Jack be Nimble
/Some quick notes: I actually meant for this to be around 1,000 words and then it sort of just kept going. I guess I'll have to work at drabbles a little harder. Artistic liberties have been taken, some things have been changed to better fit a video game into written form. I may have gotten some things wrong about the game but again, chalk it up to artistic liberty. I really wanted to explore horror and dark writting because it isn't my strong point but I thought Bioshock was as about as horror-ish as a game could get. There is something deliciously pyschologically disturbing about running around an underwater city that's falling apart with madmen all around you, waiting to kill you. Well, onward towards new fiction/
Jack be nimble…
The city named Rapture was in its dying throes and Jack was the reluctant witness of something that should never have been to begin with.
Andrew Ryan's dream of an underwater colony had been realized in Rapture; a self-sustained visionary world removed from the echoing terrors of war, the vice of politics and the suffocating zealous righteousness of religion.
Two worlds separated by reinforced glass and an infinite maze of walkways, Gotham buildings and art deco splendor.
Jack certainly felt like the proverbial rat running a desperate race on the termagant instruction of a vicious tongued Irishman who gave more orders than explanation. Maybe he had hit his head harder then he thought when the plane came to a short fiery end into the Atlantic because this world was a waking nightmare.
No time to think, no time to guess at the turmoil that had apparently torn this place apart. Sanity was a dream, screaming laughter of the mad bounded along the marble floors and dark corners were flooded with blood and the incoming sea.
Along the damp, cold corridors a mournful wail shook the ceiling, in a bass so deep Jack could feel it jumping in his gut. Ponderous steps vibrated the ground and Jack knew to give the mountainous creature a wide berth; it was one of Ryan's more prurient aspirations, a walking armored tank he had no desire to tangle with.
Rapture was breaking all around him.
Maybe it was an allusion; the true face of humanity written in the spliced genes of the citizens of a fallen Utopia. Lured with the promise of betterment, of beauty and twisted inefficacious power one by one they fell.
Jack couldn't help but feel the suppressed hysteria rise in his throat, burning, wishing he could un-see the spatters of red soaking the cable knit sleeve that extended down his wrist.
Some of the bodies littering the extended avenues of the Medical Pavilion were of his making. The cold metal head of the wrench had made it easy to cave bone, crush organs. The feel of it still stung his fingertips.
The only thing worse, he had found, than a society gone mad is a mad population fully armed with the best firearms modern technology could provide. He had wrested an RDP machine gun from a bloated, twisted corpse in the lobby of the Pavilion to make use of it himself, torn between survival and guilt.
The weight of expectation was on him, driving him towards the heart of the city.
Expectation of lives held in the balance, of answers to be found and the role he found himself in; bystander, vigilante, sleuth and victim all wrapped up in brutality and struggle.
It seemed the only way out was force and Jack was learning he possessed an unsettling talent for bloodshed.
Jack be quick…
Electric light sparked along his knuckles, down the pads of his fingers and held his gaze like moth to flame.
A bubble of giggling mirth burst from his throat, eerie and muffled in the dead quiet of the Surgical Foyer.
Because now he could be the flame, literally.
And Jack wondered if this was the first step in the long fall into hysteria; would his voice be added to the howling call of hundreds of lost souls, speaking to gods and ghosts, drooling, scratching, and laughing at shadows?
He shivered.
"Steady on, fella, don't be going berco on me just when we're getting started."
The scratchy voice of Atlas buzzed over the radio at Jack's hip, a quiet anchor to stability.
"You'll have to find some way through Surgery…and Steinman. Chin up, now – the good Lord hates a quitter."
And the device fell silent, plunging Jack back into tumultuous contemplation of murder.
A dim light lit the farthest wall, casting harsh shadows over medical debris that was scattered over the sterile black and white checkered flooring. Hovering in the twilight of gloom was an overturned gurney with shredded padding, broken bits of bottles, shattered glittering pieces of glass and a forlorn wheelchair parked underneath a plasmid promotional advertisement. The leering happy face of the woman was slashed and wilting.
It looked like a warzone, cracked tiles and sickly dried brown stains marked the path of civil conflict.
Jack followed the maze of corridors, service counters and connector tubes, the medical clinic eerily silent and bathed in the constant grey light of the ocean outside the walled glass. Neon and glitter smudges twinkled through the distortion of water. Rapture still gleamed on the outside, not giving a hint as to the collapse within.
