The DX Chronicles (Book 1): Not Against Flesh and Blood

by Brian Cody

  “Well, technically, shouldn’t I be charging?” Shawn asked.

  “Wait, what?” David asked as his jittery motions ceased.

  “I should be charging with Nate. I’m the more invulnerable individual and can take more hits. Meanwhile, B-money will stay back with Turrisi.”

  “What if Shawn went with Erik, and then Piekarsky stayed back with Turrisi?” Nate suggested, “it’d even things out as far as abilities are concerned: you’ll have an equal number of strengths and weaknesses.”

  “Oh yeah?” Turrisi humphed, “well what if we just used Nate as bait? Huh!?” he barked as he stomped to Nate.

  “No, Turrisi, I was being serious”, Nate replied as he lifted his hands.

  “Your moms were being serious! Fine, if you want be little Nancy-Sallies about it, I’ll switch it up for you, gosh!” David replied as he flailed his arms. “Okay, what if_?” he stopped, however, due to a churn sounding above the tones within that region. It strengthened over several seconds, then deepened, then took on a harsher intonation as it developed into a vast, bellowing chorus. The eruptions of volant flames had increased by orders of magnitude, and, as the group waited, glancing to one another and tightening their fists, the stridence of that nearing plague only strengthened. “Godspeed!” David exclaimed as he turned away. “Let’s do this, Garcia!” he called as he sprinted down the road.

  “No, wait, Piekarsky!” Shawn called.

  “Shawn, no time, let’s get to that intersection!” Turrisi ordered as he grabbed Shawn by the arm.

  “How far are we from it?” Shawn asked.

  “A little under half of a mile”, Turrisi replied.

  “All right, grab on.”

  “Hey!” Shawn and Turrisi looked back, past Bryen and Nate, who were standing, and towards David and Erik, who were one hundred feet down the road. “First person to die is a Commie!” Erik roared.

  “Wait, that’s not fair, I don’t have…!” Turrisi replied. By then, Erik had turned away, and Turrisi, in turn, grabbed onto Shawn so that Shawn could soar over that pathway.

  “What are we doing?” Nate asked as he swiped his hair from his eyes and cracked his fists.

  “Just charging…the instructions were kind of vague”, Bryen replied as he adjusted his glasses.

  ***

  “Memorial and Park”, Turrisi called as he pointed towards a signpost along the three-way intersection. The skyscrapers ceased along that junction, while shorter buildings and smaller businesses took root and continued beyond view. Shawn landed and then spun northward, where that impending army would initiate its invasion. “We have about an extra thirty seconds behind everyone else”, Turrisi began as he examined the nooks along his rifle, and then felt along his sides for his packets of spare, armor-piercing ammunition. “If, by some off-chance, those guys are able to hold an awesome offense, we might not have any work at all.” Turrisi lowered his gun, adjusted his hat, and breathed. He looked to his left to find Shawn dragging a sedan into the road and placing it crossways, and he watched Shawn repeat the act two more times to complete a barricade.

  “Well, bud”, Shawn sighed as he tightened the straps holding his mask. “It’s just you and me—two Red Sox fans ready to hold an impenetrable defense against a soulless army.”

  “Two Red Sox fans ready to hold an impenetrable defense against an army of Yankees fans”, Turrisi corrected with a grin.

  “I like the ring of that”, Shawn replied as he cracked his knuckles. Shawn stepped back and looked to the sky over their distant teammates. It appeared empty at first glance, but the longer Shawn stared, the more lines of intertwining and ascending vapor trails he would notice. He glanced to Turrisi, and Turrisi glanced back as they both discerned the sharp decrease in volume from those mechanized movements. They were both going to speak up, and both were prepared to make known their suspicions—Are they flying over us to continue south?—but, as Turrisi cleared his throat, and as Shawn considered hovering for a clearer view, a shape broke through the smoke about a mile ahead of them—a plunging shape, human in diminutive form, effulgent with metallic gloss, and bleeding columns of flames from its soles. A second shape followed that machine as it darted groundward, then three more after that, then ten more after them, and, as the seconds crept by, the number of those plunging automatons jumped from tens, to dozens, and then surpassed one hundred as the mechanized force dove towards the frontline.

