“C’mere, ye bastard,” cheeped Artur, then he bounded off Dan’s shoulder with relatively superhuman speed, roaring as he hurtled through the air in Krato’s direction.
A third slowdown round hit him, mid-fall. From Dan and Ollie’s point of view, Artur’s movements slowed to normal speed. To everyone else around, Artur’s descent became a laborious crawl, like he was gradually sinking into thick honey.
Dan and Ollie could only watch as Krato shoved Finn and Bonbo inland toward the factory gates looming in the distance. The children followed robotically behind him as he scurried off in the direction of the city.
By the time Artur hit the dock, he, Dan and Ollie were alone.
“So this is what it feels like,” Dan grunted.
“Can’t we speed up?” Ollie asked.
“Not until it wears off,” said Dan.
“And how fecking long will that take?”
Dan shrugged. “Depends on how much power he used. And on the gun. Besides Mindy, I’ve never seen one that can do this.”
He looked up and watched ships streak across the sky like shooting stars.
“Marnie!” Artur cheered.
Dan lowered his head just as Marnie jerked upright like she had been spring-loaded. Her head whipped left and right, her face flitting through a range of comically accelerated expressions. Dan blinked, and she was suddenly right in front of him, arms flailing, voice chirping out like a rodent in distress.
He couldn’t make out all of what she was saying, but he got the general, “What the fonk is going on?” vibe.
“Find my gun,” he said, spitting the words out as quickly as he could. Marnie’s head snapped briefly into a nod as she looked him up and down.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked. Or Dan guessed that’s what she said, at least.
“Find my gun!” he said again, pointing to the water. From Marnie’s point of view, this was quite a lengthy process, and by the time he’d finished pointing she was standing in front of him with Mindy.
“Here.”
She thrust the gun into his hands. “Mindy. Slowdown cancel,” he said.
The gun’s lights remained dark, his voice imprint not recognized. Fonk.
“Mindy-slowdown-cancel.”
Nothing.
From somewhere in the distance came a high-pitched scream. Dan had never seen an episode of the cartoon series Alvin and the Chipmunks before. If he had, and if said episode featured one of the chipmunks – Theodore, maybe – being lowered feet first into a kitchen blender, he would almost certainly have noticed a distinct similarity between those screams and this one.
A series of crashes followed, although they sounded to Dan’s ears like corn popping.
“Mindyslowdowncancel. Mindyslowdowncancel!”
The gun’s chamber spun with such speed and ferocity it almost jumped out of Dan’s hands. Lights illuminated on the weapon’s side, but only two of them. Fonk.
Dan jammed the gun under his jaw and pulled the trigger. The world around him immediately jolted back to regular speed.
He looked from Ollie to Artur, who were both still in the process of reacting to him shooting himself. One shot left, then he was out. He might need both of them, but one of them he could carry.
He shot Ollie in the stomach. She yelped and stumbled back, clutching at the invisible entry wound. “What the…? Oh. Oh!”
She wobbled her arms, jumped, then contorted her face. “I’m normal. Everything’s normal speed!”
Artur glowered up at Dan. He began to say, “Ye no-good traitorous bastard,” but by the time he’d finished he had been stuffed inside Dan’s shirt pocket, and they were halfway to the factory gates.
A scene of chaos awaited them when they emerged through the gates and out into the city. A multi-vehicle pile-up smoldered at the side of the road, dozens of other cars abandoned in both directions. The throngs of pedestrians Dan would have expected to see on a street like this one had all fled. Only a handful remained, and the only reason they hadn’t legged it was because they were quite emphatically dead.
Two squirming armored balls of spikes and tentacles stabbed and swiped at the few vehicles that hadn’t yet been abandoned. Krato watched them with paternal pride as they hacked and slashed and killed and maimed their way along the street.
The kids were still lined up in front of him, still staring blankly ahead. There was no sign of Bonbo or Finn, aside from the broken shackles on the sidewalk at Krato’s feet.
