by Sechin Tower
“I was perfectly aware it wasn’t chupacabra food,” said a well known voice. Angela was right beside us now, only she wasn’t standing on the platform: she was held in mid-air by a rippling blue wave of energy that emitted from her flight pack. She descended upon us, wrapped in that electric glow while the two lower flaps of her lab coat fluttering up behind her like a pair of huge, black wings. In her left hand she held a little wand that I guessed to be the EMP generator she had used to destroy Nikki’s phone. She was smiling, but her eyes burned with madness.
As she settled gracefully on the open edge of the platform, the energy from her flight pack created an army of shadows that bowed and scattered before her approach. Behind us, three Blitzkriegers scrambled up the ramp to cut off our retreat. Two of them had guns in their hands. The third man was Shirtless, who carried one of those really big knives, the kind with saw-teeth down the back edge of its blade.
I was debating whether I would be better off jumping over the ledge than letting them get me when an enormous crash echoed up from below. Dean’s truck had smashed through the chain link gate at the front of the amusement park and was gunning its engine as it barreled right for the parked motorcycles.
Chapter 41 ~ Dean
A two-ton pickup wins against a chain link fence. It also wins against motorcycles—even very expensive, heavily customized motorcycles.
Victor clung to the door handle for dear life. “Are you nuts?” he shouted.
“Yes,” Dean said, and then he jammed the accelerator against the floor. The world became a tumble of bone-jarring thuds and jolts as the truck’s smashed grill plowed through the remaining bikes. A length of handlebar careened off the windshield, instantly filling it with a spider’s web of cracks.
On the far side of this newly-made junkyard, Dean slammed on the brakes and the truck skidded to a halt. Even though the truck was no longer moving, Victor still braced for impact against the dashboard as if waiting for another collision. “Do you think they know we’re here?” he breathed.
As if in answer to his question, a loud crack ripped through the night as a bullet collided with the truck’s engine block. At the sound of a second crack, the cabin windshield shattered and another bullet passed between the two of them with a distinctly audible “ZZZIP!”
Dean scrambled to unbuckle himself and then pushed Victor out the passenger door. The truck’s headlights were off, so the two of them had the cover of darkness as they rolled to the ground and crawled through the shadows. Even so, more bullets whizzed over their heads. The truck’s tires echoed the gunfire as they popped and one of the rear view mirrors shattered into oblivion. On the opposite end of the parkway, at the foot of a lighted stage, a crowd of Blitzkriegers continued to fire wildly into the night.
“Over here!” Victor shouted as he spread himself flat behind a low wall. A bullet collided with the cement next to him and kicked up a cloud of dust, but he was safe where he lay.
In the army, Dean had regularly trained to elbow-crawl through soft mud, and it had seemed miserable at the time. It turned out to be even more miserable when crawling across hard, abrasive pavement, especially while real bullets whizzed overhead.
When he got close, Victor reached out to help pull him the rest of the way behind the wall.
Dean risked a glance over the wall to see the bikers clumped together in an angry mob that was illuminated by the flashes of their pistol muzzles and the stage lights behind them. All of them stood with no regard for cover, and let their guns blaze at the truck without much care for aiming. Not a single one of them moved around to flank their target. They were not soldiers, Dean realized, just a bunch of thugs with guns. Unfortunately, thugs or not, they still had the guns and Dean didn’t.
Victor slapped Dean on the shoulder and then pointed over to a row of carnival booths. “Did you see him?”
“Who?” Dean pressed himself back against the wall and looked where Victor was pointing. He saw nothing except for shadows and a cotton candy kiosk.
“Choop!” Victor exclaimed. “I don’t know how, but Choop’s over there!”
“You’re crazy,” Dean said, and rolled back on his shoulder to snatch another glimpse at the stage. He ducked back down as a bullet thumped into the base of the wall, but he was fairly certain it was a stray shot, so he leaned out slowly from behind his cover. He saw the giant, menacing form of Brick at the front of the angry mob blasting away with a sawed-off shotgun even though the truck was far, far beyond its effective range. Behind him was a stage with a big screen showing the blurred image of a man at a desk.
