I have a confession to make. This entire chapter was written up on Document Upload, so if there are any horrifying mistakes/typo's I didn't catch, I am apologizing way ahead of time. Spell-check is my hero. Without it, I might not catch the little mistakes that otherwise get tossed out into the cold, so...see anything wrong, just let me know, and I'll change it.
On a separate note, you guys have outdone yourselves - well, you outdid yourselves before, but you've outdone what you've outdone. Yeeah. Thank you - blue-eyed-cow, pandorad24, Illucida, blackberry01, BeTrueToThyself, Ren Rain, flYegurl, juniper294, Aleria14, BlueWingedKitty, soccerislife14, and lillypad22. You guys pushed us to just over 100 reviews - here, have a cookie. :)
Note: I can't remember the exact relationship between Jeb and Ari's mother, but I'm assuming they loved each other. Whew. The chapters just keep getting longer and longer!
pandorad24: review reply at bottom. :D
Disclaimer: I solemnly swear that though I am up to no good, I'm not about to steal the copyright...uh, rights to MR. 'Cuz they're not mine. I do own Jacob Marling, Anne Chen, and Nehemiah Stark, however, so hands off. :)
Chapter Eleven: Off the Face of the Earth
It was stupid. It was impulsive, not thought out at all, and completely a last-minute plan.
It was also Max's idea, so no one said a word against it.
"You'd think that after so many failures they'd learn a little subtlety," Fang commented dryly, leveling a flat stare at the bulky white van parked to the side of the winding dirt road. Max rolled her eyes and cracked her knuckles, crouching lower behind the towering tree when one of the Erasers standing guard outside the van glanced her way. The shadows of the trees bordering the empty road provided more than enough cover, and after a minute the Eraser turned back to his partners - all five of them - and dove back into their lively conversation. Whatever it was that Erasers gabbed about when they were bored and in the middle of nowhere because the van ran out of gas.
"Subtlety? Yeah, right. This is the School we're talking about." Max winced at her own words. They sounded so much like something Iggy would say - well, everything sounded like something Ig would say, now that he'd been gone more than three days. It was like he'd dropped off the face of the earth. She missed him so much that it physically hurt.
Well, she thought, flexing her fingers and eyeing each Eraser in turn, time to give some of that hurt to those who deserve it most.
"How do we know these whitecoats have the intel we're looking for?" Angel asked. She squinted her bright blue eyes and squatted in the leafy ground beneath the trees. "I can't really hear what they're thinking, but I don't think it's about Iggy. It's about us."
"Probably hoping to add us to their collection now that they've already got Ig," Gazzy muttered darkly. Ever since Iggy had been taken, he'd drooped into a grumpier, more introverted version of his usual chatty self. Max didn't blame him; when Angel had been taken, she'd become so angry at some points that she couldn't see straight. Iggy was the Gasman's partner in crime, the bird-kid he'd most likely share a cell with if they ever went to prison for, like, blowing up a bank or something. And now he was in the hands of those monsters. Again.
"Alright," Max said, feeling her blood rush through her veins. It was time to hurt somebody. "Plan's simple. Take out the Erasers. Strangle info on Iggy's whereabouts out of the whitecoats. Got it?"
"And then fly as fast as we can to where Iggy is," Nudge concluded with a firm nod of her dark-haired head. "Got it."
"Got it," Gazzy and Angel supplied.
"Yeah," Fang said. He shot her a look in the shadows, a look that said he was just as ready to bash some heads as she was. Max grinned. And then an instant later, she had sprung to her feet, balled her fists, and was sprinting toward the group of Erasers huddled around the white van.
The wolf-mutants obviously had no idea what was coming for them. They jumped at the sound of Max's footsteps pounding over the dirt, but by the time they swung their guns around, the flock was already on top of them.
Max reached the Erasers first and tackled the closest one. Around its thick waist her legs went, and one, two, three times her fists lashed out and struck full-on blows to its snarling face. The Eraser gurgled through the blood pouring from its nose and went down. Max jumped up, abandoning the downed Eraser, and set to work helping Angel fend off a wolf-mutant intent on taking off her blond head.
"It's - oomph - kinda harder to aim - augh - in the freaking - ow, dammit - pitch black!" Fang snapped, ducking the flying kick of one Eraser and the balled fist of another. Max clapped her hands over an Eraser's ears, dropped away when she heard its shriek of pain, and leapt on the back of the Eraser trying to take Fang out from behind.
