Binding Foxgirls II

by Simon Archer

  “You can say that again,” Cindra said, though she sounded nervous.

  We all piled out of the car and into the side of the alleyway. Once we were all there, people started to ask me questions.

  “Why aren’t we stopping at TelCorp?” a woman asked in a panicked voice.

  “My air car driver said that people have been looting the building!” fretted another.

  “This is crazy. We can’t just march down there in this climate,” a man cried.

  “Hold up, hold up,” I said, raising my hands to stop all the catastrophizing. “There’s no reason to jump to any conclusions. We’ll just walk over to the building and see what’s up. Then we’ll figure out a course of action from there.”

  “What if they’re already there waiting for us?” the first woman who had spoken earlier asked, wringing her hands together as she spoke. “I mean, they had to have seen us coming, right? They had to have seen us coming. We rode here in a virtual procession of air cars!”

  “Yes, they definitely know we’re coming,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. “And they might be waiting for us. But that’s the whole point of being here, isn’t it? Now that the south side is secured and the conglomerate’s crippled, both in manpower and in resources, we can make a play to take the north side back. Starting with our headquarters. Running into our enemies is sort of the point.”

  Somehow, that didn’t seem to calm anyone down.

  “Look, like I explained back on the south side earlier, we’re going to be sending the binders in first to secure the area if we have to, so the medical and tech people and whoever else can get inside the building and set up shop, help us from there. The binders are the ones doing the fighting.”

  I cast a weary glance at the binder whose leg had been crushed the day before. There was some blood running down his pant leg.

  “Well, most of us will be, anyway,” I said. “The severely injured will go with the medical people.”

  “Okay,” the woman said, her voice small. But she nodded bravely, repeating the word. “Okay.”

  “Awesome,” I said, clapping my hands together. “Shall we go then?” Seeing no more objectors, I continued walking down the dark alley, water from the previous night’s storms dripping down the storm drains and into the surrounding sewers. The air had a pungent quality, an odd mix of rain and smoke.

  As we walked, Malthe scurried up next to me.

  “Should I bring any drones up here, boss? I know you said not to, but… well… who knows what these people have up their sleeves,” he asked, his eyes darting around nervously as if he expected conglomerate binders to materialize out of the walls around us. Not an entirely unreasonable fear, honestly. I kept one hand on the hilt of my holo knife the whole journey.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I share your concerns, man, but we can’t risk the foxgirls. We’ll just be right back where we started yesterday if we do, and no one wants that. If it seems too much for us, and the conglomerate’s stronger than we thought, we’ll flee, call the air car drivers back to pick us up. But don’t forget, we destroyed all their drones. You destroyed them. And we haven’t caught sight of any more on any of the scanners, right?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Malthe said, shaking his head, though he didn’t sound convinced.

  “Why don’t you sound sure?” I asked.

  “I dunno, after how horrible yesterday was, I just feel like the world’s gonna throw us another curveball,” he reasoned. I laughed a bit at that, clapping him on the shoulder.

  “You worry too much, mate,” I told him, still laughing a little under my breath. “Not it’s warranted, given the situation, but there’s a reason the battle yesterday was so brutal. It came at a high cost, especially for the conglomerate. No one can pull drones out of nowhere, not even you. And I can promise you that if Clem and I get down into the tunnels, this day will have plenty of curveballs in store for us then.”

  Malthe looked a little relieved at this. Good thing, since we were approaching TelCorp headquarters by then. I could see the sign at the top of the building sticking out high up above the other buildings, as TelCorp was by far the tallest skyscraper in Termina, and that was saying something.

  Just then, Cindra gasped on the other side of Malthe, stopping in her tracks and clapping her hands over her mouth.

  “What?” I asked, whipping my head around to ask her, but by the time the word escaped my lips, I’d already seen it. Or them, more accurately. Every single conglomerate binder left must’ve been lined up in front of the building. And they were joined by a healthy crowd of brawlers, too.

  “Well,” I said, swallowing hard. “I guess we got the battle we asked for after all.”

  30

  “Binders, to the front, tech and med people, sneak around back and slip through the doors on my signal, but only on my signal,” I instructed the crowd of my employees, barking the orders out as sharply as I could for emphasis and speed of delivery. Cindra grabbed my arm hard, wrapping her fingers all the way around it.

  “Nic,” she said, looking up at me and whispering so no one else could hear. “We should join you. The girls and me, I mean. We can help. Just like we agreed for the tunnels.”

  “No,” I said just as sharply as I’d barked the orders, though also in a whisper, shaking my head vigorously, and I actually had a good reason for refusing this time. “I need you here, dealing with the rest of the employees. I won’t have any binders back here with you, except the injured ones, and they’re no good. And Malthe and Lin aren’t going to be much help in a fight. I need you three to get everyone inside safely and maneuver everything from there. Then, when I give you the go-ahead, we start the second phase of the plan.”

  Cindra bit her lower lip as if trying to find a way to argue with this logic, but she came up short. “Okay,” she relented after a brief moment of consideration. “But I don’t like this at all. I don’t like being separated from you like this.”

