I Am Aqueous

I Am Aqueous - Chapter 10

Chapter 10

After five days of constant running and a few breaks to check directions, Gun had killed the Alaskan boarder guard after retrieving the information on the whereabouts of this “new mine” which was the military base. The guard said that it was discovered inside an already heavily populated area, one that had skyscrapers and a few magnetic roads. The guard said that it was the first big city down the highway he was on. After a few more hours of running and passing through some rather small towns, Gun noticed along the horizon, and string of lights. The lights were from city buildings and traffic lights. Gun entered the city and he took a civilian hostage.
Gun demanded, “Where is the new mine? The one that’s a military base?”
The civilian, extremely afraid, barely stuttered out, “The mine?”
Gun spoke disturbing intensity, “Yes, the mine! I need to find my remaining quarter!”
The civilian, again with great difficulty, explained, “The large mountain in the center of the city.” Then the civilian passed out in fear.
Gun, satisfied with the answer, only threw the body to the ground. He then peered around and noticed a very suspicious mountain shaped heat source; which was, of course, the military base, because not to many mountains radiate heat. Gun ran to through the city and in a minute or two, he reached the front entrance, which was disguised as a mineshaft. Gun, knowing the true nature of the mine, walked into the shaft expecting an ambush.
There was only darkness and silence. The only sound was water drips in the form of echoes and the crunching of gravel from under his toes. Gun saw only cold in the darkness and stillness in the silence. Gun ran down the mineshaft and explored the maze of paths and set aside mine carts and picks. Gun was becoming scared. Gun researched the mine and then searched it again. The faint footprints, that Gun’s frantic steps didn’t distort, were hours old and in the shape of work boots, not military boots. Gun panicked. He started blaming people and then he started filling cracks, in search for some sort of secret switch. But to no avail, Gun found nothing.
As Gun began to leave, half melted like I would have been, Gun thought he heard a sound. A sound that wasn’t ambience. A sound that was peculiar. Gun stared deeply from every angle of the walls that enclosed him. He noticed the peculiarity of the mine’s ceiling. He placed his arm on the ceiling and spread his fingers into a wide spread circle. He did the same with his foot. His stood there, comparing, for minutes. He placed his other arm on the wall to confirm his assumption. He stood for an additional three minutes and then he laughed. He laughed with a victorious, mocking tone. He laughed at their ignorance and their inferiority. He laughed with obsession.
He turned his ceiling placed hand into a sharper form and he then started to slash away the rock. He took his other hand and mauled the ceiling too. Chunks of stone and gold came raining down on him, starting off as pebbles, but slowly increasing into revealing boulders. Gun swam his way through the cracks of rock and concentrated on keeping his bladed fingers as sharp and as solid as possible. Then Gun hit metallic flooring. Gun felt the floor and felt a familiar, but amplified heat, as well as cold fear beyond it.
Gun, with a psychotic obsession, exploded through the floor with the intensity of an earthquake that would wreak Armageddon! The screams of numerous, unexpecting workers rippled Gun’s liquid. Gun lashed out and killed everybody in the room with a few retractions of created tentacles. Gun saw the elevator and stepped inside. He saw a poster above the controls saying the top floor was called, “Aqueous containment.” That was obviously where he wanted to go, so he pressed the button.
The elevator opened and two blast door guards found sharpened tentacles in their faces. There was a retinal scanner to the right of Gun, so he picked up a body with the eyes still intact and slammed the face into the machine, almost breaking it. The scanner accepted the mutilated face and the blast doors opened slowly. Gun couldn’t wait for the doors to open, so he dropped the body and splattered through the crack and saw a room identical to the one they had been inside for 20 years. Gun raced towards the canister and smashed it on the floor with tremendous vigor. The contained liquid cometted into Gun and new 20 year memories emerged into our thoughts.
That was it, Gun transferred the newly acquired liquid to extend two tentacles from his head and he tipped them with a permanent blade. He permanently sharpened and blade-tipped each of his 16 digits. He formed eyebrows for the first time and lowered them with hideous angles. He dug his claws into the metallic floor and iron shavings curled from the engravings. Gun then grew his tail; the tail with twin set of vicious, jagged spines, tipped with the warped diamond shaped blade. Gun molded anything left, like the slightest snout for where his mouth would be and lengthening his appendages to their proper proportion.