By this time the whitecoats had heard the commotion and flung open the doors of their van.
"It's them!" One whitecoat shouted to his partner. "Get Doctor Stark off the other line before they..."
Max rammed her elbow into the back of the Eraser's neck and jumped at the whitecoat instead. The skinny man made a high-pitched squawk of surprise and scrambled backward, but not before her fist caught the side of his face hard enough to split skin. The whitecoat crumpled to the floor of the van and lay there, whimpering and clutching his bleeding cheek.
The inside of the van was like something out of a sci-fi movie, Max decided, only not as cool. Computers, radios and speakers were built straight into the walls of the van. A laptop balanced precariously on a folding chair near the driver's seat fed what looked like a live video. Max caught sight of a gray-haired man with a cold expression, before the second whitecoat moved and caught her attention. He was on his feet with his teeth bared in a frightened, panicked grimace.
And there was a gun in his hand, pointed straight at her. Oh, joy.
"Get away!" The whitecoat shouted. His hands shook as he cocked the gun into position, ready to fire at any moment. "Get down and put your hands over your head or I'll shoot!"
"Yeah, right," Max told him. "You can barely hold that thing steady."
The whitecoat's stance faltered. Max took the opportunity to peer past him to the laptop he was obviously trying to block from her view. The gray-haired man wasn't alone this time; two other whitecoats stood in the background, their faces slack-jawed with shock as they watched her scene play out. Max had eyes for only one of those people. He was the person she'd prayed she would never have to see again in her life.
Jeb.
"Down!" The whitecoat said. "I mean it, mutant!"
Max dropped. Behind the whitecoat the screen of the laptop flickered and went black, and she thought she heard someone say, "No, wait!"
Then the gun fired, the shot echoing painfully in her ears as the bullet whizzed over her ducked head, and she tackled the whitecoat around his stomach.
"Max!" Someone screamed behind her.
She and the whitecoat went crashing to the floor, knocking into the folding chair and bringing the expensive-looking laptop down with them. Max landed on top and lifted a fist. The whitecoat raised his hands above his face and flinched violently. Max nearly snorted in disgust. Wimp.
"Who was that?" she demanded. "That man with the gray hair."
The whitecoat pursed his lips, his grass-colored eyes bulging with fear. She was probably just a dangerous, out-of-control animal to him. An animal that would stop at nothing to get what she wanted. Well, Max was fired up after more than three days of missing her blind brother, and was in no hurry to console the man.
"Look," she snapped, bringing her fist closer to the man's trembling jaw, "I really don't like your kind and I have no problem punching someone when they're down. Especially when it's someone like you. So if you don't tell me what I want to know, I swear, when I'm done with you, you won't even be able to talk straight anymore."
"Nehemiah Stark," the whitecoat blurted. "He's the director of his School."
"Which School?" Max asked. "The one with Iggy?"
A look of confusion mixed with sharp terror crossed the whitecoat's face. Then, his expression closed off, leaving her with a sneering, arrogant man in her grasp.
"I know what you're planning, mutant, and so does he. You can't beat him. He's smarter, a hundred times smarter, and more cunning than anyone you've ever met. And he knows everything. He'll know if I tell. I'm not telling you anything."
A high, fractured whining started up in Max's ears - it was the sound she heard every time she became so angry she saw red.
"Max?" Nudge's frightened voice piped up. The whining died away in Max's ears, until she was suddenly aware of someone gasping in pain behind her. She gave the whitecoat a good punch in the face - just in case he decided to get smart and try to run away - and turned around.
"What...?"
But she'd already seen. The bullet the whitecoat had aimed at her chest had missed her head by centimeters when she dropped, coming so close to impaling her in the skull that it grazed a couple flyaway hairs. By sheer, dumb luck and her own superhuman reflexes, the bullet missed her.
But it hit Fang instead.
From his spot on the floor of the van, Fang gave her a queasy gesture that was more grimace than smile. "Nice of you to notice," he joked, but his voice shook. His shaking hand was pressed tightly against his side. Max could see the tell-tale red stain spreading out through the fabric of his shirt.
"Max, it looks really bad," Nudge whimpered. Her face was shiny with frightened tears. Gazzy's skin had gone several shades lighter.
