Day 6.
The North Gate.
Sauget, Illinois.
16:00 Hours.
The smell of homemade napalm was sweeter than I remembered.
It was a thick, chemical stench—diesel fuel dissolved into Styrofoam until it became a sticky, gelatinous paste. Boyd had mixed it in a cut-open oil drum, his eyes glowing with that eerie Technomancer blue as he calibrated the pressure on the backpack tank.
"It's ugly," Boyd said, handing me the nozzle. It was a modified weed-burner wand welded to a high-pressure hose. "But it'll throw flame thirty meters. Don't check the wind."
"Good work," I said, strapping the heavy tank to my back. It sat awkwardly over my heavy canvas jacket. "Get to the Command Deck. Lock the door. Do not open it until I say the words 'meatloaf'."
"Meatloaf?"
"Just go, kid."
Boyd scrambled up the stairs.
I stood alone in the shadow of the North Gate. This was the main loading entrance for the trucks that used to haul chemical waste out of Coldwell. It was a massive, rolling steel door that opened directly onto the access road leading to Highway 40.
Behind me, the factory floor was a cavern of silence. The nest of Ragers was still dormant in the center, huddled in the dark under the assembly line.
In front of me, the rumble of engines was getting louder.
BRUM-BRUM-BRUM.
Harleys. Big V-twins with the mufflers cut off. The sound vibrated in my chest, shaking the dust from the rafters.
Yana materialized out of the gloom to my left. She was holding a flare gun we'd scavenged from the hardware store.
"They're here," she whispered. "Six bikes. One armored pickup. They're slowing down."
"They see the gate," I said. "They think we left it open by mistake."
"They're not that stupid, Jack."
"They're Red Faction," I said. "They aren't stupid. They're arrogant. They think they're the apex predators."
I checked the pilot light on the flamethrower. A small blue flame hissed at the tip of the wand.
"Get to the catwalk," I ordered. "When they're inside, you hit the door switch. Seal them in."
"And you?"
"I'm the welcoming committee."
Yana hesitated for a second, then vanished up the maintenance ladder.
The engines roared outside. I could hear voices now. Rough, shouting over the exhaust.
"Look at that! Wide open!"
"Fresh meat, boys! Fresh meat and warm beds!"
The lead bike revved—a guttural scream of machinery.
Then they rolled in.
The first biker came through the gate doing forty. He was a mountain of leather and road rash, wearing a helmet adorned with welded rusted spikes. He carried a sawed-off shotgun in a holster on his thigh.
He skidded to a stop in the center of the loading bay, his tires screeching on the concrete.
Five more bikes followed, circling him like sharks. Then the truck—a battered Ford F-350 with steel plates welded over the windows—rumbled in, blocking the light.
The lead biker killed his engine. The silence that followed was heavy.
He kicked his kickstand down and dismounted. He looked around the empty, dark factory floor. He grinned. His teeth were filed into points.
"Hello?" he shouted. "Anybody home? We're the health inspectors! Vance sent us to collect the rent!"
The other bikers laughed. One of them, a skinny guy with a machete strapped to his back, started banging on a chemical drum with a pipe.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
"Come out, come out, little piggies! Reaper is getting impatient!"
I stepped out from behind the pillar.
"You're trespassing," I said. My voice echoed in the vast space.
The leader turned. He looked at me—a lone man in dirty work clothes, holding a weird metal wand. He sneered.
"Trespassing?" He laughed. "Boy, you don't own this. The strong own this. And right now, you look real weak."
He reached for his shotgun.
"I'm not the landlord," I said. "I'm the janitor."
I pointed the wand at the ceiling and squeezed the trigger.
FWOOSH.
A twenty-foot tongue of orange fire roared into the air. It lit up the factory floor like a strobe light.
The sudden brightness revealed everything.
It revealed the rusted catwalks. It revealed the chemical vats.
And it revealed the nest.
Forty Ragers under the assembly line woke up at once.
They didn't wake up groggy. They woke up active. The light and the noise of the bikes had triggered their adrenal response instantly.
Forty pairs of red, blown-out eyes snapped open in the dark.
Forty throats screamed in unison.
"MEAT!"
The bikers froze. The leader looked past me, into the darkness where the screaming was coming from.
"What the fuck is that?"
"That," I said, backing toward the shadow of the pillar, "is the eviction notice."
The Ragers hit them like a tidal wave of flesh.
They poured over the machinery, leaping ten feet at a time. They were fast—blurringly fast. They hit the circle of bikes before the men could even raise their weapons.