Still, at least they weren’t too late to save the kids.
Mindy didn’t have enough juice left to cancel out another slowdown round, but he could tease a single stun shot out of her. He only had one chance to make it count.
Krato still hadn’t seen them. Dan raised the gun and took aim. The kids were in front of Krato, but he was tall enough that Dan had a clean shot of his head.
“Night night, you piece of shizz,” he growled.
He squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked. A yellow bolt streaked through the air, closing quickly on Krato’s head.
There was a pew as it ricocheted back out of the doorway and streaked back over Dan’s head. The air around Krato became a swirling pattern of colors, like oil on water, and he jumped back in surprise.
His eyes briefly widened when he spotted Dan, then that fonking smirk of his returned. “Personal shield,” he announced. “Nice try.”
Krato raised something roughly the size of a cigarette lighter. He winked and laughed as Dan broke into a lumbering run.
“Too late, Detective,” he said, as his thumb pressed down on the top of the device. Dan stopped running as a number of terrible things all happened at the same time.
The halos around the children’s heads all lit-up in blinding shades of white. The kids screamed and clawed at the devices, their rigid, trance-like demeanor replaced by a frantic thrashing and screeching as pain tore through their insides.
Krato gave a little wave, then stepped through the door behind him and closed it.
The children staggered into the street, their skin blistering and bulging, their limbs bending like tree branches in a thunderstorm.
Marnie made a move to run to them, but Dan stopped her. “Get the others,” he told her.
“Others? What others?”
“Those kids are about to seriously start misbehaving,” Dan said. “Go fetch their moms.”
Marnie nodded, then raced back in the direction of the dock, her webbed feet paffing on the hard sidewalk.
“Whaaaaaaat aaaaaaaare weeeeeeee—” Artur began.
“Sorry, Artur, no time,” said Dan. He ran toward the children, waving his arms and trying to shape his face into something resembling a smile. “Hey, kids! Over here. It’s OK, calm down, fight it. Think happy—”
A spiky black tentacle erupted from one child’s mouth. Another doubled over and screamed as she split open, revealing a tumbling ball of tentacles within.
“Ah, fonk,” Dan spat. “So much for that.”
One by one, the children fell, their bodies unfolding and rearranging themselves into something larger and infinitely more terrifying. It was almost impressive in its own way. Horrifying, but impressive.
“What do we do?” Ollie asked. She waited a little over a second before asking again. “What do we do?”
“I don’t… I don’t know,” Dan admitted. Finn and Bonbo were much further along the street now, tearing open storefronts and stabbing frantically at anyone taking cover inside. Sirens screamed from a few different directions in the distance. The Tribunal, no doubt heavily armed.
The war was about to begin.
“Krato must have some way of stopping it,” Dan reasoned, although he had nothing whatsoever to base that on. “I’ll go after him.”
“What should I do?” Ollie asked.
“Nothing. When the moms arrive, get them to try to calm the kids down.”
Ollie looked over to where the children had been. In their place were six glistening balls of
fury, each one protected by a shiny exoskeleton. They flapped their deadly limbs, as if testing them for the first time.
“How are they supposed to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Dan said. He headed for the door Krato had gone through, but stopped almost immediately. “Tell them to sing.”
Ollie frowned. “Sing?”
“Ssssssssssiiiiiiiiiii—?” began Artur.
“There’s a lullaby or, I don’t know, a nursery rhyme.” He had a half-hearted stab at the melody. “Like that. Tell them to sing that.”
Ollie nodded. “What about Finn?”
Dan glanced along the street to where the two monstrous wrecking balls were thrashing their way through a line of traffic.
“I’m working on it.”
DAN BARGED through the door and into the hallway of a neat, if a little run-down, family home. He found the family themselves in a room through the back, cowering behind an overturned sofa. Two children recoiled in terror at the sight of him, while a wizened old woman with two extra eyes on her forehead pointed silently at the back window.