  ***

  David looked up at the metallic downpour in front of, behind, and around him. He watched as those machines righted themselves and rushed into horizontal motion above, alongside of, and through the many structures in front of him, and he watched as they descended while locking onto the road and onto the six’s positions. David then looked back to Bryen and Nate, where he found their still but standing forms, nodded with the understanding that they were aware, and, he hoped, prepared, and then spun to Erik. “Let’s do this!” They started on foot.

  An explosive flash sounded to their left as an adjacent building’s bottom floor was hollowed out. Rushing through that short avalanche of debris, a dozen machines spun into view, decelerated their flights into sprinting bounds, and continued for Bryen and Nate, while David and Erik moved beyond their notice. Erik then pushed off, a lunging blaze erupting from his feet and launching him alongside of the row of buildings. David bolted after him while scanning the mechanical foes eclipsing their airspace. He looked to his left, to five hundred feet above them and to a grouping of about twenty machines moving past them. He then looked like to his right, towards a formation landing one road over and then sprinting through the alleys. David’s eyes then spun to the left corner of his gaze, to another shape that was smaller and rushing, with blurring speed, towards himself and Erik.

  Jolting, David grabbed Erik’s back and jerked him forward. Erik grunted and spun as he found a thirty-foot gap between him and David, but he tensed as a silver rocket rushed between them and slammed into a building. As Erik wrapped his arms around his head and David thrust his legs to stop, the rocket detonated and incinerated three of the adjacent building’s floors. David spun to his left, tracing the projectile’s path as Erik lowered his arms, and David looked to the white machine, the once-inactive automaton he had forced himself from, as it bolted towards him with arms outstretched. Shouldn’t have let it out of my sight blasted in David’s mind—too close! David swung, but the machine impacted first, hammering against his chest. Within that blurring moment and as Erik looked past the falling debris, the machine plowed David through that building, out of the opposite side, and across the next road.

  “Crap!” Erik grunted as he back-flipped and angled towards David. He pulled his legs in for his swiftest rush, but intermittent gunfire sounded to his side. Erik spun to his left and locked onto a group of machines diving and shooting at him, and he angled skyward and pushed off, darting into the atmosphere with those machines in pursuit.

  ***

  “Well, do we just charge?” Nate asked as he spun to Bryen before looking down the road and to the line of machines sprinting at them.

  “Uh”, Bryen groaned as he felt his right leg slide back. He stomped to keep from giving ground, and he remained in place as those machines, five in the most immediate of formations, continued towards them. “Uh”, he grunted as he spun to Nate, but then looked back as the first of those machines lifted its right arm and pointed its barrel. “Crap!” Bryen wailed as he pushed off into a sprint.

  “What does that_?” Nate rushed after him and then crossed his arms as the automaton opened fire. An electric shield formed in front of him and was made visible by deflected rounds. Alongside of him, Bryen angled groundward for more vigorous bounds as he clasped his teeth and squinted. The gunfire increased in volume in front of him, and the clangor of metallic footsteps followed. They looked ahead, at different times, past those five machines rushing to meet them and to the dozens more just behind them.

  Two each and three for Erik, Nate recalled, Thirteen; we
brought down thirteen. None of us were hurt or almost hurt, but that was only two each. Five immediately means one of us gets three, but then after that? A dozen divided by two; two dozen divided by two; how many more can we face without getting hurt?

  They’re not people, Brian recounted. They’re not people; don’t hold back—do like you did before; do what you did to two and multiply that by ten or twenty or thirty—or forty? Will it be just two of us against one hundred?—Brian winced as a bullet whistled by his head, and he looked back to those five machines. For now at least...