"Let me in," Max said. She scuttled close on her knees until she was at Fang's side. It wasn't the first time Fang had been shot and it probably wouldn't be the last with their kind of luck, but the bullet didn't look like it had come out the other side. It was still lodged inside of him and Max really, really didn't think she could get it out with her bare hands without damaging something important. Fang met her gaze, and though his eyes were hazy and glazed with pain, he was giving her a stubborn look that said he was going to try and muscle it out.
Max looked over at the whitecoat, who had abandoned nursing his broken nose and was now eyeing the fallen gun near Max's foot, then at the unconscious whitecoat Gazzy had knocked out, and back at Fang.
You know, if anyone's listening out there, I could really use some kind of divine intervention here. No? Okay.
It looked like she would have to wing it. No dorky pun intended.
"Are all the Erasers out?" Max asked.
Gazzy nodded. "We finished them off when you were interrogating that whitecoat."
"Sure that other guy's blacked out nice and good?"
Nudge smiled shakily, her eyes flickering between Fang and Max for a second, and patted the unconscious whitecoat's chest. "Fang took him out."
"Right." Max got to her feet and stood over the whitecoat she had tried to interrogate. He stopped staring at the gun by her feet and cringed away from her.
"You're kind of in our way," Max informed him. "Out you go."
Three seconds later, two whitecoats were tossed out of the back of the van, onto the pile of downed Erasers. A second later, the van roared to life and sprung forward, completed a clumsy U-turn, and screamed back down the dirt road toward civilization. The whitecoats and Erasers turned to specks in the rearview mirror.
"Max, are you sure you know what you're doing?" Nudge asked nervously as Max narrowly avoided running the van off the side of the road.
"No, not really," Max replied cheerfully. She snuck a glance at Fang, who seemed to grow paler with every bump and swerve the van took. Gazzy and Nudge hovered at his side, their young faces tense with worry. Gazzy had removed Fang's jacket and was pressing it to the older boy's bleeding side.
"Nudge, you see that laptop on the ground?" Max asked, snapping her eyes back to the road when she almost ran into a tree. "It's important. Don't lose it."
"Where are we going?" Fang asked weakly from the floor. He'd closed his eyes and was lying with his head cushioned on Nudge's knees.
Max clenched her teeth and ignored how her every instinct screamed at her not to utter the words she knew none of them would like. But Fang was hurt, bad - worse than bad, actually. And they couldn't afford to lose another flock member.
"We're going back into the city," she said, firmly not looking back at their worried faces. "We're getting you to the hospital."
Sorry, Iggy. I'm not gonna let Fang die. But we're coming. I promise.
Well, this is nice, isn't it? Now Stark knows for certain which side you're on. He was probably waiting for this moment all along. No, I'm certain he was. And I've given it to him.
Jeb pressed his hands to his sides and took a deep breath through his nose as Stark swiveled his chair around. The cold man sported his typical uninterested look, but there was something insufferably smug in it that made a shiver ripple up and down Jeb's stiff spine. Anne's thin lips curled up at the corners into a hungry, eager smile.
"I'm sorry," Stark said softly, his voice a silky, predatory purr. "I didn't quite catch that. What did you say to me, Batchelder?"
Jeb kept himself perfectly still. "I apologize, Doctor. I did not mean to impose. I simply thought that, as per the interests of Itex, we should have watched the scene play out to ascertain the flock's whereabouts and wellbeing..."
"I am well aware of where your 'flock' is," Stark snapped. "My whitecoats have reported to me that the mutants are currently scouring the lower half of Oregon for answers to the sixth mutant's location. Obviously, they have no leads and are simply letting themselves be run off the hunt by my scouts. As for their wellbeing, I'm sure you can guess what the sound of a fired gunshot implies."
The man leaned forward and gripped the armrests of his chair tightly. His silver-gray eyes glimmered in the darkness of the room. "I worry about your interest in these mutants, Batchelder. Perhaps I should remove you from the case and place Ms. Chen in charge instead."
Anne twitched at the sound of her name and gazed at Stark adoringly, an excited glint entering her dark eyes. Jeb's hands shook with the effort of keeping himself under control.
"With all due respect, Doctor, perhaps you are overanalyzing my reactions. I am under direct orders from the Director to glean as much from these mutants as we possibly can. If all that can be learned from them is obtained, the orders are to sell them as weapons to the highest bidder. Injuring or killing them is entirely detrimental to this goal. If you suspect ulterior motives from me, I ask that you provide evidence before making unneccessary accusations. I assure you, my connection to this operation is strictly occupational. There are no ulterior motives. With all due respect, sir."
