Chương 121: Chapter 120 – Dark City

A few minutes after Alexa and Besson returned, Cole began hearing the hollow rattle of distant gunfire echoing off structures up ahead.

"Hold," he said, moving up to see if he could get eyes on. At the edge of the highway, he saw a brief flash illuminate the side of a building, and a few seconds later the distant whump of an explosion reached them. Therza moved up beside him.

"Friends of yours?" asked Cole.

"Not likely," said Therza. She eyed the downtown area ahead.

"This is as far as we go up here. There's a maintenance ladder behind the service booth up ahead. It'll get us down to street level." Cole waved the rest of his party on and took point, rifle ready. He moved up but stopped when he heard something scrape against metal somewhere up ahead. Two hundred meters up, a pair of derelict cars shifted and creaked and a dark shape darted across the road.

"Damn," whispered Therza.

"Sometimes stuff comes up those access chutes, too. We can circle back, there's an off-ramp."

"That was twenty minutes ago," said Cole. He keyed his radio.

"One monster up ahead. We'll deal with this thing quietly and then go down. Roxy, Besson, on me." The other two Kickers came up behind him, Besson already holding the axe Cole picked up on Babel. And Roxy with her sword and shield. Therza had her hammer ready. Cole slung his rifle out of the way and extended his spear. He pointed out the spot on the highway he could hear the thing scraping around, and Roxy and Besson nodded and moved off to the right.

Cole went left with Therza, picking his way across broken glass and crushed asphalt as quietly as he could. But not quiet enough, as he heard the noise up ahead stop, and an insectile head with compound eyes raised up. Therza pulled him down. Her hands were shaking. With eyes still on Besson and Roxy, with Nutmeg slinking along beside them, Cole moved up to encircle the bug-like enemy.

Whether it spotted them or heard them coming, it suddenly hissed and vaulted over two parked cars with a buzz of wings, slashing down with two mantis-like claws at Roxy's shield. She caught the blow, but it knocked her back against a vehicle. Cole felt the pop of a creature using an ability and a red glow illuminated the cutting edge of its scythes. The creature's follow-up swing nearly sliced the car in half, with Roxy just barely managing to slide out of the way.

Besson leapt forward with his axe along with Nutmeg, but a flurry of slices from the man-sized bug kept them at bay. Cole broke cover as well, dashing up behind the creature. But the compound eyes must have given the thing almost a full 360 field of view, because it sprung backwards, twisting in the air to slash at Cole and Therza. Cole thrust his spear up, and the insect's claws scraped against the crossbar as the spearhead sunk into the thing's flesh, squirting foul-smelling bile from the wound.

It slashed at his face, just out of reach, but Cole felt blistering heat coming off those glowing, bladed limbs. Cole levered the spear down, driving the creature to the pavement and pinning it against a rusted truck. Therza darted in, bringing her hammer around and straight down on the head of the mantis, smashing it like a rotten egg. The creature spasmed and continued twitching even as it started to ablate. The school teacher collapsed back as her legs gave out. She swallowed, looking up at Cole.

"Those things are bad news," she said.

"Cut through armor like paper. If I'd known it was an assassin bug I'd have said we should go back."

"I believe you," said Cole, looking at the ragged cuts the thing had carved through both asphalt and rusted steel.

"At least it was a little one." Roxy stopped short.

"Excuse me? A little one?" She looked at Cole.

"If this place has giant camel spiders, I'm out." Besson grunted in agreement, moving up and kicking aside the blackened body to reveal some LF residue and a belt of ammo. He picked it up and tapped it with his analyzer before clearing his machine gun and attaching it. Roxy siphoned up the residue. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Cole shrunk his spear back down.

"If that's the kind of shit that was popping up in the middle of the city, can't say I blame you for trying to manage them with robots."

"More where that came from," muttered Therza.

"Come on. With any luck the bots will be drawing most of the monsters away from us." Cole followed Therza behind the service booth where iron rungs were set into a circular chute. She checked to make sure it was clear before swinging over and sliding down the ladder. Cole followed while Nutmeg shrank herself down enough to be clipped to Besson's plate carrier. Roxy nudged him from behind.

