by K. L. Lewis
“What the hell?” Virmire asked, before Fara shushed him.
Fara peered through the windows, studying the floor inside. “We need to sneak in and take the Fronties out before the real customer arrives,” she said.
“Who’s sick enough to buy kidnapped girls?” Virmire asked.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” said Fara. “All that matters is getting them out of there. Tepha.”
She watched Tepha approach from the stacks of crates to the edge of the shed. “Yes, ma’am?”
“We need a little distraction on the inside,” said Fara. She watched Tepha pause at the edge of the shed’s entrance and sit the case she brought on the ground. One tug on the handle revealed a sub-machine gun hidden inside, and a gap in the front where Tepha loaded a clip of ammo. Shutting the case, and giving a thumbs up, Tepha continued into the shed while Fara climbed to the top with Virmire.
They scurried to the roof entrance, and Virmire tapped the door’s panel that slid open to a flight of stairs down. “Talk about careless, these Fronties.”
Their guns leveled and ready, they descended down to the steps, softly, quietly. Reaching the bottom, the two spread apart, sights aimed at the heads of the Fronties. They held their positions a few meters away, waiting as Tepha rose from the steps ahead.
The Fronties’ heads snapped toward her, and they raised their weapons as she drew near. Tepha raised her hands. “Whoa! Easy! I was sent here for one last inspection.”
Their lasers dotting the Fronties’ heads, Fara squeezed a shot at the first, and Virmire shot down the second. The third militant turned around in confusion before Tepha raised her case and peppered them with bullets. The three women shrieked at the sounds of gunfire ripping the air, scurrying away from Tepha standing over them. Fara and Virmire materialized before the women as they huddled against the wall, Virmire providing look out while Fara approached the women.
She pulled off her hood and goggles, revealing herself to the woman trembling at the sight of her. “It’s okay,” Fara assured. “We’re gonna get you out of here.”
“But…but you’re with the Amalgam Concord!” one of the women said.
Fara shrugged. “Would you rather stay here then?”
The woman looked at each other and shook their heads at Fara. With that said and done, Fara pressed on her earpiece and contacted their driver. “Target secured. Moving to RV.”
“Roger that,” said the driver. “Heading to RV.”
There was a sudden ping on Fara’s visor, an alert from Iya. “Uh, A-1, we have a situation,” she said. “There’s an armored vehicle pulling up outside the walls. Doesn’t look like anything the Fronties normally have.”
Fara’s brow twitched. “Send me a visual.”
An image of the outside flashed back at her on her goggles, showing a flat, black truck sitting outside the wall in the North-East. Several Pewter Tech dockworkers were spread outside, watching from a distance while a team of two approached the driver’s side of the vehicle. Looks like the actual customers have arrived.
Fara turned to the girls. “We need to move. Hurry!”
The women hopped on their feet, and Fara led them downstairs to the bottom floor. There weren’t any signs of other workers present, but the drones above forced Fara and Virmire to vanish like vapor once again. There was a brief panic from the women as the two disappeared, but Fara re-assured them. “Don’t worry, we’re still here,” she said. “Tepha, lead them to the RV point. We’ll cover you along the way.”
Tepha took point and waved the women along. “Follow me.”
Fara leapt to the top of the crates with Virmire and ran ahead to the marker. Waiting at the edge of the lane, she received another alert from Iya. “Someone’s getting out of the vehicle,” she said. “There’s four of them. And they have…tails?”
“You’re kidding,” Fara scoffed. But her own eyes confirmed it on her goggles’ display: three people, a human and two parahumans all in white business suits. Based on everything she heard, if Pewter Tech were in league with the HDF, there was no way they’d accept parahumans among them. That there wasn’t a single parahuman worker in this entire facility gave that much away.
“There’s another one coming out,” Iya added.
Her eyes still on the display of the drone’s-eye-view, she saw another figure rise from the armored vehicle, this one wrapped in a brown and black heavy-set exo-suit.