Jeb's hammering heart and the rushing of his blood in his ears was the only sound he could hear for a long, torturous moment. He hadn't realized how defensive the words sounded until they were out. Perhaps he was getting too close to the flock. He'd loved them, he knew, even though he had tried not to. Love was linked entirely to emotion, and emotion could destroy a mission in a second. If Maximum was to save the world, she needed a mentor who had access to inside information and was emotionally detached from the situation. The future of mankind was much too important to risk on love.
Or, that was what he told himself. He ignored how much he'd heard his love for the flock, and how much he wanted to protect them for selfish, loving reasons, come out in his defensive words. He could only pray that Stark hadn't heard his fatherly instincts seeping through.
Finally, just when Jeb was about to explode from holding his breath for too long, Stark reached out and pressed a button on his desk. The black metal sheet covering the window-wall slid up into the ceiling. Outside, the air was calm and clear, even if the night sky did not offer much in the way of light.
Stark rose from his seated position. Standing up, he was on eye level with Jeb. "We'll see," he said icily, then turned away to put his chair back behind his desk and close the laptop. Jeb released his captured breath in a long, silent whoosh.
"I assume you came here for a reason, Batchelder?" Stark said after a few seconds of silence, during which the only noise was the rustling of paper as Stark tidied his desk. The gray-haired man sent Anne a distracted glance and added, "Ms. Chen, you are no longer needed here."
"Yes, Doctor," Anne said with a tiny bow of her elegant head. She pointedly did not look in Jeb's direction as she swept from the room, closing the door behind her and leaving Jeb and Stark alone.
"Yes, sir," Jeb said. His heart finally slowed to a normal pace, and the roaring in his ears died down to a low hum. One of these days, all this stress was going to do him in. He gave Stark the report he expected, carefully leaving out any mention of Ari or Jacob, though his joy at finding that Ari and Iggy were showing signs of cooperating burbled in his chest like a spring. Maybe the boys weren't getting along just yet, but with a little more time and interaction, he could see it happening.
But why did he care if they got along? They were key pieces to the dangerous game he was playing. All he needed was for them to work together. They did not have to like each other to do that.
But, a smug voice in the back of his head added, you do care. You want them to get along because they're your sons. And no amount of denial on your part is ever going to change that.
Which was exactly what he was worried about. Jeb didn't expect to come out of this alive. He knew he loved his children, even if he did try to deny it, and when he was caught in the cross fire, he didn't want them to mourn. He didn't want them to miss him. He knew it would hurt. He knew exactly how much losing someone you cared about hurt.
It happened with Ari's mother and now it was happening with his biological son himself. And Jeb would let it happen, because it was for the best. It was best if Ari didn't miss him when he was gone. Even if he did feel like he was dying every time his misshapen, twisted boy looked at him and held only hatred in his blue eyes.
"A satisfactory report," Stark grunted. Jeb snapped back to the present situation and folded his hands behind his back, the ideal picture of an obedient, alert subordinate.
"Remember, Batchelder, you have five days tomorrow to complete your project. After that, Igneous is no longer in your hands."
"Yes, sir. I understand." Jeb licked his lips and resisted the urge to fidget. He could sense that Stark was about to say something else.
"I've received word from Ms. Chen that some rather important papers of hers are missing."
For the second time since entering Stark's office, Jeb's heart missed a beat. Stark scrutinized him carefully and said, "Papers on the Extermination Effect. I trust you will tell me if you ever see them."
Meet his eyes, Jeb instructed himself. Always meet the eye of the person you're about to lie to.
"Yes, Doctor," he replied smoothly. He hesitated, heart beating quickly in his chest. He was going to try something incredibly risky, but it had to be done - he had to know. "Actually, sir, I have a request to make, if it's not too much to ask."
Stark merely raised a silver eyebrow in reply. Jeb took another steadying breath. "I would like to be granted temporary custody over the trigger of the Extermination Effect." Seeing Stark's incredulous expression, he hastily amended, "Only during the experiment itself, of course. The rest of the time, Ms. Chen would have..."
"Absolutely not," Stark interrupted.
Jeb blinked, pretending to be surprise and taken aback. In reality, he'd known Stark would deny his request before he ever opened his mouth. "Sir, I assure you, I have the School's best interests at heart..."
