Chapter 14
Lily slowly opened her eyes and looked up at me. I have to say, she didn't look all that good. Her face was drawn, her hair was in disarray, and she wasn't terribly clean. Her standard-issue black Enclave jumpsuit didn't hug her curves quite so much as I remembered, as if she had lost weight. Her expression was as blank as it usually was.
On her back she carried a dark green knapsack of some sort that looked as though it weighed quite a lot. At least, the straps were digging into her shoulders. "Wizzit," I said, "am I looking at the damping-field generator?"
His reply was immediate. "Affirmative. Specifically, the generator is contained within the backpack that Lily is carrying. If you can take hold of Lily's hand, I can teleport the two of you out of here and thereby remove the damping field surrounding the monsters. That will allow your teammates to begin attacking them in earnest."
"Will do." I reached out towards her. "Lily," I said, "take my hand."
She didn't move. "Lily," I repeated, slightly louder, "take my hand!"
Still nothing. I frowned. I was Lily's master now, wasn't I? She had obeyed the earlier commands I had given her. She knew who I was, and JB Swift had told her to give me all access to everything, so why wouldn't she . . . ?
Wait a second. Did Lily really know who I was? When JB Swift had formally introduced us, she said she had tentatively identified me as Prime Blue, but she could not confirm it. If she merely suspected that the glowing blue figure standing before her now was Trevor, would she do what he told her to? Maybe she wouldn't.
"Wizzit," I said, "I may have to deactivate to get Lily to obey me."
"Negative. I do not want you to deactivate here."
"But Lily needs to know who I am!"
"Perhaps she does," he agreed, "but Enclave does not. The generator appears to be in constant communication with . . . well, with someone. I am unable to determine any specifics, but it's definitely phoning home. Were you to deactivate anywhere near it, there is every reason to believe that it would detect that and immediately scan your human form. Given how much they already know about you, that would almost certainly compromise your identity."
I sighed. "So, you want me to grab her hand and teleport away with her," I said. "Then I somehow have to wrestle that thing off her back and teleport away with her again, and only after I do that will I be able to deactivate and get her to cooperate with me. Is that it?"
"Yupperooni. When you put it that way, it sounds fairly simple, doesn't it?"
I barked a short laugh. "Simple does not begin to cover it."
I squatted down in front of Lily so that our eyes were on a level. She was in her usual waiting pose, sitting cross-legged with her open hands resting on her knees. I could detect tiny glints of gold at her ears -- the earrings that allowed the Harley twins to use their remote control on her.
I briefly wondered why she had not attacked me yet. Presumably, the Harley twins had given her some generic command that had already been programmed into the remote. If I had to guess, I'd say it would be something like "Stay here. Attack no one unless you are attacked." That would enable her to remain in this place without drawing attention to herself, but would still allow for self-defense.
So, what might she interpret as an attack? There was only one way to find out. I slowly reached out a hand. Those beautiful, dark Chinese eyes of hers were looking directly into mine, but I could tell she was keeping close track of my other movements. "I'm not going to hurt you, Lily," I said as inoffensively as I could manage. "I just want to touch your hand." Very gently, I lowered my fingers until they rested on hers.
Lily immediately exploded into action, and right away I knew I was in trouble. In her attacker-mode persona, what I refer to as Crazy Kung Fu Zombie Chick, Lily is a formidable opponent. I had fought her many times over the past year or so, and while I have nearly always been able to best her, it is usually a close thing. And now my usual primary advantage, the force shield, had been nullified.
She kicked out at me from her sitting position and caught me full on the chest. It wasn't an especially strong kick, and I was able to jump back to avoid the worst of it, but it still hurt like hell. She sprang to her feet then and closed with me. I clipped her across the jaw with a front whip, a kick especially designed to hit an opponent in close quarters, but she simply shrugged it off.
At first, I managed to block most of her hand attacks -- at least, the ones that would cause the most damage -- but aside from the front whip, I was not able to get in any offense. She was just too damn fast, and I quickly found myself outclassed in every category. Her punches felt like kicks, and her kicks . . . whew! She simply should not have been able to generate that much power. I mean, Lily couldn't have weighed much more than a hundred pounds, if that, but it felt like I was being hammered by someone Toby's size or bigger. She nearly hit me with a jumping front kick that would have taken my head off if I hadn't ducked. As it was, the stone wall behind me cracked from the force of her kick. That was when I figured out just what was going on.
"Wizzit!" I cried, rolling out of the way of an axe kick, "Lily's got herself a force shield!"
