~Chapter Twenty: Junior~

Two blocks from the MPC, the first pack of husks saw Lanni and gave chase. She led them into a bank lobby for a bit of privacy and killed all five of them with uncomfortable ease.

Leaving the bank, the sounds of the city reminded her briefly of happier days, when she didn’t know what it was like to impale, behead, or disembowel anyone. Gulls squawked overhead, and with a little imagination the wind gusting through the dead buildings could have been ocean waves attacking the dunes on the Isle of Palms.

The cries she heard weren’t all from gulls, and the wailing wasn’t just the wind. In the lulls between gusts, distant shouts, screams, and growls of feral humans became more distinct. Some, it seemed, were not so distant. Six husks introduced themselves as she stepped out of the ATM vestibule.

They, too, fell to her spear with little difficulty or time, but their dying shrieks attracted more attention. Most of them came from the north or west, either alone or in small groups.

Secrecy was no longer an option, so she ran. She had become quite a good runner, and even though her split-toe tabis weren’t made for speed, she soon left her pursuers behind.

Only to find more everywhere she turned.

The small groups chasing her merged into a single pack, and as others joined the chase, the pack had become a hoard. Dozens of skinny, filthy, mostly naked wild people chased her like greyhounds after a rabbit.

In short order, an offspring joined the party. Stronger and faster than Lanni and the husks, it crashed through the mob, killing a few, and dispersing many of the rest. It couldn’t see her, of course, but the husks were chasing something, and the moment she stopped to fight, it would have her. They would surround her, overwhelm her, and eat her.

On a normal day, she would have killed them. But normal days were over. Unless she escaped this mob, found the host, and killed it, this would be the new normal.

The incoming waves of intruders had forced her farther south than she wanted to go, and as she ran around another corner, she realized that she had been herded back towards the MPC. The area immediately around her was clear of husks, so she ducked into the shattered Starbucks to hide and rethink her strategy.

She climbed through what used to be the front window, dropping to the floor with her back to the low brick wall. Ignoring the tiny cubes of shattered glass digging into her hip and shoulder, she listened to the rapid slap, slap, slap of bare feet coming closer.

Barely three feet in front of her face, bright yellow claws convulsively scratched grooves into the dirty tile floor. They were attached to the biggest offspring she’d ever seen, at least this close up.

She almost laughed aloud. This enormous creature of nightmares was enjoying a nap on the warm tiles in a patch of sunlight, just like Goldie, her pet boxer used to do in their kitchen. Also like Goldie, it appeared to be dreaming about running.

Killing, more likely.

It flexed its arms and legs, and the skin on its chest rippled, splitting open just enough to show some of its megalodon-like teeth. Goldie never did that.

Yep. Definitely killing.

Judging by the sounds outside, the husks pursuing her had rounded the corner and slowed to hunt for her. She considered herself lucky for stumbling into the offspring’s lair. The husks wouldn’t intentionally come anywhere near the thing. So why did she still hear them panting and grumbling just a few feet away? They must not have seen inside.

Still dreaming, or so Lanni hoped, the offspring’s chest peeled back in a silent snarl, and the successive rows of teeth parted. A thin, worm-like tendril snaked out between its teeth, growing thinner as it telescoped closer to her face, waving slowly through the air.

What the…?

She had never seen a landshark with tentacles. This was something new! The only variation she’d ever seen among offspring was in size. Whether the size of a mouse or an elephant, they all had exactly the same bluish black skin, yellow extremities, mouth in the chest, and brains for a face.

The differences jumped out at her now that she knew to look for them. Its skin was too dark. The yellow of its claws was slightly muted, and of course, the tentacles were a new feature. They inched closer, while only a few feet away on the sidewalk, the husks continued their search. They must have been following her scent.

This had to be one of the natural born offspring that Alex had warned her about. He said they’d be bigger, tougher, and smarter than their human-born cousins, and the ridges on their heads would be taller and more defined. Without human parents, they would also lack the grotesque, vestigial faces that dangled from first generation’s chins.