"Let me make myself quite clear," Stark sneered. He flattened his hands against the polished metal of his desk, pressing so hard that the whites of his knuckles shone through his skin. "I do not trust you. You may have everyone else in this damn operation fooled, and the Director may have faith in you, but I do not. If I had my way, I would donate you to the School as experiment fodder. The trigger stays with Ms. Chen."
"Sir," Jeb persisted, not giving the other man the opportunity to win back his breath and composure, "I don't believe..."
"No, Batchelder!" Stark barked. Whatever blood had been in his pale countenance was now gone in his fury. He looked sallow enough to melt into the wintry background behind him. "I shouldn't have to repeat myself."
"Perhaps a copy of the trigger, then?" Jeb insisted. This was what he was getting at; he doubted someone as paranoid and methodical as Stark wouldn't make a copy of the ticket to a revolutionary experiment.
"Impossible," Stark snorted.
"I don't see why not," Jeb said stubbornly. "Then Ms. Chen and I would both have equal parts in the experimental phase..."
"No," Stark ground out. The cords of his neck stood out, and the muscle over one of his silver-gray eyes twitched like a dying beetle.
"Why not?"
"Batchelder..."
"Sir?"
"Because each trigger is specific to one mutant's DNA and one only!" Stark exploded.
Jeb leaned back on his heels. His lips twitched, dying to curl up into a satisfied smile. Excellent.
"So Igneous has only one trigger?" he probed, keeping his eyes on Stark's bloodless face. But his momentum had been lost. The man looked livid at his own slip-up, if the way his hands were shaking, even pressed against the desk as they were, was any indication.
"Out," Stark whispered.
"Sir..."
"I said out, damn you!" Stark screamed. For a second he seemed to disappear against the snow and white-drenched mountains, but an instant later he was back in his position, glaring at Jeb with more hatred than Ari could ever give out. Jeb blinked. He must have been seeing things.
"Yes, sir," he said quickly, and, not wanting to endanger the mission more than he already had, hurried from the office.
Early the next morning, the fourth day since Iggy's unexpected arrival, Ari glared down at his packaged mush of a breakfast and imagined having what the runt had had for dinner last night.
Meat, he remembered. Lots and lots of tasty, yummy meat.
That Jacob man was weird. He'd actually thought to bring some food for Ari too, as if he was going to eat in that dark, dingy room with the blind runt. Like a friend. Ari had snagged a slice of steak anyway and stalked out. The second he found a safe place to eat, he scarfed the entire thing down before anyone could come and take it away from him. If there was one thing he'd learned from living with Erasers, it was to always, always eat your food the instant you got your paws on it. Otherwise, someone was bound to knock you out and steal it from you. And then give you a kick, just because they could.
A shadow loomed over Ari, blocking out the harsh glare from the fluorescent lights of the Eraser mess hall. The seven-year-old lifted his head and scowled at the sight of the black-haired Eraser standing on the other side of his table. He was flanked by two more Erasers, each a little bit smaller than their leader.
"If you're not gonna eat that," the Eraser said with a toothy grin, "I might bust your head open for it."
The others let out low, malicious chuckles. Ari scanned the mess hall, noting that no one was paying any attention to the scene playing out. Either the Erasers were too busy burying their snouts in their meals, occupied with sparring with each other, or just looking the other way. It wasn't like anyone cared if he got beat up. Ari wasn't particularly liked, not even among his own "kind."
"Drop dead," he sneered at the Eraser. Mush or not, breakfast was breakfast.
The Eraser peeled back its lips to reveal deadly-looking incisors longer than Ari's. "You..."
Like every other time he'd seen it, it happened too quickly for Ari to process. A strange look crossed the Eraser's face, and the next thing Ari knew, the mutant was slumped over the table with his wide-eyed, ugly face in Ari's breakfast.
The mess hall went silent. Then, their faces twisted with terror, the two Erasers who'd accompanied their now-dead leader backed away from the table as if it was contaminated with a deadly virus. The rest of the hall's occupants went back to what they were doing, acting as if one of their own hadn't just died during breakfast, though some of the Erasers did look nervous. Ari got up slowly from his seat at the table and craned his neck to check for numbers on the back of the Eraser's neck.
6-16-05. Today's date. As if Ari needed confirmation.
A nasty chill scuttled up and down his back. Suddenly deciding that he wasn't hungry after all, the boy moved to step away from the table...but not before he heard a snippet of conversation from a group of Erasers huddling near the table.
