Chaltu, having pulled the last of the kids out of the school building before those damaged planes had crashed into it, paused as he felt a sharp tug on the right side of his face.
"Don't pull my whiskers," he said to the little blond boy next to him, the one riding on Gregole's back. Feeling the same kind of tug, in the exact same place, no less, he turned back to the kid. "You do that again and I'm telling Greg to set you back down."
The kid stuck out his tongue, but he did just like Chaltu had told him to in the first place.
"That'll learn 'em," Gregole said, snickering as he bounced the kid a couple times.
"Who's that playing with my tail?" Chaltu wondered aloud, shooting a look back over his right shoulder.
There was a group of first-graders clustered around him, Greg, and the two Ramochis that had stayed out there with them. The older kids who'd had the bad luck to be going to school on this day of days had already been taken to a nearby Chronos safehouse to wait out the rest of the fighting. Now they were all waiting around for the trucks to return (or for a new group to be dispatched) so they could get the rest of the little people out of this charnel house in the making. Chaltu flicked his gaze over the group of little kids gathered around his legs, and sure enough, there was a little girl flipping his tail-tip from one chubby hand to another.
She was a cute little thing, all wavy brown hair and big brown eyes; but then, all of the kids were uniformly adorable as far as he was concerned. Looking out over the group of kids, none of whom were his own, Chaltu felt an overwhelming urge to protect them. It didn't matter that they weren't his own flesh and blood - though privately he doubted that the feelings would have been any stronger if they were - they were helpless out here.
There was a battle going on all around them, and even if that hadn't been the case, these kids needed all the protection they could get. He wondered for a moment if this was what it felt like to be someone's father, then decided that hed better talk to the girl before he went completely mushy.
"Just what do you think you're doing down there?" he asked, gentling his voice so he wouldn't frighten the little girl, even as he crouched down to look her in the eye. Well, close enough, anyway.
"You're a kitty," she said, grinning at him like he was the coolest thing she had ever seen.
"I'm a nice kitty," Chaltu said, chuckling at his own response.
"I like kitties," she said, reaching up to scratch between his ears.
"Oh, is that right?" he asked, playfully thumping her on the back with his tail.
She giggled cutely.
Just then, he began to hear a strange, high-pitched whistling sound coming from not so far off. For just a second, he thought one of the kids had gotten bored and started whistling to pass the time. But no, that didn't sound like any noise a human could make, and since there were no avian-type Zoanoids in the immediate area, something else had to be making that sound. Question was, what was it?
When the whistling got louder - became almost a scream - Chaltu finally saw the source.
"What in the- No!" He'd been complacent, thinking that this place would be safe while there was a war going on all around them.
The rocket started to tip nose-downward, something he hadn't been expecting but didn't have a good feeling about, either. The Zoanoids (him included, of course) were frantically hurrying to get the kids onto the newly arrived Chronos transport trucks. Slamming the doors shut, Chaltu looked around for any of the kids who might have gotten left behind in the rush.
That, unfortunately for him, was when the missile split apart. A thick cloud of white phosphorus spread over the remaining Zoanoids, just before it was ignited by specially designed charges within the still mostly intact body of the missile. A wave of burning phosphor swept over and enveloped the Zoanoids: this, the Hellstorm Rocket, was the ACTF's new-generation weapon against furred-and-feathered Zoanoids. The five heavily furred Ramochis and seven Chaltu caught fire almost instantly.
The four remaining Gregole were choked and blinded by the heat and the flames, stumbling around as the fluid in their skin began to simmer and boil. Three more Hellstorm Rockets flew into the group of burning, screaming Zoanoids, splitting open with a nearly-inaudible "chuff" and bursting into roaring flames. The Gregoles, their lungs already seared from breathing superheated air, began at last to pass out from a lack of usable oxygen.
The Ramochis and Chaltu had long since been consumed by the fires.
XxXxX
"Drive!" Gregole shouted at the Vamore driving, his eyes locked on the rearview mirror.
The truck started moving without him having to say another word or any commentary from the Vamore next to him. Silently praising each and every one of the techs and engineers who'd worked their collective asses off to ensure the transports Chronos would be using during X-Day would be tough enough to handle various terrain and opposition, Gregole braced himself as Vamore drove straight on through the wall of flames obstructing the road in front of them.
"Turn!" he shouted.
"What?" Vamore demanded; he must have noticed the missiles then. "Shit!"
Gregole braced himself more firmly as the truck turned a sharp left, out of the path of the falling artillery that had once been in front of them. The sound of exploding asphalt and concrete played merry hell with his enhanced hearing, and Gregole suspected that they would both have one monster headache when they got back to Chronos.
"What the fuck?"
The urgency in Vamore's tone, only half-heard over the ringing in Gregole's ears, still managed to get his attention. So did the jet fighter hovering just a few feet in front of their truck. Too shocked to string two words together, Gregole could only watch numbly as the covers of the jets nose-guns snapped open.
A spray of high-velocity tungsten carbide shells was the last thing Vamore and Gregole ever saw.
The jet's bomb-bay doors opened; two smart missiles were launched. The missiles struck home just over the heads of Gregole and Vamore's dissolving corpses; they detonated seconds later. Nothing inside the Chronos transport survived.