“Kill them, you idiots!” It was the Professor’s voice, screaming through the loudspeakers to either side of the stage. “I don’t want any complications during our hour of victory!”
Below the screen, there was a big cage containing a huge, gray lizard-creature. It looked like Choop on steroids, and as the Professor railed on at the Blitzkriegers, the monster gripped the bars of its cage and roared. The noise of the roar was so loud that it even drowned the sound of the Professor’s voice. It muffled the gunfire, and it shook Dean’s innards even though he was fifty yards away. It even caused the bikers to pause their firing.
“I’m going to get Choop,” Victor sprang to his feet during the lull in gunfire. Dean lunged to pull him back under cover, but he was already sprinting away, his white lab coat trailing behind him as he streaked behind a ring-toss booth. Dean rolled to his feet to follow, but a hail of bullets thumped into the ground around him and drove him back behind the wall.
“Stupid, crazy kid,” Dean muttered as shots hammered away at his cover, grinding through the bricks like chisels. Victor’s sprint had alerted all the bikers to Dean’s hiding place, and now they were aiming for him. At least Victor had probably reached safety. Probably.
Dean didn’t dare take another look, but he could tell from the direction of the fire that the bikers were finally getting smart and splitting into two groups so that they could encircle him. In a moment, they would get a clear shot at him—if they didn’t blast his cover away to nothing before that. Either way, he would be dead within minutes, and the last thing he would hear would be the Professor’s voice booming over the park’s PA system.
Suddenly, Dean realized that he recognized that voice. He knew who the Professor was!
Chapter 42 ~ Soap
From where I stood, I could see the Blitzkriegers firing wildly at my cousin and Victor.
“This is so annoying,” Angela said. “Wait here. I’m going to start the machine and finish this little farce.”
Then she was gone in a blue streak of electricity, sailing down to the entrance building on her way to the reactor below.
“Well, I ain’t gonna stick around up here,” whined the pot-bellied, weasel-faced guy. He had his gun pointed at us but he was craning his neck to see the commotion in the parade ground. “They smashed up our bikes, man. Our bikes!”
“You heard her,” Shirtless yelled. “We’re s’pposed to wait here. We need to guard these two, and maybe kill them a little, too.”
“Forget that,” said Weasel-Face. “Vengeance must be had, man.” With that, he ran down the ramp. The third biker looked back and forth between the ramp and Shirtless and then he followed.
Shirtless yelled a load of curses after them. Then he turned back to us with a cruel grin slicing across his face.
“That’s awright,” He licked his lips and turned his knife so that it glinted in the dim light. “More fun for me. You skanks ready for some fun?”
“Sure, let’s have some fun. Starting with this.” Nikki tossed him something that looked like a half-sized can of processed cheese, the kind that has the consistency of toothpaste so you can squirt it out onto crackers. This can had no label, just bare steel sides and a white plastic tube at the top.
Shirtless caught it in one hand and looked at it with a disdainful sneer. “What’s this—” the can interrupted him with a loud pop. Instantly, he was engulfed in a thick, orange mi
st.
He dropped his knife and stumbled backwards towards the edge of the platform. He blinked and he looked down at his bare arms and chest, and then his eyes opened wide when he realized what had happened to him.
From the top of his bald head to the hip bones that protruded out of his jeans, his skin was now neon orange, the color of a prison jumpsuit. The color was so bright he almost seemed to glow in the dark. All of his tattoos were covered, too, and you couldn’t even see the swastika on his chest. Frantically, he tried to wipe it off, but it stayed so dark that it might as well have been his natural color.
“What—what’d you do to me?” he shrieked.
“Pressurized dye capsule,” Nikki said. “You never looked better.”
Shirtless shrieked and lunged for his knife. As his fingers closed around the hilt, Nikki plunged a syringe needle into the back of his hand. He yelped and rose to his knees, but he was out cold before he could get to his feet.
