I pulled the collar of my shirt down, showing the scar of the fiend on my chest. Dasha looked at it in shock, her surprise clear on her face. “Lara gave you this?” she asked in disbelief.
“Yes.”
“So you guys really are serious about this relationship, huh? I figured Lara was just doing this to attract some attention to herself,” Dasha said. “So tell me, Lance … what do you miss the most from your past?” She returned to writing something in her notebook.
“Um … my family and my best friend, Grant, I guess.” I did not want to get into my personal life with her.
She nodded understandingly. “I’ve read about your two sisters. Tell me more about this Grant fellow.”
“He was my best friend in the PLF. Anything I needed, he always had my back. I met him about a week or so after I joined the resistance, and I guess we just clicked. We had a lot of the same interests and played a lot of the same sports together, so naturally we became best friends,” I said. “Grant and I were also in the same squad. Plus, I could joke around with him about anything.”
“You don’t joke with Lara?” she asked.
“Yeah, of course I do, but it’s not the same. I have to watch what I’m saying when I’m around her so I don’t get her in a bad mood or something,” I explained defensively. “There are two Laras—the Lara I know and the Lara that she keeps secret from me.” I sat back, melting into my chair as I glanced over at the clock.
“We all have secrets, Lance. I’m sure she feels the same way about you,” Dasha debated persuasively.
I laughed, knowing she was probably right. I let out a bored sigh while Dasha sketched the tattoo that Lara had given me onto a piece of paper. “So are we done here?” I asked her.
She sat back, glancing at her notebook with a satisfied look. “Yes,” she told me, scribbling down something on a piece of paper. “You can go now; make sure to give Lara this note.” She handed me the piece of paper.
I nodded and then exited her office. Once out in the hall, I opened the note to read it, but it was, of course, written in Jural. I let out a defeated sigh, folded it back up, and placed it in my pocket.
Lara was waiting for me outside the office, reading a magazine. “All done?” she asked, looking up from the magazine.
“Yeah,” I replied, fiddling around in my pocket to retrieve the note. “Dasha wanted me to give you this.”
“Thanks.” She opened it up quickly, glanced over it, and put it in her purse. “It was just the date and time for our next appointment.” She told me, reading my questioning stare. Lara took my hand, leading me out of the waiting room and to her dorm. She was in a very bouncy, lighthearted mood for some reason, which was rare for her. Once we got in, I flopped on to the bed.
Lara opened up a window, letting in a warm breeze, and then she lay down beside me. “So how did your meeting go with her?” I asked. She had seen Dasha before I had this morning.
“It was all right. Sometimes I wanted to tell her to mind her own business, but I held back. You would have been really proud of me.”
Lara glanced over at me. “Was she as nosey with you as she was with me?”
I nodded with a sigh. “That’s her job, though, I guess.”
Lara nodded in agreement. “She prescribed me some pills,” Lara said. She sat up and dug around in her purse, pulling out three bags of pills.
“How? Isn’t she a guidance counselor?” I asked.
Lara nodded. “This isn’t the nineteenth century, Lance. Counselors can prescribe medication if they feel it’s needed for the situation. These two will dull down my tricnoses, and this one is an experimental drug that apparently lets my body adapt so that I can become pregnant by humans.”
“What? Like, you mean, kids?” I blurted out.
“Chill out. Do you see me taking them?” she asked defensively. “I told Dasha I didn’t want them, but she told me to take them anyway.” Lara laughed at my reaction.
“All right, that’s cool. You scared me for a minute. I thought you actually wanted to have kids,” I told her with an uneasy laugh.
She looked at me as if trying to read my mind. “Us having kids? That would be crazy,” she told me with a laugh.
It wasn’t a very convincing laugh, though. “I don’t even understand why she would give you those,” I muttered, thinking to myself that there had to be an ulterior motive behind Dasha giving Lara the pills.
“I don’t either,” Lara said with a shrug. She began talking to me again, but I wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. My attention had shifted to the unusual, high-pitched birdcalls outside. I listened to them for a second, suddenly panicking as I realized they were resistance-fighter calls.
“Get down!” I shouted, grabbing Lara and hurling her to the ground. I jumped on top of her to shield her.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked, pushing me off.
I glanced over the bed, confused. I could have sworn an attack was about to commence. I held her down, regaining my position on top of her as she struggled to get up.
“Lance, let me go, or I’m going to bite you.” Her eyes darkened as she bared her fangs at me.
I loosened my grip on her, ready to apologize, but before I could say anything, the building shook violently. Artillery smashed into it, sending shrapnel flying. The room momentarily filled with clouds of dust, and I ducked just in time as the shrapnel dangerously sliced through the air around me.
Lara retreated under me. The windows were smashed; glass sprayed everywhere as the walls began to creak dangerously, threatening to collapse.
I peered through the remains of the window at the tree line. I could see the muzzle flashes of machine gunners opening up on us in the distance. One spotted me, and the hissing sounds of bullets became louder as they flew in our direction. I ducked down just in time as they peppered the wall behind us.
