CWCollateral: A Tale of the Resistance
by Manajerkop
Chapter 9: Jerkops Gone Wild
April 29, 2008, 12:35 p.m., CWCville east side, near Wilderness HQ
"Okay kids, looks like it's story time again." Steve announced cheerfully as he and his patrol squad of Kevin, Matt, Kuri, Serge, Amanda, and Sugarplum Fury made their way through a deserted back alley, away from the hustle and bustle of downtown CWCville. "What do you want to hear this time, Al's Laughyland story with BMP, or this other one I heard where the Sonichu brats get all jacked up on drugs and murder each other? Robbie castrates himself with a box cutter and Christine…"
"Laughyland! Finish Laughyland," insisted Kevin loudly as Matt and Kuri nodded in approval. "Al left us all hanging last night. Did he ever tell you the rest?"
"Nah, he let me take over and finish it for him." The squad leader cleared his throat and kicked aside a bent CWC Cola can as he stepped through a patch of garbage with Sugar on her leash. "We left off where BMP had just created the Sonee-Rosey, right?"
"Ugh." Amanda shuddered. "That fucking…Pumpkinhead Rosey was bad enough. Where does Al even come up with this stuff?"
"What can I say? He's always been one hell of a disturbing storyteller," replied Steve with a shrug.
In the months since the Honey Badgers' return from the Warp, Al had been spending a much greater deal of social time with his squad – far more than Kevin had ever seen him spend back in 2004. The Jerkops quickly learned that the Legend's legendary creativity also applied to a hobby no one had ever expected him to have: making up fantastic stories about a psychopathic murderer of neutral gender nicknamed the Big Mean Person, or BMP for short. So far, BMP's adventures had resulted in the gruesome deaths of Cera, Christine, Robbie, and a hell of a lot of feral and homebred Sonees and Roseys. The stories were more catharsis than anything else, but it was exactly the kind of thing the Jerkops enjoyed – nothing but glorious tales of larval slaughter.
"Okay," Steve began. "So back at CWCville Prison, Sonichu finds Jimmy Hill and breaks him out…"
"Wait. Sonichu's a good guy now?" asked Matt.
"Yes, for the love of Arceus. I thought you all knew that. So he zaps a few guards unconscious and they keep on running up and out of the prison to freedom. Back in the Shopping Center, BMP's getting ready to sacrifice another few larvae to Pumpkinhead when the door opens up and in walks the Negotiator …"
A shadow fell across the alley and a distant engine roar filled the air. Kevin glanced up to see a single dual-prop airplane flying low overhead – a rarity in CWCville. Since the city had no airport and since Chandler wouldn't allow low-flying air traffic because the noise gave him stress and upset his biological clock, the skies over CWCville were a definite no-fly zone. It was most likely just a private plane taking a tour of the Virginia countryside. Anyway, with Chandler stuck in the Time Void, the Chaotic Combo probably wouldn't care about one little disturbance.
"You guys know that Al actually started the whole BMP myth back in the early days of the occupation?" asked Steve, oblivious to the plane. "He was so disgusted by Sonees and Roseys that he just made up that first little story to just get some of his rage out through creativity. Of course, everyone loved it, and that's how all these tall tales started spreading around."
Kevin nodded, though he was still watching the skies. BMP was sort of a Paul Bunyan or Robin Hood type of mythic hero character to the resistance, but to the chu population of CWCville, he or she was a hated and feared boogeyman – the equivalent of a vampire, werewolf, or other creature of the night. Being gullible and naïve by nature, many chu families lived in a constant state of paranoia that one day they would find their children snatched away by this anonymous maniac to be horribly tortured, mutilated, and finally murdered.
Of course, it was really the Jerkops who were enacting all the torture, mutilation, and murder on the Sonees and Roseys, but the myth of BMP had stuck nevertheless. Graffiti reading BMP LIVES and more Electric Hedgehog Pokémon-based pornography had sprung up everywhere around the chu-friendly districts, courtesy of what must have been a very talented and very sneaky group of street artists who were also sympathetic to the PVCC's cause.
Overhead, the plane dipped suddenly, as if a powerful gust of wind had struck its wing. It was flying low enough for Kevin to just barely make out the shimmer of near-invisible energy surrounding the vehicle…
Oh, fuck, he thought, just before both of the plane's wings tore free of its chassis. Some invisible force crushed the falling debris into a single ball of metal and hurled them away, toward the sea.
CRUNCH!
"…and then he turns around to see six of them trying to esc…what was that?" Steve turned and followed Kevin's gaze up to the now-burning, wingless plane. "What the fuck? Was that…"
"Yes," added Serge with an apprehensive snarl. "Was purple crazy shock-pig."
"Right. Keep your eyes on it and tell me where it lands," instructed Steve as he handed Sugar's leash to Kuri, then reached for the walkie-talkie on his shoulder and clicked it on. "Menchi-Nasu Control, Honey Badger Lead, come back, over."
"Go ahead, Honey Badger Lead," Bryan Bash replied. "Over."
"Uh, we've got a possible civilian plane crippled by Magi-Chan Sonichu and going down over the east side of the city near Wilderness," Steve explained, throwing another glance up at the trail of black smoke across the sky. "You should be able to see it from outside. Looks like it's headed for somewhere in the jungle beyond the wall. Additional information would be much appreciated, over."
"Copy. Hold, please. Over."
"Why would they ever shoot down a civilian plane?" asked Kuri as the falling aircraft disappeared into the tree line on the other side of the city.
The bulky Russian man shrugged. "Maybe is shock-pig law. Maybe plane broke air rules."
"Quiet," muttered Steve as the walkie-talkie hissed with static.