“Holy shit! They’re Monumans!” Iya shouted. “And they’re coming through the North-East towards you.”
“Yeah, that just made a bigger problem,” said their driver over the comms. “The gate’s opening up and I’m cruising right in front of them. I’m gonna have to hold where I am lest I give myself away.”
Fara cursed under her breath as the whole operation began to nosedive. It all brought more questions: how did the Monumans get from Mid-Asia to here? What do they need three women for? And why were they working with Pewter Tech and the Fronties?
She threw the questions in the back of her head—she obviously wasn’t going to get any answers standing around wondering, and there were more important matters at hand, that being their escape. Looking back at the map on her display, everyone was spread apart: the cargo truck sat between the North and Eastern squares near the edge of the gate, while Lian and Iya were holding position on the cranes. They needed something to delay the Monuman’s arrival. And that’s when an idea sparked in her mind.
“Tepha,” she spoke through her earpiece. “Take the women toward the cargo truck’s position. We’ll stun anyone that gets in your way. Iya, you take out the armored vehicle.”
“You sure? Might bring more attention than we’d like,” Iya warned.
“It’ll keep them off our back as we reposition,” Fara said. “Once you take the shot, you and Lian follow us back to the cargo truck.”
“Understood.”
Fara waited until a brief screech pierced the air followed by silence, then a rumble past the walls ahead. Smoke rose over the center like a black snake slithering to the skies as drones and workers rushed to the site. As the workers clustered toward the wall, Fara followed Tepha leading the women over to the cargo truck with Virmire taking point. She noticed a few workers in a narrow alley ahead of Tepha, curious but uninterested in the commotion.
“Virmire, look alive,” she said. “Three workers, twelve o’clock.”
“Roger that.”
She and Virmire came to a stop and fired their STN rounds at the workers, clearing the way for Tepha and the women to run through the alley and onto the truck before anyone caught sight of them. The next one in the truck was Virmire, while Tepha waited for Iya and Lian bounding across the crates toward their position.
As soon as the last two arrived, they jumped into the truck with Fara, and she slid the back door down. “PUNCH IT!” Fara shouted.
Everyone braced themselves as the driver stomped on the pedal and sped toward the North-Eastern gate. Nearby workers dove out of the way as they blazed by, swerving around the lifts and other vehicles until they shot out of the gate. Dozens of drones swarmed after them as they sped past the outpost and smashed through the gated fence onto the open road, barely hitting the other drivers along the way. It didn’t matter how fast they went; the drones were hot on their tail.
Fara looked at Lian and smiled. “You know what to do.”
She didn’t need to see the excitement under his mask as he gleefully tapped on his OmniMorph and pulled a display of the outside. Watching her map, the red highlights vanished one by one the closer they got to the truck, the drones crashing from the air onto the road behind them.
There was a calm silence in the bay as everyone breathed a sigh of relief—everyone except the three women shaking and flopping about from the truck’s sudden shifts of motion. But it was short lived as their maps pinged and flashed two objects speeding behind them.
“We’re not out of the clear yet,” said the driver. “We got Twin Fronties on airbikes, c
losing in fast!”
The road ahead erupted in black geysers of stone and plastic. Dust and debris pattered at the window and the truck’s hull, holes and pits littered the path ahead, and the truck shook and swerved as the driver made his way around them.
“Well, aren’t they dedicated,” the driver snarked.
Thoughts buzzed in Fara’s head as she thought of a means to shake off the pursuing Fronties. An idea sparked, and she tapped Lian and pointed up to the roof of the cargo bay. “Follow me outside,” she said. Then she leaned in toward the driver and told him her plan. “Deploy a smokescreen, then come to a stop when it clears. Lian and I will take care of our guests.”
“Yes, ma’am,” nodded the driver, pressing on a panel that shrouded the periphery around them with a black dazzling cloud.
The shooting behind them paused as the Fronties behind them flew in the cloud, a brief moment of ease as Fara opened a panel on the roof to the outside. They climbed out into the heart of dense smoke and kneeled on the surface, their hands sticking like magnets as they braced against the heavy wind pressing hard against their backs. Two red squares lit on their goggles, and text began to flash bold red WARNINGS as the shades grew.
