Hearing his partner, Homer looked at Hart. She had been thrown around, cut and scraped, but was still expressionless. It was a far cry from the woman who’d hysterically begged Klou to help her back on the airship. Holding his head like a blade, Homer swept around. Another wave of energy hit Hart. Her neck shattered and her head whiplashed around on her shoulders, turned almost completely around. Hart moved back a couple of steps before she crumbled. Her kill switch started to scream as she hit the ground.
Digger climbed to his feet, bringing his hands up warily as he heard Talons’ kill switch wailing. After a few moments, Talons rounded the front of the truck. The truck’s malfunctioning arm was whirring up and down, clamping at air, with a pained mechanical sound. Digger made sure to avoid it as he turned his attention on Talons.
The sleeve on Talons’ arm had injected the French assassin with adrenaline and chemicals which seemed to be doing their job, even though she was brainwashed. She pitched Digger’s own knife at him. Digger twisted out of its path, letting if rifle past. Talons flung herself after the knife, claws spread. There was less than a minute until Talons’ bracelet exploded. As long as she stayed close to Digger, the explosion would be enough to kill him whether she got her talons into him or not. He turned, dancing away as she swiped and then hit back. Punching her in the side of the ribs, Digger met solid, tensed muscle. Talons spun and slammed Digger in his armoured chest, sending the Australian sprawling back.
Eyes pinwheeling, Talons moved toward Digger. Confusion flickered across her previously emotionless face, however. The chemicals must have been doing something to counteract the thing in the church’s mind control. There wasn’t long until her sleeve would blow and kill them both.
“Come on, come on.” Digger said.
Digger gestured with both hands, waving her toward him as he circled. The pincer of the garbage truck’s arm was jerking up and down. Talons glared at him and lunged. Timing it to perfection, Digger feinted and then spun around, driving his boot into the woman’s midsection. Talons stumbled back several steps, right into the frenzied arm of the automated garbage truck. The brainwashed woman looked surprised as the pincer closed around her waist. It whipped Talons off her feet, flinging her up and backward into the body of the truck. Legs kicking, she tumbled into the empty rear compartment where the waste was meant to go, landing with a thud.
Homer appeared around the other end of the vehicle. Digger sprinted away from the truck and its grasping mechanical arm. He collected Homer by the arm and pushed him forward.
“Move!” Digger said.
Talons’ bracelet exploded inside the rear compartment. The vehicle shook but stayed intact as fire belched out of the square opening in the top. Pieces of Talons shot out of the hole and rained across the back of the truck. The mechanical arm finally broke down and stopped moving as the blast faded.
Breathing hard, Digger doubled back to recollect his knife from where it had landed after Talons threw it. Even though it was empty, he fetched his UMP45 as well. The others, Sanzeros and Ludd, Klou and Echo Three, had all vanished as if plotting a counterattack. Homer, meanwhile, was starting to look twitchy and a little glazed. Digger could feel a growing throb at the back of his skull.
“Starting to leave you, isn’t it, mate? The magic juice only works for a bit.” Digger said, “Come here then, if you need to grab my arm to keep my head clear without the juice then you’d better do it so I don’t lose my shit.”
Homer took a hold of Digger’s left elbow as they headed over to Dr Martina Hart’s corpse. She was facedown on the road although lying on her back, her chest pointed toward the sky. Digger picked up the M202 missile launcher the woman had been carrying. Since she had only managed to fire off one there were still three rockets inside the weapon. Shouldering it, Digger started back the way they had come. He made sure he didn’t move too fast for Homer, letting him keep his grip on Digger’s elbow. He could feel the presence of the thing from the church circling his mind like a hungry shark. Even though there was no sign of the other mind-controlled teams, the two of them ducked down a narrow alleyway.
