Lysa’s weapon clicked empty, and instead of scrambling to reload it while in the kill zone the hybrid warrior turned to flee once more. By the time the gunman peeked around the other side of the dumpster she was exiting the alley, and his parting shot went wide. Several more warriors joined the gunman, and they cautiously moved through the alley, remaining behind the shield-bearer who had finally arrived. Lysa slung the weapon across her back and focused on sprinting as fast as she could down the street while looking for an avenue of escape.
Her vision was still hazy, and her balance imperfect. Lysa found her thoughts wandering, no doubt a side effect of having taken the brunt of a grenade blast. She knew that she should have been dead, and before the Izrid DNA has been introduced into her system she was positive that she would have been little more than pulverized meat in a sexy dress. She could feel the micro-fibers of damaged muscle tissue begin to re-knit itself even as new skin cells began layering themselves over her rapidly healing wounds. She had never witnessed such potent regeneration capabilities among the Izrid warriors she had fought over the years, so this had to be the result of her mixed genetic heritage. Something of the Izrid in her had mixed with the human in her to re-program her very cellular structure to repair itself at a rapid rate. Lysa could feel herself growing more and more hungry by the second as her body burned through what little fat she possessed to fuel the regeneration and her physical exertion. Food would have to wait, she thought to herself, first she must reconnect with the brood.
In that moment Lysa skidded to a halt, the alien thought having occurred in her brain without warning, and it terrified her. She felt connected to Morgan, the Izrid rogue warrior, and the other hybrid women in a way that she could only describe as instinctual. They were family, and yet more than that. They were the past, the future, her legacy and her charge. As her mind spun Lysa could hear the Izrid warriors nearing her position, and something she could only describe as righteous rage erupted within her. These warriors were coming to harm her brood, and her impulse to slay them was so intense that it felt like a need of the same intensity as drawing breath. One part of her bristled at what felt like a betrayal of her mind by her own body, and yet, it felt perfectly natural, as if it would be strange to be any other way.
She had been injected with massive doses of the Izrid’s pheromone serum by the unknown magister whom had chosen her for his entertainment. At first the magister had put her on her back and took her missionary style, though he kept dosing her, so much so that she dimly recalled him making mention of his surprise that she had not simply perished from overdose. She could barely tell hallucination from reality, as she was so lost in the mists of alien arousal, her mission all but forgotten. She begged the magister to make his warriors fuck her, and not just the two in the room, but all of them. She implored him to ravage her body with an entire war hive, and for several hours it seemed as if he had agreed. Lysa was adrift in a sea of alien sex drive, her identity seeming like a ghost when compared to the muscled bodies and hard cocks of the Izrid legions. They took her by the dozen it seemed, using any part of her body that they could find a way to fuck. Those that could not bury themselves inside her made use of her willing hands, pushed her breasts together, or rubbed their throbbing members against her thighs and shoulders. Others who crowded around simply stood over her as she was gang-banged and then masturbated onto her prone form. All the while she howled at them for more. Yet, through all of the sex and chemical insanity, she had known, deep down in a part of her soul no Izrid could plunder, that it was an illusion. When she regained consciousness she was alone, covered in crusting alien filth and left on the floor like a discarded plaything. It was shortly after that the magister had returned with a single warrior, thinking that they would kill her.
This was no illusion, she thought to herself, and neither was the weapon that she used to fight her way out of that nightmare. This feeling was so natural, not like the chemical lies of the serum, and yet equally powerful. She felt is so deep within her that it could be nothing other than genetic. She found in that moment of white-hot rage that she could almost sense Morgan, the rogue warrior, and the others. It was as if she had an internal GPS system that informed her position, and Morgan was true north. After what had happened in the compound Lysa was positive the Morgan was changing into something different than she herself was, something unique to her. Lysa thought that she would be disgusted with having been so recklessly tampered with, and yet in that moment she felt at peace. Even by the distant thrum that denoted the presence of the rogue warrior, and even he felt like brood, despite being so like the invaders vast who had taken her body for their sport. This is what she was now, she could feel it, a sort of knowing that only comes with instinct. These other warriors had come to slay her brood mates, and it was her duty, no, her sacred trust, to defend them to the death.
