Chapter Forty-Seven – Cover

Chapter Forty-Seven – Cover

“We don’t usually think of plants, with a few exceptions, as having day or night cycles, but the sunflower is a beautiful example of a plant that lives and thrives by sunlight!”

–Flowers and You! 2014 (Pre-Antithesis) Edition

***

I ran out of the front of the building like a cat whose tail caught fire, dragging Jennifer the sexbot behind me and following on Manic’s rear as the older woman ran flat out. She only slowed down a little bit to fire her bass cannon at a few lingering aliens, warding them off enough for us to keep moving right across the middle of the intersection.

Behind us, I heard the building’s floor cave outwards as the model eighteen ripped after us.

I shot a glance over my shoulder, then noticed with dismay that despite a lot of slices across its toughened skin and a lot of very sticky goop stuck to it, the alien was still coming, and it still had that rocket jutting out of its face like the world’s lamest unicorn horn.

“Get to cover!” I shouted.

Manic leapt over a cement guardrail and I jumped after her. Jennifer flopped right after me, her legs clanking against the cement edge in a way that made me glad that she probably didn’t have nerve endings. “Ow,” she intoned.

“Farther!” I said as I shot past.

My shoulder mounted guns fired a few rounds at stray aliens, and I kept moving towards the nearest bit of cover I could see. A large bus, toppled onto its side near the far end of the intersection.

I was panting by the time I made it to the bus and flung Jennifer around it. Then I turned and checked on Manic, but she was only a step or two behind.

The model eighteen was in the process of ripping its way out of the front of the building.

“What now?” Manic asked.

“Boom,” I said.

I pulled the trigger on the detonator, and instantly regretted not being behind cover myself as a bomb designed to take out the structure of a large building went off less than a hundred metres away.

I was thrown back onto my ass and the entire bus scraped along the ground while Manic stumbled away from it.

The model eighteen was thrown back into the building, the blast originating from its face doing a number on it.

Once the echoing retort of the bomb’s detonation faded away, I sat up, then looked around. The explosion had ripped a crater into the side of the apartment building’s entrance, though there was now so much dust and smoke that it was hard to tell what was going on behind the smoke.

“I think that did it,” I said. We could get behind some more appropriate cover for the full detonation. We were very much in danger-close when it came to taking down an entire building, and I’d much rather be further out, especially since I suspected that this detonation wouldn’t be one of those nice, tight ones where everything just collapsed straight down.

“You think?” Manic asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I didn’t get a kill confirmation,” Manic said.

“Ah… fuck,” I said.

Glass and stone were tossed aside by the entrance and a model eighteen without a head started to claw its way out of the debris covering it.

“Okay, well fuck it then,” I said as I kipped up to my feet and grabbed Jennifer’s hand again. “Come on!” I shouted.

There were no protests as I led our party of three across the street and into the nearest building, this one as a sort of bank with a nice open lobby. I spotted the counters at the far end, with their bullet-proof glass and heavy reinforcements, then fired my railguns into one of the smaller glass panels, shattering it instantly.

Manic jumped in ahead of me just as what I imagined was a battery-powered automated security system went off with a screaming whine.

Then I grabbed Jennifer by the hips and tossed her up onto the counter. “Go!” I said.

She went over, then crouched down on the other side where I soon joined her.

“What’s the plan?” Manic asked.

“Boom,” I said.

“You just did that one!”