion inside the pod. It smelled like disinfectant, lemon cleaner, and the inside of a plastic bag. The lid sealed with a hiss.
“Most of our test subjects don’t go as willingly into the bay as all that,” the scientist said, her voice coming through a waterproof speaker beside Clay’s head. Glass vials clinked, and she appeared at the edge of the pod. Monogrammed on her white jacket pocket was the company name Conglomerated Industries. “Every Mob and NPC comes with a set of standard operational statistics that are easily looked up in the database. Since you’re new and formerly human, however, you represent an unknown quantity. We have to discern which resistances and regenerative abilities you have before we can begin testing. Let’s start you off with something easy and work our way up, shall we?”
She pulled out a frosty vial full of a glittering white gas. The tag Storm of Absolute Zero flitted in front of Clay’s eyes before the scientist loaded it into the side of his pod.
“Commencing Frost Damage Resistance test,” she said as bone-chilling cold seeped into the claustrophobic chamber…