  My face softened. “I know,” I said, reaching down and squeezing her hand. “Me neither. Especially right now. But this is the way it has to be, just for a little while.” She nodded weakly and bit her lip again. I could feel in our bond not just her fear, but Kira and Kinley’s, as well, not to mention mine. I didn’t like the idea of leaving them behind any more than they did, but I really did need them to help with the other employees.

  “Ready?” Clem asked me, walking up to us. His black eye gave him a hardened look that made him more intimidating, now that it was starting to heal and wasn’t quite as gross anymore.

  “Yeah,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I meant it. I turned to face the whole crowd and clapped my hands together again. “Let’s go, let’s go! We’re losing time already!”

  And just like that, the other TelCorp binders and I charged them, running straight at the conglomerate’s people and the brawlers, wielding our holo knives and what few grenades we had left after the last battle.

  Luckily, because we were tucked away in an alley, none of them saw us before we charged them. This gave the other employees and the foxgirls time to duck back into another alley and wait for things to play out before making a run for the doors.

  A few of the binders at the front of our group threw grenades as we approached the conglomerate’s people. I held out my arms, signaling for us to stop short of walking right up to them and attacking them outright, so as not to get caught in the ensuing explosions.

  And the explosions were certainly glorious.

  Debris of concrete and metal and God knows what else rose into the air like a minefield, pelting down on the other group. This took out a sizable chunk of their men all on its own, and brawlers, who lined the front of the group, screamed and cried and fell to the ground in pain. Some stray severed limbs even flew around us in the air. An arm, still gushing blood, fell near my boots, and I took a step back and grimaced.

  But we couldn’t afford to miss a beat. As soon as the debris started to settle, I screamed new orders. Well,
one new order.

  “Charge!” I cried at the top of my lungs, so loud that it was almost a roar, hurting my throat a bit.

  My guys, and Semra, of course, knew exactly what to do. Holo knives and fists and whatever else we had tucked away in our all-purpose tool belts at our disposal, we moved as one against the remaining conglomerate forces, descending upon them in record time.

  They weren’t prepared, still reeling from the explosions. I realized almost immediately that that was why they’d put the brawlers around the rim of their group like that. Those guys were just grunt workers, far more expendable than the highly trained binders the conglomerate had at their disposal.

  But my guys were even better trained. TelCorp had always had by far the best binder training program in the world, and under my leadership, it had only gotten better, to weed out the bad apples like Dag and Jer, who had snuck through the program when Elias Berg was CEO.

  We clashed with the conglomerate binders and the remaining brawlers. I took on about four brawlers at once, and they all came at me with their fists looming high, their muscles bulging. The guys were intimidating, that was for sure.

  But I was smarter than they were. And I had some muscles of my own, to boot.

  I grabbed the one to my left by the neck and flipped him over onto his back, impaling him on a sharp rod left over from the explosion and debris, all while managing to trip a second and run my holo knife through a third’s gut.

  This left the fourth to deal with me on his own.

  He put up a good fight, I’ll give him that. He was the strongest and smartest of the group, though that wasn’t exactly saying much in the brains department. He lunged at me and grabbed for my leg, no doubt intending to flip me over on his back and discard me that way.

  He got a good handle on me, too, and for a second there, I thought he was going to manage it. But right before he was going to flip me over, I managed to punch him right in the gut, hard, knocking all the wind out of him.

  He stumbled back, and I just kept pummeling him. Then I got a handle on my holo knife again and wedged it into his chest, twisting it so it was in there pretty good. Then I jerked it out and let him die on the ground.

  I surveyed the rest of the battle. Some of my guys were down, but more of their guys weren’t faring so well.

  Before I could register or do anything else, a bunch of conglomerate binders descended on me. I kept hacking at them, and they kept hacking at me, just like everybody else. I got more than a few scratches and bruises, but I dealt out even more of them, slitting the nearest guy’s throat with my holo knife and kicking the next in the groin to hinder him until I could slit his throat, too.

  The next two guys seemed to think better of messing with me after that, and they stepped back instead of continuing their attack after that, exchanging a worried look and giving me just the opportunity I needed to lunge at them both and flip them to the ground.

  I slit their throats then, too. They died instantly.

  I surveyed the area again, then, for longer this time. All the conglomerate’s people were tied up in battles or dead, and we’d managed to push them back further away from the front doors to the building.

  I looked back over my shoulder to see the foxgirls’ watching me from the alley, their eyes glistening in the flickering light from an overhead light above the entrance to the headquarters. I nodded curtly to them, and they came running at the building all at once, just like they were supposed to do.

  The conglomerate binders knew the other employees were there then, but there was little they could do about it. A few of them tried to push forward and stop them, but we dealt with them handily. I grabbed two at once by the throat myself.

  We managed to hold them off well enough until everyone was safely in the building. But things took a turn then. Someone on the conglomerate’s side released some kind of smoke bomb, making us all cough and making it far more difficult to see.