The white church appeared ahead of them, on top of the green hill. Digger remembered the music he had heard at first, both inside and outside his head. He could hear music again but it was darker and discordant. A screaming symphony in freefall, and getting louder with each step. Laying the missile launcher on his shoulder, Digger aimed through a viewfinder on the side of the weapon and saw neon targets overlap and paint the church. With Homer holding Digger’s arm, Digger fired the launcher.
Digger didn’t want to take any chances, unloading all three missiles in quick succession. Backblasts roared down the alley behind them and made Homer jump, heat washing across their shoulders. Rockets hissed out of the barrels, blowing tails of white smoke. The first missile howled up the hill, zeroing in on the building, and slammed into the front of the church. The impact tore apart the church’s wooden doors and rippled through the building. The steeple was cut down, collapsing outward. The other two missiles drilled through the side of the church and stained glass windows disintegrated in brilliant starbursts of colour. The rest of the building erupted with concussive force, roof imploding as the walls were torn out from under it. The blast rolled down the hill, flattening the overgrown grass and then hammering Digger and Homer. They were pushed back as the noise echoed across the arena.
Something screamed, loud enough inside Digger’s head that it pierced his skull and caused him to drop to one knee. The empty missile launcher fell to the ground with a crash. Cupping his hands over his ears, Digger looked toward the church. The structure was burning and falling in on itself. He only got a glimpse of long, bony limbs whipping wildly through billowing flames. Something contorted in agony and rage. Rubble caved in on top of the shape and the screams cut off suddenly, leaving a looming silence.
“Halle-fucking-lujah.” Digger said.
Chapter Fourteen
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“Bringing down the house, Rick!” The first commentator said, “Doesn’t Digger Dundee know that burning down a church gets you seven years of bad luck?”
“Nevermind that, Fred, just what the heck was that thing nesting inside the church there?” The second man said, “I know Dundee offering some theories but I have never seen or heard of anything like that before! The way those teams were just-, hypnotised.”
Images flashed across the contestants’ wrist screens of the burning church. Captured by circling drones, there were only glimpses of a vast, spidery shape thrashing in the ruins before it was consumed. Shots were spliced in of the two teams that had been under its control suddenly clutching their heads and reeling as some sort of invisible connection was lost before blinking and taking in the world around them, as Digger had done when Homer first snapped him out of the thing in the church’s control.
“Speaking of the other teams, Rick, Digger Dundee taking out the trash with Talons!” The first man said.
“That’s right, Fred, smart use of the environment. Those wrist-mounted bombs attached to contestants’ kill switches really proving to be a new
challenge to take into consideration.” The second commentator said, “But we can’t forget the real force to be reckoned with here, Homo Superior Number Eleven and those freaky brain powers! Three teams on one, they wouldn’t have stood a chance if not for Homer, but is it just me or does our young psychic psycho lack that killer instinct?”
“I see what you mean, Rick. We know the kid has killed before the show, and we’ve seen him exterminate two contestants already but-, somehow I think he could be dominating if he was willing to get more blood on his hands.” The first said.
DFN aka Death From Nowhere Jefferson watched the update with one eye. The other eye, her artificial one, was plugged into the scope of her lightweight rifle. Her body pressed against the floor of an abandoned office, snaked up to the broken window so she had a commanding view of the street below. The sniper hadn’t moved since she and her partner had gotten there.
Checking the map, the weapon drop across the road was still visible. It had drawn in Luthor Crispee and Marcus Halligan, ending in their deaths at the hands of the mutant baboons. The only other team in their section of the arena, the Russian supersoldier Dozer and young boy Taka, were a couple of blocks away. DFN knew they would have to move soon even though the trap was baited, they’d stayed in the one spot for too long.
“We need to get over there and check out that weapon drop.” DFN’s partner, Bolt, said, “Come on the monkeys that they had waiting in there to trap people are obviously all dead now since they killed Halligan and Crispee and no offense to your skills or whatever but the two of us are outgunned here that rifle you’ve got won’t go through body armour and all I’ve got are these little stun pistols that aren’t going to put a scratch on some of the guys out there!”
