~Chapter Twenty Two: Traffic~

Each step from the garage to the intersection was distinct in Diane’s mind. With everything coming to a head—her sister, Leonard, monsters reappearing in sector zero,—every step was one more in an irrevocable charge toward a cliff. And she was well past the point of being able to stop in time. She couldn’t even convince herself that this foreboding was just meaningless superstition, not when monsters and magic had become the new reality.

She reached the cliff—corner—well ahead of Jamie, who was a clumsy runner, at best. Unlike Diane’s, the talents he commanded leaned much more heavily toward the mental than the physical. Putting her blocks up came easily for once, as she realized she’d left him too far behind to rely on his.

Gunfire rang out as the street came into view. Boots and Wall Street stood on the tops of cars near the far end of the block, shooting the husks behind Leonard as they closed the gap. As they fell, more quickly took their places. The mob kept coming from the right as Diane moved up, dozens after dozens, with no end in sight.

Leonard vanished again, and Boots and Wall Street fired another volley before dropping their weapons. Their arms fell limp at their sides, and they stood motionless, ignoring the army that passed just a few feet away.

Diane dropped to a crouching run, staying close to the cars. This many husks had to be controlled by a host, and that meant offspring would be here, too. What had caused an entire mutant army to come against them after months of relatively peaceful isolation? Something more than Leonard’s un-guarded jog had to have stirred up this hornet’s nest.

Another single shot echoed through the city. It must have been the snipers trying to keep Leonard alive. So much for just watching and reporting. Leonard would have to take care of himself, now. If he was smart, he’d stay within the MPC’s line of sight.

Hundreds of husks swarmed the streets, some heading toward her, others toward Leonard and the prison. This many could easily overrun the entire the colony with the exterminators split up. At least Lee and the others were still there.

The first husk appeared around the front of a car. She met it head-on and knocked it down with a kick to its thigh. An elbow to the side of the head and jab to the solar plexus dropped the two behind it. More swarmed around the cars, and some came at her by climbing and jumping over them.

She attacked to stun or disable, saving the deadly end of her homemade spear for offspring. Husks and hosts were still a bit too human in her eyes. If they didn’t need killing, she preferred to leave them alive.

One by one, the nearest husks stopped moving.

“Jamie, you’re a freckle-faced angel,” she said. His time as an exterminator counted in hours, but he was a natural. Still not fully trained, he continually experimented and learned new tricks, unaware that he shouldn’t be able to do many of them. Once he learned to control his power consumption, he would be a force of nature. For now, he burned through power like a five-ton truck with a four-cylinder engine.

She cleared a spot around Boots and Wall Street and pulled them down from their cars. Making them less conspicuous as targets was the best she could do for them, at least until Jamie or Ron could check them out. If an offspring had done this to them, it would have eaten them. This was definitely the work of a host.

Husks came in an endless stream, flowing around and over cars, spreading out through the intersection, and into the street toward her. They stretched further back down the street than she could see, but some sort of commotion rippled through their ranks just out of sight.

Approaching the street, she hopped onto the hood of a black Mercedes. An offspring leaped from car to car, coming right for her. Wild cries of pain rang out in the distance, and several offspring closed toward a black-clad figure with a spear. Whoever it was, he cleared a path through the army, tumbling, leaping, and seemingly flying from enemy to enemy, quickly dispatching even the offspring.

A husk about thirty yards away caught her attention as the nearest offspring loped past it. Unlike the others, it stood relatively upright, letting the mob race around it. It wore more clothes than most husks, too. Was this the host?

The tide of feral men and woman surged toward her, over and around the nearby vehicles. They left her little choice but to bring deadly force against them or risk being overrun. Five fell in bloody, lifeless heaps before the offspring reached her.

Belying its four hundred or so pounds, it soared toward her with deadly grace, nearly toppling the car it used as a springboard. Claws reaching, jaws exposed, it hammered her mind from mid-air. The attack didn’t penetrate her blocks, but it still sapped her energy and nearly shattered her defense. Another attack like that would get through.

She let her blocks go and channeled energy into her spear, creating a buzzing aura around the blade. It was a trick passed along to every exterminator. It supposedly came from an alien exterminator named Xipe and the first human he trained to use nanites. She braced her spear on the Merc’s roof, keeping the blade pointed at the top end of the offspring’s jaws.

As oddly graceful as it seemed dropping toward her, it could not actually fly, and impaled itself on the spear. The blade stabbed completely through the beast, and the blunt end punched through the car’s roof like a hammered nail.

The roof crumpled under its weight, with the dripping spear tip standing up from the back seat like a gory flagpole. Diane rolled away at the last second, falling from the back of the car into the waiting clutches of a sea of husks.

They bit her and tore at her with their bare hands as she fought to regain her footing. She knew she was rubbish with mental blocks, but her skill at enhancing her physical speed and strength more than compensated.

The Hulk couldn’t have done it better. Diane stood up, flinging half a dozen clawing, biting husks aside like used tissues. She kicked, punched, shoved and threw those who rushed up to take their places, delivering vicious wounds with her enhanced strength and anti-nanite vibrations.

