by Sechin Tower
“What do we do?” Victor whispered tensely.
Dean didn’t have an answer, but Choop did. The smaller gray creature slid past them to crouch just out of reach of his larger counterpart where he chirped a bird-like song. Compared to the raw, destructive power of the monster, Choop seemed even more skinny and sleek than he had before. It was like a ninety pound panther squaring off with a four-hundred-pound-gorilla.
Choop chirped again and the monster’s eyes widened. For a moment it appeared that it might respond. Then suddenly it raised its fists, roared, and leaped at the smaller version of itself.
Springing sideways to avoid the monster’s spiked fists, Choop evaded the bigger creature long enough to slip past it and escape around the row of booths. The monster roared after it and then turned to face Victor and Dean.
Dean leaped to the center of the lane, blocking the monster’s path, looking for some way to buy Victor more time to escape. To his surprise, it was Choop who again came to the rescue.
Just as the big monster seemed about to charge, Choop bounded in from behind to rake his sharp talons down the rampaging reptile’s tail. The monster howled and spun around, and Dean could see deep red gashes where Choop’s claws had split the gray skin.
Bellowing again, the monster lunged forward in a blur of talons, fangs, and spines. Here again, Choop’s speed and agility saved him as he sprang into the air, bounded off his attacker’s back, and dashed away, letting out another low-high-low birdcall as he went.
The monster bolted after Choop and almost had him. But each time it got close, Choop managed to evade its attacks. In a frenzied moment, the two creatures were around the corner and out of sight.
“Was he…” Victor began in disbelief. “Was he protecting us?”
“It looks like he was protecting you,” Dean said, pulling Victor away down the alley. “But I know he just kept both of us from getting pounded into pâté. That makes us even for the cavern, so now you only owe me one for the Blitzkriegers—”
Before Dean could finish, he was yanked off his feet from behind. The bright lights of the amusement park spun around him in a violent circle until he crashed face first into the sidewalk. A lance of pain shot through his head. Rolling onto his side, he squinted through double-vision to see a mountain of a man standing over him.
“You owe me a new bike,” Brick boomed as his size 16 motorcycle boot crashed into Dean’s side. There was another explosion of pain as he heard another rib snap. Agony paralyzed him. He couldn’t see, and he couldn’t breathe.
“I’m gonna send you to find your dead girlfriend,” Brick roared.
“Fi… fiancé…” Dean could hardly hear his own voice as those gargantuan hands clamped onto his shirt and hauled him into the air.
Chapter 44 ~ Soap
I kicked my legs through the air below me, but my toes didn’t find any crossbeams to stand on, and I could feel the heat of the flames searing my feet. That meant it was a race to see whether I would die by falling or burning. Oh, wait, there was also a chance that the whole Doomsday Machine could come crashing down on my head and crush me to death, so I had lots of options.
One of my hands slipped off the two-by-four, which made the fingers on my other hand slip even closer to the edge as I swung like a rag-doll. On the back-swing, I managed to grab the rail again and re-position myself, but it wouldn’t last. I realized my hands were now close enough for me to re-activate Rusty’s homing bracelet, but I knew I had maybe thirty seconds before I fell and Rusty would take ten times as long to navigate down from the top of the tower.
“Help!” I yelled, but I doubted anyone could hear me. I braved a look over my shoulder. The lights in the amusement park were now overloading and exploding into darkness. In a few places fires were beginning to eat away at the gaudy paint of the parks attractions. By the light of the swirling cloud of illumination that now stretched across the sky, I could see that all the Blitzkriegers who could still move were either riding away on their bikes if they still had them, or else just running off into the night. In a moment, I saw why they were running: in a flash of motion, Choop scampered out from behind a concession stand with the big monster close on his spiny tail. It looked like Choop was hauling flat-out for the Doomsday Machine, probably because he intended to climb it to get away from the bigger, clumsier beast.
“Help! Up here! Help!” I yelled, even as I slipped another inch.
Choop didn’t slow his gallop, but he did glance up in my direction and veer slightly my way. He couldn’t run in a straight line for very long or the monster would catch him, so he had to keep doubling back and zig-zagging to avoid getting pulverized. I slipped down to just my fingertips and realized that even if Choop was going to come to my rescue, he would never make it to me in time.
Suddenly a strong hand clamped onto my wrist and hauled me up onto the burning platform. I rolled over to see which of my friends had come back for me and was shocked to find Angela glaring down at me, her lips pulled back in a frightening grimace.
“What did you do?” She grabbed the collar of my hoodie to yank me to my feet, and then shoved a shiny, six-barreled rail-gun into my face. “What did you do to my tower?”
Although the fire was burning through the scaffolding and the wooden platform where we stood, the working parts of the Doomsday Machine would easily survive the blaze. But the whole structure was already quivering as the earthquake grenades amped up the harmonic resonance. I could feel the vibrations in the floorboards below my feet, and at that moment a screw fell from high above and bounced next to me. I could hear the grinding of metal reverberating through the steel struts. In another few minutes the whole tower would pull itself apart, but if I told Angela what was causing it, she would be able to cut the power, stop the earthquake grenades, and go back to destroying the world. On the other hand, if I didn’t tell her, then she would blow my head off.