It was the syringe of Victor’s special formula that I brought with me. Nikki must have kept it after confiscating the contents of my pockets.
“Too bad you only had half a vial of that tranquilizer left,” Nikki said. “I suppose he’ll live.” Nikki’s voice was so cold that I thought she honestly might not care one way or the other. She left the empty syringe protruding from his limp hand, but kicked the knife across the platform.
We both moved over to the edge of the platform to see what was going on down below. From where I stood, I could see that Victor had managed to run off, and a group of Blitzkriegers had gone to chase after him through the little alleyways of the carnival booths. The rest of the bikers were pressing forward to where my cousin was pinned behind a low wall.
Nikki swore under her breath. “Looks like the boys’re in trouble. Wait here.”
“Where are you going?”
“To create a distraction,” she shouted back at me as she sprinted down the ramp.
A stray bullet knocked a jagged, splintery hole in a post three feet away from me, so I dropped to my belly and inched forward to look over the edge of the platform again. Nikki was dashing onto the stage, right in between the gang of bikers and the monster’s cage, but I had no idea what she was planning to do.
Then something happened: every light in the park came on as if someone had flicked a switch. The rides came alive, too, swinging their plastic cars back and forth as they played garbled music. They were slow to get going, but their pace steadily increased as they received more and more electricity. I rolled onto my back and looked upwards, towards the broadcasting dome at the tip of the tower high above me. The sky all around it was lighting up in gyrating rivers of glowing greens and blues as the magnifying transmitter pushed millions of volts out into the stratosphere. Angela had started the reactor. The Doomsday Machine was warming up.
I could already feel the jostling vibration in the planks of the platform, which meant Rusty had got all the earthquake grenades into place. Now I just had to pray that they could wreck the Doomsday Machine before the Doomsday Machine could wreck the world.
As soon as I had that thought, the first of the earthquake grenades overloaded. High overhead, it blew up in a great cloud of red and black fire that sent a rumble through the whole tower. I stood up just as another grenade went off, this one below me. The tremor knocked me off my feet and I went backwards off the edge of the platform.
As I fell, I managed to grab a cross-beam, but two-by-fours are not meant to provide the best handholds. Thirty feet below, the pavement awaited me, but the orange flames were more impatient as they climbed the wooden scaffolding towards my kicking feet.
I should’ve known that my experiment would explode. Again.
Chapter 43 ~ Dean
Dean realized with a surge of disappointment that knowing the Professor’s identity wasn’t going to help him at that moment. There were only three options: be gunned down where he lay, be gunned down as he fled, or be gunned down in a futile, suicidal charge at the approaching enemy.
He balled up his fists—his only weapon—and allowed himself one deep breath before opting for the suicidal charge.
He cleared the low wall and got only two steps before his charge came to a halt—not by bullets, but because the angry mob of heavily armed Blitzkriegers had dissolved into a disorganized mass of panicked rabbits. The monster chupacabra, the one that had earlier let out a roar so deafening it had interrupted the shooting spree, was out of its cage and rampaging through their midst like a bully stomping his way through sand castles. It roared again and again, swinging its spiky fist into the crowd and knocking a biker through the air to collide with two of his comrades. Faced with the thing of their nightmares, most of the bikers simply fled. A few fired their pistols at it, but without taking time to steady their shaking hands, their shots went way off target.
Dean circled around the crowd, sticking to the shadows as the monster smashed its way through the Blitzkriegers. He saw a weasel-faced biker step out behind the creature and take careful aim, holding his black revolver steadily and pouring all of his concentration into the sights along the barrel of his gun. The biker’s focus was so great that he didn’t see Dean’s fist coming. Weasel-Face dropped heavily to the ground and the gun skidded away into the shadows.