I knew what I was talking about. A couple of years ago, just for grins, I had challenged Nicolai to a sparring match where he used his force shield and I didn't. I picked him because he and I are about the same size and weight. We had sparred a few times before, and while he was pretty good, I knew I was better.
With the force shield? All I can say is, I was glad it was just a friendly match and that he wasn't really trying to hurt me. I hung with him for a little while, but he quickly wore me down. There was exactly that same sense of overwhelming power, of unstoppable force, that I was getting from Lily now. When you're the one using it, a force shield sometimes doesn't seem like such a big thing, but when you're on the receiving end, it's a huge deal.
"That is unlikely," Wizzit said matter-of-factly. "Checking . . ." There was a pause. "Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, you are correct, in a sense. The device she is carrying is not just damping out your powers. The energy it is draining from the team's force shields is being used to . . . hmm, fascinating. Oh, I see! This is quite clever. I should have thought of something like it years ago. Her device is not, in fact, generating a force shield, but I can certainly see why you would think so."
"Good to know, Wizzit!" I grunted. I was sprawled on the floor from Lily's latest kick. She leaped on top of me and punched straight down. Her expression carried no anger, no malice whatsoever; it was as blank as it always was, which somehow made the ferocity of her attack even more chilling. I jerked my head to one side, so that her punch caught me only a glancing blow on the side of my head and across the upper ear. "What the hell am I supposed to do about it?"
"Objectives remain the same as before," he replied calmly. "Remove her from this location, separate her from the backpack, remove her from the pack's location. First objective is about to be achieved; prepare to land on top of her."
It's a good thing I have worked with Wizzit all these years. I figured out what he meant almost before I began to feel the teleportation tingle at the base of my skull. Lily's latest attack had put her into direct physical contact with me, and Wizzit was taking full advantage. In addition, his last comment told me that he had at least some appreciation of the difficulties I was facing and was trying to help.
When we reappeared, we were on a city street somewhere. To this day, I have no idea where it was. It appeared modern enough, with asphalt streets and cement sidewalks and everything, but I never saw a living soul there besides Lily and me. I figure it must have been some sort of modern-day ghost town.
Oh wait, did I say we were on a city street? Sorry, I meant to say that we were above a city street. Several feet above, actually, and in almost exactly the same position we had been in before we teleported. The main difference was that Wizzit had manag
ed to rotate us by one hundred eighty degrees. Now I was on top and Lily was on bottom.
I have to give her credit; she very nearly broke free even then, which was pretty incredible, given how little time she had to react. Still, I'd had an idea of what to expect, and I made the most of it. As soon as we materialized, I pushed off with both hands as hard as I could, increasing her downward momentum. She was still in a reared-back position, which meant that even though she tried to twist away, the back of her head smacked the asphalt before the backpack did. And then, as I landed on top of her, I drove my forehead straight down onto the bridge of her nose, putting all my weight behind it.
By all rights, the impact with the street should have knocked her out, if it didn't kill her outright. And her nose (and possibly her cheekbones) should have been broken by the the force of my blow. None of that actually happened, probably because of her not-exactly-a-force-shield. Taking the long view, that was good news, I guess. I mean, I have never really wanted to hurt Lily.
In the short term, though, it was kind of a disaster. True, she had been hit twice in quick succession, awfully hard, and it did stun her for a short time. Those precious few seconds were enough for me to slide the strap off one of her shoulders. But then she started fighting back while I was attempting to pull that arm completely free of the strap. The nails of her hand dug into my forearm, drawing blood. She smashed the palm of her other hand into my cheek, slamming my head back.
We fought close-up for a minute or two while I tried to tear the backpack off of her. I lowered my head and did my best to endure her repeated palm attacks while driving my forearm and elbow over and over into her ribs and stomach. This near to her, I couldn't help but notice that she evidently hadn't washed, or been allowed to wash, for quite some time.
Finally, she yanked her other hand out of my grip and went for a Three Stooges-style double eyepoke. Ain't too much fun being on the receiving end of one of those, let me tell you. I couldn't get my hand up to block it; the best I could do was to duck my head and scrunch up my eyes so that she didn't blind me.
She managed to get some leverage with her legs then and thrust me off of her. I rolled to my feet, and we faced each other warily. "I have turned off your force shield, Blue," Wizzit said, "except for blurring and communications. It was helping her more than you at this point."
"Understood." I shook my head and blinked my eyes rapidly, trying to get them to focus. I felt a trickle of blood down the side of my head. I reached up to touch it; the top of my ear was bleeding from Lily's earlier blow. "Does she still have her force shield?"