“Tell me!” she shrieked. I closed my eyes, ready for the burning magnetic slugs to slice through me.
She held me at arm’s length and put the gun up to my chin. I don’t know if she really would have pulled that trigger, but she stopped to look over my shoulder. I squirmed around in her grasp to see Choop perched behind me at the edge of the platform. He cocked his head like a bird, looked from me to Angela, and then glanced back down the way he came.
“Get out of here, you stupid lizard!” Angela waved him away with her gun. It startled him enough that he bounced up higher into the scaffolding and climbed up into the darkness.
If Angela had wished for no more interruptions, she was disappointed only a moment later. The soft clangs of Choop scaling the tower structure above us were replaced by the heavy thumps of something else coming up from below. A thick, spiked claw appeared over the edge of the platform, followed by another that wrapped around a cross-beam with the grip of a python. The monster wasn’t nearly as good a climber as Choop, but what it lacked in agility it made up for with brute strength. It moved not so much as though it was pulling himself up as if it was trying to pull everything else down.
The monster’s head appeared over the ledge, and then the rest of it emerged from below. It struggled to get its thick, powerful hind legs over the edge, but then it rose to its enormous height and glared at us. Angela dropped me to the side and stood before the monster, seemingly unafraid. When it roared at her, she didn’t even blink.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Angela said. “I’ve heard that before.” Then she thrust out her rail gun and fired.
A steady stream of thunder split the air around us as her magnetic projectiles broke the sound barrier. The noise was horrible, and it drilled into my skull even though I clamped my hands over my ears. However bad the sound was, the sight was even worse.
The monster’s charge was arrested as countless red gashes opened in its chest and arms. It stumbled backwards, wobbling on its legs just like it had done when it first emerged from the egg sack. When it looked down at its own body, the hoods over his reptilian ey
es trembled. Even I could see that it was feeling pain and confusion.
I felt like someone had packed my heart in dry ice when the monster raised a hand towards Angela to show her the red droplets trickling from its claws.
“Eep?” it said. It was the first noise other than a roar it had ever made, and it was such a small sound to come out of such a big creature. In that last moment of life, I couldn’t see it as the depraved killing machine it was designed to be. It was just a lost baby, utterly alone in a strange world, abandoned by parents who died millions of years before it was born. And now it was being murdered by its very own midwife.
Angela shot it just once more, this time through the head, right between the eyes. The big creature went limp and slid off the platform, all the power and energy and life extinguished from that mighty body. I ran to the edge to see where it had landed, but I had to turn my head away after I saw it stretched out on the pavement below.
“You killed him!” I shouted at Angela, hot tears burning my eyes.
“That creature was defective,” she said, the gun at her side as she walked towards me. The fire rose up behind her and made her hair shine red while dark shadows played across her face. Half way across the platform, she tripped, just a little, just enough to make her look down and see what had caught her foot. It was the tightly-drawn power cable that led to the earthquake grenades.
Her eyes blazed in the reflected light as she inspected the cable and saw that it went up into the rails above. Then she laughed, scooped up the knife Shirtless had dropped, and slashed the cable at her feet. There was a blue flash, and the shuddering vibration beneath my feet settled into nothing.
I cried out and lunged for the cable, but it had been stretched so tight across the floor that I couldn’t bring the severed ends together to close the circuit. If there had been even an inch of wire or a chunk of metal in my pocket I could have made the connection, but I had nothing left.
Angela stood over me and laughed. “Well, Soap, it looks like you’ve finally outlived your usefulness.”
Chapter 45 ~ Dean
Brick hurled Dean into the center of the skee ball court hard enough to crack the machine’s casing. Then the big man was on top of him, pinning him to the ramp with one ham-fist and slamming down onto his skull with the other.
The first blow created a miniature universe of pain inside Dean’s head. When he finally managed to get his eyes open, he saw stars everywhere.
“I was going to beat you to death with a crowbar,” Brick rumbled. “Now I think I’ll just use what God gave me: fists and boots.”
Dean wanted to ask about why boots qualified as God-given while crowbars did not, but the question was unlikely to work to his advantage. Also, he wasn’t able to catch his breath to speak. All he could do was watch the big fist coming at him again.
“Leave him alone!” Victor grabbed Brick’s arm in an attempt to stop him, although he might as well have been trying to hold back an avalanche.
Brick shook him off as though he were a fly. “Go home b’fore I smash you up, too.” He rumbled.
“If you want my Dean of Students, you’ll have to go through me first.”
Dean tried to tell Victor to get out of there, but his voice came out as nothing more than a pained exhale as the world around him spun and faded in and out of his vision.
Brick, seemingly amused by the audacity of his new enemy, dropped Dean to the ground and turned to look at the young man. He drew in an enormous breath, making his already-massive chest swell to titanic proportions. “I got no problem killing you first, if that’s what you want.”
“Why are you even doing this?” Victor asked desperately. “Why would someone like you want to work for someone like the Professor?”
“I’m just in it for the money,” Brick chuckled and took a menacing step forward. “Bought me a badass hog—which you wrecked. So now I’m gonna wreck you.”
