Malcontent

 is a story from the lore of BATTLEGROUNDS.

Part 1
Featured characters:

All she could smell was cold cuts and cat piss.

That meat smell, salty and sour – that was from the Czech madman. He was hunched over a desk in front of her, head down, clearly impatient, waiting for Madison Malholtra to carve open the flesh behind his ear.

Mal had noticed the smell when they first met on the cargo plane two days ago. Christ, had it only been two days? The last forty-eight hours were a blur of bullets, blood, and yeah, that sweaty smell of meat. The Czech man had refused to answer when she asked him on the plane but there was no question now; she knew why his nickname was "Lunchmeat."

The four of them – Mal and Lunchmeat along with Duncan and Julie – were hiding out in the backroom of a shuttered Bangkok internet café. Front doors chained, a metal gate pulled down over the windows. They had broken in through the back. By the looks of the place, it’d been years since anyone had come here for internet gaming or to print out a resume. The only action this place had seen was from a pair of stray cats – the stink of ammonia made Mal’s eyes water.

She had contacts in Southeast Asia. Places they could go. But for now – with no money, no phones, and no clue who was after them – the North Star E-cafe would have to do.

"The hell are you waiting for?" Lunchmeat barked.

"The anesthetic needs to kick in," she said. In truth she was nervous. She’d never cut a tracking device out of someone’s neck before.

She tapped the scalpel against Lunchmeat’s skin.

"I told you," he said, "painkillers don’t work on me. Just go."

Duncan, the one who looked like a GI Joe action figure, pulled off his leather belt and offered it to Lunchmeat. "Here. Put this in your mouth."

A cackle from farther in the room. That was Julie. The one with the purple hair and the Y-incision tattooed on her chest. She was moving from computer to computer, checking for a working internet connection. No luck so far.

"Wanna know what I did to the last guy who said that to me?" She cackled again.

Mal knew something was off about her the moment she saw her. Long before Julie lost it and murdered everyone in the bunker.

"It’s for the pain,” Duncan explained. "You can bite down on it and-"

"I know what it’s for," Lunchmeat said. "I don’t need it. Just get on with it already."

But Lunchmeat was wrong. He did need it.

Not at first. Not when Mal buried the tip of the scalpel into his neck. Not when she pulled down and split the skin like paper.

It was a minute later, when Mal shoved a pair of tweezers between his muscle fibers when Lunchmeat slammed his fist down on the table and pointed at Duncan’s belt. He took the belt in his teeth, bit down hard, and growled.

Mal kept working, another thirty seconds fishing in a sea of red before she pulled it out.

The device was the size of a SIM card. Two clear filaments dangled off it, wiry and slick, and so thin that Mal had the feeling you wouldn’t be able to see them if they weren’t coated in blood. She dropped the chip on an aluminum tray.

"There’s more hardware. In your neck. But it’s up against bone. I don’t want to touch it" she said.

"Get it out. All of it," Lunchmeat said.

"I can suture a bullet wound," she said. “I can treat a burn. But I’m not playing Operation to pull Matrix-shit off your skull."

Matrix was an exaggeration – but not by much. The thing they pulled out of his neck was advanced. Mal half-expected those filaments to start whipping around in the air.

"This is messed up," said Lunchmeat, cradling a roll of gauze to his wound.

"Don’t use all of that," said Duncan. "We have one med kit between the four of us."

But Lunchmeat wasn’t listening. "Man, I thought the creeps behind this were just rich assholes who liked to watch people shoot each other. But look at that thing..." He gestured at the chip.

"Who are these people?"

The truth was, Mal had no clue. She’d only met one of them, a man named "Martin," though that was almost certainly not his real name. He spoke with an accent – European but hard to place. The guards at Puzhal Central Prison in India, where she was serving her term, said he was a lawyer.

No, not a lawyer. Her lawyer.

She knew the moment she had eyes on him that he wasn’t a lawyer. There’s a vibe you get from lawyers. Even the dirty ones. This guy was different. Interpol, maybe. Could be doing work with India’s Research and Analysis Wing or something. Just another young man trying to prove how big his dick was by cracking a case on the back of some coerced testimony.

At least, this Martin guy didn’t look he’d waterboard her.

"Look," she said, "if you’re gonna ask me to rat out my buyer-"

He held out a finger and mouthed the word "wait." Then he pulled out his phone and thumbed open an app. He set it on the table in front of him and forced a smile.

"You’re not being recorded,” he said. “This is for our privacy."

She tried to get a glimpse of the app but couldn’t make anything out. The phone emitted a barely audible whine. Or maybe that was just a pipe in the walls.

"I’m not a lawyer," he continued. "I am a recruiter of sorts. The people I work for have had their eye on you for some time. Since your Karakin deal, actually. Do you remember Karakin?"

Of course she remembered Karakin. You always remember the weird ones.

