Twitcher: An Illustrated Dystopian Cyberpunk Tale of Revenge and Redemption Read online

  To Hannah.

  For being there. Every step. Every day.

  Copyright © 2019 by Kaleb Schad. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

  I greatly appreciate you taking the time to read my work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about it, to help me spread the word.

  Thank you so much for supporting my work.

  www.kalebschadauthor.com

  GET THE

  TWITCHER SKETCHBOOK

  FOR FREE!

  Get a downloadable PDF of the Twitcher Sketchbook for free. Join the mailing list and get early access to new releases, exclusive art, deleted scenes and sneak peeks at projects in development.

  Learn how at the end of the book!

  Thank you for reading!

  TABLE OF CONTENTS TWITCHER

  A BOY

  A MAN

  A REVOLUTION

  A KILLER

  What I choose is my choice.

  What’s a boy supposed to do?

  The killer in me is the killer in you.

  — Smashing Pumpkins, Disarm

  A BOY

  When sniping someone, especially with a two-hundred-year-old rifle like his Springfield .30-06, you have to consider a lot of factors that could reveal your position, noise being the first. That’s why Tyler waited, miserable and wet in the corn field, to pull the trigger until the John Deere combine was next to him, swiveling its thrusters vertical to land and begin threshing. His ears automatically dampened the crack of the shot by thirty decibels and the tendons and muscles of his shoulder were flooded with blood and proteins to increase elasticity, allowing the recoil to travel through his body without swinging the barrel off target. His Sakanaya Cybernetic left hand and forearm began a microscopic oscillation that mirrored that of the bullet rifling down the barrel so that as it exited, its trajectory was as true as any shot by a mortal in all of history. Tyler was just under two clicks out from the guard’s station and at 850 meters per second, it would take over two seconds for the bullet to reach the man. A lifetime for Tyler. He felt the familiar boredom settle in as he waited.

  The bullet passed through the guard’s head, his blood and brains coughing out in a heated miasma visible only to Tyler’s thermal sensors in his cybernetic right eye. The man’s body crumpled.

  Tyler worked the bolt action, caught the ejected shell, loaded a new one, then crouched, strapped on his backpack and began jogging toward the veterinarian clinic.

  Agripharms weren’t big clinics, usually a veterinarian, two or three technicians and a security guard. It didn’t take any human effort to run the actual farms, only to dish out the meds and keep the livestock alive.

  He swiped the dead guard’s hand over the key pad and heard the door unlock.

  Inside, he moved past the admin offices and their sleepless monitors blinking away the health of the livestock, up a set of stairs into the dormitories. The faint filtered smell of cow shit colored the room. He moved like a sigh, gentle and quiet. He’d forgotten what it was like to do this, to be uninvited, afraid you’ll be discovered, violence a possibility, a likelihood, if found.

  Outside the veterinarian’s door, Tyler paused. There were two other techs in rooms behind him. He knew they should all be under their synmaps, but what if they weren’t? Was he prepared for what that would require?

  He eased open the door and scanned the room. His eye made a barely audible click as the aperture switched to near-infrared and the room’s details came into focus. A woman lay in a cradle plugged into a synmap, the electrodes protruding from her hair like robotic porcupine quills, wires draped from the electrodes over the edges of the cradle to the synmap itself. An intravenous tube connected to her right arm. Her eyes twitched under their lids and she had a trace of white crust at the corners of her mouth, which was odd. Synmaps weren’t supposed to arouse physiological responses, just mental simulations, but who knew what kind of smack she’d slung in her IV sack to ride along.

  Next to her, in a cradle much too big for him, lay a boy no older than five. His head had been recently shaved with freshly installed synports, red tissue swollen around the edges. He had turned in the cradle and his head lolled off the edge like he was going to fall.

