Sub Francisco 1500 word story

Sub Francisco
genre: Steampunk/Noir/Horror
Format: music video / graphic novel

synopsis: After several hundred years of rising sea levels and civil war, Sub Francisco is the only major city to have repelled the zombie armies of the US government. The city is under 110 feet of water, and the ruling faction for 10 years is a shapeshifting orca whale and her council of marine advisors. Ten years ago, the orca queen and her research partner, a bioengineering prodigy named Phlex, had a falling out. Phlex left her friend and hometown just as civil war started. Now Flexx Jones is a federal agent zombie-like ReLife experiment sent to cause chaos in Sub San Francisco. Flexx has plenty of contacts in her old city, but has no idea of the changes her old partner has undergone.

San Francisco Bay Delta
Tri-hulled stealth warship USS HAVER

"NORCAL CMD. TO USS HAVER, WE UNDERSTAND YOU HAVE A MEDICAL EMERGENCY ABOARD -CONFIRM MISSION STATUS"

"SSHK-THIS IS HAVER, WE HAVE JUST RELEASED TARGET, UH, SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH, BUT SHE -SHE TOOK THE CAPTAIN'S HAND WITH HER. SITUATION UNDER CONTROL. RETURNING NOW CCCHHK"

The destroyer roostertails back up the delta, spooking the local scavenger tribes cowering in the reeds. The diver waves her severed trophy around for bait, sinking to walk on the bottom, slipping past the ruined Carquinez Bridge a few meters below the bay. In the murky brine, what might look like a helmet is the diver's treestump neck and jawbone, now unhinged to gnaw down into the mud, scooping up a few crabs and a bucket of muck, all swallowed back in a flash. Flexx Jones blinks once, twin flashes of bruised purple on a biohazardous face. No bubbles mark her descent, she moves without disturbing the water, without air tanks.

The great white shark never knew what hit it. Flexx shakes the two ton thing into Relife, releasing fangs only when the beast shudders and opens its new and improved mouth. With a flick of her hand she sends her new pet into the deeps of Sub Francisco Bay, triangulating her approach. A pack of morays rushes her out of nowhere, locking onto her here and there. Feet together, she dives fast and deep into the bay, trailing eels that keep biting down. By the time she reaches the busted open Transbay Tube, she leads a nice little undead armada. More sentries harass Jones inside the tube, some human, all too slow. More minions for the real work ahead. No flashlight, no bubbles. Silent entry into softly lit subway tunnel, the best entry point to ignore the towering hulk of Pacific Fortress North, spanning across the bay 20 miles west, with its airship stations and railguns marking the border of America, and this other place.

Flexx Jones is American. United States Counterintelligence Relife Experiment # 1, actually. Protein-fueled hoodoo bioengineering on a mission to "go out and do your worst." This is Flexx Jones hammering through the ceramic blast doors of Embarcadero BART, 100 m eters below sea level. These are the garbled curses she croaks -still without air bubbles- as the royal guards introduce themselves. Octopi smear themslves around her from all sides, wrapping nets around her and twisting elegantly to avoid her snapping beartrap teeth and claws. They are trained not to bite anything unfamiliar, they signal with pulsing lights to their leader.

This is their customized ink that clouds her terrible eyes, and from the far end of the station, gripping her Xeramic double-bladed harpoon in stubby emerging fingers, Deepsinger the Orca Queen watches, pinging some little echo that messes with Flexx's sense of right and wrong...

Wrong wins. There is a lot of drama in the water. The orca queen is unimpressed. She moves south towards Daly City, taunting Flexx with some crazy song about a way to set her uninvited guest up at the helm of her very own airship.

Zombies were designed by the Federal government to be harbingers of doom, not drivers of vehicles. It just sounds too good to be true. Jones follows, herself shadowed by the octopi fast enough to avoid being zombified. Down more tunnel, thru the stations Flexx remembers from her wartime childhood as bomb shelters: Montgomery, Powell (the water here tastes like rot, the mass graves are close) and now in the waving kelp beds of Civic Center Station, The Orca Queen attacks. Her harpoon is alive, more biomagikal trickery, and it hunts Flexx while the queen shatters the zombie's teeth and eardrums with songs that rumble up to the surface through great iron trumpets rising up from the depths. Sub Franciscans hear this music in their bones and hold their children close, and wonder how this new unlucky stupid bastard will die.


But Jones is right where she needs to be. She parries another jab from the living harpoon with her severed right arm, then sends her chompy guards forth as a shield while swooping up the levels, rippling her body faster towards the surface. Just a meter to go when a massive spiked rubbery mitt wraps around her legs and pulls her down, but not before she fastballs a grenade, which bobs to the surface and explodes, sending her chemical beacon out in oily rings.

Back down into the depths, pinned by something stronger. She's lost her arm but a new, better one is already growing back. Perhaps, lodged in some dark corner, her arm is growing a new, better Flexx. She looks down at her captor. It watches back with luminous golden eyes the size of dinner plates. She wonders if she'll get another meal in soon. Might need more food to make enough toxin to zombify a giant squid...

No meal. Not yet. They keep her subsurface, watching her arm grow back. Three thumbs on the new hand, all resting on coils of muscle, spring loaded. They argue for her death, then debate on how. Nights pass. The Orca Queen and her human and cetacean council finally sense her rejuvenation and teleport her up to the streets. They figure she can't kill all of them. And they are always right...

Dry Streets: Jones is finally happy: her contacts have come through and after dodging Deepsinger's agents, she now knows about the airship factory in Daly City. She rallies her friends to take control of the factory. But Deepsinger always seems to have the upper hand, and in the industrial chaos of the factory, the Orca queen reveals her past identity to Flexx, shapeshifting into an exact mimic of the zombie while escaping in a giant submersible airship. Betrayed and exhausted, Jones now is the most powerful figure in Sub SF, where the majority has fiercely defended their city against hordes of undead. Her loyal army can defend the factory, but somewhere along the Pacific coast, she is being impersonated by a telepathic echolocating shapeshifter aboard a ship with radical new technology...