Iron Drumbeat Chapter 2 (Patreon)

!! So the CW's for this chapter are VERY IMPORTANT. This chapter is full of GORE and BODY HORROR. This should be the last completely awful chapter for a long while. We're about to get into the cool, fun good feel trans stuff, and then the cool MC powerup phase. !!

“When Dr Baljit Bhindal was born, humanity lived much as our ancestors did during the days of the industrial revolution. When she died, her discovery of and advances in the techniques of spirit shielding for electronics had uplifted humanity into a new golden age.”

— Reestablishing Contact with the Thoughtorium of Mars, by Lorena Millington.

I hit the ground with a thud, and cried out in pain. Nearby, I heard the impacts of two more bodies on… what was this, gravel?

Scrambling, I attempted to get to my feet and look around. I managed the second part, but not the first, cos I didn’t have feet anymore. There was nothing around me but a wall of that gods damned nightmare fog. Visibility was down to ten metres or so, and it was right about then that I realised I was absolutely, totally fucked.

The Eldlands were not a place that any human should ever set foot in without a pressure suit. It might not be as quick to snuff you as the vacuum of space was, but it’d do the job just the same. Only, it’d do that job with way more pain and suffering.

Someone groaned, and I turned, staring out into the fog. The coppers’d been right next to me when we took the dive into the fog, but somehow during the trip into this whacko nightmare realm they’d been dropped a lot further away.

“No—” a choked, desperate male voice said. “O— oh god no, oh god no—”

I honestly have no bloody clue why I started to crawl my way towards the screaming man with the gun, but I guess I was curious. Plus, I figured we were in this together now, until whatever horrors made this place their home killed us.

It wasn’t far til I got an outline of them. One body was on the ground, silently convulsing while all sorts of nasty shit happened to it. The other was sitting in a foetal position, rocking back and forth while babbling about gods and shit. A spurt of some sort of fluid that definitely wasn’t blood anymore hit the still conscious copper in the side, and he screamed.

He was up and on his feet with gun in hand faster than an upper chick covering her valuables. The copper on the ground groaned, even as his skin continued to bubble like some sorta soup. Then, he grew a whole ass second head out of his chest, blinking, seeing eyes and all. The head looked up at the terrified copper and howled.

The copper with the gun filled his britches and put a glob of electric goo between the extra head’s eyeballs. Sparks flew and the body on the ground began to spasm violently, which woke up the head that was born on the body. Then, he was screaming too, staring down at his chest where the extra head was still howling.

Copper with the gun realised that his shots weren’t doing shit and with piss dripping down his legs, opted for the knife in his boot. He scrambled forward, but his leg suddenly just… disintegrated. One second it was there and whole, the next, it was falling apart like it was held together by old glue. Gravel flew everywhere as he hit the ground next to his mate, and the knife missed anything vital, burying itself in the meat of the screaming cop.

Ichor sprayed up into the air, mixing with the fog in a way that definitely didn’t look natural. Wait… yeah, nah, it wasn’t even coming down. It was just spraying up and then merging with the fog like it belonged there.

Knife cop ripped the weapon out of his mate, producing more ichor and an awful sucking, schlorp. Crying now, he grunted, “It’s okay, Jerry, it’s okay. I’ll end it, I’ll end it. I just gotta—” Crack. The knife found a new home in the copper, Jerry’s brain via an eye socket.

“Fuck…” I murmured, staring at the scene.

Knife cop whipped his head up and we locked gazes through wisps of mist. “You,” He snarled, hatred sparking in his eyes, giving them new purpose. “You and your little rat fucking friends…”

“H-hey man, chill,” I stammered. Oh crap, oh crap. I wasn’t just a spectator anymore.

“Chill?” he rasped, blood dribbling down his chin from some unseen inner mutation. He laughed, but it devolved into a cough that sprayed more of his blood over the cold gravel of the ground. “Boy, I’ll chill when I’ve carved you the fuck up.”

Terror had already been a very present thing in my head since seeing my busted feet, but it grabbed full control of the steering wheel now.

Turning to flee using only my arms took way, way too long, and he caught me despite his own ruined leg. I kicked blindly out behind me, but my charred stump of a foot connected with the gravel instead and pain lanced up my body. A full body spasm flexed my spine like a bow, and my throat suddenly felt dry. I was screaming, but I could only dimly hear it.