Lysa stopped fleeing, and turned to face her enemies, determined to put and end to the chase. She bolted across a two lane street, wondering silently to herself what the burned out storefronts might have once sold, and leapt through a broken display window. She found herself in an empty store, whatever goods it had once sold having been plundered or destroyed long ago. She rushed deeper into the building as the Izrid warriors emerged from the alley. As she swiftly worked to reload her flechette caster she counted four warriors in the hunting party, and considered herself lucky. Usually hunting parties of Izrid were at least platoon strength, yet these warriors had only come at her with six fighters. The aftermath of the viscous battle at the compound must have sent ripples throughout the Izrid command structure, else there would be a much more compounded effort to bring her down. She could dimly sense Morgan and the others far to the south, though exactly the distance she could not tell. The sounds of fighting still carried faintly on the wind, and from the reports of the weapons she could tell that the resistance force was still aggressively engaging the Izrid enemy.
Lysa found herself wondering which of her former comrades had died today, since the horrific firefight with MacArthur only hours before. She thought of Anders and Magna, the two men she had been intimate with before volunteering for MacArthur’s infiltration mission. Anders, she thought to herself as she slammed home her last cylinder of flechette rounds, had been more the quiet type. He was a good soldier and a good man, maybe too good for this broken world. He’d been a family man in his prior life, and Lysa knew the loss of his family still haunted him. Magna was from the Pacific Islands, and was a proud bearer of his heritage, more so now that humanity was struggling for its very survival. His native warrior culture had served him well, and made him popular among the other soldiers. In these troubled times two such men might have had conflict with each other over sharing the same woman, and yet the three of them had a made a certain peace. They could all die tomorrow, Lysa had once told them, so let us live while we live. She had thought at the time the phrase had a nice ring to it, from a television program she’d seen as a child, and it seemed to do the trick. Fate, it seemed to Lysa as she raised the loaded weapon to cover the entrance to the storefront, was making good on their arrangement. Anders and Magna had been there during the standoff between the resistance and the small group of hybrid women, the only problem was they stood on MacArthur’s side. It seemed to Lysa that all the time they’d spent together, all the fighting, the fucking, and the bonds of making war as comrades had been swept away in an instant. She could see it in Magna’s eyes, the disgust, the hostility, and a jealousy so deep it had been twisted into righteous anger. Anders seemed reluctant, and when triggers started getting pulled she saw him hesitate. Anders had died without firing a shot, as a bullet from one of the hybrid girls blew out his chest and sent him hurling backwards in a cloud of blood and bone. Magna had managed to get into cover before Lysa opened up with the flechette caster. The resistance fighters had not been prepared for the kind of damage the weapon could do, and she’d mowed down several who did not get behind cover fast enough. Lysa had screamed then, in rage
and in sadness, to be hurled into the abuse of captivity by MacArthur, only to be told she was a monster who needed putting down.
She had lost three lovers today, thought Lysa as she held her position, keeping her breath shallow as the Izrid crept towards her. Anders was dead, Magna hated her, and the resistance had classified her as an enemy. As if to punctuate her thoughts a flash grenade detonated at the front of the store, though thankfully Lysa was able to shield her eyes from the majority of the blast. When she could open her eyes again she could tell that at least one Izrid warrior was hurling himself through the breach, firing as he ran. Hard rounds chewed up the wood around her position, and at least two grazed her thigh and arm. Had she still been completely human such wounds might have knocked her to the ground, though now she simply ignored the pain and withstood the shock while she returned fire. The warrior had expected her salvo and was already spinning out the way, so only a few of the bladed projectiles found their mark. She kept up the pace of fire and sprayed clouds of projectiles through the storefront, chasing the reeling warrior and finally blasting him into bloody chunks. A sound behind her triggered Lysa’s freshly honed battle instincts and she dropped to one knee while she turned around. The shield-bearer had breached the store and was rushing her. She scampered for cover as she unloaded the rest of her weapon’s cylinder at the warrior, who remained unscathed by the assault. However her withering fire did ricochet in a multitude of directions as they pinged off the shield, preventing the other warriors from engaging. With the precious few seconds she had bought herself Lysa turned and fled. Three down, she thought to herself as she bolted through the alleyway looking for her next escape route, three to go. She knew she was the hunted, and the advantage clearly lay with the Izrid, especially now that she was out of ammunition, though she was determined to survive and reconnect with her brood.
