Much like in the control room, the second floor mostly stayed together. Spots of concrete fell and the nearest section of floor simply bent downward toward us, giving us a view of storage rooms.
A file cabinet slid sideways, and fell into the room, landing on the melted remains of the cloning tanks.
It would have been great if that had been the end of it.
It wasn’t, but it looked like it for a second.
Cassie lowered the gun. “Let’s get out of here.”
The fan increased its power by the second.
The whirring noise came from deeper in the building—possibly pulling it directly outside. That meant instead of being something that Rook’s people had done, it might be ours.
Instead of drifting away, the smoke streamed toward the smashed door, pulled by the fan, but behind it came cold air from outside.
A glance upward showed that the section of the room’s ceiling that had reached up to the roof now opened to the sky. Izzy had taken it completely off.
If she hadn’t taken it off, the part she did remove included the middle.
Anyway, it was pretty impressive. I wouldn’t have been able to do it in the Rocket armor.
Beyond a brief sense of awe, I didn’t think about it much then. I had other things to worry about.
An alarm went off. Continue reading Breaking & Entering: Part 10
Casting a last look at the dead people on the floor, I ran.
Only a few steps of the Rocket suit took me away from the scene, and that was good. I didn’t want to look at them.
They’d probably died when I broke the barrier between the core and the rest of the base.
Still, even if out of sight wasn’t really out of mind, they were at least out of sight.
Unfortunately, the next room was worse. Continue reading Breaking & Entering: Part 9
Lightning hit the leader again, and while his body shook, the paralysis gun dropped out of his hand, falling to the roof with a clunk.
Part of me hoped it still worked by the the time I could move. I planned to grab it. A more practical side of my mind hoped it had been destroyed in the first lightning strike.
Near me, Cassie stood up, entering the edges of the helmet’s peripheral vision. She didn’t waste any time. Once she was on her feet, she ran straight at the leader as he bent over to grab the gun.
He didn’t get up easily. He pushed himself up one hand at a time, swaying as he made it up on two legs.
Taking an experimental step, he spied something on the roof, and bent over to get it—the automatic pistol. When he came up the second time, he seemed stronger. He stood up normally.
Quickly, he pointed the gun past me—probably at Vaughn.
This time the wind came up as a roaring, howling blast that drew the man into the air, and threw him off the building. Continue reading Settling In: Part 4
I tried to dive to the right, but I’d already lost control of my legs.
I crumpled, and fell to the roof of the building. I fell sideways, and then rolled halfway on to my back—”halfway” because I was mostly on my arm and right side of my back, and partly on my rocketpack. It wouldn’t let me roll all the way there.
The other guy—the only guy with an exoskeleton still standing—had pulled out a paralysis gun too. Continue reading Settling In: Part 3
Marcus followed them, lengthening his legs as he jumped, and stretching his arms to grab the ledge on the other side. His leap reminded me of a frog somehow.
If it weren’t night, I could have blamed it on his green costume. I only recognized him because I knew he was coming, and because no normal human could stretch like that.
Frog-like or not, the way his shape briefly blocked the stars made me think of Batman cartoons—which ironically brought me back to reality. Continue reading Settling In: Part 2
When I said the League jet appeared, I meant it literally. In one moment I heard an engine’s roar coming closer. In the next, the jet hung above the roof, floating lower until the door opened, and Daniel walked down the ramp.
Then he stared for a second at the hundreds of dead frog-things on the roof.
For Rod, Sam, and the rest, it wasn’t Daniel walking down the ramp. They saw the Mystic, third generation telepath, and a member of one of the most famous telepathic families in the world.
Plus, Daniel was kind of hot even if that wasn’t obvious through the mask.
I muttered a few words that would have gotten a look from Mom if she’d been there, and leaned over the edge. The first wave of frog monsters hung halfway up the wall. They’d reeled in whatever line they’d used, and were hanging by their claws.
I hadn’t seen them holding a rope or anything. What were they using? A suspicion passed through my brain, and I watched as they opened their mouths. Their tongues shot out, sticking to the wall above them, and they yanked themselves upward, steadied by their hands and feet.
I knew what I’d have to do even though the idea made my stomach knot up. Continue reading Cassie: Part 25
The gun fired a piercing, white beam. It had to be too bright to watch normally, but through the gun’s vision, I could see it burn the creatures. They changed from standing into whitish-black charcoal in bare instants.
Chunks of the patio beneath them cracked and shattered from the heat, flying everywhere, pelting the windows, breaking a couple.
The frog-things made that mournful howl I remembered from when we were on the highway. Continue reading Cassie: Part 24