"Remind you of Curahee?" she asked.

"A bit," said Cole.

"Except we're not carrying people up the ladder this time." She and Howie dropped down as well. Cole was curious how Alexa was going to manage with Archie, but the clockwork doggo folded in on itself, shrinking down not unlike Nutmeg had, and its limbs extended grasping appendages. In a very un-Nutmeg-like fashion, it simply clung to Alexa's pack. Cole watched it go.

"You're going to have to tell me how that thing works," he said.

"Fractal geometry," she said.

"I don't know what that is," said Cole. Alexa shrugged.

"Then there's not much point explaining how it works, is there?" She asked as she swung onto the ladder. Cole followed her down, boots splashing in a half-inch of water. He was unsurprised to see Nona already on the ground with the others.

"I went ahead," she said. She pointed out two structures.

"Nest there with more of those ones like up top, and some sort of giant moth in that one has Soul Sight so I couldn't sneak past it." She pointed east.

"Automaton patrol that way, moving parallel to our course."

"A moth doesn't sound too bad," said Cole. Therza cleared her throat.

"They're venomous. It's a powder from their wings, makes your lungs bleed if you breathe it in. And you will breathe it in." So much for that. They didn't have a gas mask for Therza—not that Cole was certain it would protect them anyway. But he wasn't keen on riling up a nest of those mantis assassins, either. One was scary enough.

"I have a suggestion," said Howie.

"We could shadow that patrol. Any big nasties will hit them before us." Cole nodded.

"Nona?"

"This way," she said, setting off toward the east. It wasn't too difficult to locate the automaton patrol. Six humanoid bots in various states of disrepair marched along with smaller, skittering quadrupeds. A bigger model looked like a M-ATV on two legs, with a generator of some sort belching white smoke from its back as the massive automaton swept a pair of lights across the road ahead of it. All of the models in the bot patrol bore battle damage. Most were missing limbs.

Others had parts cut into them or torn out. Therza tapped his shoulder and pointed." They're Mark 1's, first wave deployed to contain the outbreak."

"As strong as the ones we fought before?"" Much stronger. See that one that looks like a barrel?" Following her finger, Cole spotted a squat trash-can looking bot with stubby legs working overtime just to keep up with the bigger automatons." That's the one to watch for, the red reaper."" Not the big guy with the cannon?" Cole whispered back. Therza shook her head." Trust me." Cole moved the squad into their trail, keeping far enough back that the lights wouldn't reveal them.

For these things to have survived any amount of time in this monster-infested city, they must have been tough as nails. Not something Cole wanted to tangle with.

"Are they going the right way?" He asked. They followed the strange procession for almost an hour as it wound its way north through abandoned streets and derelict downtown plazas. Shops with broken or bent bars in the windows lined the side of the road, most of them scuffed and pocked by weapons-fire. One of the bots made a noise like a short fog-horn burst, and the big automaton swung its top half around, lights centering on movement in one of the windows.

An electric whine mounted as its gun spun up, and then the drone of a high-RPM gun that chewed into the façade of the building. A half-dozen of the assassin bug creatures spilled out of the disturbed building, claws flashing as they sprung from windows and wriggled out from behind cars. It wasn't even close. The automatons put down six of the mantis monsters with a quick display of overwhelming fire before another wave came from the opposite building in their blind spot.

Before they even hit the ground, the little drone Therza had pointed out sliced all but one with a zig-zagging red beam. When the dust cleared, not a single bug had made it within striking distance of the patrol. Several small skitterers dashed out, crawling over the corpses and carrying back belts of ammunition and armor from the bugs." Jesus fuckin' Christ," muttered Howie." Hextant's bots behave like monsters. But these ones were designed to interface with the HB-Layer the same way as humans.

They repair and sustain themselves from the monsters they kill. And they get stronger over time." The engagement hadn't even offered enough of a window for them to take advantage of it to get ahead of the patrol. Cole checked his watch.

"How much further?"" Hour, hour twenty at this pace,"said Therza." Louixcorp main compound is under ground. Closest entrance connects to an old metro line that hasn't flooded yet." Cole keyed his radio as the patrol lumbered on.

"Keep moving."