ACT II
Jana Cruz squeezed the trigger for what felt like the thousandth time that day, and a three round burst of .223 high velocity rounds exploded from the muzzle of her assault rifle. The soldier’s aim was true, and all three rounds slammed into the neck and jaw of an Izrid warrior, who fell to the ground gurgling on his own blood. She swept the barrel of the rifle to the left and squeezed the trigger twice more, hurling a fullisade of bullets at a second warrior who had been attempting to flank her platoon’s position. The warrior shuddered with the impact of the rounds, though unlike his comrade this warrior was encased in advanced body armor, and he remained unscathed. Jana sucked in her breath and dove for cover as the armored warrior turned its weapon towards her and unleashed a salvo of hot plasma rounds. Jana shouted in pain as she bashed her elbows hard on the ground, and then rolled to her right shoulder over shoulder until she fell under an exposed culvert and into the blast crater below. She could tell from the stench of burning meat that at least one of her fellow soldiers had been hit, though from the report of multiple small arms fire signatures she knew enough had survived to keep up the fight.
Jana swiftly ejected her spent magazine and replaced it with a fresh one, racked the slide, and then rose up from the hole to take aim. There was a smoking human corpse near her makeshift foxhole, though who it used to be she could not fathom. She scanned the area and saw that the armored warrior had closed distance and was using its twin war-axes to hack apart another resistance fighter. Jana could see another soldier, a young man named Liam, whom has been eviscerated and left to die near where the warrior currently stood. She could see that Liam had pulled the pin on a grenade and was attempting to drag himself across the shattered ground towards the warrior. The elite Izrid was so intent on butchering the resistance fighter in front of him that Liam’s approach was going unnoticed. As Jana watched she knew that Liam was moving too slow to reach the enemy in time. Jana raised the rifle to her shoulder and began taking deliberate shots at the warrior, focusing as much as she could on body strikes that would keep the armored warrior off balance. After four solid hits the warrior finally gained his footing enough to turn his plasma weapon towards her. Jana’s last shot went wide as she hurled herself backwards. She landed hard on her back and began scampering to the other side of the blast crater. She had gone no more than a few feet when she heard a deep sucking sound, the kind that a boot makes in thick mud, and the world went white just as an explosion shook the ground itself. She could taste ozone in her mouth, like licking a battery, and then the smell of burning metal and dirt assaulted her senses. She kicked up onto her feet and hugged the edge of the crater as superheated metal poured into the crater. She knew in an instant that the plasma round had destroyed the culvert, reducing it to a molten slag that was filling the bottom of the crater. She slid her knife from its sheath and used it to anchor herself for a swift climb out of the crater, heedless of what horror might await her at the top. When she ascended she immediately unslung her rifle and rolled onto her stomach, taking a prone shooter’s pose as she looked down her iron sights towards where the warrior had been standing. The whole area was a mess of gore, broken concrete, and twisted metal. She could see pieces of ruined Izrid armor, and said a silent prayer for Liam as she checked the perimeter for the rest of her platoon.