Lara crawled across the floor to a closet, opened it up, and returned to my side a moment later. She was holding some kind of fiend machine gun. It had a scope with a green, glowing liquid in a container on the side of it by the feed tray. “PLF?” she asked me, yelling over the sounds of bullets as she began to set up her tripod.
I peeked over the side again as the machine gunner stopped firing and artillery started to pound the base again. There were two squads running through the tall grass in front of us toward the compounds where I had been held prisoner. They were wearing blue uniforms, not the flashy red ones we always wore on our major attacks.
“They’re the NWO—the New World Order,” I told her. She cracked open a box of ammunition, fed it into the machine gun’s tray, and cocked the weapon. I stared at the silver rounds curiously—it was a unique type of metal.
“Fiend-crafted ammunition goes farther and packs more of a punch,” Lara said in answer to my questioning stare.
Gunfire started to erupt from the fiend’s compound as the NWO fighters were instantly mowed down. Lara braced herself on her knees, firing through the broken window into the tree line, nailing one of them. He fell limply to the ground, probably dead before he even knew what hit him. I crawled over to the closet where Lara had retrieved the machine gun and brought her a few boxes of ammunition, feeding the belt to her as she fired.
“Over there!” I yelled, pointing toward the right side of the tree line, where fighters were trying to flank the base.
She started firing in that direction, causing them to duck down into the tall grass, narrowly escaping death. She turned back as another soldier ran across the field, but she wasn’t fast enough. He hid behind a large boulder, and Lara cursed angrily to herself. The NWO was slowly gaining ground toward the base. The all-too-familiar emergency siren began to blare in the background.
Lara reloaded the machine gun, moving aside. “Use it if you have to!” she told me as the sky began to fill
with fiends smashing down helicopters that were barely visible, far off in the distance. “Don’t get yourself killed,” she ordered, starting to morph into her fiend form. Her clothes began ripping as her muscles and bones bulged from her back. A moment later, she let out a heart-stopping cry as the transformation was complete. She burst through the window and flew out of sight. A loud smash snapped me back to reality as a stray bullet shattered the lamp beside me.
I figured there had to be at least two battalions out there, which shocked me. Usually, both the PLF and NWO used hit-and-run tactics against the fiends, but these guys were digging in for a more conventional battle, which almost never happened anymore. By nightfall, tanks had begun to roll through the woods, firing freely into the now-crippled base.
The war had been raging around me for three or four hours, with the NWO, surprisingly, still gaining ground. They had set up a trench about a hundred meters away from the base, which it appeared they were using to communicate to the tanks and artillery through flares and radio equipment manned by the personnel inside.
The fiends must have really dropped the ball on this one because usually things like that would never happen in the war. I was beginning to get worried about Lara. The ground was littered with dozens of fiends’ bodies.
The sound of bullets hissing by kept ringing out around me, and then a stray bullet flew into the room, smashing into my improvised bunker that I had constructed out of the furniture. I hunkered down, trying my best to be as small a target as possible. A round ripped through the bunker, exiting an inch away from my head and coming to a rest in the wall behind me. “That’s it,” I said angrily to myself. I set the machine gun up inside the bunker and stared through the sights, out into the battlefield. It was strewn with dead figures of humans and fiends.
I mowed down one soldier who was running toward my shattered window with a grenade. He fell, and the grenade blew up harmlessly a couple feet away from my semi-fortified bunker. I reloaded the final belt into the machine gun and fired slow bursts at the trench, trying to conserve what little ammo Lara had left me.
A sharp pain in my chest reminded me of the connection Lara and I shared. I felt an emotion from her. I sent my thoughts to her. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, I’m a bit busy though, Lance,” the reply rang back.
“I have no more ammo.”
“All right. Hold on, stay low,” she told me.
I scanned the sky and saw a fiend smash a fighter jet into pieces with one mighty swing of its paw. I figured it had to be Lara. My worries melted away, and I mowed down another fighter as she raced through the sky toward me. And then as I tried to fire again, I realized that I had wasted what was left of my ammo on the soldier I had just killed.
After a moment of me not firing, heads began to pop up from the trench in front of me. They peered questioningly over at me. “Run out of ammo yet?” one of them called over to me.
“Come find out!” I yelled back threateningly.
Luckily for me, a machine gun opened up on them from the third floor, drawing the attention away from my crippled bunker. Two guys decided to fire into my room, forcing me to hunker back down behind my improvised defense. The bullets were starting to penetrate through the wood, hitting the wall behind me.
There was a sudden flash of bright white light as a flare shot up into the sky, illuminating the entire base. Screams of rage erupted from the fighters as they all charged from behind their cover toward our base. The ones in the trench fifty meters from me jumped out and sprinted toward the base as well. Three of them broke away from their group and headed into my room.
I punched one in the face. He fell over on top of me as the other clumsily shot his rifle at me, killing his partner. I swiftly unbuckled the pistol around his waist and aimed at the soldier’s neck, killing him instantly.
A fierce growl of rage erupted behind us as the last guy sprayed wildly, sending bullets flying everywhere. Lara burst in on top of him, biting a chunk out of his chest before violently ripping his head off. She led me into the hall and transformed to her human form as we jogged along corridor after corridor. Luckily, she didn’t regain her human form immediately, as one NWO fighter mistakenly ran straight into us.