"CONTACT!" the leader screamed, bringing his shotgun up.
BOOM.
He vaporized the first Rager mid-air, turning its chest into red mist.
But three more hit him. They didn't punch or kick. They tackled. They bit. They tore.
One Rager latched onto the leader's arm, teeth sinking through the leather jacket. Another grabbed his leg.
The other bikers were swarmed. The skinny guy with the pipe swung it wildly, cracking skulls, but a Rager leaped from the top of the truck and landed on his shoulders, driving him to the ground.
"Get them off! Get them off!"
The factory floor turned into a blender. Gunfire erupted—strobing flashes in the gloom. Chainsaws revved. Screams of rage mixed with screams of agony.
The truck tried to reverse.
CLANG-GRIND.
The heavy steel gate slammed shut behind them. Yana had hit the switch.
"Trapped!" the driver screamed. "Ram it! Ram it!"
He gunned the engine, but the tires spun on the slick concrete. Before he could gain traction, a Rager punched through the driver's side window. The glass shattered. The Rager dove inside the cab.
I watched from the shadows.
`[ROOT: BEAUTIFUL. LOOK AT THE CHAOS. LOOK AT THE FEEDING.]`
`[ADMINISTRATOR: THREAT ENGAGEMENT 100%. EFFICIENCY: HIGH.]`
The Red Faction bikers were tough. They were level 5 or 6, hardened by the first week of chaos. They killed a dozen Ragers in the first minute.
But the Ragers didn't feel pain. They didn't stop when they were shot. They just kept coming, driven by the viral fire in their veins.
The leader was still fighting. He had drawn a combat knife and was carving a circle of space around him. He was covered in black blood.
"Show yourself!" he roared at me. "Fight me, you coward!"
"I'm busy," I said.
I stepped forward. I adjusted the valve on the tank.
"Burn," I whispered.
I squeezed the trigger.
A stream of sticky, burning napalm arced through the air. It hit the cluster of fighting men and monsters in the center of the room.
It didn't just burn. It stuck.
The diesel-Styrofoam mix clung to leather, to skin, to metal.
The bikers screamed. The Ragers screamed.
The fire spread instantly, fed by the spilled gasoline from the toppled bikes. A wall of heat slammed into me, singing my eyebrows.
`[FIRE DAMAGE: CRITICAL.]`
`[BIOMASS: INCINERATED.]`
The leader was on fire. He was a running torch, flailing blindly. He ran straight into a chemical vat, collapsing in a heap of burning slag.
The Ragers that weren't burning turned toward the new threat. Toward me.
Five of them. Their skin blistering, eyes melting, but still driven to kill.
"Come on," I said.
I swept the flamethrower in a wide arc. I painted the floor in front of me with liquid fire.
They ran into it. They didn't stop. They dissolved mid-stride, their muscles cooking, their tendons snapping from the heat. They fell at my feet, twitching, blackening.
The smell was horrific. Burning hair. Burning rubber. Burning meat.
I held the trigger down until the tank hissed empty.
The factory floor was an inferno. The truck was burning. The bikes were melting. The bodies were piles of charcoal.
I stood there, panting, the empty tank heavy on my back. The only sound was the crackle of flames and the distant wail of the fire alarm.
Yana slid down the ladder. She landed beside me, coughing in the smoke.
She looked at the devastation. At the charred remains of the Red Faction scouting party. At the pile of ash that used to be the Rager nest.
"Jack," she said, her voice trembling. "That was..."
"Efficient," I said.
My Decay Sight swept the room.
`[THREATS NEUTRALIZED.]`
`[BIOMASS YIELD: 0 (INCINERATED).]`
`[FACTORY FLOOR: PURGED.]`
I unbuckled the tank and let it drop to the concrete with a clang.
"Open the vents," I said, turning away from the fire. "And tell Boyd to bring the shovel. We have a lot of ash to clear out."
My mortality index flickered in the corner of my eye.
`[MORTALITY INDEX: 85%.]`
`[DAYS REMAINING: 24.]`
We had survived the wake-up call. But the smoke from this fire would be seen for miles.
The war had just begun.
FOUNDRY PROTOCOL - DAY 6
SECTOR 1 (JACK MONROE) ████░░░░░░ 4/10 Nodes
FACTORY FLOOR: PURGED (FIRE DAMAGE)
THREATS:
Red Faction Scouting Party (Eliminated)
Rager Nest (Incinerated)
ASSETS:
Flamethrower (Empty)
Quintuple Serum (Locked)
NEXT: System Sickness / Ghost Blueprints