It was one thing to know how to identify a natural born, but what about killing one? She raced through everything she knew about offspring, everything she had seen, and everything Alex had taught her. The terrifying truth, however, was that she knew absolutely nothing about how a natural born offspring would act in a fight.

She inched forward along the wall, pushing herself with her feet, grinding more shards of glass into her shoulder and arm. She only moved about two inches before that tentacle reacted. It stopped waving lazily and pointed directly at her.

A heavy, rhythmic thumping sound came from outside, growing louder with every second, and directly above her, a skinny husk leaned through the window to look around.

The tentacles shot up at the unfortunate creature, grabbed it, and dragged it inside. It kicked and stomped on Lanni’s chest and stomach, screaming in pain or terror, or both. She couldn’t avoid crying out, either. Its bare heel landed hard on her ribs.

She sat up to scoot back to the corner and risked a quick glance outside. The street was busy with both offspring and husks, running like stampeding cattle. One of the closer offspring slowed down and veered toward her, probably sensing the dying husk’s terror.

The giant offspring beside her didn’t bother to stand. Several shorter tentacles, the same yellow as its claws, wrapped around the husk and dragged it into its open jaws. The husk’s flesh sizzled and smoked beneath those yellow coils.

Another offspring, about half the size of the one on the floor, jumped onto the counter. A child, perhaps? Easily four hundred pounds, it was a pretty big baby. The ridges on its head blurred, emitting a deep hum she felt in her chest, like the thumping bass from her old neighbor’s sound system. This was something new, too.

Another time, Lanni would have been pleased to dispatch the entire happy family. But her hatred of offspring had to stand down. The next time she’d get the chance to see a second-gen offspring in action, she’d probably be fighting it. Better to watch and learn their capabilities than be surprised by them when it mattered.

The big daddy offspring grabbed its prey with a claw and retracted its tentacles. Its jaws snapped shut on the husk in a diagonal line across its torso. Its jaws shivered, severing it from right shoulder to left hip, with its head, chest, and one arm trapped inside the living meat grinder. The husk’s no-longer-kicking legs and lower abdomen fell in a messy heap on the floor.

Just in time, daddy monster rolled to his feet and faced the window. The offspring from outside stepped a clawed foot onto the low wall and blasted the room with mental energy. It scattered on Lanni’s aura like rain on an umbrella.

Surprisingly, daddy offspring staggered backwards into the counter where junior stood. The intruder pressed the advantage without delay. It leaped at daddy offspring with all four claws forward, but junior leaped, too. About the same size, the attacker’s momentum was broken and they fell to the floor at daddy’s feet, rending each other’s flesh and bathing the lobby with energy.

Jaws tore and claws rent, delivering vicious wounds to both beasts. The daddy, apparently still stunned by the initial attack, staggered sideways. Junior’s humming sent vibrations through Lanni’s bones and rattled bits of glass on the floor but had no other discernible effects.

Lanni turned away from the mesmerizing battle as two roughly man-sized offspring, even smaller than junior, climbed through the shattered window. Apparently the first gen offspring had no love for these second-genners.

Time to go. Let them kill each other.

She waited for the newcomers to join the fight so she could slip away, but their coordinated movements sent up a red flag. One offspring moved straight in on daddy, while the other circled around to his side. She slid farther from the window until her back found the corner.

Offspring were brutal fighters, but intentionally flanking an opponent was tactically beyond their capabilities.

They’re being controlled. The host must be near!

If so, why wasn’t it controlling all of them? Was it not strong enough, or was there another reason?

The two charging offspring ignored her, which was good news. It meant the host, if there was one, didn’t know she was there. It was the perfect opportunity to set an ambush.

She lunged at the first intruder, stabbing upwards with her naginata through its back into whatever counted as offspring brains. Her spear’s long blade pulled free as easily as it had slid through the beast’s tough, armored hide. Junior crouched beside his fallen opponent, ripping into its already cooling fleshing with both claws.