"It's happening more and more," one Eraser muttered. "Yesterday my bunkmate went down at lunch, and the day before that, our captain and his right-hand man keeled over during training. It's like a freaking virus. It's spreading."
"Anyone one of us could be next," another Eraser mused anxiously.
"Can't we stop it?" an Eraser with bulging eyes asked.
"I asked Dag what he'd heard," the first Eraser broke in. "You know he's been goin' around, listenin' in on anything he can hear. He said there's a chip in the back of your neck. Like a tracking device, you know? He said the whitecoats experimented with it. It's what makes the numbers come up. And you can't take it out because it'll paralyze you, and you can't kill it with chemicals or nothin'."
Dag and chemicals. He'd heard of Dag before - apparently he was one of the smarter, more independent thinkers in the Eraser ranks, and a "bad egg" in the whitecoats' point of view. Ari stored the information in the back of his mind for later. He was sure Jeb would want to know about this. Not giving the dead body sprawled over his breakfast another look, he pushed past the huddled group of nervous Erasers and stepped into the long, white hallway leading to the stairs.
It was six o'clock in the morning, but Jeb was bound to be up. Ari didn't think his dad ever really slept. Maybe he snoozed with his eyes open.
Ari had almost made it to the stairs when he heard the unmistakable sound of Eraser laughter. It was coming from around a bend in the hallway, accompanied by the sound of feet pounding against the white tiles. A second later a tall, skinny figure in dirty jeans and a tattered white shirt careened into the wall, caught himself against the tiles, and ran clumsily down the hallway toward Ari.
It was the runt. Great.
Ari held his breath, knowing that the freaky kid could hear him breathing from five feet away. Iggy ran with his hand along the wall, a look of extreme concentration on his flushed face. He collided hard with Ari and bounced off, landing hard on his back with his feet in the air.
Ari smirked.
"What the..." Iggy pressed a hand against his bruised forehead and glared up at Ari's stomach. "What was that?"
"What are you up to now, runt?" Ari asked. He expected the runty kid to blanche and go running back the way he'd come. Instead, the stupid mutant actually seemed...relieved that he'd run into Ari and not someone else. He scrambled to his feet and ducked behind Ari's back.
"Good, it's you. Mind telling your buddies to lay off a little?"
Before Ari could ask what the runt was going on about, his pursuers rounded the corner. Leading a group of six hulking Erasers was a brown-haired wolf-mutant with four jagged scars running down the length of his face. Ari fought back a groan.
Perhaps now is an ideal time to prove your loyalty, the Voice said cryptically.
Shut up, Ari told it.
"Batchelder!" The scarred Eraser exclaimed. His incisors flashed hungrily, the eagerness in his gaze only increasing when he saw that now he had not one mutant to run down, but two. The Eraser's name was Rawley, and he'd hated Ari ever since the seven-year-old had given him his distinctive scars in a food brawl.
"Not another food fight?" Rawley taunted, eyeing Iggy like a particularly tasty slab of steak. "Go on, Batchelder, get out of here and maybe I won't beat you so hard during training."
Ari bristled. Rawley was one of the only Erasers whose viciousness matched Ari's own infamous temper, and he wasn't afraid to use it as a threat. Well, Ari would beat him here, right now. Rawley wouldn't get the runt. For one reason, Jeb would never forgive him if he let any harm come to poor, wimpy little Igneous. And two, he just liked to see Rawley gnash his teeth in frustration.
"You can't eat this one, Rawley," Ari said smugly. "Stark will bite your head off and toss your ugly butt off the side of the mountain."
"I just wanna have a little fun," Rawley jeered. "We're bored. What's so wrong with a little entertainment? Come on, Batchelder. Step aside so I can get at the runt."
"What if I don't wanna let you have it?" Ari asked, ignoring the runt's sound of indignation.
Rawley growled. "I saw it first."
"Finders keepers, freak."
"I'm feelin' the love and all," the runt whispered from behind the safety of Ari's back, "but he doesn't sound like he's gonna give it up."
Rawley took a couple steps forward. He wasn't quite as tall as Ari, but he made up for it in bulk. "Back. Off."
Ari leaned forward and lifted his lips away from his fangs. They were impressive and he knew it.
That was the snapping point for Rawley. He sprung forward and slammed hard into Ari's stomach, knocking the Eraser flat on his back. The runt moved out of the way at the last second. Ari saw him lunge for the other Erasers and snap a solid hit to one mutant's nose.
