Fiction: Xmas With Exotroopers Demo!

Back for Christmas with a fiction post from way back. Here's the opening/ demo for Christmas With Exotroopers, part of my longest running and least read series. It featured an evil Slavic wind god, genocidal nutcrackers, an angel based on a snail, and this, fair warning, possibly the most gorey scene I've written.

Though the principles of the combat exoskeleton were well-known, there was a persistent belief that the angled-slab armor of the exotrooper corps of Serbia, known to the Serbs as hercegs. “lords of blood” to their enemies, and to the wider world as “finbacks”, did not cover human beings but robots, or at least some unwholesome combination of the two. And the most feared of the exotroopers, a neo-Nazi ex-convict known as Zaratustra or Zed, had discoursed that there might be some truth to it.  Yes, the exotroopers were men, wholly separate from their mechanized armor.  But on another level, the human and the armor were in symbiosis.  Each of them customized the armor to his personality and preferred tactics, in Zed's own case welding a crown of rebar rods to his helmet to mark his status as commander.  Over time, the exotroopers had spent more and more time in their armor.  And for Zed in particular, the armor was a part of him even in his dreams. 

Zed found himself standing in the frame of a door knocked halfway off its hinges, with a festive Christmas wreath still hanging askew upon it.  At his feet is a fat man with a long, white beard in an unmistakeable red suit, still feebly clutching at his spilled intestines.  Beyond a short hallway, he could see a living room, decorated for Christmas and now smeared with blood and semi-solid fecal matter.  A man's decapitated corpse slumped on the hearth, and what remained of a woman was mixed with crushed gifts and the splintered ruin of a Christmas tree.  From behind the counter of an adjoining kitchen came the steady crunching of bone.

Zaratustra crouched to look Santa Claus in the eye.  “Let me guess,” he said.  “A little girl wanted a hippopotamus for Christmas...”

He snapped the dying man's neck, and drew a 12-gauge sidearm as he stood up.  In the kitchen, a huge, half-seen shape splintered cabinets as it wheeled about.  An enormous head reared momentarily into view, tossing blood-stained shreds of a frilly pink dress into a bowl of egg nog. As Zed took aim, hindquarters the size of whole turkeys pushed into view, and then ejected a literally staggering spray of excrement straight at his helmet.  He fired twice, virtually blind, at the hulking yet low-slung shape that smashed through one corner of the counter as it burst out of the kitchen.  Then he kicked, and his lashing foot met the ivory and bone of the bull hippo's swinging jaw...

“Zed! Lieutenant Zed!” The voice that drew Zed out of sleep was Zotgjakt, aka the Albanak, the only Albanian in Serbia's exotrooper corps and the only finback whom Zed might consider a close friend. “The Lieutenant is here for a briefing!”  And Zed lowered his foot, which he used to prop himself up in the closet while he slept, and replaced his outer helmet, which was crowned with pieces of rebar.  Within seconds, he was battle-ready.