“Thermoptics on,” Fara ordered, vanishing with Lian as the cloud waned around them.
The view was crystal clear, and the heavy wind lightened against their backs as the truck slowed to a stop. The Fronties shot at the road ahead, hovering a mild distance away with their laser sights beaming at the rear of the truck. “Come out with your hands up!” the Fronties ordered.
Fara stood up and scanned the two Fronties, her rifle scoped and ready. “Take aim,” she said, with Lian following her lead.
As long as the truck doors remained closed and the Fronties kept still, they had five easy seconds to line up a shot. No doubt the Fronties already know what, or rather who, was inside: their special “product” to the Monumans that just arrived. They wouldn’t want anything happening to them, and that only added more time for them to guarantee a kill.
Fara gave the order. “Fire.”
They both took one shot. The airbikes began to swerve and spin before righting themselves in mid-air. There was a pause, a heavy breath sighing out as Fara kept her aim on one of the airbikes. She noticed that the line of lasers was offset away from the truck. Her eye back in her rifle’s scope, she zoomed in to the airbike at the pilot’s upper body draping off to the side in their harness. “Target down,” Lian said.
“Copy that,” said Fara. “On me.”
She and Lian dropped of the truck and rushed over to the airbikes. They examined the pilots, guns ready for any signs of movement. They weren’t dead, and they were lucky Fara only came with stun rounds, but given how high they were floating, Fara wouldn’t mind detaching them from their harnesses and letting them break a few bones in a fall. “Unhook them,” she told Lian. “And don’t mind the fall.”
She leapt up to the airbike, sticking tight as it wobbled in her climb, and unhooked the pilot from their seat. She smirked as they slid off and slammed on the pavement with a crack, then she got into the seat of the airbike and gripped at the handles. “Like the new ride?” she asked Lian.
“Oh, they’re ours now?” Lian said with a snicker. “It’s not even my birthday yet.”
“Don’t get too excited. It’s not for joyriding, but for this one case,” she revved the airbike’s engine, “let’s have a little fun.”
Another red WARNING flashed on her goggles and a square popped-in, flashing another red dot approaching from the streets. Another black truck, the same armored one that Iya once shot down with sparks jumping from the hole in the hood. “How is that thing still moving?” Lian asked.
The black truck’s doors flew open, and three men came out. Fara’s eyes nearly bulged at the sight of more HDF exo-suits, ones of a different kind. They didn’t have that huge, gaudy H emblazoned on their shoulders, and what’s more, one of them had a tail fashioned for them—the tail of a parahuman.
But a fourth man came out, this one a in a blocky, bulky, brown, and black exo-suit: a Monuman. It seems there was more than just the women that the Monumans came here for, and they were gearing up to find it.
The Monuman made the first steps as the other three followed. Fara snapped the vehicle around and rained bullets on them with the airbike’s gun. The monumans jumped out of her line of fire, ducking behind their truck as Lian added more suppressing fire from his airbike’s weapons.
“Fall back to the truck,” Fara ordered as she reared back and flew to the driver’s side of their getaway. She leaned into the driver and tapped on his window. “Take the others back to base, we’ll keep these guys off your back.”
The driver gave her a thumbs up and sped off on the highway, leaving Fara and Lian with the Monumans jumping out of cover to give chase. Fara fired another shot, blasting a hole in the center of the street between her and the Monumans scurrying back behind cover. She heard the Monuman murmur among themselves. “Are these new drones? What happened to the pilots?”
What an ignorant bunch, Fara thought. But the ignorant the better. These cavemen seemed unprepared and unfocused, and as long as they kept it that way, she figured this might send more shockwaves between them and their HDF suppliers.
“Lian,” Fara spoke. “Fly ahead and cover the others.”