Bolt’s narrow frame, covered in wiry muscles, vibrated with potential energy. He paced the room behind DFN at what would have been jogging speed for any normal human. The detritus of the meal he’d stolen from a vending machine earlier was scattered around his feet.
“We don’t know about the big Russian, Dozer, or Taka. Up here we can see them coming. Down there-, well, they’re probably laying a trap as well, just like us.” DFN said.
According to their maps, the Towers section of the arena was the smallest of all five sections. There were many places to hide, however, since it was occupied by looming, pockmarked skyscrapers, full of vertical hiding places, with a few silvery bridges slung between them. Below, on the street, the blackened bodies of Marcus Halligan, Luthor Crispee and the nest of mutated baboons that had attacked them were still smoldering in front of the old mall. Since the baboons there had been no sign of other mutated or sick animals but their forearm maps said mutant animals were meant to be this section’s unique threat.
“I can be in and out of that drop before you know it in a blink of an eye no way they can catch me!” Bolt said.
“We’re connected by the kill switches, there’s a proximity alert on them as well as a heart monitor.” DFN said, “If we’re apart for too long they’ll kill us both all the same. That means we move together or not at all, and I’m staying right here until we see Dozer and Taka.”
“That alarm gives us a full minute though doesn’t it?” Bolt’s face brightened, “A full minute I can get from here find the weapon drop and get back in under a minute easy!”
“No! No, don’t!” DFN said.
“Don’t believe me just watch!” Bolt said.
The superfast mutant had been stretching and limbering up as he spoke. Being trapped in the room for the last hour had been too much for his hyperactive mind. DFN turned away from the window, reaching, but she had no chance of stopping him. Bolt shot out of the room and down the corridor like a cork exploding from a champagne bottle.
Picking up speed, his metabolism and senses going into overdrive, Bolt bolted down the stairwell that he and DFN had climbed earlier. His feet floated over steps, barely touching the ground. At each turn his footprints raced up the walls, taking each corner in a blur of motion. It was less than ten seconds before he reached the wreckage-strewn lobby again. The proximity alert had failed to even register until he shot out the front doors of the office tower.
1:00... 0:59…
A sixty second countdown started as Bolt blazed into the street. Glancing at his screen, Bolt chuckled at just how slow the ticking seconds looked. Sneakers pounding pavement, Bolt circled around the burnt bodies toward the entrance to Diamond Plaza mall. He slowed to an easy sprint down the sidewalk. Mentally, Bolt planned how to cover the most ground once he got inside. He could grab the weapons and return to DFN in a blaze of glory.
As he reached the entrance, the floor-to-ceiling windows exploded. Gunfire roared from across the street, bullets hissing through the air right by Bolt’s face. Glass shards ruptured outward and Bolt veered to avoid being cut to ribbons.
0:54… 0:53…
“Where the heck did that come from?” Words left Bolt’s mouth in a blur.
Bolt had been so fixated on the mall entry, with the ticking countdown playing against the back of his mind, that he’d failed to take in his surroundings. Across the street was a cooling whine. Then, six spinning muzzles fired up again, bullets howling from a compact, black minigun. Bolt was still backing up as shots screamed across the asphalt and sidewalk at his feet, creating sparks and flinging chips of concrete and rock like shrapnel.
Cut off in the direction he had originally come from, Bolt wheeled around in a panic. He was fast but he couldn’t literally outrun bullets, especially not when dozens of them were being poured out of the minigun per second.
0:49… 0:48...
From beneath the overhang of another office tower, the hulking shadow of Dozer emerged. The Russian supersoldier was a seven-foot-tall monster with a shaved head, distinguished by his jutting ears and narrow eyes. Covered in black body armour, he looked like a walking tank. Dozer was carrying the six-barrelled minigun by his right hip. A belt of bullets ran from the weapon to a massive pack on his back, trigger attached to a chainsaw-style handle on the rear of the gun. He was much slower than Bolt but he swept the compact minigun around effortlessly.