“Thank you,” said Dan. He leaned out through the window, then jumped back as a blaster bolt disintegrated the frame. “Shizz!”
He waited for a moment, then quickly thrust an arm out and back in. Another hail of blaster fire screamed across the house’s backyard, burning holes through a line of washing that had been hung out to dry.
Dan gave Mindy a shake, then slammed her twice against his hip. The lights remained dark. The charge was fully depleted.
“Fonk!”
Shoving the gun back in its holster, he took a step back from the open window and readied himself to jump through it. If he moved fast enough, maybe he could get clear before Krato opened fire. Maybe he could find cover. Maybe Krato wouldn’t score a direct hit to his head.
Lot of maybes, but what other choice did he have?
“OK,” he muttered, psyching himself up.
Just before he started his run, something heavy slid across the laminate flooring and stopped at his feet. It was a gun. A small gun, but a gun all the same.
He looked across to the sofa. The old woman nodded, and he nodded back.
Snatching up the gun, Dan approached the window. There was a lamp on a table just beneath it. It had been knocked over, presumably by Krato. Dan lifted it, turned it over in his hand, then tossed it out through the window.
It was shot to pieces before it hit the ground. As it exploded, Dan vaulted through the gap, opening fire in the direction Krato’s shots had come from. The gun made a little pwing sound every time he pulled the trigger, launching disappointingly cute-looking marbles of fire across the backyard. They hit the fence Krato was taking cover behind, throwing out a few clumps of splinters, but otherwise doing no damage.
Dan tucked himself into cover behind a large trash can. Garbage sprayed out as Krato blasted holes in the metal, and Dan knew he only had seconds before the whole thing disintegrated.
He studied the old woman’s gun, hoping for some sort of slider or dial that could crank up the firepower. No such luck. He had a peashooter against a man with a portable shield generator. Sure, the battery readout said it was almost fully charged, but what good was that when the shots it fired were so pitifully weak? He may as well be throwing Funplings.
Wait. The battery.
Dan ejected the clip and caught it. It wasn’t the same size as Mindy’s, but the connection…
Mindy’s own battery popped free. Dan compared the terminals and came very close to smiling. It took some fiddling – not helped by the crescendo of blaster fire screaming around him – but the battery eventually slotted into Mindy’s grip.
The chamber spun. Lights illuminated.
“Mindy, explosive round,” he said, then he stood up, ignored the hole that was blasted through his stomach, and the damp splat of innards hitting the wall behind him, and fired.
The explosive round turned the fence to matchsticks, while also turning the previously stationary Krato into anything but. His shield flickered as he tumbled across an alleyway and crashed through another fence.
Dan stalked across the yard through the flapping sheets drying on the line.
“I’m coming for you, Krato,” he warned, keeping Mindy raised as he approached the smoking hole in the fence. “Put down your gun and let’s talk.”
There was a buzz like a chainsaw and dozens of blaster bolts cut what was left of the fence in half. Dan ducked for cover, firing blindly at the source of the gunfire. The first explosive round detonated with no apparent effect, but the second brought a pained “Urk!” from inside the other garden and the rapid-fire assault sputtered to a stop.
“Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidddddddd yeeeeeeeeeeeee geeeeeeeeeet…?”
“Don’t know, Artur,” Dan said. He jumped to his feet. “Let’s find out.”
“SING? WHAT DO YOU MEAN SING?”
“Sing!” said Ollie. “You know. Laaaa! Like that.”
“Sing what?” Marnie demanded.
They were surrounded by all six mothers. The women gaped in horror at what had become of their children, watching helplessly as they squirmed and rolled off along the street, limbs swiping and slicing at anything that moved.
“A song. You know, like… I don’t know,” Ollie admitted. “Dan said there was a song. A lullaby or something? He said you should sing it.”
The mom who had been piloting the sub looked round at her. “Wait. The Tidesong?”
Ollie shrugged. “I don’t know. What does it go like?”
