You Can't Save Sam - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Charlie slides into the concrete wall with his shoulder, losing his balance as he runs too quickly around the sharp corner. Sparing a glance behind himself with terrified eyes, he presses the metal door to the roof open, running outside and to the closest edge of the building, looking down for a way out.

But all there is to see is a black void below, a dizzyingly high pit lined with buzzing neon signs.

There’s nowhere left to run this time.

He looks back over his shoulder, fumbling for his waist.

Storm water crashes down against the rooftop, its roar pressed away for an instant by an overpoweringly deep crack of gunfire that breaks out. Three shots. The man steps back away from the ledge and into a puddle, his shaking arms thrown around by the recoil of sudden shooting that he fails to properly control. Large, elongated brass casings clatter down noisily at his feet, ejected from his gray-market reproduction pistol. It’s a fake — A clone of an obscure military platform for heavy-tango neutralization back from the days of the insurgency from over a decade ago. The falling brass casings from his weapon strike against the wall behind him at the same time as his own back does, both him and them having run out of room.

His chest heaves as he looks at the wounded person chasing him, who is quietly standing there, unphased.

“What’s the matter, Charlie?” asks the imposing man that he just shot at, a few steps ahead of him, looking his way. His dark frame is silhouetted by the neon sea of Tartarus City’s thousands of billboards, lights, and displays; words and faces of unimaginable colors drowned in the blurring rain — all of it comes together to create a mess that is indistinguishable. The metropolises’ lighting, covering its uncountable tower structures that hang high over them, comes together more as a blotchy smear over the environment’s surface rather than a series of sharp adornments, especially in this muddying rain. The heavy telecom-towers spire up at the city’s core, flashing slowly with deep, red strobe lights at their peaks that bathe the spires of many skyscrapers.

Charlie screams, throwing the empty gun he had spent his week trying to convince a shady friend of a friend to sell him right at the approaching man in frustration, reaching for his belt. It hits the wounded man’s bleeding, mangled chest and drops lifelessly to the wet rooftop.

“You look a little glum,” says the threat.

“You…” Charlie’s hand fumbles against the wall behind him, as if his burrowing fingers were trying to find a way through. But there’s no way through. “- You can’t stop me! I can -”

The man, who has, in theory at least, been shot several times, can stop him. He approaches, the gaping holes in his chest being very much there, with every shot having struck center mass. Gore and red leak out of his ruptured body. Splinters of bone and organ tissue hang out of him. But he’s not even bothered and, despite the hole through his spine, takes another step toward Charlie, who has fallen silent.

“- You can’t, Charlie,” interjects the wounded man, the threat, dryly.

Charlie, his chest heaving and rain pouring down his face, lifts his other hand that had been fumbling in his belt and pulls out the detonator hidden there, holding it up in the air. His eyes, wide and fearful, stare at the threat, who just stands there, unimpressed. Blood and water run down from his bullet wounds, intermingling as they leak onto the dirty rooftop that even the heavy rain can’t clean off.

The threatening man smiles with an unnatural, digital smile, as if his obscured face were a computer display, and shakes his head as Charlie’s shivering hand holds the detonator aloft, his jittering thumb balancing over the self-fused button on the homemade device. The cord runs down into his own belt, onto a bundle he has strapped beneath his thin outer shell layer.

All around them, on the facades of the gray skyscrapers that tower all around them like the bars of a prison cell, the neon signs change. The smart-displays are covered in a veil of static for a moment, as if they were all flooded by the rain, before the colorful messages on them change together in synchronicity. The screens go pitch black. The many colors fade in an instant as all of the text in a full circle around them, above, below, and beyond, turns into a rigid, ghostly white — all of them repeating the same string of words over and over again endlessly in a scrolling loop that barrages his eyes from all angles.

The threat’s hand reaches out toward him. Long, thick fingers — too long and too thick for the rest of his proportions — come closer to Charlie’s face. “See you next week, Charlie,” says the stranger, as Charlie sees nothing else in his vision except for the palm only inches from his eyes and through the gaps, the mocking letters printed a thousand times over on every digital surface around the two of them, the sure message filling the world as if it as a whole were made of nothing else save for the blocks of its letters.

‘You can’t save Sam.’

— The button lets out a heavy click as his thumb presses down on it before Charlie is touched by him.