  It’s just those five. Nate grunted midstride as he found the shooting machine no more than a few yards away. The force of the gunfire increased, and the strain of his shield made him shake. He looked to that shooting machine, and, as he stared, he recalled his previous bout. He charged. With his ephemeral shield protecting him, he gored his right into the automaton’s gut and sent an electric surge that made it shake and convulse. With his hand held in the indent along the machine’s torso, Nate lifted and hammered it into the ground with cracking and denting force before sending another surge that caused it to burst. Nate then stepped past it, stepped up as the next machine jumped at him, and uppercut his left to intercept it. As that machine was launched backwards, Nate then fired an electric surge, near-blinding in radiance, that incinerated the second and a third machine.

  Nate then continued, and, watching him accelerate with greater, more upright, and stronger bounds, Bryen nodded, faced forward as another of the automatons rushed him, and jabbed; in a caliginous blur, a length of his shadow spiraled out of his silhouette, wound around his jabbing arm, and gored into the chest of that automaton, slicing through with grating ease and heaving the machine backwards with a jagged gape. Then, sliding on his silhouette, Bryen spun in a clockwise, three-sixty turn, and swiped his right. The same blackened limb followed the path of his second motion while condensing into an axe-head that cleaved through the right arm and into the chest of a second machine and launched it into the second floor of an adjoining building. Bryen then retracted that limb, spun to look behind him and Nate, and, with a right roundhouse kick, fired a clawed limb which latched onto the rising shape of the third machine which Nate had uppercut, and slammed it into the corner of another building in a cratering and quartering drive. Bryen then about-faced and sprinted alongside of Nate towards that growing line which, by then, neared thirty machines on foot. The blur of a rocket speeding between them caused the duo to lunge away, and the detonation twenty feet behind them drove them to jump and to roll to slapping halts along the back of an overturned bus.

  ***

  Spiraling out of alleys on both sides of the road, an aerial formation of machines rocketed for Shawn’s barricade. In a simultaneous extinguishing of their flames, they flipped into scraping touch-downs, tearing through the pavement as they decelerated to just under fifty miles per hour before maintaining their inhuman sprints. In a flash of impacting clangs, a machine along the formation’s left slid and then toppled with five bullet holes. The machine running alongside of it lifted its own firearm, but was thrown off-kilter by a swarm of paper airplanes that jabbed into its chassis, cut across its armored form, and then cleaved into its joints. The machine, after two more steps, seized and then erupted as a dozen burning papers rushed out of its back and wrapped around the head of a third machine behind it.

  A fourth machine lifted its right and fired an automatic barrage, with the rounds zipping through the car windows beside Shawn, and causing him to lunge and forge a rectangular shield. Across from him, on the far side of the barricade, Turrisi slid to the ground, and, with a quick pull, dropped, grabbed, and released his spent clip, reached for a second, and loaded it.

  “You good?” Shawn asked as he pressed against his shield and shook at each bulleting impact.

  “Maybe I should be asking”, Turrisi replied as he cocked his weapon, “you look tired.”

  “Nah, I’m good”, Shawn replied as he pulled back his right and conjured another square document. “I just have to concentrate a little harder to make my papers sharp enough to deal damage”, Shawn explained as he folded the document. “How about you? How long will your ammo last?”

  “Right now, at the rate I’m expending my armor-piercing rounds”, Turrisi began, “about two and a half minutes of regular fire. But with four shots_” Turrisi jumped and, with a machine at his twelve, pulled the trigger four times, with four bullet-holes forming in the center of the machine’s chest and bringing it down in a flash of sparks. “Three-and-a-half minutes”, he replied as he ducked, sighed, and then jumped back up. “But with three shots”—Turrisi aimed and pulled the trigger three times, striking another machine’s chest twice and then once at the base of its neck. That automaton seized and collapsed, while Turrisi lowered to the ground a second before opposing gunfire resounded above him. “Around six minutes.”

  “Better”, Shawn replied as he reared up and pitched a four-pronged, paper shuriken which dissevered the left arm of a charging machine. “That’ll do”, Shawn chuckled as he dispersed his shield, reshaped it into a forty-foot paper chain. Shawn bifurcated one automaton and severed the legs of another before pulling back, thrusting his arms, and causing that jagged length to disperse and then, in front of his hands, to reshape into a barrage of paper shuriken that speared through the bodies of four more.