His finger found the play button on the recording and Dr. Steinman's voice filled the stillness.
"Throned in splendor, immortal Aphrodite! Lady of beauty, she speaks to me still…"
There was some background noise, then the high pitched giggle of Steinman as he continued,
"I asked her, 'what would you have of me, goddess?' and she said…she speaks, she speaks to me…"
Another pause.
" 'Symmetry, dear Steinman! It's about time we did something about symmetry'…"
Jack frowned, not understanding the reference but not liking it all the same.
Jack is in deeper trouble than he predicts…
Steinman's Aesthetic Ideals hung crookedly on the wall above Jack's head; neon light half lit and fluttering around the bullet holes inflicted. The entrance looked as inviting as the gaping hole of a demon's mouth.
Faintly, echoing off the tiled walls he could the moans and shrieks of the Splicer's; too far gone to even recognize what the fatal overdose of plasmid had done to them.
Jack pushed the ornate double doors open and squinted in the semi-darkness. The lights were flickering due to the rush of sea water interfering with electrical. Without anyone to maintain the life saving divide between city and ocean the walls were cracking; pipes were bursting, freezing and a constant onslaught of water was filling Rapture, sloshing with every step that Jack took, running freely down stairs and dripping from the ceiling.
He followed a curving set of stairs down; a porcelain plaque pointing the way to the operating theater.
The voices were getting louder.
"I mostly bent it but don't worry I'm a professional…."
It was close. Jack pushed himself behind a support column and as quietly as he could slid the round dish plate shaped magazine into place on the machine gun. He jumped as the creature shrieked suddenly, so close it rung the ears. The mindless wail trailed off into incessant giggling and Jack's skin crawled even as his heart pounded in his chest.
He could hear a sharp ringing clink as something heavy and metal was scraped along the hard floor. Great. It was armed and deranged and probably trigger happy.
"I just want to see what's inside…"
Closer still, Jack could see the wavering shadow against the wall behind him. Swaying like a drunken sailor, voice rising and falling in a hum. Jack eased his finger onto the trigger and in one smooth slide brought the gun into place against his shoulder as he swung out of his hiding spot. Then he froze.
Everything he had seen thus far in Rapture hadn't prepared him for the sight before him; standing silhouetted against stark flickering light was a monster.
Perhaps, once, it had been a man. It wore the tattered white scrubs of one of Rapture's elite surgical team but that's as far as it went to being identified as human.
The face was a jigsaw puzzle; deep, gouging precise cuts that were badly healed warped the features, blurring them, the mouth twisted and upturned as though partially burnt. One ear had been cut and been replaced between the bridge of the bent and broken nose and the gaping black hole of where the eye socket had once been. The remaining good eye was pure madness, lit by the use of plasmids and surge of electricity giving it an eerie glowing effect.
One arm held a dented and obviously well used shotgun and the other…
Jack tried to keep his gorge down as he realized someone had amputated the other arm and attempted to attach it to the space between the shoulder and neck, but to no avail. It swung uselessly, obviously beyond redemption, bloated and black and giving off a powerful stench.
"LET ME SEE YOUR EYES!"
Jack barely pushed himself out of the way as the creature swung the barrel of the shotgun up and unloaded two rounds into the wall behind him.
Despite its deformities the creature was fast, inhumanly so. Jack was hard pressed to keep the swinging tip of the barrel from finding its mark as wall and tile exploded around him.
He saw his opportunity as the Splicer lurched towards him, stepping into a deep puddle of water. Instinct rose, energy crackled along his wrist and built in power. He flung out his left hand sending a bolt of pure electricity scattering brilliantly out, hitting the pool of water.
The effect was immediate; the limbs of the Splicer locked and jerked as he was momentarily incapacitated.
Revulsion, shock, pity all tore at Jack's gut and he clutched at the trigger, straining to keep the powerful burst of rounds on target.
The bullets ripped into the creature, spattering blood, organs and bone against the sterile white tile behind him. It had died without a word and Jack's harsh breathing was the only sound other than the dripping of water.
He realized he was shivering and he pushed himself away, willing himself to forget the bloody carnage that stained the floor behind him.
"Think of it as a mercy, boyo." came Atlas's quiet and serious voice over the radio connection them.
"Think of what that bastard Steinman did to them, the suffering they felt and the kindness you are giving them."
