Taiga's Impulse

He’d done it again. Looking over their shoulders the pair ran through the night. Ducking around a corner they stopped to listen for sounds of pursuit.

            As usual she was angry with him. Instead of verbal berating she punched his arm. He took the blow with a shrug and wrinkled his nose at the smell of the restaurant binbags waiting for collection. A ginger cat sat on a windowsill looking at them intently.

            Distant shouting told them both that the chase was not over. They looked for an escape as the sounds of many footsteps sounded on the wet tiles of the pavement.

            Taiga saw a fire escape and easily hoisted his accomplice Gene onto his shoulders so that she could reach up and lift herself to the railing. She pulled herself up, wincing at the metal groan as it shifted under her weight and again as he leapt up behind her with inhuman agility.

            Taking off her black shoes she ran up the stairs in bare feet to avoid making a noise. Following suit her partner removed his own hard soled oxfords and chased after her up the stairs.

They were almost up to the roof when a dozen soldiers reached the alleyway and looked up at them before taking aim with assault rifles. The harsh ping of bullets ricocheting off the metal frame followed them as they moved faster up the stairs.

“It’s almost dawn Taiga, I can’t keep running,” said Gene. Her red hair was plastered to her hair by the rain which had just stopped pissing from the sky.

“I’m sorry,” said the tall man chasing after her in a black suit. The white shirt beneath was almost transparent with rain and sweat. His thick onyx hair was slicked to his head which only made him look more like a model. The moment he stopped the visible spark of a bullet hitting the banister next to his hand spurred him on.

“Sorry isn’t going to help me if I’m shot or caught in sunlight. We have minutes Taiga, look at the sky.”

Looking at the horizon the dark blue of the night was surrendering to the purple which would soon be a reddish orange.

“Seeing them swanning around as if they own the place just sets me off,” said the immortal to justify his murderous outburst minutes before.

He had been standing at a bar, minding his own business when three imperial soldiers wandered in and interrupted his order to place their own. It had felt only right to him that he should pulverise them by way of an etiquette lesson.

“They do own the place moron, along with most of the universe now. Get over it before your temper puts me in the ground” She was out of sight on the rooftop as she finished. He accelerated to keep up.

Without a word to him she threw herself from the lip of the building down to the one across an alley. He heard the loud thump of her hitting the next rooftop, two storeys down. He followed on faith, seeing tar paper on his landing point.

The light around them was going red, she had a minute at most to be in cover before the heightened ultraviolet rays nullified her immortality. Being a vampire must have been such a pain in the ass.

Throwing on her shoes, Gene dropped out of sight again, no longer taking the time to argue with him or explain the route. The next jump was a good distance for him. She was pushing herself. She was getting desperate. A golden orange rim appeared on the horizon, sending deadly rays across the rooftops. She’d dropped off the rooftop with only moments to spare.

Dropping down to the fire escape he saw a door open the floor below and slid down the banister of the tenth floor to the ninth. Inside a mint green corridor that smelled of bleach she was waiting for him with a frown on her ever-youthful face.

Gene kept running, down the corridor until they found a staircase which she followed up until a dead end. Above them was a door to the rooftop which only opened from the inside and a tiny hatch to some sort of attic space which was no doubt cramped in the extreme.

With a finger to her lips, she looked at the floor, not because she was interested in the pink linoleum but because she was listening to the sound of footsteps on the stairs below. She couldn’t go outside; she wouldn’t survive a gunfight. She pointed to the hatch in the ceiling.

With her shaking on his shoulders, she reached up to push the wooden hatch away from the hole to the crawl space above. Dust rained down from the edge as she hauled herself up and looked down at him.

If he ran on and was seen their pursuers would know she was laying low nearby and she would be trapped. He had to go with her. The dust on the floor would give the game away if he didn’t clean it up.

Taking off his jacket Taiga wiped up the dust with his beautiful black suit and threw it up to her. The footsteps on the stairs were louder. He leapt up to the hatch and grabbed the edge, hearing it creak under his sudden weight. Gene had wiped back the dust from the edge as best she could for him and retreated lying down.

Throwing his leg up over the edge he rolled into the space. By the light of her comm he slid the lid back into place and looked at her face contorted in anger. Everything was grey with dust, including them. They couldn’t talk, or move, not until night had fallen again.

Gene usually didn’t mind Taiga picking fights with imperials. It always had to be planned though. She had to have an exit strategy or be sure that no one would ever know what they’d done.