Just when I thought Gun would run around and murder everything in sight he stood there, hunched over with his legs spread out and his knees bent and his elbows well behind him. His antennae above him waving and his tail lashing; he waited. But only for a few seconds. He noticed that this room had a window that was tainted, so no one would really notice that it was a window. Gun leapt from that building as hard as he could and after a few seconds of falling, he landed with a smack, on top of a small apartment building. He reformed and paced slowly towards the edge of the roof. Gun hopped onto the roof’s guardrail and clasped firmly with his feet. Gun arched his back and spread his arms and opened his hands as far as a normal human’s could go. He peered straight up at the full moon with his eyes and scanned all around at all the helpless, unsuspecting citizens of the planet. The night was cloudy, but the lit up windows, in all the constructions were still just another useless obstacle. Gun screamed at the maximum that his anatomy could handle, as if to warn everybody, “The world is mine!”
But that was it. That was all. Gun paused and took a normal stance. He had done it. He was in control and he was complete; he was free. But something that should have happened didn’t. Where was the resistance? Where was he obstacle? Where was the oh-glorious climax that Gun sought? Nothing. He stared at the streets below. There were no screaming people, no roaring vehicles, no chaos. Gun thought that the people below must have not heard him, so he began to shout again.
Before any bubbles formed inside Gun, he felt an odd rumble through his talons. The shaking grew stronger and stronger and soon a faint noise of crunching earth and piercing sirens. The sounds were coming from his right, and a very large heat source was approaching at intimidating speeds. Gun turned around and looked at it closer with his eyes. He couldn’t make an exact assumption, but Gun predicted it to be a very significant fraction of the entire U.S. Army.
Gun smiled inside his mind and said out loud, “Oh, boy! This will be fun.”
By this time, I was absolutely fed up with Gun’s behavior. I couldn’t sit back and watch in shear horror at what Gun had done to the hundreds of people already. I didn’t want to feel the temperature of human blood splash through my liquid ever again. I hated that heat! I hated the patterns of heat and light, the ones that formulated to unnecessary over-kill! I knew that I wasn’t 12 any more, and I knew that I had 4 different versions of the same 20 years in my memory; a total of 80 years of cowardice, sorrow, frustration, confusion and anger. I needed to stop the pain, of others and myself. I broke free of whatever chains I put on myself and screamed to Gun as loud as I could imagine, “Stop killing people!”
Gun, overly bewildered at my sudden burst of enthusiasm towards my opinions, knocked his head forward from the blast, as if he had been smacked across the skull. Gun demanded, “What are you doing now? Won’t you ever leave me alone?”
I shouted back to him, “Haven’t you killed enough innocent people already? When will it stop? I’m not allowing you to hurt anyone else!”
Gun laughed a little, “What are you going to do about it? I’m going to keep killing this until I’m done!”
I retaliated, “Well you’re done now!”
Gun’s liquid and mine, started to shift back and forth between his dark blue and my light turquoise. We both started to scream a little, and then tone of the voice shifted back and forth between each of ours. The spikes on the tail retracted and extended and retracted again. The added blades on the antennae and the knife-like finger and toenails went back into the digits like a cat’s would, then extended again. We had a fight internally and externally, but eventually, Gun’s will to kill surpassed my will to prevent him from killing. Gun, inside our consciousness, hit me across the face and made me whimper like a scolded dog. I sat in the corner a little while longer.
Gun fully faced the direction of the fleet. Gun paced over to the edge of the building and jumped off the building and landed with a splat. Gun reformed and paced towards a clearing of grass that was perhaps a park or a commercial site for sale. Gun stood in the center and soon enough, the tanks, helicopters, jeeps with mounted guns, truck-fulls of soldiers equipped with all the latest in body armor and heavy automatic assault rifles. The soldiers looked almost like walking tanks, for they had at least 80lbs of armor, consisting of shin pads, bullet proof vests, bullet resistant visors and helmets, titanium gloves, and an arsenal that was fit for a whole army on one man.
Gun heard the sound of hundreds of assault rifles and EPPs cock. He heard the gentle, but deadly hum of the rotating, laser bladed wings of the missile equipped helicopters. He heard the crunching of gears as barrel after barrel connected to tank after tank aimed their cannons at him. One armored vehicle drove a little closer and a very prestige looking military man emerged.
Then Gun heard his orders, “Aqueous! Surrender yourself now!”
Gun replied, “What can you ever hope to accomplish?”
The leader explained, “As you can see, military technology has advanced since you last remembered. Although our weapons aren’t fully equipped to combat some… one of your… anatomy. But this doesn’t mean two research facilities’ research was in vain, we were able to construct bullets that might prove effective. And every single bullet, bomb shell and missile we have, is effective against you.”
Gun remarked, “Why hadn’t you given these rounds to the other soldiers I murdered so easily?”