The rooftop erupts in a violent explosion as Charlie’s explosive vest detonates, the color of vivid orange wildfire mixing into the city’s faded lights for only a brief moment before all of what just happened is drowned out by the heavy, muffling rain.

_______________________________________

/// [TARTARUS CITY - KOBALTSTR.] ///

Lights of many deep colors flash, streaking down the carbon-fiber motorcycle helmet in long, drawn out stripes. The glow of the rapidly passing auras paints the surface of the pitch black thing in a wash of many ever-cycling colors, as if it were a leaking tie-dye blend that could never quite manage to stick. The heavy machine roars as it cuts down the street, weaving through the open spaces between the dense car traffic.

Tarturus is a dense place. The city’s many blocks, full of towering concrete and metal buildings, are lined up in an artificial hexagonal pattern that hardly resembles its historical origins. From above, the city’s streets make it look like some sort of hive, overtaken by mechanical drones. But for some reason, people still insist on driving their own cars instead of taking the public rail and bus systems.

But who can blame them?

A vehicle is the only real sense of freedom you can have here. Even if you’re stuck in traffic, at least you’re stuck inside your own private cage, unlike everyone else.

The figure on the motorcycle, Saras, lifts his thumb, toggling a jury-rigged button on the handlebar that toggles the radio built into his helmet, cycling from the music that had been playing to a local news broadcast as he weaves to the side to dodge the car door somebody is opening in the middle of the road.

“- explosion on Mercur Street has destroyed an apartment highrise. Authorities report that no one was harmed in the event and that further investigation is underway. It’s assumed to have stemmed from a gas-leak from an unauthorized system installed into the buil-”

— Saran flips the channel back, his helmet rumbling as the bass of the music returns to overpower the screaming of his muffler in his head.

They got Charlie.

He looks out to the side, not stopping, as he crosses the next intersection, staring down the street lined with police vehicles, and then keeps driving. Saran makes a detour to the right, pushing down into a quieter street and racing past the blocks of lightless apartments as he drives. Their facades crumble more and more the further he goes, as if he were traveling in time. But he’s really just driving to the poor neighborhoods. The further you go to the outskirts, the more dilapidated the buildings and streets become. The only constant are the bright, neon signs that everyone has above their doors and windows. The distractingly blinding colors call to the eye, inviting everyone to look this way and that way. It’s a never-ending race for attention, for the chance to eat a little of that precious, limited dopamine every person has.

Saran begins to slow down, pulling into the side as he looks up at a building that is essentially crumbling. By all rights, it should be condemned. However, the proper ‘fines’ have been paid, just like with every building in this district. So everything passed ‘inspection’.

Rents are, of course, attuned to the concept of proper housing and not what this place is in reality.

He shuts off his bike, his thickly soled boot pressing against the ground as he leans it on its stand and dismounts, taking off his gloves and stowing them away into his jacket’s pockets.

It looks like it’s his turn now.

Saran walks up toward the crumbling steps into the apartment building and opens the door that probably had a lock two decades ago. After another few flights of stairs, he arrives at Charlie’s apartment.

Its state is reflective of the shithole the building is as a whole.

Moving through the cramped one bedroom, he kicks away piles of half-full pizza boxes. Whether they’re half full of actual old pizza or roaches, it's hard to say. However, given the squirminess of the floor, he’s not going to look too closely. Charlie has always been kind of a slob, but it’s gotten out of hand, especially considering what’s at stake here.

Saran shakes his head, walking to the window over the crunchy floor and then leaning down to look at the thing atop a dresser with drawers that don’t open anymore. A colorful little cage sits there, with oddly vivid metal bars that are highly out of place in this bleak environment. The washed out lights of the city outside of the smog smudged window carry in to illuminate the pair of plastic tubes inside of the cage, together with the small wheel that is squeaking as a night-active creature runs its heart out — as if it could get away.

“How you doing, Sam?” asks Saran, picking up the cage and taking it with him as he leaves, with the hamster in hand, as police lights flash by the window for a brief second, in a hurry to get somewhere. “Come on, bud. Let’s ride,” he says, stepping out of the apartment.

He has a week left until it’s his turn.

But no matter what, he and they are not going to let them get Sam.

Saran closes the door to Charlie’s home behind himself, unaware of the cracked flatscreen television set that flickers on all by itself in the neon darkness, the same sentence running on repeat over its display over and over for nobody but the ghosts to see.