The problem was that wherever they went one of them stood out. Redheads stood out even on worlds dominated by European ancestral diaspora and in places where her hair wasn’t an issue the Asian ancestry of his body was.

His body, the body he had possessed for decades, had been that of a man on Gene’s military research division until the original owner no longer needed it. In desperation she had summoned Taiga from the realm of the immortal souls to fight for her in a doomed war. As the kind of immortal soul people called demons, he had been happy to go to war.

Without a family or home to root her Gene had gone with him on a bloody tour of the many worlds humanity had colonised over centuries amongst the stars. No matter how far they went the soldiers of that superpower seemed to follow them.

Gene’s comm vibrated after sunset to let them know it was safe to poke their head out from under the rock. Taiga cautiously lifted the lid of the hatch to peek into the stairwell below. He gave the vampire a dusty wink and pushed the lid further away so that he could drop to the brown concrete floor, taking a cloud of grey mess with him.

Stifling a cough, he held out his arms to catch her as she hung from the lip of the hatch and dropped, bringing down more dust with her. Letting her down to her feet they both dusted themselves off. They’d lived to fight another night.

“I’m thirsty,” said the vampire, licking her lips. She did look dehydrated. Without roughly a pint of blood a week she started to age, though it could be reversed by drinking more.

“Time for us to go on the hunt then?” he asked, smiling. She nodded without returning the expression. Gene didn’t smile much unless she was drinking someone dry. Watching your whole life obliterated by a mushroom cloud could suck the optimism from anyone.

She didn’t want to run around in the night like a cat after mice anymore she said. She wanted to play spider for a while. The next floor down in a corridor with ten doors she told Taiga to pick one. They were all the same faded pine green. He chose number 62.

“If they make a move, we need to subdue them, but not kill them,” said the predator with pearly white teeth. She looked at him said it again, “don’t kill anyone,” she whispered.

When he gave her the thumbs up, she nodded and rang the doorbell. Standing away from the camera on the door she smiled as a young man in a t-shirt and underwear opened the door. The button on his boxer shorts was undone and was sweaty.

“It’s you,” said the young man, his eyes opened to the size of saucers. Before he could finish the thought, Gene’s fist knocked him out and down. She rushed into the home with the demon behind her. Taiga gently closed the door, not wanting to slam it in case the sound drew someone’s attention.

“Who was at the door? Want pizza?” asked another man of similar age but broader build, in a blue T-shirt and green shorts. Guzzling down a slice of pepperoni deep dish he took a moment to notice the two invaders in his home.

The broader man whose nipples showed through his blue dinosaur T-shirt forgot the pizza in a moment and dropped into a boxer’s stance. Taiga shot across the room and placed his palm over the man’s mouth and crushed his nostrils together with his long fingers.

Dinosaur man swung wildly at the suited immortal, landing solid punches which grew weaker and weaker until his eyes rolled, and his body went limp. Taiga lay him down in the recovery position as Gene had done with the other one.

With a moment to take in his surroundings Taiga decided he’d picked the wrong door. The two-bedroom apartment smelled of rotting food and old washing. Clothes lay scattered across the carpet in the hallway and every room. Dishes piled up in the sink were turning mouldy. Everything needed cleaned.

“What now?” Taiga asked softly.

“Now I spell bind them,” she said. He laughed. “What?”

“That was a disaster last time,” said the demon. She shrugged.

“It was practice. This time will be better.”

“If you say so,” he teased. She frowned. Finding a seat covered in takeaway debris she swiped the boxes off and planted her prey upon it. There were no cable ties, no chains, no lengths of rope so they tied up the due with their own stinking clothes.

Dinosaur Boy had to be tied to his own bed because they only had one chair. First to be bitten was the blonde one in a T-shirt with an army of robots on it. Pulling out his lip she nipped it with her teeth and drank his blood which was amongst the most awkward things Taiga had ever seen.

Gene’s eyes dilated and rolled in their sockets. Her chest heaved. The pale of her skin began to flood with colour. Robot Boy didn’t move. Taiga let the vampire come down from her blood high before motioning at her to hurry up and move the process along.

Her eyes turned white, not rolling but fading as if dead and then some. Her voice was deeper older as she looked at Robot Boy and slapped him until he woke. He moaned around a sock in his mouth and looked at both immortals before struggling against his bonds.

Gene grabbed his face and stare into his eyes until they were vacant, then let go.

“Are you going to behave for me,” she asked in the same ancient voice. He nodded like a bobblehead with a blank look on his face.

“But” he tried to say, causing her to sigh and bite his lip again.