The military leader explained, “The weaponry is in the prototype stage and there was a lot of paperwork and production to be done in such a short time. Though our estimates were correct and you’re here now, faced against 7500 elite troops with… “Anti-Aqueous rounds” in their magazines.”
Gun was bored and asked, “What do you want?”
He replied, “Well we can’t simply ask you to behave from now on and run away and be a good little freak, now could we, not after the criminal record you’ve obtained. By law you should be killed 200 times and sentenced to about 3 billion years in prison, but as we both know, this result is unlikely.”
“You haven’t explained yet. I’m a busy, you know.”
“Quite the one for words I see. To the point. You have two options, Aqueous: one, you surrender yourself and become a rather valuable asset to the United States Military and we make it worth your while. Or two, we kill you.”
Gun crossed his arms and lashed his tail violently, as if it were a mace. Gun explained, “I would choose the second one, except for one small correction.”
The leader started reaching for his gun, “And what would that be?”
Gun uncrossed his arms and explained, “‘We kill you’ sounds good, but I’m doing this alone, so it would actually be, ‘I kill you.’”
“So be it.”
The leader pulled out his gun instantaneously and shot Gun. Gun, half expected the bullet to be completely useless and ineffective, but to his surprise, the bullet didn’t splash right through him like he thought piercing rounds would. The bullet stayed there and it released another liquid, which solidified the surrounding liquid. Gun shifted the solid area and placed it in his hand. It was true, Gun held an oddly shaped chunk of himself and it was as hard as a rock. Gun couldn’t control it at all so it was useless, but he could feel through it and felt like it was only temporary. Gun put the piece of himself back inside him and shouted to the 7500 soldiers, “It seems I have underestimated you!”
The leader aimed his gun again and explained, “I think underestimating you saved us a little bit of money, you stand no chance.”
Gun crouched down, spread his arms and stared the leader in the face. “Big mistake.”
Gun leapt in the air and every single gun fired in his direction. Gun latched onto the bottom of helicopter with his feet. He shot a formed tentacle through the bottom of the helicopter, and in one swift, fluid motion, Gun made that tentacle his head and the rest followed as he shot himself into the cockpit. The guns ceased firing, because they didn’t want to shoot their own team member. Gun killed the pilot and the co-pilot. One of the tanks shot and hit the helicopter’s tail and the machine started spinning out of control. Gun however, took control of the missile controls and shot every rocket he could before he crashed into the ground. The rockets fly in every direction and fortunately for Gun, the rockets headed towards the groups of soldiers surrounding him.
Massive explosions lit the sky and highlighted the ground. The echoes of the explosions were followed by the echoes of body parts hitting the grass and dirt. Gun reformed himself quickly and managed to leap into the air again with being shot once. Gun landed on another chopper and leapt off its front windshield. Gun, after flipping backwards a few times, landed on the windshield of another chopper and slashed the pilot’s heads off with his tail. Gun leapt from that helicopter to dodge four missiles aimed at the helicopter. Gun landed on the chopper that shot the missiles and the previous helicopter exploded. Gun killed the pilots with his antennae and leapt yet again in the air. Another chopper was below him and started shooting at him with its mini-guns. Gun spun around and chopped the machine in half with and extended tail.
All the helicopters hit the ground with violent explosions and heavy casualties. Gun then landed on the ground and right in the middle of a group of one hundred soldiers. Gun quickly formed himself into a pinwheel of long, sharp appendages and he spun around, taking off almost everyone’s legs. After one quick rotation, Gun raised his tentacles a little higher and separated the soldiers at much more fatal fractions.
Gun took a few more bullets, despite the very amorphous, blob-like form he was taking in hopes of dodging bullets. Gun leapt again and landed in a very long strip of soldiers. Gun ran with the hardest hold on his liquid he had ever done yet. He extended his arms and sharpened the edge of it, in hopes of decapitating every one. Those who ducked or might still pose a threat, Gun lashed his antennae and tail around accurately to eliminate those who stilled breathed.
Gun jumped onto a tank and bent the barrel just enough so any shell fired out of it would result in a massive internal explosion. Another tank shell fired his way, but Gun tipped the shell, as if you could slow time, and it landed on another group of soldiers and blew them up.
The men continuously poured in like water rushing through a city after a massive dam had broken. Gun, not stopping even for a millisecond, dodged and confused and even awed the firing army. Gun slowly, but surely, getting hit frequently, thinned out their numbers so that replacing soldiers couldn’t even stand anywhere without tripping over bodies or in some cases, pieces.
