Rex surveys the city below him from his vantage point on the observation deck of the Torre Latinoamericana, which was, of course, still standing despite the damaging chaos of an fresh EVO outbreak.
From here, Rex watches with the perfect bird's eye view as hoards of civilians make their way out of the city, away from the EVOs and their destroyed livelihoods. The EVOs on the other hand lumber around the city, occasionally attacking anything that moves.
Being up so high away from the city below, Rex could almost imagine he was watching a movie instead of watching the city below him get destroyed. Rex gets the feeling that if he told this to his parents they would scold him if they could talk. The occasional flying EVO kinda ruins the movie feeling, Rex thinks to himself, cringing as one of them lets out a blood curdling screech that leaves his ears ringing.
There's not too many EVOs yelling in the sky so Rex pretends their ear grating calls are the background squawks of birds you would hear in the silent parts of movies.
Down below, swaths of the city roads are backed up with an alarming amount of cars stuck in traffic. Most of these cars are empty, their owners having long since abandoned them hours ago when it became clear most of the roads had been blocked off by large chunks of bricks and twisted steel beams. On foot, these civilians had headed to the city's EVO shelters at the outer edges of the city.
With most civilians out of the way, newly mutated EVOs had been free to rampage through the city and destroy to their heart's content and terrorize the remaining city's inhabitants. But now that Providence was here the EVOs had become sitting ducks, trapped in the urban landscape.
Hopefully by the time everyone trickled out of the city, the EVOs will have been handled, preventing further damage to the city, but somehow Rex has his doubts.
Already Rex could see the toll Providence's brutal Contain or Kill methods had on the city. If a building had been lucky enough to not get smashed by a panicked EVO when the outbreak first broke out, it now lay in ruins along with its siblings. Smoke from various sources marked out where Providence agents openly opened fire on EVOs.
"Okay, so if I can safely assume the majority of Providence agents are dealing with that EVO over there…," Rex mutters to himself, pointing to the group of Providence agents giving hell to a large humanoid squid EVO towering over an intersection, almost as tall as the surrounding skyscrapers. The EVO was obviously previously an evacuating civilian having recently gone EVO, judging by the torn up car that was embedded in the tangled up limb of his left leg. "...Then I can guess that there's Providence trucks parked there, there, and probably over in that alley." With every "there" Rex points out the spot, committing them to memory.
"Welp," Rex says as he stands up and stretches. He stretches his arm out as far as they go and twists his upper body backwards to crack his back. He shakes out the pins and needles in his legs from having been in the same crouching position on the observation deck for so long.
"I guess I should find out which vehicles aren't being monitored right now," Rex said to himself.
"And with that being said…'' Rex grabs his backpack off the ground and puts it on backwards, to prevent it from ripping and damaging its precious contents when Rex activates his boogie pack. "... I'm going to check out that alley first."
Rex mentally reaches into his back muscles and pictures his boogie pack blueprints in his head and wills them to form and takes a running leap off of the rooftop.
Metal bursts out of Rex's back through his shirt, forming twin wings, and metal stretches over his backpack straps and into his skin again to secure the structure to Rex's body.
The sound of his engines are masked by the screeching of the EVOs in the sky, providing Rex some cover from Providence's eyes.
Rex flies a short distance away from the Torre Latinoamericana, mimicking the flight patterns of some of EVOs in the air just in case any Providence agents decide to look up, before deconstructing his boogie pack as soon as he's in close proximity to the alleyway.
He lets himself drop down like a rock.
Just before he hits the ground he forms his smack hands and digs his metal fingers into the side of the nearby building that make up the walls of the alleyway. His fingers gouge out huge brick divots, slowing down his descent.
Rex shakes out the crumbled bricks in between his fingers and winces at the damage he had done to the once beautiful building. A part of the building crumbles inward from the faults Rex dug into it, unable to take the weight of itself after Rex's damage to its structural integrity. Rex feels a bit guilty about contributing to the number of buildings that were unnecessarily destroyed by EVOs, but Rex hasn't quite figured out how to land without breaking his knees and he couldn't say that he regretted slowing down his fall this way.
While Rex's boogie pack is useful, Rex hadn't gotten rid of his fear of heights just yet and hadn't used the build enough to have mastered everything about flying.