Shaking his fist to clear it of the pain of impact, Dean caught a glimpse of Nikki standing to the side of the empty cage. She gave him a thumbs-up. Dean was taken aback even as he returned the gesture. What was Nikki Du Boise doing here? Evidently, all of the students he was supposed to protect had charged head-long into danger the minute he turned his back. Then he remembered he had another problem—Victor had run off alone.
Dean sprinted out towards the row of carnival booths where Victor had disappeared. A Blitzkrieger stepped into his path and swung at him with a tire iron, but Dean ducked the blow and caught the man in the stomach with his shoulder. His ribs flared with pain, but he knocked his attacker to the ground without losing speed. Another two bikers raced past him as the monster thundered around a corner in hot pursuit.
Dean dodged through the stampede and threw himself behind a spinning rocket-ship ride. The monster charged past him, too intent on its original prey to notice Dean’s escape.
It was that moment when the lights all across the park blazed to life. Dean had to slink deeper into the alley as the bright pink and green bulbs of the cotton candy booth chased away his concealing shadows. Overhead, strange colors filled the night sky, as if someone was spewing phosphorescent paint out of the top of the Doomsday Machine.
Suddenly he felt a searing pain against his thigh, and he just managed to pull the phone out of his pocket before it exploded in vermillion flames.
“Un-freaking-believable!” he raged as he stomped his phone to extinguish it.
Before he could smother the phone, a pair of explosions rocked the Doomsday Machine. Most of the tower was steel and therefore not flammable, so as long as no one was foolish enough to be up on the platform, the ensuing fire didn’t matter. His first priority remained finding Victor.
For the next few frantic minutes, Dean darted from game kiosk to concession stand as he searched. Finally, through a gap between booths he caught sight of something gray with hooping spines along its back. It was the original chupacabra, the one that had invaded Topsy on his first night there, and it was cornered against the outer wall of the park, pressing itself against the high concrete barricade as it hissed at a pair of armed Blitzkriegers.
“What do we do with it?” one of them said, his voice pinched with panic.
“Let’s waste it,” said the other. “Let’s waste it and get the hell out of here before the other one catches us.”
Dean was stuck on the wrong side of the lane of booths, which meant that to get to them he would have to run sixty feet to the intersection, round the corner, and run sixty feet back. He knew Victor cared for that animal, but there was nothing Dean could do to save it.
Then a voice shouted “No!”
Dean peered through the gap again and saw the flash of a white lab coat as Victor ran into the space between the gunmen and Choop.
“You can’t kill him,” Victor flung his arms out wide.
The Blitzkriegers laughed and raised their pistols.
Now that Victor was in danger, Dean knew he needed to do something. Placing his foot on a sign that read “you must be this tall to ride,” he launched himself up onto the roof of the booth. His plan, such as it was, involved leaping down at his enemies and knocking them both to the ground before they could get off a shot.
The moment he pulled his full weight onto the roof, he heard a splintering crack and felt the booth lurch underneath him. The Blitzkriegers heard it too, and they turned just in time to see an avalanche of lumber coming at them. Dean collided bodily with the first Blitzkrieger, which served to cushion his fall while doubling the force with which the biker hit the ground. The second biker dodged backwards and avoided the worst of the tumbling wreckage, but a stray board hammered into his wrist and stripped the gun from his grasp.
Holding his bruised wrist, he steadied himself against the wall. He watched as Dean rose from the wreckage and dusted himself off. Then he turned and ran.
“All right, you,” Dean rounded on Victor. “What were you thinking, running off like that?”
Choop pressed his head against Victor’s side and chirped.
Dean held up a pair of fingers. “That’s two times in the past four hours I’ve had to save you.”
“Can we make it three times?” Victor held up a shaking finger to point past Dean.
The roar from behind him told Dean what he would see before he turned around. The monster filled the lane with its bulk as it watched them with burning red eyes that flicked back and forth between Victor, Dean, and Choop.
Dean stood rigid. He sensed that this creature wanted to rend and maim with mindless ferocity. It was paused now, but probably only because it was working out how to kill one of them without letting the other two get away.