The pile up of corpses was slowing down reinforcements and Gun was noticing this. He was beginning to have great difficulty performing his graceful evasive and lethal attacks, because the amount of solid Aqueous was building at an increasing rate. Gun wanted to think of a new strategy, but I blasted an idea for him, “Run! You can run faster than me, so run!”
Gun killed a few more men and realized that I was right, so he ran. He took his normal shape and sped off in the opposite direction of the mine, towards Canada. Gun was thankful for the imaginary adrenaline rush he had pumping through him, for not only did he stay extremely solid for running, but stayed solid enough so the chunks of his liquid didn’t bump out due to the force of his legs pumping.
The soldiers that weren’t sprawling through corpses, hopped onto the nearest transport truck and drove off. Every other vehicle drove off too and the remaining helicopters were able to catch up quickly.
Gun strafed left and right to dodge the explosions from the missiles and he jumped over the ones that would have been direct hits. Gun eventually swung his antennae back and forth a few times and managed to destroy a helicopter. Gun did this process a few times and took out a few more choppers until they backed off. Instead of turning onto the magnetic roads, he stuck to the old fashioned roads, so the pursuing vehicles would be forced to use their electric motors and tires to drive and be incapable of 300km/h speeds.
I let go of my urge to take over Gun, because he was finished killing people, he was running away. Just as I was going to relax for the first time, Gun stopped in his tracks. I immediately asked, “What are you doing?”
Gun replied, “I’ve found another open field. We should be able to finish this killing spree here.”
I shouted in anger, “What!? You said you’d run away!”
Gun shook his head and explained, “You never specified for how long.”
I raged again, “Oh come on! That’s the oldest and lamest trick in the book! You knew exactly what I meant.”
Gun barked back as he saw vehicles fill the horizon, “You’re not my superior, you’re a thorn in my side! Now shut up and let me do what must be done!”
I warned him, “You’ll regret this. You’ll regret this if you done leave now!”
Gun shunned me from his mind and concentrated on the task at his hand. Thousands more soldiers and hundreds of tanks, jeeps and trucks still pounded their direction. Gun would have smiled along with his lowering eyebrows. He also laughed; he was extremely confident he could kill every one of them with ease, despite the difficulties he was having earlier. I begged Gun again, but he didn’t listen. I heard the sounds of thousands of ammo clips recharging and shells being replaced. The helicopters boomed in the distance, but were approaching still. A new sound, the screams of fighter jets, armed with most likely some very advanced guided missiles. Gun even struggled to keep himself in his proper shape, because of all the clumps of hardened liquid inside of him, but yet he felt that he could kill every one of them and survive.
When the Army had stopped and their guns pointed at us, I knew that it was now or never. I braced myself and with a burst of mental strength, I broke through Gun’s mental barrier and we were fighting for control. Gun was extremely surprised and fought back with all his will. I fought will all my will too, and I believed, with the will of everyone else’s.
Our colours and forms shifted back and forth and shook with resultless vigor. The tension between our battle for control could only be compared to a legendary arm wrestling match or jousting match. Two fronts battling over whose water vapour will become the storm. A tug of war match over a pit of lava. Two warrior’s swords are caught together. It felt like it was never going to end.
Then a soldier pulled an RPG and shot a Rocket Propelled Grenade towards us, seeing us struggle as a perfect opportunity. Seeing that rocket heading towards me, I had a sudden burst of control and I won the battle. Gun started descending into the realm of our consciousness and I trampled his face so he stayed down there for a long time. But before I could react to anything, the grenade hit my chest area and it stuck in there. I felt the fuse run out and the heat diffuse. It exploded.
The liquid quickly hardened my liquid, but before it had time to react and before my fragments weren’t too far away from each other, I did something that would even impress Gun.
Every single fragment that was in the air created as many appendages as it could and caught and merged with every other fragment it could find. So it a split second, I had gone from Aqueous to a massive geometrical, shape with hundreds of sides, as if it were a game die with 70 sides, but its skeleton was to be constructed with straws. I was the most complex, three-dimensional spider web any spider could imagine. I stood there, (or whatever) in a skeletal diamond shape and watched the entire military gaze in awe as my liquid hardened. I was completely solid now and I thought it was all over, but then a heavy gust of wind blew and I shattered like fragile glass. I seemed to turn to dust and I floated to the ground. The military came to the area, but found no trace of me, like I had disintegrated. I must have fallen into the earth, but I didn’t know, it was one of the few times I experience, “blacking out” being Aqueous. That was all I remembered after that point. The military soon left, thinking I was dead.