Chapter Forty Seven

SY

After getting the cannons and ammo loaded into the back of the tilt-jet, Sy fires up the four engines while they’re still inside the building. He doesn’t wait for the rear door of the jet to finish closing, nor drive the thing out of the hanger like he’s supposed to either. He only glances back once, to make sure Mikel is fully strapped in at one of the guns before punching it.

He cranks the engines up hard, blowing half the sheet metal siding off the back of the building. Papers, the rack of Don’s jackets, and anything that weighs less than a brick goes flying all over the place as they take off. The tail of the jet barely makes it out from under the bay door frame as he immediately slams the craft into a hard climb.

Sy knows very well how fast the mechs are, and is praying he and Mikel aren’t already too late. When he banks the jet over hard, and looks down, he sees that everything he’s given his entire life to is still there. It makes him consider what he might have to do to save it. If the guns don’t do the job, maybe sacrificing the jet will. When he catches a glimpse of something huge and yellow, off in the distance, his heart skips a few beats. The mech is out on the open road now, and is charging in hard towards home base. The thing is taller than most of the buildings around it now, and twice the height of SSS by the looks of it. He can see that it doesn’t have any weapons with it, so he rockets over to it as fast as the jet will go, sweeping in close overhead of it. He opens the side gun door for Mike and shouts into his headset.

“Light the thing up!”

The chain gun blasts a line of fire out in front of the robot, overwhelming the entire thing in big blazing hot bullets. Fist sized chunks of shrapnel and molten sparks are flying off the machine in every direction. They can hear the rounds striking solid metal with intense power, even from inside the jet and over the screaming engines. The big empty shell casings being ejected down the metal chute sound like a thousand shopping carts being run over by a freight train.

Still, half the rounds are glancing off the ceramic faced armor plates and end up showering half of the nearby buildings. Glass and concrete is exploding all over hell, and all the cars in the vicinity are erupting into rising balls of fire. Even with all the damage its taking, the robot is not deterred. It can see the SSS bulding, and it is hard pressed to reach it. With a clear path ahead, the titan keeps stomping down the road as fast as it can. It’s unstoppable.

Seeing his empire spiraling the drain in a hurry, Sy loses it. “FUUUCK!” He almost tears his headset off and throws it, but this isn’t the first time he’s been faced with unsurmountable odds.

In the back, Mikel yells “I’m out” as loud as if he were still trying to shout over the gunfire.

They have one gun full of ammo left, but two robots to deal with. It doesn’t look good. If he can get this one with the second gun himself, he might be able to take the other one down by kamikaze. He shouts back to Mikel. “Hey man. When I tell you, I need you to get one of those parachutes on as fast as you can, and then leap out the back. Ok?

When Gabriel finally reaches the main hanger, everyone else has established a perimeter outside the open bay doors and are watching the first of the giant yellow machines hauling ass towards them. The evening sun is glinting off its flat armored plates, making it almost shimmer as it moves. It hasn’t been stopped yet, and it’s closing in fast.

Someone shoves a rifle into his arms hard enough to almost knock him over. “Where the hell have you been you dumbshit?”

“I had to secure all the drives in the vault!”

They point to the mech and give him a frantic look. “You want to die shooting, or running?”

“Where’s Five?”

The man looks at him as if he’s going to die either way. “You’re girls out there on her metal tiger, doing her thing bro!” The man runs off to join the others out front of the building, leaving him standing there stunned.

Gabriel looks around bewildered. No one else is running. None of the vehicles are ready for evacuation, or anything. All the guards are just standing out in the open with the biggest guns they could grab. He admires their courage, but it’s not going to do any of them a damn bit of good this time. He knows very well what the B-one hundred robots are, and what it takes to bring them down. The only way to do it is with a hypervelocity weapon, or something big, really big.

Being told that Five is already out there is the same thing as hearing she’s already been killed again. If one of those machines got ahold of her, it will likely require an entirely new print to bring her back. If the Mech’s destroy SSS, it could mean her being lost forever. It tears him apart with a fear he’s never felt in all his life. He can’t lose her, not now. None of them can.