Jack laughed harshly, turning it into a cough that burned his throat.
"Kindness? Is murder a kindness?"
"Tis' freedom, of a dark sort. Now, would you kindly make your way to the operating theater and take care of Steinman?"
A cold grip clutched at Jack's insides as he navigated his way down the lower levels, dispatching several more unfortunate creations with grim determination to end suffering. At least, he did his best to make it fast.
Finding Steinman was a matter of simply following the trail of blood leading towards the open auditorium that was lit almost in theatrical splendor. The great circular room was empty; the sterile white tiled walls and numerous rising benches were steeped in black shadow except for the brilliant single spot of light dead center of the room.
A voice echoed, bounding off the hard walls like a mad bullet and Jack found himself an averse spectator unwilling and unable to tear his eyes away from what he was seeing.
Beyond the glass wall that separated the first row of seats and the center dais was Steinman; dressed in heavy duty gloves, surgical mask and protective eyewear, in his element, gesturing wildly, having an animated conversation with himself and…
what was left of the brutalized cadaver he was so gleefully hacking at.
"What can I DO with this one, Aphrodite!?"
The surgical knife glistened red and silver in the beam of the flood lights above, having raised it above his head, preparing to bring it down again.
"She. WON'T. STAY. STILL!"
Steinman emphasized each word by gouging the knife randomly into the fleshy bits of the mutilated naked woman. Her head already was nearly separated by several deep and jagged lacerations, bone and sinew the only thing keeping it from rolling right off onto the ground. Her torso was unrecognizable. Her remaining untouched arm swung over the metal edge of the table, small hand extended out almost beseechingly.
Steinman paused in his gory productivity and slammed his hands down on the table, spattering more blood, bending almost tenderly over the corpse. He began to rock back and forth, emitting a moan.
"I want to make them beautiful…but they always turn out WRONG! That one…too FAT!"
Stab.
"This one…too TALL!"
Cut.
"This one…too symmetrical!"
-and Jack had seen all he could take before it felt as though his blood would boil through his skin.
He slammed his fist into the glass, spidering shards of it outwards, startling Steinman out of his lunatic reverie. His eyes were almost unseeing, mad, red and nervously darting before an unnerving smile rolled back his lips.
"What is this? What can it be, goddess?"
He lurched away from the table as Jack hurled himself against the heavy glass doors separating them. Steinman swung around the table awkwardly, drunkenly, almost slipping on the blood and gore that stained the white tiles below him.
"An intruder and he is ugly, goddess! But you needn't worry-" he continued in a sing song voice, crooning.
"I can fix him…"
Jack had violence in his head, he had seen red and wanted his fists embedded deeply in Steinman's face; to break bone, rake blood from his throat, crush the mad doctor into a crumpled dying heap at his feet for what he had done to those people
-and it nearly ended him.
Steinman had stumbled beyond the edge of the harsh light and when he had righted himself he held a shiny .44 magnum that was aimed right for Jack's head.
In his old body, the one before the plasmids rearranged the fabric of his being, the bullets would have found their target and ripped into his body, leaving him bleeding before his enemy.
However, muscle and reflex moved with the instant of a thought and though it was a close thing Jack missed the first few shots only to bowl into Steinman, shoulder to chest, sending them both tumbling hard to the ground.
It turned into a mad struggle of power over weapon; Jack was trying to get a good enough grip on the large machine gun, to get it good and flush with the doctor's soft gut before letting it rip and Steinman was all wiry, mad strength.
A deafening burst of rounds rung in the surgical auditorium followed by a wet groan and thud as a body slumped back to the ground.
Jack watched coldly as Steinman gazed off into nothing, mouth working around the blood bubbling up.
"…Goddess…"
Then he stilled, never to see anything again.
The radio crackled and popped and Atlas's voice burst out,
"Are you all right!? Well, I'll be a monkey's arse, you did it."
Jack didn't answer but took the key to the Emergency Access door and exited the auditorium without looking back.
"About time someone took care of that sick bastard, glad to see it's done. Get through Emergency Access, boyo, and I'll start working me way to the back side of Port Neptune."
Radio silence and Jack was glad for it. He wondered at the chill pragmatism gripping his soul. The moment he let loose lead into the soft tissue and bone of Steinman it wasn't repulsion or sorry or regret he felt.
It was joy.
Jack wondered what it all meant and went to find out.