Machete in the right hand, Reaper automatically went to raise her other hand into a fist. She made a stuttering gasp. Holy shit it feels like molten metal poured on my arm. A low groaning sigh escaped her lips. Oh fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. She raised her arm and held the machete up for Cleaver to stop. Not knowing how to stop the dog or wanting to anger it, Reaper just looked at it. The Hoisin Hybrid canine stopped walking faster than her Sergeant.

The people filler for the concourse they had just made a good attempt at destroying emptied into seven different hallways that fanned into a half-circle. Walls lights no stronger than a tealight, hanging above most of the doors, was the only illumination to guide them. Fine for reading a number when you were next to it, but ultimately it created more shadowy areas than lit areas.

“Can’t say I’m a fan of shadows anymore,” Cleaver muttered. His head slowly moved from left to right as he scrutinized each hallway.

“For once, I agree you with you.”

He started like he hadn’t been aware of talking. Reaper left him wondering while she studied the seven hallways. It wasn’t the same level the shit had turn south but laid out exactly the same and the awful stench was the same. Decay it was. Sickly sweet enough to have you tasting bile with every swallow. There had been a lot of dead on Level 210. Dead that Black Dragons hadn’t created. Dead that gathered flies and maggots, opportunistic rodents, and stench.

Shoulda been our first warning. Dead gathered like so many weeds plucked from the ground and left to wither in the hot sun on a bed of scorched land. Nothing alive but vermin in that humidity laden with rot. The scores of rats that wouldn’t move but to hiss at the presence of living. Would that we listened to that voiceless voice of reason, but Black Dragons aren’t scared by a few rodents and rotting corpses.

…

Level 210 maintenance access. 5,009 feet above a dry Martian riverbed. Triple sealed. Twenty-two security sensors with triple redundancy built in. Physical locks, with zero digital access, designed of such a weight that only a machine could turn each of the seven locks in each door. Locks that, on each door had to be turned simultaneously or a failsafe controlled explosion would weld the door to the frame. Run by timers with zero wireless access that would close after six minutes of being open. They stood open.

Aries Team 2 “Black Dragons”, with Ghost taking point, jumped from the lowered rear hatch of the Stealth Insertion Vehicle into the now open entrance. It wasn’t supposed to be open. There were nasty things that happened when you opened a door between a building that has an atmosphere and a planet that doesn’t. Decompression and venting of that life sustaining oxygen being top of the list. It wasn’t supposed to be open, but when do people look gift horses in the mouth?

Ghost was followed by Queen, Javelin, Reaper, and Cleaver, with Hatchet bringing up the rear. Did the six elite special ops soldiers pause for a even a moment to ponder the revelation that this entrance into the arcology, protected by a single airtight hatch used to keep honest people away from the real deal, was so putrid that the air actually tasted of rot? Reaper did wonder why the not so pleasant aroma. Cleaver quipped to Hatchet about dry aging steaks gone wrong. Then they came across their first resident of Olympus Mons Arcology.

…

Reaper tapped her Sergeant on the arm and then hooked her head to the left. He gave her a nod and then as one, dog included, they started toward the dimly lit residential hallways. Did we come out of there from the right? That would make it the left how we’re facing. Or was it the left making it the right. If I could, I would, I should! Makes about as much fucking sense. What’s the worst you can do to us if I fail in this as I failed in our first contact with the honorable Grim Reaper?

She glanced at Cleaver walking beside the dog. He was keeping it together. Head straight. Shoulders back. Like a goddamn poster boy for the Army. Who do you draw on for that resolve? A cripple with nothing more than a machete to fight her way through heavy firepower and horrors beyond? Perhaps it is more the canine persuasion you reap confidence from. Oh I will chop off more heads and limbs that you can shake a stick at, Sergeant, one arm or none, but I do admit there is something soothing and comforting when in the presence of a being that understands it is the Apex predator.

“Soteria,” Cleaver whispered, the word coming out as a soft whistle between where he used to have teeth.

The tealights above each door flickered in luminosity that only just illuminated odd patterns on the cracked walls, like a child had gone crazy with a finger paint set. Streaks, drips, swooshes. Air handlers hummed, pushing out a noxious moist air that was not just reminiscent of a restaurant dumpster in the middle of summer, but spot on. The summer feeling didn’t stop there either for the aroma held undercurrents of a lit grill cooking sizzling meats.

