Dance of Death

Sorry that this is a bit rough. I only heard about this contest yesterday via a friend, and decided I'd like to try my hand at writing again after a couple of decades...

Kora held the heart shaped locket in front of her face, imagining with its swaying that it was like a real heart beat, a reminder of what she once was.

Just minutes before, she was reveling in years gone by, battles fought and won. And lost.

“…I’ve taken out more than 500 wyrms…” she yelled to the air in front of her.

The biggest of the men in the bar tried not to meet her eyes, looked at her from the side and chuckled nervously. She smirked to think that the whites of their eyes showed like scared livestock. She had waltzed in and slammed her rump on a stool, wanted to feel the alcohol on the back of her tongue, though it would never make her drunk. But being at the bar made her feel more human for a moment.

“…I took out at least 100 in San Francisco alone!” she bellowed. No one wanted to hear it. “Fucking wyrms…” she muttered.

Bar. That was a funny term for the shit hole. She wouldn’t be there, except it helped her feel human again. It was one of the few outposts left that served the soldiers alcohol, and most of them weren’t allowed but a few drinks before they had to shuffle back to their barracks. She recognized a few leathernecks that she had fought alongside. Too few that she remembered fighting with since the initial invasions.

The earth’s history read like a whimper at the end, with an alien invasion that wiped out most of mankind. To end the war, mankind fought a war of attrition, stealing technology and using it against the aliens. The wyrms. And like worms, unlike the dragons they resembled, they dug their tunnels deep and practically disappeared.

Kora was a testament to the tech that kept mankind in the hunt. She had died too many times to count, and they brought her back, ratcheting new robotic parts into human remains. She became a metallic testament to man’s treacherous ingenuity.

She waived her hands in front of her face. Hands. Claws. Servos whirred softly with each move. Her fingers were alien metal, linked together by the blood of humans that spilled themselves into her every inch of tech, hoped beyond hope that she would be the answer.

And she delivered. Inch by inch, dancing across battlefields, she deflected every laser, every death blast, every blade thrust. And she used every manner of warfare against the beasts. Her every enhanced thought was of the beautiful dance of death, every precise movement to kill. And she dreamed of it. Well, day-dreamed, as she no longer dreamed in her sleep.

Kora’s enhanced brain was programmed to think through every scenario, and in idle moments the computerized elements continued to calculate, estimate, run routines and algorithms on bullet and laser trajectories, time to close a gap to the enemy, knife angles, speed of defensive reactions and counter attacks. Sometimes she felt fatigued by the ongoing monotony of the inhuman side of her brain.

She caressed the metal alongside the back of her head, ran her fingers along the interlocking plates around her neck. Her hand fell to the locket that rested above where her breasts used to be. The locket was a gift from a past life. Mother? Sister? She couldn’t remember. But it too helped her to feel somewhat more human.

She held the locket up and fingered it with a metal hand. Tink… tink… metal on metal… gazing on it with computerized eyes…

She wasn’t paying attention to her own sensors, as the dark figure came up from behind her. A loud crackling sound hit her back with the weight of a charging bull, and she slumped forward.

A dark figure came around and quickly bent down and whispered in her ear.

“Ssssomething, isssssn’t it, metal wo-man? A sssspecial weapon to dessstroy computersssssss.” A wyrm. She was only able to manage turning her eyes, her cheek resting in the stale beer rings on the counter.

The non-descript man’s face scrambled before her eyes. She thought for a moment that her eyes were failing, but then digi-cloak that it was using faded and she saw the snout of a wyrm, scaled and its mouth filled with wicked, jagged teeth. Its raspy laugh reverberated in her ears as it disengaged the language translator.

“You sumbitch!” she heard a male voice growl, and then the wyrm was gone. Tossed between the men of the bar as they prepared to tear it apart.

My heroes, she thought.

Her eyes flickered for a second, and then remained steady. She willed her arm to move. It only jerked sideways at first. It spasmed upward and slammed down on the counter of the bar, hand resting beside her face. Then, with her head still laid sideways on the bar, she was able to lift the locket in front of her face.

Her life support systems were failing. She couldn’t feel the normal pain where flesh met metal. And yet the computerized part of her brain kept insisting that she was fighting, destroying, strategy, upon strategy as she lay dying. Making her fight until the end.

She realized that she was tired. She wanted to sleep. Maybe she would finally get to dream.

She held the locket in front of her face. Her mom. Her best friend. She had given her the locket when she was a little girl, just before the invasion. Before she was taken away, likely to slave camps or a food processing plant.

So tired…

She gazed at the locket and the sound of laughter echoed through her mind. She spun in circles with her momma, both of them dressed in gingham summer dresses. She could smell the grass, the wildflowers at the back of their yard.

As her eyes flickered, she was still looking at the locket, which her arm slowly lowered to the bar as it failed.

And she danced and twirled, her brain telling her to fight while her soul sang with her mother.