  Tyler stood over the woman. Watching her while scoping this place over the last several weeks, he knew she was a kind woman who treated her son well, but to get what he wanted, he needed her to be afraid of him. Tyler seized the electrodes and yanked. There was a wet popping sound as the couplers released, the slurp of needles retracting from her brain, and then there was her scream. She rolled out of her cradle, thrashing on the floor, wailing. Was her anguish from pain or because she was pulled out of whatever bullshit story she’d been living?

  “Thetabiencort,” Tyler said when she’d stopped to catch her breath.

  “Wh-.” She huddled on all fours, rubbing at her eyes. She’d dyed her nails an iridescent pink that blinked a random pattern in the dark.

  “I need your thetabiencort. You need to unlock the fridge.”

  She was coming to grips, a frightening reality gelling around her. “Who are you?”

  Tyler tapped his watch. “Lady, I don’t have time. Open the fridge or I kill you and get the next tech to do it.”

  Tyler followed her out of her quarters, down two sets of stairs into a lab. She leaned on the railing, a hand probing her scalp for blood. Everything was stainless steel and cold. She stumbled to the vault and began keying her entry code.

  “How did you even get out of the city? If you need a hit of something, just use your portion like everyone else,” she said.

  The door unlocked, a metallic thump of giant bolts retracting, and a cloud of frost pillowed out from the broken seal. Tyler stopped her from entering, told her to kneel with her hands behind her back and forehead on the floor. He went into the cooler and followed her directions to the thetabiencort. It was a liquid in small metal canisters with the Staern Life Sciences logo etched across the surface.

  Staern Life Sciences. SLS. The company that had made him what he was, that had wired his body with wretched narcotics and mechanical bits so thoroughly that he would die within years. Turned him into a dead man walking. Even gave him a watch so he could count to the second how much life he had left. It felt fitting that Tyler would now use one last narcotic from them to truly, finally end that life they had already stolen six years ago.

  He shoveled the entire shelf into his backpack.

  Back in her quarters he had the tech lay on her cradle. Now what? He couldn’t let her go, obviously. She couldn’t go back under the synmap, not with how he ripped them out like that. Probably wouldn’t be able to for weeks. He knew he should kill her. Would have killed her two years ago.

  He walked next to her and leaned over.

  She sucked in a shaking breath. “No,” she said. “Don’t.”

  He knew how he looked to her. Years of wilderness clawed into his skin. His reddish orange beard and mustache making him look older than the twenty-seven he was. Red. As if his cheeks and chin were burning. As if he had been bobbing for apples in Hell and the flames had stuck. Tyler reached across her and used the loose synmap cords to tie her left wrist. As he worked on her right wrist, he saw her looking at the carbon fiber carotids running up his neck under his jaw.

  “
You’re a JACKK?”

  Tyler moved to her legs.

  “Why would they send you here? What is this?”

  With her tied, Tyler straightened and looked at the boy. He was further off of his cradle now, one arm dangling. Tyler had watched the woman play with this boy in the yard. He seemed like a decent kid, obedient and joyful. Sometimes she would bring out a baby goat and they’d play with it for a while. The kid seemed to like that.

  Tyler went to the boy sliding off of his cradle.

  “Don’t wake him,” the woman said. “Please. He just got the ports, if you wake him now he’ll never go back under. You realize how long I’ve waited for the little shit to start sleeping like a normal person?”

  Her words churned in Tyler. He should have known. It was all bullshit, the games he had seen her playing with the child. Just wasting time until the synports could be installed.

  He eased the child back onto his cradle.

  She watched Tyler pick up his backpack, the thetabiencort clinking inside, her eyes following him to the door.

  “If you shoot that theta you’ll die,” she said. “It’ll kill you. Even you.”

  Tyler looked at his watch. Minus 06 days, 19 hours, 44 minutes and 23 seconds.

  “I’m counting on it,” he said.

  Voices first.

  “Is he dead?”

  “Ben, hurry.”

  A boy and a man. The man had an accent.

  “I think he was a doctor. These are doctor books.”