Rawley's fist came down on Ari's head like a shovel. Ari blocked the hit and shoved the heavier Eraser off of him. In an instant he'd sunk his teeth into the Eraser's arm. Rawley howled.
Something heavy crashed into Ari, ripping his fangs free of the mutant's tattered arm. He caught a flash of yellow-red hair and flying fists both human and not, and then an Eraser was trying to rip his throat out with its fangs, and he sank his teeth into its shoulder. The mutant backed off, shrieking. Ari rammed its head into the wall and it went down faster than an expired Eraser.
"A little...umph...help over here!" The runt's muffled voice piped up. Ari kicked an Eraser in the snout and whirled around, barely taking in the sight of Iggy struggling to hold off the snapping jaws of a wolf-mutant before he went to help. His boot connected crushingly with the snapping Eraser's cheek and knocked him out. Iggy grinned up at him thankfully. A bruise was forming over his left eye and his cheeks bled furiously where an Eraser's talons had nicked him, but he looked relatively intact.
"Get up, stupid!" Ari said, and jerked the runt to his feet. "Don't stay down!"
Four Erasers were left standing, Rawley included. He was cradling his bitten arm to his chest, an expression of sheer fury on his face.
"Go get 'em," he told his group. Everything was suddenly a blur of fists whistling through the air, feet flying into chests, and heads snapping back with the force of heavy punches. In minutes unconscious Erasers were sprawled on the floor, some of them alert enough to moan in pain. Ari stood over an Eraser that had managed to tear into his shoulder with its fangs. He was sure he and the runt had gotten everyone.
Except for one.
"Whoa, look out!"
A furious roar erupted in the quiet of the hallway. Ari pivoted just in time to see Iggy leap onto Rawley's back and bring him kicking to the floor. Rawley's claws missed Ari's neck by inches. Iggy landed on the scarred Eraser's stomach and, his face set in a grim expression, hit Rawley between the eyes. The Eraser went down.
Iggy sat on the Eraser's stomach, breathing hard. Then, pretending to look around him, he smirked. "They all out?"
"Yeah," Ari said dazedly. He rubbed the back of his neck. Just a couple more seconds and Rawley's claws would have been stuck there.
"You, uh..." Ari blinked, looking from Rawley to Iggy and back again. "You took him out."
"Yeah." Iggy bounced to his feet and pressed a hand gingerly to his bleeding cheek.
"Why?"
The runt blinked up at him and raised his eyebrows. "Uh. Because he was gonna kill you. Does that not...make sense?"
"No, I..." Ari shook his head, feeling strangely off kilter. No one had ever saved him before. He'd always been the one to watch his back. To have someone else do that was strange. But...not really in a bad way.
"Come on," he said gruffly, rolling his shoulders and continuing for the stairs. "We've gotta find Jeb."
"Anything to keep me from getting tossed around again." Without missing a beat, Iggy slipped his fingers through Ari's belt loop. Ari growled in annoyance.
"You never have this trouble in the air," he complained.
"Yeah, well, there aren't any walls to run into up there," Iggy said.
These five days are going to be the longest of my life.
A/N: Hey, look, they're getting along. I have no idea how this turned out, but I was desperate to post something. Please review!
pandorad24: (your review to chapter 10) Usually it takes me about a week to update, with the new chapters appearing anywhere from Friday-Sunday, which really isn't that long considering my sporadic updating record. O.O Hmm. I'm changing that with Icaria and trying to either update ASAP or on that weekly basis. Yeah, "cumulonimbus" is a type of storm cloud. I meant for the chapter to relate to how, just as a storm cloud builds and heralds the coming of a storm, the events in chapter 10 were building up to lead to the climax. -shrug- Though the climax is far away, chapter 10 was important because Ari finally started to cooperate with his father's wishes. On another note, I don't see why your mom won't let you post the stories. Maybe she's afraid that input from anyone other than professionals might badly influence your writing and self-esteem. I was afraid of that for a little bit, but then I trusted that I was strong enough to discern good input from bad. And it's amazing, the rush you get every time someone favorites/reviews/alerts your work. Plus, you get fantastic reviewers like those in my audience. Writing fan'fiction has opened me up a LOT to what my target audience wants to see. Besides, even if you don't post stories, opening an account of your own would make replying to your reviews a lot simpler. :) Love ya back. In the non-creepy way.
-Kimsa