Ch. 10
Locus resisted the urge to leave for a full week. He searched for any distraction he could find during that time period; Joannes, however, moved faster than he did. She forbade labor of any kind, going as far as to make sure the people Locus went to wouldn't accept his help.
"Sam, you will shut down if you push yourself any harder than this. You're clearly not going to give yourself time to recuperate, so I will just have to make sure you get that time whether you like or not."
Her firm words rattled around in his skull as he paced around the town for what felt like the umpteenth time. Restless energy pooled inside of his limbs like liquid lightning, but there was no outlet for it. Locus attempted to get involved with other parts of the town, but being around so many people – so many strangers – set his teeth on edge. It turned the energy into something sharper and he backed off for their good.
Did you? asked an invasive voice. Did you even try?
He squelched the thought in a mental fist.
Faced with a lack of options, Locus found himself looking more and more outward. Chorus was still rife with pirates and bandits. It was a problem he could solve in a way he couldn't help here. Civilians built and maintained civilian lives and enterprises. He... didn't. Couldn't.
On the seventh night, the temptation grew too strong to resist. Locus slipped away from Wode as the streetlights began to turn on, not looking back once. Each step away from them felt better than the last.
The journey back to A'rynasea was uninterrupted this time. Locus felt tension drain out of him as he left atmo and by the time he was in the stars, his guts no longer felt like they were tied into knots. The presence of other people should be a healing experience, but for him, it was like being a wind-up toy. There was only so much twisting he could take before things broke.
It couldn't mean anything good, but Locus was too tired to parse why.
He arrived in Chorus at noon. His landing site was in the middle of a truly atrocious thunderstorm, but Locus couldn't muster up the necessary fucks to give. He flew through the angry black clouds, landed in a jungle that was being beaten flat by the rain, and suited up without thinking.
The rain was doubly worse outside of the ship. It was as if all of Chorus' oceans had been picked up by the sky, transported here, and dropped. Visibility was nil. Footing was unsteady despite his armor enhancements. Locus wasn't entirely sure if a bullet could actually fly through this kind of deluge. He was soaked the moment he stepped out of his ship and the steady beating against his armor felt good, felt right.
When he hefted up his crossbow, its weight didn't feel sufficient. It felt light in a manner that mismatched his suit. He traded it for the shotgun and finally, finally, the world slotted into place like a puzzle that had found its last piece. He was solid. He was real.
He squeezed the shotgun. Its weight was good in his hands, as heavy and reliable as death.
There was a camp of people here. They didn't call themselves bandits, but they were thieves. Murderers too, if the situation called for it.
They weren't the worst people on the planet, but that was fine. Locus just had to look in the mirror to find the worst.
He tracked them down to a set of caves converted into underground bunkers. It was a pretty decent set-up, actually – these people either had the necessary equipment to set things up, or someone with the know-how for that kind of work. Locus analyzed it, using his HUD to compensate against the rain, and the pieces fell together with perfect clarity.
The cave had a single entrance. It had limited lighting and they likely hadn't mapped it out beyond what they needed. After all, why should they? No one had bothered them in the years since the war.
He slipped through the jungle like a ghost. The rain fell too hard for anyone to notice a few disturbed leaves and he made it to the mouth of the cave before anyone noticed the intruder. He stopped there, a shade outlined by the grey downpour, and he looked into the warm lighting of the cave and the people inside.
They were alive. They were surviving on this hard, awful planet where so many others hadn't – and how? By cheating. By killing. By reducing themselves to monsters.
Locus let out a shaky breath. His helmet opened so that he could breathe in the air of the jungle.
Maybe this was what he had to do. It was what he could do.
Trying to help Wode… hiding his scars, his face, what he really was… what had been the point of it? Maybe he could have helped that man if he hadn't been so late. If he hadn't hesitated on the killing shot, that man might have been alive. The woman, their second hostage, had gotten away but still. Still.
What happened to them anyway? Locus had not stayed behind to learn. Had the people of Camp 10-B killed them anyway? Could they have even survived after suffering so many wounds and falling in that mud, surrounded by enemies?
The questions tortured him. It was too much. All of it was too much. The kindness of Wode suffocated him, pressed down on him, and it was twist, after twist, after twist, and he was that toy, turning tighter and tighter –
Someone moved in his peripheral vision. Locus didn't even think as he swung the shotgun up, took aim, and blew their torso into wet chunks.
The shot echoed through the cave, through the rain, through the cavern of his ringing skull. His mouth was dry but his hands were still for the first time in forever, and this… this was it. This was how he paid back each pound of bloody flesh he'd carved out. This was what he was, what he could only be.
Locus. Not Sam.
Just Locus.
He killed more people in one night than he had for the last few weeks.
Their bodies remained where they fell. In a few hours, their corpses would cool. Their meat would fester. The maggots and flies would fly in from the jungle to devour them. Their names and their lives meant nothing now, because all they were was meat in the jungle.
His vision narrowed down to a single bullet point, to only the sights and sounds that controlled his survival and their deaths. Bang, bang, one after the other, until they were all down, until they were all dead.
Afterwards, Locus sat in the entrance to their cave and huddled in the rain wetly. It was too hot inside his helmet but the effort required to take it off seemed too gargantuan in the moment. He took deep, shuddering breathes, feeling like he was sucking them through a wet blanket each time, his lungs working like abused bellows. He was hurt and bleeding, but the pain was dull and far away, like it belonged to a different body. Joannes would be furious if she knew he'd strained his body again but if she were here, then he would probably choke her dead in the mud.
His fingers twitched uncontrollably. His hands shook. Every noise keyed him up too hard and Locus wanted to peel his skin off and scrape everything out until he felt clean and numb again.
Dimly, he realized that he was taking this too hard. He was over-reacting – or was he? Maybe it wasn't just that incident between the tents. Maybe it was everything building up together, hovering on the cusp of collapse, and now he was the avalanche, tumbling down the precipice.
What now?
He couldn't go back to Wode. He couldn't look at their faces again, take their kindnesses again, and pretend to be something he wasn't. Going back to Wode would mean he would have to step back into Sam-the-human and suffer his guilt, his terror, and his yawning, unescapable black despair. Being a gun was so much easier, being the tool and the weapon, something to be picked up and put down. A gun was metal and gunpowder, a thing that could not feel bad for what it did. It merely was.
Locus didn't cry. He was just breathing hard in an animal way, shoulders heaving.
He stood up on legs that felt like cinderblocks. He took his first stumbling step forward, mud squelching under his feet, and then his second, not feeling anything as he walked. He maintained a death grip on his shotgun and he walked away from the cave, never looking back.