Two children stared at each other through the bars of a cell. "What's your name?" The boy asked the girl.
Yelena sat up so quickly, she flipped out of her hammock and onto the cold ground. With a groan, she reached out and pulled her left arm prosthesis towards her. She couldn't explain how it was done, it was like a shifting of pressure inside her. In truth, she wasn't pulling the arm to her, but pulling herself towards it, but her arm was light, so it moved instead of her. If she tried to push or pull a car, she'd go flying while the car wouldn't move. Manipulating her magnetic field was second nature to her now, but manipulating other objects was still difficult. After years of practice, she was able to manipulate her left arm like it was her own, though it was clumsy.
She stood up after strapping her arm on and packed up her camp into her backpack. The sense of dread she had from her dream was still hanging over her like a dark cloud. It had only grown in the past few weeks as she made her way to Romania. For as long as she could remember she had felt called or beckoned this way, but an intense fear and anxiety would rise as well. She knew it had to do with her missing arm and her "powers" but she wasn't sure what. Yelena had finally managed to narrow it down to a remote village in the Southern Carpathians. The village now sat in the valley beneath her.
Yelena set off down the winding deer paths. Every step felt heavier than the one before and her stomach twisted into knots. When she finally reached the outskirts of the village, the sun had already begun to sink behind the mountains.
"My my," a voice called out from the trees. Yelena saw an old caravan wagon with an enormously rotund man sitting in the back of the caravan with crates stacked around him. A couple of men seemed to be packing rugs and trinkets and loading them into the cart. His eyes followed her as she neared him, and Yelena could sense something off about him. "Are you lost?" He asked.
"No," Yelena said. "I'm just passing through."
He laughed at her, "Don't lie to me." His cheery voice suddenly turned sinister. His face twisted for a second but was back smiling smugly so quickly that Alyona questioned if it changed. "You're after something here, aren't you?" He chuckled. With a great inhale, he said "I can sense it on you, the Cadou."
"The what?" She asked breathlessly, taking a few steps back. Flashes of an old operating room and jars of black fluid filled her head and were gone. She shook her head. "What do you want?"
He laughed again, "I've been watching you, for a few days now. Your little trick with metal is fascinating" he lifted his left arm and shook it. Alyona clenched her fists and fought the urge to run. She didn't like this. "I know of someone else that can do that or something like it."
"Where?" she asked wearily.
"Ah ah ah," his smile seemed to grow even more, "I'm a merchant, you see. Information is as much of a good as these baubles" he waved his hand over the crates. "How valuable is the information you want?"
Bastard, Yelena thought to herself. He knew that teasing her with just enough information to know the answers she wanted were indeed here, but holding back anything useful. She shrugged off her backpack and began digging into the various pockets. She pulled out a golden chain and a few silver rings she'd pilfered from a hostel a week or more ago. She did what she had to to survive.
"Will these do?" She asked, holding them up.
The man licked his lips greedily and held out his hand for them. He seemed to weigh them for a while then seemed to make them vanish with a flick of his wrist. He nodded and smiled again.
"Look to the old Heisenberg factory," he pointed to the Southwest of the village.
She thanked him and started in that direction. "Careful," the man called out to her, "I haven't seen anyone come out of that factory in years." He laughed again. "Come back any time to the Duke's Emporium"
Yelena shuddered as his laugh hung in the air. What did he mean? No one has come out? The woods around her grew darker Does he mean it's abandoned or. . . She didn't want to finish the thought.
It was fully dark by the time she reached the gates of the factory. The yard was lit with floodlights, but she couldn't see any movement. She laced her fingers through the chain link fence and closed her eyes. She could feel the electromagnetic waves inside. Occasionally they would pulse and her field would react with its pulse.
"That slimy bastard was telling the truth," she muttered. Alyona wasn't sure what to expect going in, but it didn't matter, she had come too far to turn back. She had nowhere to go and was tired of roaming.