Out of the corner of his eye, he notices the giant eight wheeled flatbed trucks. The smaller one is fifty feet long and eighty thousand pounds. It doesn’t even fit in one traffic lane. The bigger one is eighty feet long and takes up two lanes. It’s not exactly fast, but it should at least outweigh the mech. As fast as he can, he runs across the main floor to the bigger truck and leaps up onto the door ladder, slamming into it. He curses all hell, but claws his way up to the door and flings it open as hard as he can.

He cackles when he finds that the keys are in it and cranks over the tugboat sized diesel engine. The sound of the straight exhaust and huge turbochargers winding up gets every head in the entire building to turn his way. By the time he gets the truck moving, black smoke has already filled the entire ceiling of the hanger and is pouring down out of the bay door entrance. The entire world feels like it’s shaking underneath the truck. The feel and sound of such incredible power is better than sex. He blows the air horn and yells out the window at allt he guards that think he’s trying to flee.

“MOVE YOUR SHIT!”

Between changing gears with the three foot long shift lever, he buckles himself into the four point harness, and puts the helmet with the headset in it on. As he barrels up the road towards certain death, all he can think about is avenging Five, and making sure the Five-Series project is still there to bring her back again. If he had to choose only one single person to survive it all, it would be her.

With the headset, he calls out to Five. She doesn’t respond, but her battle com feed pops up in the helmet’s HUD. He can’t see her, but he can see where she’s going. She is on the back of Runner, and blazing through the insane wreckage on the streets after the second inbound Mech.

Even with how big the truck is, slamming into and running over so many cars on the road is making it really hard for him to keep the thing going straight. If it weren’t for the harness, he would’ve already broken his neck on the ceiling by now. The faster he goes, the easier going over things is. It acts like a boat over big waves once he gets enough momentum going.

Everywhere around him, people are fleeing their abandoned cars and leaping behind any kind of shelter they can find. In his rear view mirror, it looks like he is likely leaving behind more destruction than the mech. When he lines the truck up with the colossal yellow armored legs stampeding in front of him, he only has enough time to clinch his eyes shut before the impact. There’s a good hundred miles an hour between two of them, surely enough to do the job. Like a grenade going off inside the cab, the impact between the heavy steel truck and the robot is deafeningly loud, and over in an instant.

For the microsecond he’s still conscious, he can feel his entire body being ripped apart, as if a claymore had been stuffed in the dash of the truck. Ever since the start of the Five-Series project, he’s wondered what death was like. He never did expect to actually feel it, not like this. The flash of pain, beyond comprehension, certainly lasts long enough for him to truly feel it. Bright light spirals all around him while something like what feels like a pack of grizzly bears is pulling him apart in every direction. He tries to gasp in shock, but he can’t even manage that.

Sy’s mouth hangs open while he witnesses the complete destruction of his beloved flatbed shuttle carrier below him. Even as he watches the mech go down hard, he screams “NO!”

The truck turns into a twisting mass of steel and exploding glass as it hammers the mech right off its feet. The body of the huge yellow robot crashes down onto the flatbed like a felled redwood, completely collapsing the truck’s chassis underneath itself. With so much forward momentum, the robot rips the entire plate steel bed off the chasis of the truck when it grabs ahold of it with its claws. In a skidding roll, the mech sprawls across the ground, dragging up all kinds of asphalt and rubble with it. What is left of the truck rebounds back out from under the weight of the robot and careens on its side through the entire side of a nearby building.

With the heavy equipment apocalypse unfolding below him, Sy almost loses focus on what he’s supposed to be doing. When the freakish undying robot starts getting back up, it spurs him right back into rabid attack mode. He takes control of the cannon on his side of the jet and holds the trigger down. With the machine down on the ground he focuses every round across its back where the turbine exhaust ports are venting from underneath the armor plates. As half of the bullets end up ricocheting up the exhaust channel, the mech starts to suddenly lose its strength. There’s a quick blast of fire that shoots out of the exhaust and then the machine lays over in a smoking pile.

Both he and Mikel are cheering, as if they’ve won the day. Even after all that it took, they are still in disbelief that it finally went down. When a small powder blue colored sedan flies right across the virtual canopy of the jet, barely missing it by a few feet, their cheering abruptly stops. Their mouths go dry as they share wide eyed glances at one another. They are out of ammo, and the second mech still hasn’t taken any damage yet. Sy’s heart drops hard in his chest when the image of him diving into the mech with the jet at full speed flashes through his mind. Mikel is with him, and he’s supposed to be a father soon.

