Chapter Forty-Eight – A Time for Explanations

Chapter Forty-Eight – A Time for Explanations

“We need something better to really sell our new fall 2047 collection. Chanel’s Water Number 7 is coming out soon, and Louis Vutton is pushing out a new flavour with a new bottle and everything.

If we don’t step up our game, we’re going to start losing shares. We’re only the fifth best designer water brand in the NA region, we can’t afford to fall back any further.”

–Interior Guucci Memo from head of Designer Water Production to head of Marketing, 2047

***

Manic, Jennifer and I walked back towards the front lines of our defences. I figured we probably made something of a weird show. Manic in her leather coat and new-samurai armour, me in my slightly better gear, then Jennifer in nothing but a hoodie.

The sun was setting quickly, with the buildings shrouding us in deep shadows, at least until we turned a corner and came face-to-face with one of the fires Gomorrah had lit. It was currently chewing its way up an apartment building, but fortunately, the fire didn’t seem to be burning through everything.

Some buildings were a little more robust, made of nothing but cement and glass and the fire didn’t seem to catch onto them as easily. They’d hopefully act as firebreaks, keeping it all away from Downtown and from spreading too far.

They’d also make any antithesis invasion a little bit harder, I imagined.

We went around, in any case, avoiding the worst of the fire. I could probably walk through some of it without much issue, but Manic’s gear wasn’t as fire proof and Jennifer risked melting her latex ass right off if we tried.

So it took a little longer to reach the makeshift barricade, but we made it there eventually. We found a few alien corpses dotting the roadside, and as I squinted I was able to make out a couple of militia folk up on the wall next to a few of Lucy’s kittens in their jumpsuits and cat ears.

“Hey!” I called out. “Got a place we can come in through?”

As it turned out, they didn’t, but what they did have was a ladder they could sling over the side to make it easier to climb our way up. Jennifer went first, since we didn’t want to leave her undefended on the ground, then I followed after her and kept my head down on the rungs ahead of me, because she was just wearing a hoodie and Lucy would kill me for staring.

Once all three of us were up, the kittens and militia pulled the ladder back up. “Anything to report?” I asked one of the nearest militia guys.

He froze up for a moment, then shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “Nothing much going on here. Just a few stragglers.” He gestured down the street, towards the corpses dotting the road.

“Uh, alright then,” I said. A few random, low-tier aliens was fine. In fact, that was pretty much the best we could hope for. We could hold out for days if all we were dealing with was the occasional lost alien. I had the impression we’d be dealing with a lot more than just that soon, though. “Keep an eye open for more trouble,” I said. “There’s some bigger fuckers hanging out there, and they might pop around for a visit.”

He snapped a salute, and I went and climbed down the other side of the wall with Manic and Jennifer following after me.

“What now?’ Manic asked.

“Depends, what do you want to do?”

“Me?” she asked. “Grab a bite, maybe an hour of shut-eye. If you think the real show will start tonight, then I’ll want a bit of sleep before it really gets down to it. I can rock on with nothing but beer and energy drinks in my veins like the best of them, but there’s nothing like a nap to keep you going for even longer.”

I nodded along. “Right, let’s head over to the mall. You can get both there. And I’ll leave Jennifer there too, maybe you can find your, ah, owner, right?” That felt like such a strange thing to say to someone who looked so human. Maybe I’d leave her with Lucy, she might think it was funny.

We hitched a ride on a bus that was doing transport duty between the centre of downtown and the walls. It looked like Lucy was busy moving her volunteers towards the edges of the city where they’d be able to do a bit more to help.

While we found seats near the front of the bus, I dialled up Intel-chan. “Hey,” I said as a familiar weeb-y avatar popped up in my augs.

Intel-chan was now wearing a fake–insofar as anything on a digital avatar could be fake–pair of cat ears atop her head, but otherwise they looked the same as ever. “Hello! You’re back.”

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“Yeah,” I said as I crossed my arms and leaned back. “Any news?”

“Plenty. You were gone for nearly three hours, which is forever. We had a small rebellion in the militia instigated by the Major who was fourth-in-command. He disagreed with the general on a few points and tried to depose him. That failed though. Fortunately, he wasn’t very popular. The fires Gomorrah-dono started began slipping into downtown, but we were able to put them out. The kittens started a zombie eradication campaign near the south end of the city. It pissed off a lot of people until Lucy-sama started posting helmet-cam videos of the zombie exterminators breaking into apartments and finding zombified people within.”

“Fuck,” I said.