  “I think”, Turrisi called as he jumped and fired in bursts of three, “I can do better”, he continued as he turned to his left, brought down one machine, turned to his right, struck another, rolled to evade gunfire, then fired at a third, with the mechanical corpses collapsing in front of him and Shawn as a loose mound of one dozen while dozens more rushed.

  ***

  Above the road marking the nexus of continued battle, a line of six machines in V-formation pushed through the open skies, locked onto the three bouts occurring along the road, ignored the first, then Shawn and Turrisi, then focused upon and dove for Bryen and Nate. A simultaneous chime from all six machines occurred in unison with a silhouette appearing on the leader. With clockwise spins, they rolled onto their backs, and, at the same moment, Erik dove, his blurred and flaming form hammering into the foremost machine with malleating and contorting force. With a double-quick turn, Erik unsheathed his sword, his blade slicing across the top of a second machine and sending it spiraling from controlled flight. Then, before the other four could break away and shoot at him, Erik pitched two fireballs, consuming three of them. He then speared his katana through last machine’s chest, deactivating it in a short flash.

  Gliding to the twirling form, he retrieved his sword and looked right, to a diving formation of twelve machines. “Let’s do this!” he roared as he held his katana by his side and rushed into blazing flight. The machines opened fire as he closed in, the intermingling clangs rushing by Erik’s sides as he swerved leftward and then ascended. The machines levelled off and pursued, and Erik accelerated in a pulse of all-engulfing flames, darting past the speed of sound and tearing towards Mach two. In an extinguishing flash, Erik flipped in his supersonic rise to invert and to look to those machines, then distant as they struggled to push past the sound barrier. Smirking, Erik dove, and, a second away, clasped the hilt of his katana with both hands, tightened, and spun. In a blur of turns, slices, flips, and cleaves, Erik cut his way through those twelve machines, the act lasting for a second before he levelled off, while the smoldering and red-hot parts combusted behind him.

  ***

  “We should charge soon!” Bryen yelled as he ducked along the overturned bus. He looked to his left as a burst of gunfire tore through the back of the bus and rushed between his and Nate’s sides.

  “Ya think?” Nate replied as he pulled his legs in and squeezed his fists, staring as his mind took in the myriad mechanical sounds around them. Within view, along the curve of that extended road and about three hundred yards down, he could see blasts and what might’ve been a sheet of paper; he could see Shawn and Turrisi’s fight and
could confirm that they were still alive, but still he sat with form tense.

  “Should we have prayed about this?” Bryen asked.

  “What?” Nate grunted.

  “Should we have prayed about this”, Bryen repeated.

  “Prayed what?” Nate hocked. “‘Dear God, help me fight these robots to the best of my ability’?”

  “As long as they don’t have souls, I don’t think it would’ve hurt… It sucks”, he added while crouching. “We could die in the next moment via a stray bullet, or missile, or something ricocheting, or shrapnel from an explosion we’ve caused, or an explosion they caused. Even with the armor_”

  “B-money, you are not helping”, Nate groaned.

  “Yeah, true”, Bryen replied, “all right.” Bryen turned to his right and looked past the edge of the bus, “so how_?”

  “B-money, I killed a guy once.”

  “Like, in a shootout?” Bryen asked as he adjusted his gloves, “Surprisingly, I’ve only had one close call…that was my fault…but the EMTs revived him_”

  “No”, Nate groaned.

  “It gave me nightmares for two weeks.”

  “B-money, he wasn’t armed, and I was having a really crappy day_”

  “All right, I’ll count to three”, Bryen began as he arched his shoulders and knelt onto his hands, “uh…three!” Bryen darted out of Nate’s view. Nate growled, hoisted to his feet, and turned to run after Bryen, but, in the same moment, a scrape sounded behind him. Nate spun, expecting to find a machine, but his gaze slanted as he found Bryen kneeling and glaring. “Huh!?”