"But she doesn't have a . . ." He sighed. "Fine! Yes, her 'force shield' is still there. It's waning but still there, so be careful for the next several minutes. I will let you know when its effects become negligible."
Lily's backpack dangled off of only one shoulder now. She made no attempt to slip her other arm through its strap, although as far as I could tell, the arm was uninjured and the strap was intact. Did she even know she had it on? It didn't look that way. If I had been the one controlling her, I could have said something like "Keep both straps of the backpack on your shoulders", but I doubted the Harley twins could have given her so sophisticated a command using just the remote control.
Lily came at me with her typical CKFZC-style attacks, and I went into full-defense mode. It wasn't like I didn't want to fight her, or that I was running scared. There was just no point to wasting my energy going after her with that damn not-a-force-shield protecting her. Luckily, I had much more room to work with here than at the top of the small pyramid, so I was able to prevent her from closing in with me and doing me any real harm.
After about five minutes or so or this, Wizzit finally said, "All right, Blue, her force shield has faded away. Go for it."
I squared my shoulders. "Will do, Wizzit." And I began to fight Lily in earnest.
I waded into her with a series of turning sidekicks, crescent kicks, backwheels, back whips, and some others. These were all circular kicks, and I chose them because they're very easy to string together, one after the other, to form a sustained attack. Once you get going, you just keep kicking and turning. The main thing to watch out for was getting dizzy from too much spinning around.
She slapped some of my kicks away hard enough that it stung my lower legs, and she dodged the rest. They did force her to stay on the defensive, though, and they drove her back as well, which was my aim. There was a building behind her, and I had an eye towards pinning her against the wall.
Lily glanced back, saw the wall just a few feet behind her, and tried to edge off to one side. I matched her movement, keeping her directly between me and the wall. She kept edging, and I kept matching, until she finally broke out into a run.
Of course, I started running alongside her, narrowing the gap between us as I did so. Soon, just a couple of feet separated me from the wall, with Lily in between. We were rapidly approaching the corner of the building, though, and I didn't want to let her turn the corner and thus lose my hard-won advantage. So I did something I have never done before in a fight. I slide-tackled her.
No, it's not some secret Tae Kwon Do technique; it's not really a martial arts move at all, in fact. Slide tackling is something you do in soccer to try to steal the ball from an opponent. Basically, you throw yourself forward feet-first and slide along the ground toward your opponent. I hadn't played much soccer since high school -- just the occasional pickup game in the gym or with friends at home -- but this, I still remembered how to do.
Our feel tangled together, as I intended, and Lily went down hard. And since we were on a concrete sidewalk, that meant really hard. If this had been a soccer game, the ref would have had his red card out even before she hit the ground. I could hear a whoosh as the breath was driven from her lungs. Her martial arts training had evidently been more like judo than aikido, I noticed, because as she fell, she slapped her arms and hands down to absorb the impact rather than rolling through. Her chin came within half an inch of bouncing off the sidewalk.
I bounded to my feet in a hurry. My hip and the side of my leg were burning where I had skidded on them on the cement, but I couldn't afford to let up now. I threw myself on top of Lily before she had a chance to recover and began tearing the backpack off of her.
She fought like a wildcat. Luckily, I had grown up with two fairly aggressive, athletic sisters who were not at all averse to a good scrap, so I was not shy about some of the not-very-gentlemanly things I had to do to stay on top of Lily. After we struggled for a minute or two, I finally was able to take hold of the strap with both hands. I slid it down and off her arm quickly so as not to give her a chance to grab at it.
"What do I do with this thing now?" I asked Wizzit.
"Throw it as far away as you can and keep her away from it. I will do the rest."
I raised the backpack over my head with both hands and heaved it as hard as I could. It was moderately heavy -- probably somewhere between fifteen and twenty pounds -- and throwing it sent me a little off-balance. It wasn't much, but it was enough to send me spilling to the ground as Lily twisted beneath me.
I jumped to my feet as fast as I could, afraid that she was going to get away from me, and I was surprised to discover that Lily was still between me and the wall, which meant that I was still between her and the backpack.
"Come on, Lily, give it up," I panted. I knew she wouldn't react no matter what I told her, but I felt like I had to say something. "No one wants to hurt you, but we can't let you go on hurting us or other people."
As I expected, Lily ignored me. She did that "look right, look left, look up" thing she does to orient herself. Then she took off running. Not, as I expected, toward the backpack, which I was still blocking. No, she turned and started running straight toward the wall.