  I waved my arms around, trying to feel out where I was and who was around me. I pushed and pulled at the bodies I ran into, assuming they were enemies and doing my best to make quick work of them despite the difficult conditions. I think I downed one or two more that way.

  The smoke started to dissipate after several minutes, and I looked around to see that we’d lost a bunch of our guys in the chaos. I sighed heavily and shook my head. I’d have a lot of mothers to call when this was all over. And wives and kids. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  I looked around wildly at the front doors then, trying to make out whether anyone had managed to slip through. But there was a gaping chasm in the ground where the explosion had occurred, blocking anyone’s path there. And the conglomerate’s people had been just as hindered as the smoke bomb as we had, so it didn’t look like anyone had made it through.

  I reached into my bond with the foxgirls but didn’t sense any new anxiety there other than what they’d already been feeling. There was even some relief about making it inside okay. It seemed like they were alright for now. I had to worry about the more immediate problem of all the conglomerate binders who were still standing. Most of the brawlers were down by that point, but we’d lost a lot of people, too, and it looked like the conglomerate actually had the edge on numbers at this point.

  I had to find another way to deal with the situation, another way out. I stared down into the chasm and saw something I hadn’t quite expected. A giant water pipe ran below the city, probably servicing the surrounding buildings. Through the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the flickering lights above the TelCorp headquarters entrance again. I narrowed my eyes at it. It was large, a sort of beacon to the city that we were there, and we were the best.

  And it was loose.

  I realized what I had to do. The pipe was leaking some water already, but it hadn’t burst yet. I looked around at the other TelCorp binders. No one probably had any grenades left. Otherwise, they would have used them already. I’d have to figure out some other way.

  I grabbed, punched, and stabbed a nearby conglomerate binder who tried to lunge at me, but other than that, I wasn’t involved in any immediate battles right then. So I pulled out my holo knife and leaned down and out over the chasm and the pipe. I opened it up, and water started spraying out, high up into the sky.

  Well, that got people’s attention. The crowd of binders on both sides dispersed a bit in alarm. I walked under the entrance and jumped up, so I was standing on the awning that held the light over the entryway.

  “Come and get me,” I screamed, holding out my arms, taunting the conglomerate binders, urging them to go toward the water.

  They took the bait, walking into the raging water, sputtering and holding up their arms to cover their faces as they did so, trying to move toward me without falling into the giant holes in the ground caused by the grenade explosion.

  I whipped out my holo knife again and started sawing at the back of the awning itself. It took some effort with such a small blade, but eventually, it came off, and I leapt off to the side and rolled so that I was on the other side of the chasm. I waved at the TelCorp binders to move back as the light fell on the water.

  And just like that, the conglomerate binders lit up. It was like lightning, but miniature and everywhere, and the unmistakable, putrid smell of burnt flesh began to waft up in the air. I covered my nose and tried not to watch too closely for fear of blinding myself with all the light. And the horror.

  Inevitably, a few of our guys got caught up in it, too. But when all was said and done, we offed every single one of theirs and were left with about half of our original number that day. So maybe an eighth of the number of binders we’d had at the beginning of the week, but still better than the conglomerate could say.

  “Nic, come over here!” I heard Clem scream when the death was pretty much done, and the electricity on the awning was pretty much all burnt out. I looked around wildly to find him. He and Semra were on the far side of the battle, standing over a part of the chasm, waving me over.
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br />   I ran as fast as I could, hearing the urgency in their tones and seeing it in their expressions, too. When I got there, I just stared, open-mouthed.

  “What… what is it?” I asked, trying to make sense of what I was looking at. It was some kind of room… or was it? It was hard to make out since it was so far beneath the surface, but somehow the explosion had reached that far down.

  “I think there’s someone down there,” Clem said, pointing. “Look.” I squinted harder and then took a step back in surprise.

  “Shit,” I said, shaking my head. “There is someone down there.” There was a person, a man, I thought, standing down there in a tiny room and staring up at us, wearing nothing but a hospital gown.

  “We have to pull him out somehow,” Semra said, all business as always. “Does anyone have any rope or twine or anything?” She looked around at the remaining binders, holding out her arms to them.

  They seemed just as surprised and taken aback by the whole thing as I was, if not more, but after a few seconds of stunned silence, they rifled through their belts and turned over some stuff to her. She got to work tying the rope together to make a longer tool she could use to pull the guy up. When she was done, she dropped it down.

  “Hello,” she screamed into the hole. “We’re here to help you. Just grab on, and we’ll pull you up.” The man didn’t respond. He just continued to stare open-mouthed up at us. I squinted harder, trying to make out his features, but he was too far away. Even so, there was something familiar about him, something I couldn’t quite place.

  “He’s not doing anything,” Clem said simply, dropping his hands to his sides.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Semra said, rolling her eyes at him. Then, to the man in the pit, or room, or whatever the fuck it was, “Dude, we’re trying to help you, just take the fucking rope, okay?”

  “Pleasant,” I said, giving her a pointed look. “I don’t think he’s gonna do it. Something seems… I don’t know, just off about him. I’ll go down and bring him back up myself. Do you think the rope will hold both of us?”