Just because a bird has wings doesn't mean it knows how to fly.
So far Rex has only used the boogie pack for long flights where Rex could slowly descend until he could deconstruct the build and roll into a fall, but shorter flights meant he had to figure out how to stop fast and safely. Aaaand sometimes that meant destruction to private and/or public property.
Tearing his eyes away from the ruined building, Rex cautiously makes his way to the end of the alley he plopped himself in. He carefully tiptoes the entire way, more wary about the possibility of alerting a Providence agent to his presence in the alley way than attracting a nearby EVO.
Rex could easily handle any kind of EVO with both of his hands tied behind his back (mainly because he could simply make most of them…stop being an EVO), but coming face to face with a Providence agent? Rex might as well kiss his freedom goodbye and lay himself down on the ground. Rex could heal himself from the brink of death, but that still didn't mean Rex wanted to get shot at.
Luckily for Rex, when he peaks his head out of the alley the coast is clear of Providence agents. There are, of course, some EVOs wandering about the open courtyard the alley way opened into. Rex can tell they're very new to being EVOs from the glazed look of hunger in their eyes and from the way they gnaw on just about anything that moves. The wind blew over a plastic chair that had been left out and an EVO pounced on it, gnawing on the legs.
One of the reasons why EVOs are so feared is because of how hungry one is right after the energy consuming transformation. Usually the death toll from EVO outbreaks is mostly made up of people who got eaten, followed closely by deaths caused by falling debris. Older EVOs, having established themselves with a food source (usually deer or cows if they were big), usually steered away from humans. Bug jars, Rex had heard, were a whole other barrel of monkeys, but Rex stayed far away from those, afraid he'd somehow wake up and find himself trapped on the other side of their yellow energy walls.
One EVO in particular catches Rex's eye. Its looks are reminiscent of that of a scaled up vampire bat, but if one would imagine the furry little creatures as being more vampire than bat. But what animal the EVO resembles is not what catches Rex's eyes, but instead the blood red liquid its fangs were absolutely soaked in. This EVO had already taken lives and it's multiple arm wing thingies it had were dragging behind corpses it had obviously taken a munch out of.
This was one hungry EVO Rex did not want to mess with, but he could probably get by it without being eaten if he just…
Little red dots swivel from out of nowhere and train themselves on the bat. Rex jerks his head around, trying to figure out where the dots are coming from before there was a swift and fatal bang that Rex recognized from being from Providence issued guns.
Providence agents had surrounded the EVO without Rex knowing. Rex shivered. It was a good thing he hadn't just blindly ran out into the street just then.
Rex's heart pangs out for the people the EVO had eaten, and for whatever poor sap that lost their mind when their nanites took over their rational thinking and caved into the new hunger that took hold of them, but pushed the feeling back down. He was getting distracted and needed to pay very close attention to his surroundings. He could feel sorry later. Whoever that person was before was gone and Rex could very much follow suit.
Rex waited until the Providence agents came out of hiding to deal with the EVO's corpse before he took advantage of their undivided attention on the EVO and darted out of the alley, ducking behind cars, looking for potentially empty Providence vehicles.
Rex finds one stopped at an intersection. There was a lookout driver seated in the back of the truck but he wasn't paying attention at all and it was almost too easy to sneak around to the back of the truck without him noticing.
Placing a hand on the truck's bottom, Rex took advantage of the noise Providence and the EVOs were making to mask the sounds of his nanites powering up. Rex moved around the metal and pipes of the truck's bottom to create a secret hidden compartment to hide himself in. He thinks he did it without messing up the insides of the truck too much.
Rex crawls into the compartment from underneath the truck and opens the hatch door he made that opens up into the truck's insides. There wasn't anything of valuable to Rex that he could nick without someone noticing…..but….
Rex pops out and snatches the emergency pack shoved underneath a seat. Rex opens up the box and grins at what he finds.
"Fuck yeah, a woobie!" He whispers in glee. Rex takes the woobie out and closes the emergency pack. He slides the pack across the floor and it slides itself under the seat. Rex hops back into his little hidey hole and uses his nanites to close shut the hatch door he made as if it never existed.
He sighs in relief and snuggles up as best he could in the slightly cramped space and closes his eyes. Rex drifts off to sleep, his body too tired for his nerves to keep him awake for much longer.