Continuing the motion of withdrawing her blade, she spun to face the nearest of the two other intruders. With limited room to maneuver, she attacked with the blunt end of her spear first, striking the monster’s ankle.

The half-second it took to realize it was being attacked and shift its weight was all the time Lanni needed. She pulled the spear’s haft against her body, switched her grip, and slashed downward with the business end. The blow severed the offspring’s thigh, dropping it to the now very slippery tile floor.

Daddy offspring was still sluggish, but his mental assault seemed to have a devastating effect on the last attacker. Unwounded physically, the smaller monster struggled with its final few steps, but it dropped face-first to the floor before it reached him.

Both buzzed the room with their odd humming and turned to face her, only a couple of feet away in a pool of melting offspring corpses.

Are they using it like sonar?

Junior was closest, easily within arm’s reach, but she wasn’t ready to kill either of them. With luck, they’d soon be too busy with another enemy to bother with her.

Junior was already covered in wounds from his battle, including at least two that would have been fatal on a normal animal. A wound on a typical offspring would ooze a thick, blue gel that quickly thickened and regenerated damaged tissue, but Junior’s wounds weren’t closing as fast. The blue sludge from his wounds flowed like blood.

When the vibrations dwindled, Lanni vaulted the countertop and ducked down behind the bar. A quick glance at the street before she fell out of sight told her what she needed to know.

She opened the sliding door on the refrigerated display case just enough to see what was coming. The host was easy to spot.

One of the husks in the street wasn’t running or cowering from offspring. It stood facing the coffee shop as others ran around it. This one wasn’t hunched, and its clothes were largely intact. Its ridiculously thin body stood tall and straight, and its face betrayed no emotion. Just like Alex.

Daddy offspring moved like a gorilla on all four limbs to stand between the host and junior. This was utterly unexpected behavior. Lanni knew it was blasting the host. It was the strongest attack she ever sensed from an offspring, but the host didn’t seem to notice. With such expert control of the Con, a host’s mental barriers were vastly more effective than even the strongest exterminator.

Big daddy’s posture relaxed, and he took a single loping step toward the street before stopping and spinning back to face the counter where Lanni hid. Nanite activity suddenly raged around her, though it was still no more than a tickle against her aura. The offspring sludge from the corpses evaporated as the host used all the power it could summon.

It must have scanned the offspring’s mind and found her, even if it couldn’t sense her on its own. Unlike offspring, hosts had eyes. If this one saw her, she’d be in trouble.

The display case and the counter that hid her began disintegrating in the nanite wind, like beach sand in a hurricane. She was now pretty certain the thing knew she was there.

“Come out, child. You are in no danger from me.” Its voice was eerily similar to her brother’s. “I can protect you. I can give you anything you want.”

The offspring’s hum buzzed the room again, and the remains of the counter and display case fell to dust.

Ready or not…

She rolled forward directly toward the giant offspring, keeping it between her and the host. It was a shame to kill this monster before she could learn more about it, but she was well outside the scope of her previous plans. It was time to just roll with it.

No longer thinking and analyzing each move, she turned her inner martial artist free. She came out of her roll with a spear thrust at the offspring. It clumsily deflected the blow with swipe of its claw, earning a shallow cut on its forearm. To Lanni, it felt like scraping her blade across a stone.

The host stepped back as the offspring sent pulse after pulse of vibrations through the building. She wasn’t sure what the host was trying to do, but she could feel its attacks dissipating harmlessly against her aura. It wouldn’t continue that tactic for very long. She needed to kill it quick.

The black rubbery skin on the offspring’s chest peeled back, and tentacles shot out of gaps beneath its teeth. Lanni slashed and severed one of them, but three others wrapped around her spear and yanked it from her grasp.