  “Blankets, Ben. Boots, warm clothes, whatever you can find.”

  The boy was next to Tyler.

  “Look at all of the blood.”

  “It’s from that machine. He’s going to wake up, Ben, hurry.”

  Tyler’s Sakanaya eye cycled on while he kept his flesh eye closed and lay still. He remembered sitting down to start dialysis. His face was laying in something wet and now he could see flashlight beams tumbling around the room. His dialysis machine lay shattered on its side, the outflow tube missing and blood sprayed everywhere. A seizure. He must have had another.

  His Sakanaya switched to night vision.

  “Is that his gun?”

  “Ben.” The man took three thumping steps toward the boy. Tyler snaked out his hand and caught the man’s ankle, sweeping his feet out from under him.

  The boy screamed and tried to jump away, but slipped in the blood and flopped backwards, thwacking his head on the floor. His flashlight spun away, strobing the room.

  The man landed hard. He tried to scramble, but Tyler was faster. Always faster. He climbed on top of the man’s back, grabbed him by the hair and drove his face into the wooden floor so hard the floorboards bucked. He rolled the man onto his back and punched him twice, the first breaking his cheekbone, the second finishing off his nose. He could feel his JACKK pumping. Tyler had to remind himself to pull his punches, forgetting how strong he was—how weak normals were.

  Tyler held his third punch like an asteroid waiting to fall. The man had a dark brown beard and mustache, red sacks around his eyes, the sign of a man exhausted or coming off of something, aching for a hit of Seven Ten or emenethol or anything. Tyler would know. Had seen it enough times in the mirror in his earlier years.

  Both the man and the boy were covered in mud and scratches and their hair hugged their scalps like it had been hidden under hats for days without washing or sunlight.

  “Three words or less. Why are you here?”

  The man moved his lips as he counted, finally deciding on, “Hungry and cold.”

  “Please, mister, don’t hurt Eddie,” the boy said. “We saw your cabin. We thought you were dead.” The boy wore an orange jumpsuit that had the SLS logo of Staern Life Sciences on it. He was young, not quite a teenager, not quite a little kid, maybe eleven, with blond hair, soft cheeks and unguarded eyes.

  Tyler stood up, put a foot on the man’s cheek and smashed his face sideways as he leaned to grab his .30-06 resting against the wall behind him. Tyler saw his Mark 9 handgun was on the table three meters away along with two clips. How long had he been out? He hadn’t left that gun there.

  “Were you sneaking down from the—shut up,” Tyler said. Outside. He heard a jeep ease to a stop and shut down, hydraulics lowering a suspension system. That meant military or industrial.

  Tyler worked the action on the .30-06 and drove a shell into the receiver, appreciating the look on Eddie’s face as he did so. Today’s guns just didn’t have that murderous crack of metal on metal when a round was chambered.

  He pointed the gun at Eddie’s right eye. “You have friends?”

  “What?”

  “Outside.”

  The boy whispered, “They followed us.”

  “Please,” Eddie said. “They want Ben. They’ll kill you and me and take him.”

  “Maybe you two. Kid, kill the light,” Tyler said, unaware of how right he was.

  He stepped over Eddie so he had line-of-action to his cabin’s door. Two years and the only soul that had crossed that threshold was his own, whatever kind of soul it was. Now, six days from the end, this shit happens.

  Tyler heard them step onto the porch, one man sneaking around to the window over the sink, the other three waiting. Then, without speaking, which meant hand signals or comms implants—either way, probably military—they breached the door. A red laser sliced through the archaic hinges Tyler had used when building the place and the door collapsed in. He hadn’t planned on defending himself against the LCP armed forces, would have built a sterner door.

  They rushed the room, the front two soldiers barking for Tyler to get down, to drop the gun, to get back, none of which Tyler would do. The first soldier stopped at the end of the hall and pointed the beam former of a Ranzel L226 personal laser system at Tyler, the power conduit slinking around to the backpack. The second zeroed in on the boy like a shark after blood. The first soldier screamed at Tyler a second time to get down. Drop the fucking gun.