“What’s Soteria?” Reaper asked. And why the hell am I all of a sudden hungry?

“Soteria is a goddess of safety, salvation, deliverance, and preservation from harm. Soteria is also an epithet for the goddess Persophone, daughter of Zeus, who became the goddess of the underworld when abducted by Hades.”

Reaper snorted. “Fitting. What say you?” She nudged the huge dog with her elbow. “Soteria sound good?” The dog gave her a loud sniff and then began sniffing the ground, angling toward the first door in their cheery hall.

Reaper gave a nod and then flashed hand gestures at her Sergeant. He dipped his chin and responded in the same non-verbal communication as he moved to the right side of the door. Soteria continued to sniff the ground in front of the same door. Cleaver’s eyes dipped down to the dog and then to his Master Sergeant. Reaper held up a thumb and then promptly clenched her teeth until a filling began pressing on a nerve. Which did nothing to alleviate the agony throbbing in her left arm. And then just as fast the pain vanished.

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. Oh Marcus Aurelius, what a shitty party guest you must have been. Likely never got so much as a hangnail.

Cleaver knocked on the door. Waited the ten seconds Reaper ordered. He then squared in front of the door and kicked. A rocket would’ve done less damage.

Good thing you’re on my side. Reaper followed on her Sergeant’s heels. And there was the hanging out on the beach with friends in summer just drinking and having a good time aroma. So much stronger than the hall yet just as fleeting. It wasn’t coming from couch to the right or the entertainment center on the left. The dinning table was empty and the pictures on the walls straight ahead and to the left of the table did not give off aroma.

Placing the machete under her arm, Reaper flashed several more hand gestures, and then followed her nose into the kitchen. Cleaver going down the hall to the bedrooms. It was clean, the kitchen. Cleaner than Reaper ever had hers. There was but a single cup left on the counter. A thin vase with two red flowers in it graced the back of the sink.

What the fuck? She looked around, flicking her tongue across her lips. It wasn’t so much the smell in of itself but the placement of it. An entire arcology was on lockdown. Rotting meat stench permeated the air to the point you could almost taste it, and someone was grilling. It is coming from in here. I know it. But how do you grill on something that isn’t a grill?

A slight sound, shifting of a foot, caught her attention. Immediately she fell as much into a fighting stance as her sore body would let her; and then relaxed when Cleaver walked into the kitchen. He held up a yellow crowbar the length of his forearm.

“Found it in a utility closet. No one home and no palmlet I can find. At least I now have a weapon,” he whispered.

Reaper dipped her chin in acknowledgement and then asked, “You smell that?”

“Kinda hard not to Master Sarge.”

“Not that. The grilling aroma,” she said. He shrugged. “There’s no oven so what could make it…” Reaper trailed off and made a slow full turn. She tsked and pointed to the dishwasher. “They have heating elements in them. Open it up.”

Obedient like a good Sergeant should be, Cleaver pulled open the dishwasher without ceremony. The two simply stared. Cleaver cleared his throat. Reaper shifted her grip on the machete hilt. After many long seconds, each seemingly stretching into eternity, the two looked at each other. Cleaver then slowly closed the door to the dishwasher. In silence the two left the kitchen and then the apartment home.

Reaper carefully set her machete on the ground next to Soteria who was just sitting in the middle of the hall. She then knelt and pressed her face into the dogs fur, inhaling deep as Cleaver began to vomit. Reaper closed her eyes and focused on the sound of a man being sick. It was the sound of life. She inhaled forcefully. The smell of life.

“What the motherfuck,” Cleaver said, pausing to spit, “is fucking going on here Master Sarge?”

I wish I knew Sergeant. “We need to get going,” she said aloud, standing up and giving Soteria a pat. “We need a palmlet. We need to be able to find our people.”

“People don’t do that,” he whispered. Reaper caught him wiping tears from his cheeks. From the act of vomiting or what they saw, she didn’t know but either way there was no judgement.

I hope people don’t. “Come on. We’re going to skip the next block and try not to get killed in the process.”