August 18, 2008

“What’s happening?” Madison asked, barely able to speak over the staggering pain registering all over her body.

Adelaide ignored her and opened the door, allowing Madison to see the bodies scattered all over the street. The corpses didn’t, however, prove obstruction enough for the crowd of Reborn, who were waiting for Adelaide when she emerged from the MED-OP unit.

To Madison, the woman didn’t appear at all fazed by the littering of dead around her. Coolly, she inspected the bodies of her soldiers, then raised her face to the legion of somber, silent creatures standing before her.

“They were my men,” she yelled at them. “Good men.” Then she shook her head, exhaled heavily and said, “Take them.”
The air grew tense, the ground vibrating under the force of a skull-rattling hum. The Reborn, sensing the change, raised their heads as one. Cold blue light turned their skin to ice as three Dragonflies dropped their cloaking devices and materialized above them. Their guns began to whir and pulsate as energy filled the charge packs attached to the underside of the cockpits.

One of the Reborn, a reed-thin man wearing the soiled remains of a business suit, lowered his head to regard Adelaide with pure, unadulterated malice. “Those who stand in the way of the light . . . become shadows of themselves,” he said, and, with a sound like a small child crying, ran at her. A well-placed burst of nano-vapor from the helicraft literally froze him in his tracks, his arms outstretched, hands clutching the air before Adelaide’s face like some B-movie zombie. The Dragonflies opened fire, their lights soundless, engines and rotors humming softly as they cut down the army of Reborn.

The street quickly became a museum of the frozen dead.

The remaining Reborn did not scatter, merely screamed in rage and tried to clamber atop one another in badly orchestrated human pyramids in an attempt to claw at the Dragonflies.

Some, however, remained focused on their true quarry.

“Shit, you guys just don’t give up,” Adelaide said.

Before her, seven of the Reborn—all of them, it seemed, cut from the same mutogenetic cloth—were moving toward her with malevolent intent writ on their ruined faces. Their eyes were dark, faces twisted into sneers of wicked delight.

“Crush her,” two of them said at once.

“End the light before it swallows the dark,” said another.

Adelaide whipped a gun from her pocket and leveled it at the nearest of them. Pulled the trigger once and watched his head vanish in a red mist. Repeated the action on another, but they were already too close.

Behind them, one of the more resourceful Reborn, a gigantic creature with enormous bone-deep scratches in his back, reached down and picked up a manhole cover, which he inspected for a moment like a curious child, before drawing back and hurling it like a discus at the Dragonfly over his head.

Despite the awkward throw, and the sinuous movement of the Dragonfly’s delicate rotors, the heavy metal disc connected with a short screech, buckling the blades and sending the craft into a tailspin. The front end crashed into the tail of the Dragonfly to its right, shearing it completely. Both vehicles began to fall in flames, their forms vanishing and reappearing as the cloaking devices went crazy.

“Now that was impressive,” Adelaide said, the descent of the craft reflected in her eyes as she grunted.

The Reborn were almost on top of her now. Only the cryogenically frozen man with the outstretched arms stood between them.

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