“We are going to stay here with you and your friend. Do you agree.”

Looking high and vacant he nodded, mouth wide open and stared, blinking straight ahead. Giving Taiga a sour grin to say she’d told him so, the vampire got on her knees to work her magic on Dinosaur Boy.

 It took a few tries to get the second one compliant but when he was Gene untied them and ordered them to clean their home from top to bottom. As the immortals sat on their couch, thankful for the lack of windows, the residents threw load after load of laundry into their washing machine and most other detritus into binbags which had previously been unopened.

Six hours later the place was spotless. The hardwood floor was visible without posters, papers and menus scattered across it. That one of both were avid readers was obvious from shelf after shelf of paperback novels, a rarity in the age of digital media that had begun centuries before.

When the two had laboured until their shoulders hung and their eyes had bags of exhaustion under red veined eyes Gene commanded them to rest. She turned on their projector and took in the local news. Taiga hoped that the soldiers which had been chasing them had moved on.

Instead of their chase being the main story the Human Empire’s main propaganda channel showed scenes of an anti-empire protest where all participants had been arrested and charged with treason and sedition.

Taiga paused the projection as it scanned over video of an angry crowd. Looking at a photo on the bookshelf he pulled the family photo down next to the projection to compare the faces he was looking at.

In the photo the families of the two boys stood arm in arm amid a party, smiling and by the looks of it, drunk. Holding the photo up, the demon looked at the vampire. She gave him the same ominous look. The man in the projection and the father of Robot Boy were one and the same.

Robot boy was asleep with his back to the sofa. Dinosaur boy was droopy eyed, awaiting instructions from Gene. On the tidied table in the middle of the room were the men’s comm devices side by side. Lifting one then the other, Taiga saw dozens of missed calls and unread messages.

Gene gulped, seeing the alerts on the screen. They both looked at their hosts. They knew what was coming, her more so than him. He was an immortal soul with seemingly endless cruel siblings that were all as old as time and could never die. Gene had seen all her family disappear one by one into the fog of war or the mushroom cloud of the nuke which had turned the hill her home sat on into a crater.

Gene unfolded something from the table and handed it to Taiga. He saw a sign up for the imperial forces, promising good pay and travel to other worlds. Half of the details had already been filled in by Igor Foley and Jon Short. They had been ready to join the army which had just stolen their fathers away.

“They might be let off. There were thousands of people at that protest. They can’t have killed them all.” He tried to sound hopeful but hope and belief were not the same.

“We both know those men and everyone else who was arrested is never coming back. No one arrested by the empire comes back.” Gene collapsed into the sofa and buried her face in her hands.

For an hour, perhaps two, they all sat in silence until Dinosaur Boy was asleep as well. Taiga ripped up the sign-up forms and pushed them to the bottom of bin bags sitting in the hallway by the door.

Gene snapped her fingers. The roommates stirred but didn’t wake. She clapped loud enough to wake the dead, stirring them from slumber.

“Both of you are going to forget about trying to join the imperial forces, do you understand?” The two spellbound drones nodded their heads. “He and I,” she pointed to herself and the demon, “we’re going to look after you until you have come to terms with the bad news about your family. You will not tell anyone about us or refer to the presence of strangers in your home. You will not invite others to come here or allow them to enter the residence until we have left. Do you understand?” Gene asked as if she was reading them an ironclad contract.

Both nodded. She held out their comms. After a while she realised, she had to tell them to take the devices from her hands. She also had to tell them to act normally and answer the calls as the comms vibrated again.

Igor and Jon answered their calls. Taiga watched their zen calm evaporate as their lives were torn apart. Jon dropped his phone, shaking as tears ran down his face. Gene hugged Robot Boy, shocking the demon to his core.

She was crying as well. Igor joined his flatmate and the vampire in an embrace that bound them as grieving children.

Looking at them with a common pain the immortal soul felt an odd jealousy. The trio hugging each other had all lost parents. From the dawn of time, he had known untold hordes of ethereal siblings who had tormented him endlessly. To lose loving family you had to have one.

“I know you two just lost people you love,” he said. Drowsy faces turned to look at him. “It’s natural to want revenge. Please don’t go after imperials. Let me and her do that for you.” He pointed at Gene. “We’re immortal, relentless and we hate the empire. I promise you here and now that we will be kicking imperial ass for centuries to come. All you two must do is watch. Understand?” Blank faces.

“Do you agree?” Gene asked.

Igor and Jon nodded, still crying.