As he starts to take the jet into an ascent, he swallows hard and speaks into his headset. “Mikel…”

Suddenly, the jet jerks hard and starts plummeting downward, out of control. It’s like half of the controls don’t work. He lets go of the controller, hoping to god that the system will do something. There’s nothing he can do now. A rage of fire and smoke start pouring over the virtual canopy. As the aircraft flips over twice, there is nothing either of them can do but clench onto the shoulder straps of their harnesses like a scared children on a rollercoaster.

As they plummet to the ground in a wild spin, a smashed up delivery van, and one of their engines float across their view in a slow motion free fall. Both he and Mikel are growling out whatever screams they can while involuntarily clenching their entire bodies for the coming impact. For some reason, Mikel shouts that he’s sorry.

There is a massive burst of throttle from the remaining two engines just before the jet smashes down on the pavement upside down. The cab doesn’t completely collapse, and what’s left of the aircraft slides up against the wreckage of the flatbed truck. Running on complete instinct, he detonates the latches on the rear door, launching it out across the street. When he releases the buckles on his harness, he naturally flips over and lands in a crouched position. The sound of a heavy thump in the back signals Mikel’s less graceful landing on the sheet aluminum ceiling. He’s making a hell of a racket, sprawling around over all the empty shell casings that have spilled everywhere.

The quick thumping sound in the ground, of the other robot quickly approaching lurches him out of his daze. “Mikel! Hurry the hell up before it flattens our asses! Jump out the gun door!”

Both of them leap out of the jet in reckless somersaults, splaying across the pavement outside. Right behind them, a monstrous three toed foot completely collapses the front half of the fuselage like a pop can. Mikel only gets a few leaps and bounds underneath him before tumbling across the pavement in a shaking panic. A heavy metal fist the size of a van punches a crater into the asphalt where he was only one blink before.

Both of them are yelling “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! As they flee into the wreckage of the scrapped flatbed truck.

As soon as the robot strides on past them towards base, he and Mikel look at one another almost apologetically, as if they have both let each other down. They know it’s all over now. They had their chance, and they blew it. A lot of their folks are going to die now. It’ll be the end of them.

Sy recoils in shock when he witnesses a massive flow of thick red blood pour down the front of Mikel’s face from out of his hair. When Mikel reaches up for it, both his hand and face completely smear with the slick mess. With confusion on his face, Mikel looks down, and then straight up above himself. There is a large pool of blood on the pavement, slowly flowing out across the ground. It’s more than either of them could have lived through.

Mikel gags, almost losing his lunch when he spots Gabriel’s corpse hanging from the driver’s seat of the truck above himself. His pale blue eyes are staring down at them as if waiting for them to answer a question he’s asked of them. Laying in the street, where they had come running in from, is his severed arm with its wrist communicator still on it.

After Mikel helps him unbuckle Gabriel and pull him down, he uses the med kit from inside the truck to tourniquet what’s left of the severed arm and both completely mangled legs. Somehow, Gabriel still has a pulse. It’s weak, but there is no saving him. The best chance they have is getting to one of the white prep boxes Five made for when something like this happens. While Mikel drags the body out into the street, he sprints out into the road in hope of finding a vehicle that hasn’t been completely crushed. He finds a little electric cargo wagon that’s been pushed up over the sidewalk. It’s pretty beat up, but it’s still drivable. The keys are still in it, and it’s still on.

Out of nowhere, all three of the runners stampede pat them like wild horses. They can’t believe it, but the’re still in the game, and so are their riders. Five is the farthest in the lead, still gaining speed, and leaving both Alexis and Marek in her dust. She’s got one of the energy weapon platforms slung over her back and, she’s pushing Runner to its very limit. They can hear the fading scream of its overload alarm buzzer as she barrels away down the street.

He and Mikel watch in complete astonishment as Five bolts up behind the mech and launches Runner through the air at it like an attack dog. She lands the big cat-like machine up on the mech’s heel as it’s taking another step, slinging them up even higher with the stride. Runner latches its claws in over an armor panel and gives Five one last leap up as high as it can. Like a little rag doll, Five slings her arms over another armor plate on the machines back and holds on with everything she has. Even as far away as they are, they can hear her screaming with the struggle.