It opened its jaws and reached for her with a dozen of the smaller, yellow-tipped tentacles, too. This had gone far enough. She rolled to her right, and a heavy clawed foot crashed into the tile, blocking her.

Outnumbered, with virtually no room to maneuver, facing an opponent that could crush her physically, and another whose thoughts were equally deadly, she would need more than her spear to survive.

Instead of rolling away from the clawed foot, she grabbed the offspring’s leg with both hands. Its rubbery flesh gave way to her grasp like dense clay, leaving deep wounds that gushed more of the thick blue sludge as it tried to pull free. The tentacles snapped back into its chest, and it threw the spear across the room.

Attuning her mind with her aura, she let all of the energy she had flow through it. She intended to negate the bulk of this creature’s nanites and dissolve it, or at least rip most of its leg off. Pouring every ounce of energy she could muster into her aura felt like pouring a thimble of water into the ocean.

Instead of increasing the aura’s power, it expanded, surrounding her like a giant bubble. The offspring she clung to was inside the bubble, too, severing both of them from the con.

The barrage of ineffectual attacks from the host stopped, and its desiccated body collapsed. Lanni let go of the monster’s leg and rolled to her feet, ready to attack again. The offspring squared off against her, also ready to attack, but even more eager to see to the smaller, badly wounded offspring writhing silently on the floor.

Lanni sensed its pain, its anger at her, its fear for the life of its young, and its hatred of the host who battered through its defenses and controlled its body. It was confused about Lanni. It couldn’t “see” her before, but now it could. This invisible demon had resisted all of its attacks, and her touch was agony. It wanted to escape but wouldn’t abandon its young.

Curiosity overcame Lanni’s hatred of offspring. This creature was not at all what she expected. It wasn’t all hatred and hunger like the other monsters. It was behaving, at least in part, like a protective parent. It was smarter than the typical offspring, too. She almost felt bad that she still intended to kill it and its poor little four-hundred-pound killing machine

This string of realizations occurred in a tiny slice of a second. The rest of that second was spent in stunned trepidation. With both beasts inside her aura, she was completely vulnerable to their mental attacks. Worse yet, by thinking about it, she probably just told them as much.

Perhaps misreading her hesitation to attack, the big monster slashed a claw across its forearm, and dripped blood, or whatever they had, onto the smaller monster’s wounds. Much of the fluid it had lost evaporated in the host’s attack, leaving crusty blue residue on its wounds.

The sympathy she felt for these two killers was quite a surprise, and Lanni moved cautiously closer. Her newly found kinship with one of her hated enemies was almost certainly an effect of the mental link they shared, but she didn’t try to reason it away. At least she knew that this new brand of offspring communicated entirely telepathically, just like the rest of them.

She knelt beside the younger offspring and put her hands on it. Its nanite ratio wasn’t as high as she expected, but it wasn’t as easy to balance as Alex usually was. Cut off from the con by her aura, which was beginning to feel rather heavy, she pulled what nanites were left within the radius of her bubble and repurposed them to mimic the offspring’s wounded tissue.

That was all she could do for it, but it was working. Now that the process was begun, those nanites would regenerate lost tissue for a little while longer. Hopefully it would be enough to save the “little” guy.

Gratitude—actual gratitude—came to her from Big Daddy. There must be more human heritage in these beasts than she thought. As much as she would have liked to learn more about these creatures, she was struggling to support her aura and had to let it snap back to its normal role as her second skin.

The larger offspring leapt toward the front of the café the moment her aura collapsed, and she saw why. Another offspring separated from the dwindling crowd outside and was loping toward them.

“Sorry, Junior. You’re on your own, now. I have to go.” She recovered her spear and stabbed the host a few more times, severing its head with a final blow. Could this have been the host that Alex was concerned over? It seemed unlikely. As dangerous as any host could be, this one was just too easy.

The husks all running the same direction down the street weren’t heading to a Black Friday sale. The host that could attract this many mutants, including offspring, would be incredibly powerful.