Okay, I'll admit it; this is where I screwed up. I made a mistake, a big one, and
I spent the next several days kicking myself over it. I had seen Lily do this same trick before, and I should have been expecting something like this. But did I, in fact, expect it? No sir, I did not. Like a dummy, I stood watching her, open-mouthed, as she took three or four steps on the sidewalk, then began running up the wall.
She continued going up as high as her momentum could take her. Her movement was so quick, I didn't even see her push off at the top of her run, flip herself around in midair, and land behind me. The next time I spotted her, in fact, was when I turned around and caught a glimpse of her outstretched leg as she kicked me squarely in the temple.
As I regained consciousness, the first thought that came into my head was, "So that's how she gets her roundhouse kicks so strong!"
See, when I execute a roundhouse the way Grandmaster Park taught me, I strike with the top of my foot, somewhere near where the toes join the foot. That's pretty much the standard technique (unless, like Toby, you cheat and strike with the toe of your savate boot). The top of the foot is of course a pretty bony, tendon-y area, so there's a limit to how hard you can hit something with it without causing yourself some damage.
When Lily had kicked me, though, she had pulled her toes way up, so that she had actually struck me with the ball of her foot. There's a whole lot more padding there, so she could afford to kick a whole lot harder. Heck, one could probably break a board that way, something I would never try with a conventional roundhouse kick.
It took only about a second for all of that to flash through my awakening mind. My second thought was that I couldn't let her get away. I struggled up to my feet and looked around anxiously. No Lily, no backpack.
"Welcome back to the land of the living, Blue," Wizzit chirped.
"Where is she, Wizzit?" I asked.
"Lily? Gone. As soon as she flattened you, she scooped up the backpack. Ninety-three seconds later, she was teleported away. I can only assume that the backpack carried the Enclave equivalent of one of our transponders."
"Dammit!" I exclaimed, slapping the ground in frustration. "How long was I out?"
"Approximately four minutes, forty-seven seconds."
"'Approximately'? That sounds pretty exact."
"Well, it is sometimes difficult to tell when humans have actually achieved full consciousness," he said modestly. "You were pretty groggy for a bit."
I sank back down to the sidewalk and closed my eyes. My head hurt, my ear hurt, my left leg and hip hurt -- actually, my body hurt pretty much all over, come to think of it. All I wanted to do was to lie down and make the world stop spinning. My job wasn't finished yet, though. "Wizzit," I asked without opening my eyes, "what's happening with the others?"
"Let's see, Red managed to steer the scorpion monster over to where Orange and the others were still fighting," he told me. "In the battle which ensued, the lizard was destroyed by a combination of the scorpion's blast and Yellow's spear. Another monster has since made itself known, a giant turtle-like creature. As soon as you teleported away with Lily, I sent in the Emeriti along with Violet, who had completely recovered by then. Violet is now leading the battle against the turtle, the frog, and the scorpion."
"Violet is?" I repeated incredulously. My violet-colored sister was still pretty green, so to speak. I couldn't imagine her taking charge of a fight against three monsters.
"At the moment, Violet is my only Prime with a fully-functioning force shield," he said. "Copper, Blackiron, and Gold are helping. Indigo's force shield has nearly recharged; Indigo will join the battle shortly. Yellow is using the spear wherever possible, and Red and Orange are currently riding the scorpion and providing tactical and strategic advice."
"What about Green?"
"Green sustained a number of minor injuries during the battle so far. None of them individually is disabling, but Green thought it best to withdraw from the fight for a bit of healing."
Wow, I thought. I had never seen Toby willingly back out of a monster fight before. He must have gotten himself beaten up pretty badly by the lizard monster. I got to my feet, determined not to complain too much about my own aches and pains. "What can I do to help, Wizzit?"
"Not much until your own force shield recharges. Five minutes and counting."
So I waited. Wizzit kept up a running commentary on who was attacking which monster and whose force shield was now active, while I stretched and practiced a few basic kicks, trying to keep myself from getting stiff. I discovered that my head didn't hurt quite so much if I kept moving. My left leg was bleeding in a few places, which didn't surprise me. I made a mental note to wear long pants the next time I slide-tackled someone on cement without a force shield.
It sounded as though my force shield would be the last one to recharge, which made sense, since I had been hanging around Lily and her backpack for longer than anyone else. Eventually, though, even mine was ready. I heard Wizzit say, "Teleporting you now, Blue," and everything faded from view.
Attack Doll 5: The End of Lily Lee Page 14