For some fucked up reason, what I heard was the knife entering my gut from the back, but the sound got to my ears through my body. It was an awful, violent sensation, and I could only lay there, experiencing the horror of it.

The knife left me with that same sucking sound I’d heard earlier, and whatever part of me was still lucid braced for another wound. It didn’t come.

Blood pouring from my back, I twisted and flopped onto it. If there’s any one character trait my friends would use to describe me, it’d be that I was curious. Well, either that or they’d say I was a shit-stirring cunt, but everyone knows it’d be meant in an endearing sort of way.

So yeah, I was curious why I wasn’t being stabbed more. The answer became obvious very quickly. The other copper, Jerry, wasn’t quite so dead after all. At least, his body wasn’t. His dead head was sitting back where it’d been snuffed, but his body was crawling on all fours, back pointed towards the ground. Where his neck used to join with his body, there was now a massive maw full of rows and rows of unorderly teeth. Teeth that were busy ripping the other copper apart like a guard dog that’d been thrown a raw steak.

Panic threatened to take me again, but something else happened to take my attention away from the feasting next to me. My body began to… ripple. My skin was shifting, my muscles twitched and moved on their own, and even what little fat I had began to slither around under my skin.

Every single bone in my body fell out of its socket with a staccato popping sound that wasn't far off gunfire. Everything inside me was squirming around like a bag full of pigeons, and for some messed up reason, it didn't even hurt. Well, mostly.

My hips ached, and my chest itched like crazy. My groin felt numb, but I could feel some awful movement down there. My shoulders were slow on the uptake, but soon they were numb and somehow also throbbing. It felt like a mess, it felt like I was being shoved in a trash compactor, and it felt like a massage, all at the same time.

What— I tried to squirm into a position to look down at myself. I succeeded, but I almost wished I hadn't.

Sprouting from my knees and mid thighs were at least a dozen extra legs now. My hips had widened slightly as though to accommodate them, but none were actually joined there.

Nearby, the cop-monster roared in rage, and… oh cock, it was staring right at me with its awful second head. The jaw hung loose and forgotten, while the massive maw of teeth dripped with blood and viscera. It charged.

"No!" I growled, some odd part of me deciding that despite everything, I refused to die in the jaws of a mutated fuckin' copper.

From inside my old, loose cargo pants, I produced the one weapon I carried. The knife was barely longer than my hand normally, but for some reason it was bigger today. Did the fog affect objects too? That didn't seem right.

The pissed off feral copper lunged at me, and I tried to stab it in its new mouth. Instead, it ducked down and I missed. Razor sharp teeth bit down on my legs, enveloping the whole lot like you might suck in a bunch of udon.

For the hundredth time in as many minutes, I screamed. With a thousand tiny knives already ripping me apart at mid thigh, I leaned up further and jabbed with my blade, aiming for the throat.

To my amazement, I actually got it. My little shiv ripped open the throat of the useless head, tearing important blood vessels as some imperfection in the blade caught and pulled. Ichor sprayed out in a wide arc to the side, coating the already slick gravel in foul smelling muck.

The beast that used to be a copper howled in agony and twisted with its maw. Everything below the midpoint on my thighs came away like a lazy street vendor pulling vat-grown meat apart for a kebab. Except, of course, the delicious juices were replaced with way, way too much blood.

I blacked out. Don’t know if it was the shock of having all twelve of my legs torn off, or if it was the blood loss. It can’t’ve been too long though, ‘cause both me and the copper was still alive.

Laying there bleeding out in the fog, I wondered if Pix and Coke got home or not. We lived down an alley that connected to an old and forgotten shop. None of us knew what the shop used to sell. It was older than the Eld-fog, though, that was for sure. It still had all sorts of unshielded electrics in it, like light switches or whatever. After the fog arrived to fuck literally everything up for humanity—like making those electrics go nuts—someone’d turned it into their home. Then the corporate vultures swooped in to build their arcologies and shit, and the house got cut off from everywhere useful for normal folks.

Me and the gang weren’t normal folks, though, we was street rats, and it was the perfect place to make our little den. I hope Pix and Coke made it back to the others. Our little family needed to stick together in times like this, with the uppers squeezin’ the lowers for all the cash they could.

Gods, but I was so tired. It couldn’t be long now. My heart was still busy pushing all my blood out the stumps were my legs were, after all. I guess I could… just go to sleep… maybe… maybe the… the…