We both jumped on top of him, and Lara swiftly killed him with her fiend strength. “We’re being overrun. I need your help, Lance,” she told me as she led me deeper down the hall and into a room. It was an armory, filled with weapons and ammunition. She threw an assault rifle over to me that I had never seen before. She quickly showed me how to load it and turn the safety off and on. She grabbed a backpack, slid her hand along a shelf, and pushed a whole bunch of C4 grenades and magazines into the bag. She tossed it over to me, and then pulled me into a hug, giving me a kiss just before she turned back into a fiend.
Lara took a step back, nodding her head toward a vest that had four rocket-propelled grenades in it, which I used to load the launcher hanging on the wall. I slung the loaded RPG over my right shoulder. Then I grabbed my rifle and peeked out into the hall. A soldier was running down it, yelling out orders. I poked the rifle out the door and killed him as he ran by.
Lara then ran past me into another room. She smashed through the window, and then I jumped through it, clumsily landing on the soft grass. I felt her jaw clamp onto my back, lifting me up, and I then sprinted behind her lumbering fiend body. I jumped on top of her just as she shot into the air. We flew at breakneck speed, and I spotted an artillery gun off in the distance.
The sound of bullets whizzing past my head was shockingly loud. I threw a C4, clicked the remote control to set it off, and was satisfied by the smoke billowing up from the destroyed artillery piece below us. Lara raced over to two more howitzers, and I repeated the process, successfully destroying them.
The fiends were greatly outnumbered. I could see about a dozen fighting in the sky as I began to lose hope. A fighter jet streaked past us, locking onto us. I cringed and tightly wrapped my arms around Lara’s neck. The machine gun blared, followed by the sounds of whizzing bullets.
Lara nose-dived, plummeting toward the ground without warning and nearly knocking me off her back. With all her strength, she smashed off the wing of the jet. She caught the pilot in midair as he ejected, and she beheaded him. Lara glanced back, purring to get my attention. I dropped a C4 on the last howitzer, blowing it up. She then raced back to the base, making passes on the trenches below.
I unclipped some grenades, tossed them, and watched in satisfaction as they exploded in and around the trench. Lara was getting tired—I could feel her chest heaving through the heavy coat of fur as she sucked in breath after breath.
Fiends started dragging their wounded comrades from the courtyard, but an American-style helicopter known as an Apache appeared from behind the tall fiend base, mowing them down as the injured fiends attempted to escape; it was like shooting fish in a barrel. I untied the RPG from the side of the backpack. Lara stopped in midair, giving me a split second to aim.
I fired it, and the recoil nearly threw me off her back. I dropped the firing mechanism, which fell to the ground below with a dull clunk. The rocket sailed through the sky, hitting the Apache dead on.
Cheers erupted from the fiends below as we flew by. I took out the rifle, while Lara flew back down to the field. She flew about six feet off the ground, and her claws ripped through NWO soldiers who were retreating into the tree line. I glanced through the sights of my rifle but held my fire. More fiends flew into the air, slaughtering the remaining humans who hadn’t retreated yet.
“Please stop, Lara,” I told her through our minds’ connection.
She flew up from the ground, leaving the rest of them to surrender. Some threw down their weapons, while others sprinted toward the tree line, defeated. Roars of victory began echoing through the moonlit sky as the fiends flew around victoriously.
Lara joined in th
e cheering and then flew us away to the lake where we had been last night. She landed gently on the ground. I glanced down at the purplish blood oozing out of her massive paw.
“Are you all right?” I asked her.
“It’s nothing. I just nicked it, hitting down that jet,” she said, bending down to drink the water from the lake. She looked exhausted from the battle.
I knelt beside her, washing the blood from the pilot off me and then gratefully taking a drink from the lake. Fiends started to land on the other side of the lake. Lara’s claws retreated inside her massive paws, and she nudged me with her good paw, taking me under her towering body protectively.
I looked around—some fiends across the lake were drinking from it; others were licking their wounds or washing them off in the lake. Some of them were staring at me.
At first, I thought they must want to kill me, but one of them came over and bowed its head, which I returned. Then it shot into the air and flew away. Lara glanced down at me. Pride showed in her eyes, and then she let out her lion-like fiend growl and stood up on all fours, indicating to me that we were leaving. I got on her back, and she shot up into the air. We slowly flew back to the base and landed in the open field a few moments later.
I hopped off her, clinging to her leg like a cub, so as to not be mistaken as a resistance fighter by the other fiends towering overhead. Some fiends were lounging around in the grass, talking to each other in their lion-like growls. Others were eating, maiming, and killing wounded resistance fighters.
A wounded soldier grabbed at my leg as I walked by. I glanced down at him. He was young—only about sixteen—and had a gaping wound in his stomach that was squirting out blood. It was clear that he was never going to make it, even if he got medical attention. “Please, comrade … don’t … don’t let them take me,” he murmured as he slowly started to succumb to his wounds.
The Unexpected War Page 9