Karakin was a dried-up island off the coast of Tunisia. Nothing but octopus farmers and pirates. Word was some bad shit had gone down, some kind of smuggler coup. It didn’t matter to her. All that mattered was that the new residents needed weapons fast. Her contact had asked if she could provide, so she had: automatic weapons and ammunition from a source in the Congo, heavy ordinance delivered from the Baltics.

It’s what she did and she didn’t lose sleep over it. The way she figured, people were going to get guns one way or another. Better they get them through her. The world was going to hell anyway, right? Someone should enjoy the ride down.

But this Karakin job, it was different. Right from the start. For one, the buyers weren’t mercenaries. And they weren’t smugglers either. Mal could sniff out a hired gun a mile away but these guys… She wasn’t sure who they were. And everything was done through so many layers of secrecy. Even their middlemen had middlemen. And the weirdest part? They paid full in advance.

In her line of work, no one paid in advance.

After the guns had been delivered, she never heard from them again. She moved on, working a dozen more deals over the years before the Delhi job had landed her in prison. She hadn’t thought of Karakin since. She figured those octopus farmers or whatever they were got what they needed.

Except now Not-a-Lawyer-Martin was sitting across from her making an offer.

Her death would be faked, he said. She would be removed from the prison at an unspecified point in the future and taken to a region of their choosing. Then, she would participate in a game.

That was the word he used. A game. Mal almost laughed in his face. But there was something about Martin and the way he delivered the offer. How clearly rehearsed it was. He’d given this speech to a hundred other inmates. Maybe a thousand.

He explained that others would be playing the game. Some would be her allies, chosen by the people he worked for. The rest would be her opponents. Her combatants.

How many would be playing this game? Martin couldn’t say. She then asked the obvious question: what were the rules of this game?

Martin lit a cigarette. He offered her one. She accepted.

"Before I tell you the rules, Ms. Malholtra, I need to ask you a question. Do you consider yourself a survivor?"

Mal removed the chips from Duncan and Julie without incident, collecting the bloody hardware on the same tray. They reasoned that the devices weren’t transmitting – otherwise they certainly wouldn’t have made it off the beach, let alone to Bangkok – but Duncan wasn’t comfortable until they wrapped the chips in several sheets of aluminum foil.

Then it was her turn. Mal didn’t like the idea of someone else cutting into her neck but she couldn’t do the operation herself. Duncan swabbed the area with alcohol and injected the anesthetic. Once the numbness set in, she took the belt and bit down.

The drugs dulled the pain to just pressure. A tug on her skin. Duncan was confident but he didn’t know what he was looking for; Mal had to walk him through most of it with a hand mirror. It was surreal, watching her own surgery on the glass. Feeling without really feeling. After the longest two minutes of her life, Duncan found the chip and pulled it out with the tweezers.

And Madison’s field of vision deteriorated.

She wasn’t aware that she had lost consciousness. It was more like her senses stuttered for a moment. Like the world was an internet video streamed over shitty Wi-Fi. There were colors, electric and sharp. The taste of copper filled her mouth as the world decayed.

That’s how she would describe it. Later. After the seizures had stopped.

When the world made sense again, she found herself on her back. Duncan stood over her, pale and frightened, his square jaw hanging open.

"You okay?"

"I don’t know," was all she could manage. She was surprised how hard it was to talk, how weak her voice sounded. She closed her eyes. The decay was still there. Chaos and colors and...

Lines. Like a pattern or a symbol. She tried to make sense of it, but it faded quickly. Like a dream. Then she just felt hungover.

"You’re bleeding," Duncan said.

"No shit." She propped herself up on an elbow, her head swimming.

"No. Your nose."

Mal reached up and caught blood on the back of her hand.

They knew they had little time. The people they escaped from would be looking for them. They had to move. To run and keep running.

But by the time Mal’s nosebleed had stopped, Lunchmeat was asleep in the corner, pants off and rolled up into a makeshift pillow, a half-finished bottle of Singha beer in his hand.

Fine. They needed sleep anyway. In the morning they would divvy up what few supplies remained and go their separate ways.

Mal sat in the corner, calming herself with slow breaths. Watching the others. Some of them, maybe all of them, would be dead within a week. And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.

These weren’t good people and she had no loyalty to them. The madman, the psychopath, and the GI Joe.

Sleep wouldn’t come. It wasn’t Lunchmeat’s snores or the carpet that stunk of ammonia. It was that every time she closed her eyes she’d see that digital decay. Just for a second.

It was a little past one when she got up for a drink. One of those beers would be nice, anything to wash away the metal taste in her mouth. She left the backroom and found an unplugged minifridge behind a counter in the front of the café. Two warm bottles inside. She grabbed one and was looking for a bottle opener when she heard a car door closing outside.

It wasn’t significant because it was loud - it was notable because someone was trying to be quiet.

The scuff of boots on pavement. The sound of metal on metal. A rattling at the front door. Someone cut through the metal chain.

Before she could think, the door to the E-Café flew open and the man with the sub-machine gun charged in.