They had been hot on the trail of the hybrid scum. Morgan, Lysa, Susan, a few others she didn’t know, and the Izrid warrior that seemed to have defected from the main battle force and joined the fugitive women. The firefight back at the compound had been a terrible affair, and Jana was still reeling from the horror of it. In an instant the resistance had become something more complicated than just humans versus aliens. What were the hybrids? Were they the brave women warriors of the resistance who had been taken captive, only to be gunned down at the end of their ordeal? Or were they alien abominations that needed to be wiped out? MacArthur had made her judgment in a matter of seconds once Jana had briefed the resistance leader. Jana herself was unsure of what to do or how to feel, and in that moment of doubt relied on her training, her discipline as a former cop and present soldier. She had gone through her chain of command, and that meant leaving Morgan and Lysa to seek out MacArthur directly. Jana had not dreamed that MacArthur would have chosen to eliminate them without even a debriefing or at least a re-capture and interrogation.
When MacArthur had given the order to open fire Jana had not hesitated, and now, as she stood near the ruined bodies of three more of her resistance family, she wondered if she had been right. The Izrid had been routed from the compound, and the number of warrior casualties the resistance had been able to inflict were staggering. She had even heard over the platoon’s shortwave that at least two magisters were kill-confirmed. She had snorted at that, knowing that Lysa had killed one of those two. She found herself wondering if the other magister who had been killed was the one whom had taken possession of her for those brutal few days. Jana and her platoon had been dispatched away from the main battle force and given express orders by MacArthur to hunt down and terminate the surviving hybrids, at all costs. They were to only engage Izrid targets if presented with no option of evasion. MacArthur had given Jana the monitoring system for the tracking nodules embedded in the tongues of the surviving infiltration agents, of which Lysa had been one. Jana had toggled the monitor to ignore all other signals, as most of them belonged to dead women, and one to herself, leaving only the nodule resting in the base of Lysa’s tongue. In the fury of the fighting it seemed that Lysa had not stopped to remove or otherwise destroy her device, as had been done to Morgan. Jana had tapped her soldiers in minutes, choosing fourteen soldiers with solid battle records and reputations for loyalty to the cause. Magna had grimly volunteered, and she could not fault him for that.
The platoon had picked up the signal immediately and moved out of the compound, running as fast as they could while the rest of the resistance forces went about the grisly work of dispatching wounded Izrid and setting explosive throughout the compound and the immobilized war hive. They had made it several blocks before first encountering the enemy, and sadly it was not the hybrids they sought, but
a small Izrid squad, no doubt returning from a foot patrol in haste to join in the lost defense of the compound. Her platoon had engaged them fiercely, though that shootout had grown into a roving free-for-all as she pushed her soldiers to keep up the pace in pursuit of the hybrids. Lysa seemed to be taking a very circuitous route according to the monitor, and when the platoon discovered the slave skiff they knew that at least some of the Izrid forces were also in direct pursuit of the hybrids. It seemed that Izrid command wanted them as badly as MacArthur. Jana looked down the street at the skiff they had shot down minutes before and then spit on the ground.
“So much for the competition,” she uttered as her second in command, Magna, stepped up next to her, “Casualty assessment?”
“Six dead sir, two wounded, not fatal, but they’re going to slow us down. Costin and Bradshaw,” said Magna as he adjusted the heavy machine gun slung across his back, “and there’s something else.”
“What?” asked Jana as she turned to look over the rest of the platoon as they slowly gathered in on her position, having spread themselves out in order to engage the more numerous Izrid they’d just defeated.
“Zach spotted a six warrior squad disembark the skiff before we hit it with the rocket,” Magna spoke as he nodded towards a sturdy looking soldier, “He says they were heading southwest, and rolling heavy. Makes me think the skiff doubled back to fight us as a rearguard.”
“Agreed, they know we’re after the hybrids,” stated Jana as she moved among her soldiers and gave her orders, “Ok boys and girls, this is going to be a real son of a bitch choice to make, but we do what we have to. Costin and Bradshaw are going to have to stay here, we can’t afford to have you slowing us down. If you can hold out long enough its possible that a resistance patrol might come across your position, otherwise, well, fight the good fight.”
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