They watch in awe as the small black shape of Runner crashes back down to the ground and flipping through the back of another abandoned car. Their mouths are aghast, unable to take in what they’re seeing. They all know Five as the smallest and most tender of everyone at SSS, but here she is attacking a hundred foot tall unstoppable killing machine like a bat-shit crazy weasel.

Carrying as much gear as she is, Five barely has enough strength to pull herself up over the big armor plate she’s managed to catch herself on. The pain of all the damage she’s been taking has her gritting her teeth hard, but her artificial muscles keep pulling her along all the same. At this point, her strength and determination is drawing on an almost infinite well of spite. She let Gerald slide, and this is what she got for it.

The next thing she puts her hand on is hot to the touch. It doesn’t immediately melt her skin, but it’s close to doing it. When she looks at her palm, it’s covered in soot. As angry as she’s been, she almost didn’t mind the extreme deafening blast of the engines right alongside of her. The heat of everything all around her is overwhelming. Her whole body is burning hot, she can feel it in her core, and the nausea her battery about to fail is becoming impossible to ignore.

The screaming shriek of the engines exhausting right beside to her is loud enough to even drown out the voice of her own thoughts. With such incredible anger, she unclips one of the spray paint can sized grenades off the front of her vest and forces her arm up as far in through the heavy exhaust grate as she can, holding it there against the scorching powerful pressure of the thrust. After what she’s been through, she thought she would be able to handle anything. What it does to her is well beyond what she can take.

The pain is not like when she was engulfed in flames, when Evan’s home was burning down, it’s much worse. She feels every bit of her skin being immediately stripped away under incredible force. It feels like a hundred barbed claws furiously stripping the flesh from her arm, leaving her nerves bare to the heat of a torch. When her muscles start to fail, she screams out a wail in fear of losing hold of the grenade. She clenches her eyes even tighter and forces her arm up in through the searing hot grate all the way up to her shoulder with every last ounce of fight she has left in her.

When the explosion rocks her and the robot, it feels like it has torn her body in half. She nearly gets thrown through the air when the blast erupts out the back of the robot. If the energy gun strapped to her back hadn’t gotten hung up, she would have been hurled down to the pavement. There is almost nothing left of her arm at all when she pulls it back against her chest. The glowing hot jutting end of bone that is only a stub of her forearm has her doubled over in excruciating pain. She screams again, hard enough to nearly break herself.

The mech stumbles and recoils in what looks like severe pain as well. It thrashes and spins around, searching for its attacker. It takes a glance back at the SSS building, being so close, and considering its goal. The hanger is right there. Limping on one engine, the giant robot turns back around and bounds toward SSS as fast as best can. All it probably has to do is fall down on the place to crush it.

When the machine doesn’t stop, Five becomes even more irate. She’s given it everything she has, but it just won’t stop. She is not letting the damn thing take her family. She wraps the remainder of her scorched arm around the huge energy gun and tries to shove the end of it into the huge lesion under the bulging armor plate that the grenade blew open. The uneven staggering movements of the robot is making it hard for her to hold on, and the rifle is already too heavy for her. When she looks down, she watches the mech stomp down one of the trees at the edge of the SSS campus below her. She can’t hold on any longer if she is going to do what she has to.

With one last push she holds the rifle with both arms, shoves it in through the opening and pulls the trigger. The satisfying boom of the munition shell going off, and the bright arc flash makes her thing of a pleasant death. When the giant robot lurches again, she’s thrown from its back. As she falls, she watches the yellow of its plate armor turn to blue sky, then to black pavement. A sudden wave of pressure engulfs her entire body.

From behind, Sy and Mikel watch the hundred foot tall armored monstrosity fall to its knees on the pavement just out front of the main hanger door. His heart feels like it’s trying to punch its way out through his sternum. The world around him is starting to go quiet. The hurricane sound of the robot’s engines has wound down to nothing and all the gunfire has stopped. All that’s left is the hum of the electric motor and the sound of the small tires of the wagon he and Mikel are in.

Where the second Mech lies motionless, its fist is balled up right in the doorway of the bay. When he and Mikel bail out of the scrappy little vehicle, they yell for some of the guards to help pack Gabriel inside. Alongside the giant downed machine, they spot a lifeless Five, piled up on the ground. She looks to be in bad shape. He screams for Valerie. She’s the only one left who has any idea what to do.