“For the love of God, what did I say?” DFN yelled.
Bolt was dancing back from a hurricane of bullets. Dozer was out of DFN’s sight and therefore she couldn’t hit him with the sniper rifle. Glancing at the screen on her wrist, DFN saw it was down to forty-five seconds. If she didn’t close the gap between herself and Bolt then their kill switches would go off and blow them both up. The most direct route to make up the distance of course was right in front of DFN, a flying leap ten stories straight down. Unfortunately, she didn’t have one of the parachutes they had ridden down to the arena. Without thinking, DFN shot upright and sprinted out of the room with her rifle.
0:43… 0:42…
DFN thought and moved fast but she was nowhere near as quick on her feet as Bolt. Running down the hallway, DFN knew she could never clear the ten flights of stairs, cross the lobby and get to Bolt in the street in time. The elevator bank was right by the stairs. They weren’t working, of course, but one of the two sets of doors was slightly ajar. If she wasn’t as fast as Bolt then she had to be smarter. DFN jammed the butt of her rifle into the gap. Pushing and prying, DFN revealed a dark and cavernous, empty shaft.
DFN’s artificial eye lit up, night vision revealing the contours of the shaft that would have been totally black otherwise. Two thick steel cables ran straight down the middle. No time to hesitate, DFN lunged and grabbed the elevator cables in midair then let herself drop into darkness. She whipped down the shaft, walls rushing by, and her gloved hands started to burn. It slowed her down just enough to stop her from breaking her legs when she landed on the roof of the elevator with a crash. The elevator was stalled without power and parked just below the first floor. In spite of the pain radiating through her hands and legs, DFN threw herself at the nearest doors. With her night vision eye, DFN could see a manual emergency release to the side of the doors. She yanked it down
and the doors clunked open loosely, just wide enough for her to squeeze through. DFN clamoured up through the gap and onto the carpet of the first floor, dragging her rifle with her.
0:32… 0:31…
Just over thirty seconds left on the countdown on DFN’s wrist. It was still going down, proving Bolt wasn’t in range. Trash and shafts of weak sunlight filled the first floor corridor. DFN had climbed onto her hands and knees when a wet growl echoed toward her from down the hall. A large shape padded toward DFN. DFN looked up to see amber eyes in a red face, lips drawn back from curving fangs.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” DFN said.
Out on the street, Bolt sprinted to avoid Dozer’s minigun. Bullets tore apart walls and vehicles behind him. He zagged, unable to double back to the tower where DFN had been left behind. Half a minute disappeared off Bolt’s clock. The belt of ammunition was vacuumed into the receiver of Dozer’s minigun, casings spraying out the other side, and the burst from the weapon seemed to go on and on forever.
0:29… 0:28…
Bolt raised both of his stun blasters, bodies of the weapons looping over his knuckles. Beams of blue light zapped out of the glowing muzzles. The beams splashed against Dozer’s body armour and even against the side of his face in dazzling blue blasts. Dozer didn’t seem fazed. He was a giant and his subcutaneous body armour, a fine mesh implanted beneath his skin, apparently dampened the already weak blasts to nothing. Bolt ran and kept firing, unfortunately getting further and further from where he’d started as the seconds ticked away.
Dozer might have been practically invulnerable but he had the same weakness as all the contestants, his connection to a partner. The second half of his team was Taka, a former child soldier. Taka was scrawny and underfed, a small, dark face totally shrunken in the shadow of Dozer’s vast bulk. The child soldier was cradling a wood-furnished AKM assault rifle. He wore dark olive body armour that looked oversized as well as several gold chains around his neck and skinny wrists. Bolt changed his aim, firing and trying to hit Taka instead. The child soldier stuck to Dozer, however, and the blasts glanced uselessly off Dozer’s side.
Kill Switch: Final Season Page 17