Children of the Plague

Chapter Twenty Two: Traffic

~Chapter Twenty Two: Traffic~

Each step from the garage to the intersection was distinct in Diane’s mind. With everything coming to a head—her sister, Leonard, monsters reappearing in sector zero,—every step was one more in an irrevocable charge toward a cliff. And she was well past the point of being able to stop in time. She couldn’t even convince herself that this foreboding was just meaningless superstition, not when monsters and magic had become the new reality.

She reached the cliff—corner—well ahead of Jamie, who was a clumsy runner, at best. Unlike Diane’s, the talents he commanded leaned much more heavily toward the mental than the physical. Putting her blocks up came easily for once, as she realized she’d left him too far behind to rely on his.

Gunfire rang out as the street came into view. Boots and Wall Street stood on the tops of cars near the far end of the block, shooting the husks behind Leonard as they closed the gap. As they fell, more quickly took their places. The mob kept coming from the right as Diane moved up, dozens after dozens, with no end in sight.

Leonard vanished again, and Boots and Wall Street fired another volley before dropping their weapons. Their arms fell limp at their sides, and they stood motionless, ignoring the army that passed just a few feet away.

Diane dropped to a crouching run, staying close to the cars. This many husks had to be controlled by a host, and that meant offspring would be here, too. What had caused an entire mutant army to come against them after months of relatively peaceful isolation? Something more than Leonard’s un-guarded jog had to have stirred up this hornet’s nest.

Another single shot echoed through the city. It must have been the snipers trying to keep Leonard alive. So much for just watching and reporting. Leonard would have to take care of himself, now. If he was smart, he’d stay within the MPC’s line of sight.

Hundreds of husks swarmed the streets, some heading toward her, others toward Leonard and the prison. This many could easily overrun the entire the colony with the exterminators split up. At least Lee and the others were still there.

The first husk appeared around the front of a car. She met it head-on and knocked it down with a kick to its thigh. An elbow to the side of the head and jab to the solar plexus dropped the two behind it. More swarmed around the cars, and some came at her by climbing and jumping over them.

She attacked to stun or disable, saving the deadly end of her homemade spear for offspring. Husks and hosts were still a bit too human in her eyes. If they didn’t need killing, she preferred to leave them alive.

One by one, the nearest husks stopped moving.

“Jamie, you’re a freckle-faced angel,” she said. His time as an exterminator counted in hours, but he was a natural. Still not fully trained, he continually experimented and learned new tricks, unaware that he shouldn’t be able to do many of them. Once he learned to control his power consumption, he would be a force of nature. For now, he burned through power like a five-ton truck with a four-cylinder engine.

She cleared a spot around Boots and Wall Street and pulled them down from their cars. Making them less conspicuous as targets was the best she could do for them, at least until Jamie or Ron could check them out. If an offspring had done this to them, it would have eaten them. This was definitely the work of a host.

Husks came in an endless stream, flowing around and over cars, spreading out through the intersection, and into the street toward her. They stretched further back down the street than she could see, but some sort of commotion rippled through their ranks just out of sight.

Approaching the street, she hopped onto the hood of a black Mercedes. An offspring leaped from car to car, coming right for her. Wild cries of pain rang out in the distance, and several offspring closed toward a black-clad figure with a spear. Whoever it was, he cleared a path through the army, tumbling, leaping, and seemingly flying from enemy to enemy, quickly dispatching even the offspring.