“I warn you: I’m pre-med,” Victor said, stepping backwards. “I’ll be able to name each and every bone you break.”
Brick just grunted and cocked his fist.
“No, really. These over here in my hand are called the metacarpals,” Victor held his left hand far out to his side and wiggled his fingers.
Brick sneered at the hand that waved to him. When he did, his head turned for only a second, but it was long enough for Victor to use the broken length of two-by-four he had been hiding behind his back in his other hand. He whipped the board around, jumping up just enough to connect with the side of the giant’s neck.
With nothing more than a grunt, Brick’s eyes closed, his head lolled back, and he crashed to the ground.
“You K.O.ed him,” Dean said as he struggled to his knees. “You K.O.ed him in one blow…?”
Victor checked Brick’s neck for a pulse and nodded with satisfaction. Then he wrestled the giant’s limp arms behind his back and bound his wrists with medical tape. “I did warn him about being pre-med,” he said with a hint of smugness. “A blow to the carotid artery causes swelling that momentarily interrupts blood flow to the brain. If that happens, you’re taking a nap, no matter how big you are.”
Dean winced as he stood up. “Okay, we are officially even as far as saving each other’s lives. But you have to admit you just proved that brawn wins out over brains.”
“What? No way. This was pure physiology. Plus, check out the two-by-four,” Victor tossed the broken length of lumber to Dean. “That wood is compressed and chemically treated. Very high tech. Tons of science.”
Dean realized that this was the first time he had seen Victor smile—and that it was the first time he had smiled at Victor.
Their moment was interrupted by a series of rapid-fire shots echoing across the park.
“Sounded like a machine gun,” Dean tried to sink low into a soldier’s crouch but found his legs almost giving out under him.
“It was Angela’s rail gun,” Victor said. “And it sounded like it came from up in the tower.”
Then Soap screamed, and without another word the two raced across the forty yards between them and the Doomsday Machine. All the bulbs in the rides and streetlamps they passed had burned out, leaving the park in shadows once again. The only illumination came from the small fires sprinkled throughout the booths and attractions, as well as the eerie glow from the bizarre borealis effect in the sky.
As he moved, Dean clamped his right arm over his side to reduce the shifting of his broken ribs, but the pain was still oppressive. His agonized breathing, combined with his other injuries, slowed him to little more than a limp, and he did not arrive at the Doomsday Machine until well after Victor. There they both stopped, looking at the curtain of flames that blocked the only ramp that led to the platform.
Victor threw his arm across his face to protect himself from the heat and the smoke. “How do we get up there?” he asked frantically.
The ramp was burning and getting worse fast. Dean estimated that it was only about as hot as a thinly-packed camp fire, and the danger zone was still only a few yards wide. He had run through bigger blazes than this—but only while wearing an insulated suit, a helmet, and respirator gear.
With protesting ribs, Dean stripped his bomber jacket off his arms and slung it around his head and shoulders.
“Wait here,” he told Victor.
“What are you doing?”
In answer, Dean pointed to the fire department logo on his t-shirt. Then he buried his hands into his armpits to protect his fingers and charged into the blaze. Uninjured, he might have been able to cross the burning area in two great bounds. Limping as he was, it took a dozen shuffling steps, each one blistering his feet. The skin of his arms and face reddened as though his body had received an instant sunburn, and the heat and smoke wrapped around him like a suffocating blanket. He gritted his teeth in pain, but he pressed on through.
The moment he broke out of the flames, he collapsed to his knees and slapped his palms against his body to smother a dozen embers on his clo
thes. As he did, he could smell the burned rubber of his shoes, but he did not detect the salty stink of cooked human flesh, which was a good sign. Still, all the hair had been burned off his arms and the skin was dry and red. He might need hospital treatment. But first he needed to rescue his cousin.
He reached the platform to find Soap kneeling next to a severed cable. It looked like she was trying to get the two ends together, and from the expression on her face, she must have thought it was really important. Angela loomed over her, clutching a big silver gun.
Dean stepped up onto the platform. “Let her go. Just fly away on your jet pack and let her go.”
“And leave you behind to destroy my doomsday machine? I don’t think so.” She grabbed Soap’s arm and pulled her up and around in front of her, holding her tight and pressing the six shiny barrels of her rail gun to the side of the girl’s head. “Look at that, Soap. Your cousin is here to save you. I see passion runs strong in your family. I have to admit, I find it really sexy.”
With Soap clasped tightly in front of her, she backed to the far edge of the platform, her gun never wavering. Soap’s eyes went from her cousin to the cable, as if she were trying to tell him something.
Dean held out his hands to show he was unarmed. “We can talk about this. Your guys have all run off, so it’s just us.”
Angela laughed. “My guys? You mean the smelly little pawns? Frankly, after they had completed enough heists to fund our operation here, they were expendable. We’ve got far better people than that. We’ve got a whole nation.”
Dean wasn’t sure what she meant by that statement, but he guessed it might be a bluff. At that very moment, it didn’t matter, because it wouldn’t bring him any closer to saving Soap.
“I’ve got something else to tell you,” Dean took another step, his hands still high. “I know who the Professor is.”