She jumped back up on the crushed Mercedes for the tactical advantage, and to get a better view of the battle, but the car rocked violently as she landed.

The impaled offspring twisted in the back seat, snapping Diane’s spear in half. It pulled the sharp end out of its body and tossed it into the crowd. Getting back on its feet, it shredded and tore away what remained of the car’s roof. Its broken teeth and cut flesh still oozed blue ichor, but unless someone killed it very quickly, those wounds would heal.

Diane’s broken spear was a painful loss, and not a sentimental one. She liked having several feet of weapon between herself and an enemy, but it was more important than that. A weapon with a long piercing blade could kill an offspring with a single, well-placed attack. For a punch or kick to be as effective, she’d have to burn through a heap of power, and in a protracted fight, that simply wasn’t an option.

Hoping the offspring would need at least a few more seconds to recover, she tuned the world out and, perhaps a bit frantically, put up her blocks. They lasted for nearly a second before something grabbed her ankles and yanked her feet out from under her.

Her face bashed against the trunk, and she felt herself being dragged off the car, broken glass cutting her face, palms, and forearms. She grabbed for something to hold onto, but there was nothing in her reach. It was just as well, since the offspring’s claws ripped through the metal where she had just been.

Her exterminator reflexes kicked in as the ground raced up to catch her. She pulled her arms together on her chest and twisted her body, trying to roll over and free at least one of her feet. Even with her enhanced strength and momentum, her assailant’s hold didn’t break.

She ended up half turned over with her legs twisted like a bread-tie. Pulling her knees up, she kicked her attacker in the chest the moment she hit the ground, launching him backwards into the crowd.

Still moving in combat speed, she got a good look at the tiny husk that grabbed her as it flew backwards into the crowd. It could have been a nine-or ten-year-old boy.

The Merc slid into the car beside it as the offspring leapt away. She couldn’t see where it went through the wall of husks closing in around her, but the child-husk held her attention.

Layers of dirt and caked-on mud clothed his skinny frame. His oversized hands and thin, tapered fingers were spattered red. A small nose and mouth and big ears gave an impression of youthful innocence.

She might have believed it, too, if she hadn’t noticed the calculating gleam in those deep, emotionless eyes. That, more than anything else, set this cute little beast apart from the rest. Not to mention that he just might be able to beat her in a fight, if she weren’t careful.

As the child-husk landed in their midst, the rest took it as a sign to rush her. She destroyed three of their legs with a nanite-enhanced sweep, but three others reached her and tore at her with incredibly strong, rending hands. Another clamped its teeth down on her ribs just behind her elbow.

Individually, these attacks posed little real danger to her, but they all hurt. She dispatched the three already on her and rolled up to one knee. Any position was a tactical improvement on prone. She needed to get off the ground before these insignificant wounds collectively became a problem.

She fought her way back to the Merc and jumped from it to the bed of the ancient F-150 pickup in front of it. Already the center of attention, she hopped onto the roof and surveyed the battle.

The lone husk formed an isolated island in the sea of its own kind, standing alone against the flow of bodies with a respectfully empty ring around it. Diane’s mysterious, black-clad ally seemed to attract offspring, simultaneously fighting four of them while three more plowed toward him.

Now that she had a better view, she saw the stranger’s hood and facemask, and the black spear with a long curved blade. She would have laughed at the absurdity of someone dressing up for a fight, but she had to admit the diminutive warrior was more than earning the right to dress like a ninja. She wished Lee could see this.

Behind her, Jamie battled through the endless husks, apparently less concerned about sparing their lives than she. His most effective attacks were mental. Similar to an offspring’s blast, Jamie’s small bursts of nanites stunned everything within about ten feet.

He lacked the physical grace of the other exterminators, simply moving through the stunned enemies in a straight line toward Diane, bashing any heads in his path with his batons.

Diane kicked a few husks off of her truck and went back to searching the battle for any advantage she could exploit. Someone needed to reach the host and kill it before they all died of exhaustion in this war of attrition.

The ninja hit a roadblock in the form of offspring, and a few thousand husks stood between Diane and the host. Her best hope was for Jamie to reach her soon, and with enough strength to clear the rest of the path. She could tell he was already running out of juice. Charging into battle without him had been a huge error. Next time, she’d stay beside him even if he chose to crab walk.

“Next time” is starting to sound a bit optimistic.

Gunfire rang out again, punctuating her need to end this fight fast. They were rapid shots this time, not the controlled sniper fire she heard before. The army must have reached the MPC.

With only three of the six exterminators defending the colony, several entrances would be unguarded. A single offspring in the wrong place could devastate their already tiny population. The enemies around her returned to a normal speed as she slipped out of her combat trance.

Between the exterminators, the hosts, and the offspring, even Diane could sense the massive manipulation of nanites. Anyone or anything with the ability to sense it would see this battle blazing, maybe even from miles away. Any number of hosts could already be on their way with armies much larger than this one. For the first time since her parole, Diane felt hope slipping away.