She started to push at the fence, the galvanized steel wire squealing as it bent and twisted away from her hands. Soon there was a hole large enough for her to squeeze through. A loud grating froze her in her tracks. A large barn door had opened up on the other side of the yard. A shadowy figure stumbled out of the crumbling barn. It swiveled its head towards her, and a bright red light was strapped to the figure's head. It raised a pipe and began shambling down the path. Two more emerged from inside and followed the first.
Yelena dropped her pack and reached into her pocket for a handful of horseshoe nails. She threw them into the air and pushed them at the creatures. They ripped through their torsos but didn't slow down. She ran to the left and along the fence, jumping over half-buried railroad ties and piles of scrap. She continued to push nails at them until she ran out. They seemed to absorb the nails and continued to come after her. She pulled on a piece of rebar and flung it at the light on the creature's head. It was an exhaust port of some kind. The rebar punctured the small grate and smoke bellowed forth. The creature dropped. She tried to pull it again, but it was stuck. Frantically she searched for more things to throw. A railroad spike took down the second one.
Yelena spotted an old tank, half buried by time, and pulled on it. She jumped and flew towards it, her snowboarding boots hitting it first and sending a jarring shock through her legs. Pulling all around her, as hard as she could, she started flinging everything she could at it. A saw blade took the head off the third.
With a heavy sigh, Yelena sank to her knees. Sweat had broken out on the crown of her head and she gasped for breath. Her relief was cut short as a buzzing sound snapped her to attention. A larger monster stepped out of the barn, both arms had been replaced with drills.
She recoiled at the sight, its yellowed bulging eyes stared at her over a mask fixed to its face. Its skin seemed to be held together with crude staples. Yelena had a flashback to being in a gurney and masked figures shouting in Russian. She shook her head and began her barrage of any scrap she could pull from the surrounding heaps. It didn't miss a step as it ran at her.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck" she chanted as she pushed off the tank and launched herself into the roof of the barn. She tried to run, but the corrugated roof was rusted and collapsed under the force of her landing. The creature changed course into the barn and she was in a worse spot than before. She pulled a sheet of the roof to her and pushed it against the creature. It caught it with its drill. She struggled to keep it up against the monster. The pressure was causing her vision to go black around the edges.
Her field faltered for a moment. The pulsing at the gate she had felt earlier, grew stronger. It made it harder to concentrate on the monster before her. Her left arm failed and hung limp at her side. Was something else coming? She dropped to the ground and the sheet of metal went flying towards her. The creature walked over to her heaving form on the concrete floor.
"Stop," a deep voice said behind her. The creature stopped, but Yelena didn't have the energy to roll over. Her head exploded in pain as something knocked her to oblivion.
-'/,-
Karl Heisenberg had to shout at the Soldat Zwei to get it to stop. It stepped back and stared blankly at him. He grumbled and fished his cigar out of his breast pocket. The acrid smoke scratched an itch on the back of his throat.
"Now, what do we have here?" He asked. "She seemed to be giving you trouble." He chuckled and looked up at the Soldat. It continued to stare through him. He laughed and turned his attention to the woman on the ground.
She has brown hair, with streaks of gray, held back with a loose braid. She wore a long brown coat and black snowboarding boots. His attention turned to the injury on the back of her head. He hit her with a pipe while she was distracted by the Soldat. The flesh was starting to knit back together, and a familiar black slime was filling the gaps. "Interesting," he mused. Heisenberg looked at the Soldat "Fuck off somewhere," he said with a wave of his hand.
He then threw the woman on his shoulder and carried her like a sack down to his operating room. "Let's see what this bitch is made of." He started to laugh and took another draw off his cigar.
(A/N: Thank you so much for reading the first chapter of Life Eternal. I'm purely writing this for my pleasure and benefit. I've been in a writer's block stump for a while and using this as an aide to practice my writing. That said I'm posting it in case someone else finds a little joy in reading.
Also, a note on the terminology of pushing and pulling: it's taken from Brandon Sanderson's Allomancy as I feel this was the best way to describe using magnets.)