  Tyler stepped back from Eddie, but held the gun over his head in one hand.

  A third man in a civilian uniform walked up and patted at the walls in the hallway. “Don’t you have any lights in here?” He wore glasses, a pointless affectation for the past that some High Laners had, and his uniform had the SLS logo on it. Staern Life Sciences again. Just when you thought you were done with them, that they couldn’t ruin anything else…but Tyler should have known better. After all, he still had six days to live, didn’t he? And if there was one thing SLS was good at, it was fucking up Tyler’s life.

  The soldiers wore standard tactical gear—tactical shirt and pants, armored vest, Sakanaya implants for both, sync cables for their weapons snaking out of the synports in their scalp—though their uniforms also had SLS logos on them, not the Liberty Conglomerate Province government badge Tyler had expected.

  The second soldier threw the boy to his stomach and knelt on his back.

  A merciless blue light filled the cabin and the third man said, “Better.” He looked at the boy and Eddie, then at Tyler, assessing the blood. “Holy hell. They did a number on you.”

  “It’s not mine,” Tyler said. “Well, it is, but not from them.”

  “Leave us alone,” the boy groaned from under the soldier.

  “We’re not supposed to let you talk,” Glasses said, then to the second soldier with the rifle, “If he speaks again, make him wish he hadn’t.”

  “He’s just a boy,” Eddie said. “He doesn’t deserve this.”

  “He’s no more a boy, than this laser is a flashlight,” the first soldier said.

  “You did good. Eddie, is it?” The man took off his glasses and cleaned them, as if he’d seen it in a syncast and thought it looked sophisticated. Before they left this cabin, Tyler was going to make that man eat those glasses. “All the way through Ottawa, up between the lakes and back down to here. That’s what? Two-thousand kilometers?”

  “One-thousand nine-hundred thirty-six,” said the first soldier. He hadn’t looked away
from Tyler yet, but he’d let the beam former droop under the weight.

  “He’s just a boy,” Eddie said again, this time tired. This time like he was trying to convince himself. How easy giving up was.

  The boy began to plead as he was hauled to his feet. Don’t. I’m sorry. I’m not what you think I am. The soldier punched the kid in the gut, sending his breath and courage fleeing.

  Tyler took a half-step and Laser Dick lifted the beam former.

  Glasses said, “He’s a Cull. SLS property.”

  Cull. Cullings. The word bombarded Tyler. A child. His mother behind him. Flash of fire and two small piles of ash. Two dust piles of life. Tens of thousands of dust piles.

  “Okay,” Glasses said, reeling Tyler back. “Let’s clean the room.”

  “Now, hold on,” Tyler said.

  “Brooks,” Laser Dick said. He gestured with the laser. “Look.”

  Glasses looked at Tyler and he watched as the man’s eyes traveled from Tyler’s face to his neck, to the carbon fiber carotids inserting under his jaw, to the too-dark veins bulging in his forearms, to the iconic watch.

  He opened his mouth, then closed it. After a moment: “You’re a Twitcher?”

  “I never liked that term,” Tyler said.

  “Oh God,” Eddie moaned.

  “Why are you—“

  “Please, mister,” the boy said.

  “You called him a Cull.” Even saying the word was hard. The once-a-decade government-ordered Depopulation Protocol. For the no-bullshitters in the room: slaughter. But don’t worry. It’s all in the name of a greater good. Generations of Lower Skimmers sacrificing their lives in defense against the Resource Gap. If you force someone to die for something, is that still a sacrifice? From where Tyler had been standing it looked more like murder, but, you know, tomayto, tomahto.

  He’d spent his entire childhood having nightmares of being Culled. Then, courtesy of Staern Life Sciences, he lived the nightmare.