The mom cleared her throat and sang a couple of faltering notes. Ollie yelped. “Yes! I think that’s it! That’s what Dan sang. Only his was all…” She lowered her voice into a gravelly growl and almost choked on the notes that emerged. “Like that.”
“And what’s it supposed to do?” Marnie demanded, but before Ollie could give an answer, one of the other moms began to sing. Her voice was high and piercing, yet smooth like velvet.
There were no words to what she was singing, but somehow the tune itself told a story that Ollie instinctively understood. It was a story of home and of hope and of snuggling up safe. It was a story of a mother’s love – pure, unconditional love – that wrapped around Ollie’s shoulders and swaddled her like a blanket.
Another mom joined in, then another loaned her voice to the harmony. The sound rose as all seven Deeper Down women sang as one, their voices carrying along the street to their monstrously mutated children.
And doing absolutely fonk all.
“It’s not working,” Marnie said.
“They can’t hear us. We have to get closer,” the pilot mom said, but Marnie blocked her path.
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Get out of my way, Marnie. That’s my son!”
“Not right now it isn’t,” Marnie said. “I’m sorry, Torus, but if you get any closer you could be killed. I can’t allow that.”
“We just need to get their attention,” said Ollie.
“And how do you suggest we do that?” Marnie asked her.
Ollie’s forehead creased as she tried to come up with a solution. She wished Dan were here. Dan would know what to do. Or Artur.
Or Finn.
Finn.
Her eyes scanned the row of partially-destroyed storefronts. They stopped on one that was no more or less damaged than the others, yet somehow managed to look worse in every conceivable way.
“Wait here,” she said. “I think I have an idea.”
DAN KICKED through the debris of the second fence, but found no trace of Krato. A nightdress whipped at him from another washing line, snapping so quickly he almost obliterated it with an explosive round.
“No point running, you piece of shizz. I’ll find you,” Dan warned. “Come out now and I’ll only make you eat one of your own balls.”
“Tempting, but no.”
Krato’s voice echoed around the yard, like it was being projected from several places at once. It screeched a lit
tle on the higher notes, suggesting whatever was projecting the sound had taken damage.
“How’s your shield holding up?” Dan asked, his eyes darting between gaps in the fluttering laundry. “Still got charge left, I hope? I’d hate for the next shot to put a hole through you.”
“It’s completely gone,” Krato said. “If you want me alive, I’d put your gun away.”
“Nice try,” Dan said.
He opened fire in one of the many directions Krato’s voice had come from.
“Cold,” said Krato, once the dust had settled. There was a sneering tone to his voice that bugged Dan immensely. He fired off another two rounds in opposite directions.
When the dust settled again, the garden was deathly silent. It stayed that way for several long, drawn-out seconds, until:
“Warmer.”
“This could all be over with, Krato,” Dan said. “Just come out, help me change the kids back, and I’ll make sure everyone goes easy on you.”
“Mmm. Let me think about that,” Krato said. “No. No, I think I’ll pass.”
Dan’s voice became an angry growl. “I’m going to find you, you piece of shizz. You should’ve killed me when you had the chance.”
“Kill you? Why would I want to kill you, Detective? I made you.”
Dan hesitated. “What did you say?”
The voice broke up like a bad radio signal as Krato continued, but Dan heard enough to piece it together.
“Not the original you, of course, but this new incarnation. This… thing you are now. That was my doing.”
“Bullshizz,” said Dan.
“It wasn’t deliberate. I had no idea your colleagues were going to murder you in cold blood and bury you in the exact spot where my company had disposed of some pretty unsavory toxins, but when they did, I thought… What the Hell? Let’s wait and see what happens.”
Krato’s voice became a slightly awed whisper. “And then you emerged. Reborn into something better, something new. Just like those children. You were instrumental to my research, in fact. Without you – without having witnessed your comeback – I doubt I’d have cracked the necessary code that allowed me to put my current plan into action.”
Dead in the Water_A Space Team Universe Novel Page 25