BioShock Rapture

Only to reappear, bringing a nasty smell and posing like a dancer, between Sullivan and the wall, yanking Sullivan’s right ear and cackling, “Hiya Chief!”

Bastard acts like one of them cartoons at the movies, Sullivan thought. He made a grab for the splicer—and felt his fingers pass through air that crackled with departing energy.

He turned to see the splicer grabbing the pistol from Harker with one hand, with the other tearing the constable’s badge off.

Sullivan got his pistol into play and fired at the splicer, squeezing the trigger a split second too late—the bullet passed through the place where the teleporter had been, ricocheting off the steel walls near Harker. The sucking sound came again, and then a flash of light from the cell window of 18.

Harker made a plaintive little eep sound, a noise you’d never expect from him—then he gasped as he slid down the wall, leaving a smear of blood. He fell on his face, squirming, groaning. The ricochet from Sullivan’s gun had hit the constable, and hard.

“Dammit, Harker!” Sullivan sputtered. As if it were Harker’s fault. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Just…” Harker gasped again. “Get the fucker…”

Tommy gun raised, Cavendish was stalking toward the window of cell 18. He peered through the small barred window in the studded-metal door … and his head jerked back with the bang of a gunshot from inside.

Sullivan thought at first Cavendish was dead—but then he saw the constable was just missing part of his left ear, much of it shot away. Cavendish crouched down in the corridor, put a hand over his red-streaming ear, hissing with pain. “Fuuuuuck!”

A “tee-hee-HEEEEEE!” came from inside the cell. “Too bad I missed, could’ve improved your ugly fucking face to have a bullet hole through it, dog humper! I gotta recommend that one to Steinman!”

Sullivan cocked his pistol, moving in a half crouch down the row of cells. He ignored the bearded splicer in number 16, who taunted, “You see, if you’d given us our ADAM, we’d all be happy harpies, but now, right now, you’ve made us into saddy soddies, and sadness hurts, it hurts, going to hurt and hurt!”

It’s me that’s done the hurting so far, today, Sullivan thought glumly. He’d accidentally shot Harker. This teleport thing had him shaken. He saw now why Harker’d been so unnerved.

He approached the cell door obliquely, pistol raised, trying to peer in without making himself a target. There, the seminude splicer was relaxing on his back in a cot against the farther wall of the padded room. His naked genitals, spattered with dried blood, all too clearly on display. He had his left arm behind his head, his right arm up, and he was spinning the pistol on his index finger and singing a Rapture advertising jingle to himself, “Ohhh, the beer may be green, but it’s mighty keen; it satisfies a man, makes him feel grand; it’s Ryan’s own, Ryan’s own, Ryan’s … own … beer!”

On “beer!” the splicer stopped spinning the gun and fired it toward the barred window of the cell. The bullet struck a bar and ricocheted down the corridor. Sullivan ducked, though the bullet was already on its way by then.

He raised slowly up, only to hear that sucking sound and Cavendish yelling, “Down, Chief!”

He flattened belly-down on the floor—and saw, out of the corner of his eye, the splicer materializing over him to his right, the pistol pointed down to shoot him in the head.

A rat-a-tat echoed harshly in the corridor, along with the big thump of a shotgun—and the splicer was stumbling backward, stitched across the middle with blood-spouting bullet holes, right arm torn half off from a shotgun blast. Cavendish had gotten him square with the tommy gun, and Karlosky had clipped him good with the shotgun. Someone around the corner yelled in pain as part of the tommy-gun burst ricocheted down the corridor. Maybe the steel walls hadn’t been such a good idea.

Sullivan got up again, coughing with the gunsmoke in the small space. Yips and jeers and shouts of derision came from the adjoining cells. But the teleport splicer was twitching, gurgling in death.

“Well, we got him, but we lost Harker,” Sullivan muttered, turning to look at the dead constable.

“This is a whole new … how you say it? From baseball…” Karlosky said, looking down at the twitching splicer.

Sullivan nodded. “A whole new ballgame.”

Footlight Theater

1956