Not a word was said as Lian turned his airbike around and soared over the highway. Fara followed behind, watching the Monumans scurry toward their truck on her bike’s mirrors. As she flew over the streets toward the town ahead, the Monumans raced right behind her, swerving around the cars and autos in their path as they made haste toward the town. Rising over the buildings, above the height of the other aerodynes, Fara caught a bird’s eye of the others far ahead with Lian hovering in place at the horizon.
“Captain,” Lian spoke on the comms. “The trophy’s been delivered from the area.”
Fara smiled at the Monumans’ aimless driving through the streets, no doubt searching everywhere for the truck that stole their ‘product’ under their noses. She followed them, her goggles tracking them as she kept her distance from above. As they drove under Lian, Fara hovered by him. “Let’s keep an eye on our new guests,” she said. “I have a personal message to give them.”
They flew after the Monumans, blending in with the other aerodynes and drones zipping around. The Monumans went from street to street, their armored truck rolling like a mad rhino charging through everything in their path. Then their truck went toward the outskirts of the city, a road leading to Grand Detroit. Once they were outside of the city limits, Fara aimed her airbike’s gun at the truck, and at the press of a button she opened fire.
III
Part Three
CHAPTER 21 – AFTER THE STORM
“DeMarcus?” a voice called out.
There was a tap on his head, and his eyes opened to his mother leaning over him. “Rise and shine,” Sekhmet said. “Come on, let’s head out into the city.”
Yawning and stretching under his sheets, he rose from the bed and got dressed. It had been so long since they traveled together, and he was eager to see where they were heading next. They took the elevator down into the red carpeted floors of the Romchell Hotel and waltzed out into the breezy air of Cape Brighton. The sun’s rays drummed on his skin as they took the highwalks, gazing out into the crescent sitting in the horizon.
But wait…something was amiss. Where was Yue and Tyrone?
And his mother was here with him? Sekhmet made a pause, her ear twitching at the air before she snatched DeMarcus in her arms and leapt to the building rooftops. An explosion erupted from where they once were, then several rockets flew toward them. Sekhmet pushed DeMarcus away before they hit, sending him tumbling off the edge of the rooftops. He grasped the ledge just as he fell, pulling himself up to the sight of missiles slamming on the roof and engulfing Sekhmet in a ball of fire.
“MOM!” he cried out, climbing the ledge and running to the r
ising smoke. There was nothing left of her. He clenched his fists as his blood raged through his veins, only for a crushing grip to squeeze his neck as he found himself smacking against the ground. He gasped at the raven-haired human flashing her knife over his head, squirming at her tightening grip. “The world could use less of your kind.”
Her blade ripped the air, then everything went white. Was this death? Someone called out to him. “DeMarcus…DeMarcus? Wake up!”
“AAHH!” DeMarcus launched awake. His heart hammered in his chest, and his head was drenched in sweat. He looked around his empty room and locked eyes with a worried Jade leaning away from him. He took a huge breath and relaxed—it was just another nightmare.
“Are you all right?” Jade asked.
“Yeah,” DeMarcus answered, wiping the sweat off his head.
Jade sat beside him. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry about it.”
DeMarcus rose out of bed, dressed in the bathroom, and pocketed the Red Phoenix flash drive before walking out of the room with Jade. Along the way, he noticed Jade smiling and humming to herself, a huge change from her shy demeanor yesterday. It made him smile too, until she dropped this bombshell. “My parents are here,” she said. “They say they want to meet you.”
“Uh…that’s great!” DeMarcus lied, his body trembling as he moved. Of course he’d be a star after last night’s little parade. Oh, the attention that brought. Never mind meeting a girl’s parents.
Jade’s head lowered, her face reddening a bit. “Also,” she continued, looking back at him, “thanks for saving me yesterday.”
“I couldn’t have done it without you showing me around,” DeMarcus said with a chuckle. “Kinda why I got lost afterwards.”
They shared a laugh as they descended the steps to the balcony where everyone else ate breakfast, and where Yue was yelling at Gabby. “I said no! You’re two years older than him for crying out loud!”