"Honey Badger Lead, Menchi-Nasu Control. What's your current location and assignment, over?"
"East side, somewhere between…I'd say we're about six blocks from Wilderness, over."
"Okay, listen up. Administration just issued your squad new orders. You're to proceed to Wilderness and rendezvous with a Jerkop squad based in that HQ, as well as a civilian liaison to act as your guide. Once there, you will be escorted beyond the city wall and into the jungle region to locate the crash site and recover any survivors and equipment you can. Confirm, over."
"Copy and confirm." Steve glanced up at his Jerkops and nodded. "Anything else? Over."
"Yes. It's crucial that you don't let any loyalist troops reach the crash site first. That's no civilian plane – it came straight from 4-cent_garbage in Tennessee. Over."
"What's on board?"
"You don't need to worry about that right now. Just secure the crash site, retrieve the cargo and anyone who's still alive, and get them all into Wilderness in one piece. Over."
"Copy. Out." Steve clicked off the walkie-talkie. "Well that's just fucking perfect. Need-to-know information. Why do I get the feeling we just got roped into something really shady?"
"It can't be that bad," Kuri consoled him, and handed back Sugar's leash. "Anyway, they said we'll have plenty of Jerkop support. Who do you think the civilian is, though? Can we trust him? Or her?"
"We won't know until we meet 'em," said Amanda. "C'mon, Steve, let's go see Wilderness."
North CWCville, Menchi-Nasu HQ
Allie, Zoey, Nick, and Jexis watched attentively as Al tapped a few keys on his laptop and plugged a USB cable into the control node in SUZI's torso. The Legend had been tinkering with the Honey Badgers' LIESA support unit since February, and after a few false starts, it seemed like the small mechanical Rosey was finally ready to wake up again.
"I ran a full system purge to reset her," explained Al from behind his welder's mask. His gloves and protective apron were still covered in black scorch marks from all the soldering and welding he'd been doing in the forge all morning. "Now hold on – I'm going to boot her up. Hopefully she won't go into blue screen again" He typed a line of commands into the startup console and pressed Enter.
Once again, SUZI's speakers played the Windows XP jingle, and her eye-screens both turned into miniature replicas of the display on Al's laptop. As her system ran a self-diagnostic, the screens flickered and turned into their Rosey eyes, complete with the same hideous lizardlike pupils inherent to the species she was designed to imitate. Al popped open the laptop's CD-ROM drive and inserted a disk containing all the software necessary to run the robotic support unit.
"Can we change that?" Jexis asked uneasily. "Their eyes just…ugh. Creeeeeeeeepy."
"Right." Al opened the program's Customize menu and set the Normal mode color designation to a nice light blue. SUZI's eye-screens immediately changed to match his selection. "Good. Quick responses. Okay, let's get that AI in gear." He clicked on the Install button and waited a few seconds while the software began transferring a standard LIESA AI program into the metal Rosey's interface. "It's gonna take a while for the combat and utility programs to copy over, but I set her up so we can try giving her some basic commands. Anyone want to try?"
"Go ahead, Al," insisted Zoey. "You fixed her."
"If you insist." Al placed the laptop on the floor beside SUZI so she had room to move around within the confines of the USB cable's length. "LIESA, on."
The little robot twitched and activated her skirt repulsor until she was floating the standard two inches off the ground. "LIESA is now active. Please state your name and squad designation now, Jerkop controller."
"Albert Ledger, nickname Al," replied Al, enunciating each word. "Honey Badgers Jerkop squad, based in Menchi-Nasu."
"Thank you…Al." SUZI blinked as she processed the information. It was slow going, given the fact that the commander was installing such a huge file on her at the same time. "I am thankful and delighted to serve the PVCC. Please state your name designation for me now, Al."
"Your name is SUZI."
Allie could have sworn she saw a single wisp of smoke trickle out of the robot's ear. Before she could warn the Legend, SUZI's eye-screens started flashing red in an epileptic light show, and a sound clip of the iconic red alert siren from Star Trek blasted through the room.
"ERROR 371," stated SUZI in a voice somewhere between that of a Rosey and a Cylon. "COMMAND INCOMPATIBLE. SELF-RESURRECTION INITIATED."
"Damn it," sighed Al. "I think I triggered her previous state. Don't worry, I can wipe the system and start all over ag-"
"CLEAR!" SUZI roared, and triggered a stock sound of a defibrillator firing. Her eye-screens blinked back to blue.
The Jerkops looked on expectantly. No one really knew what exactly was happening, not even Al. The LIESA unit twitched a few more times and wavered in midair silently.
Then, completely out of nowhere, it raised an armstub and waved.
"YAY! HI THERE!" SUZI squealed. Her voice was still that of a Rosey's, but with none of the horrible irritating nuances of twee-speak. If anything, it sounded exactly like what one would expect a typical little girl's voice to sound like…through a synthesizer.
"Um, hi," replied Zoey, and waved back uneasily. "Are you SUZI?"
"Iiiiiiiiii THINK so," replied the robotic Rosey, and scratched her steel headspikes. "Are you my mommy?"
"No, this is Zoey," said Al. "And I'm Al. I activated you, remember."
"NOPE!" SUZI giggled, hovered over to Zoey's knee, and hugged it. "I got nooooo idea. Your pants smell like toothpaste!"
"Okay, that's it. I'm rebooting her." Al reached for the laptop, but was halted by Zoey.
"Let all her combat stuff install first," insisted the Jerkop. "And…I kind of like her this way."
"You like her this way?" asked Nick in surprised. "Listen to her. She's totally loco."
"As long as she takes orders, I'll leave her like this," muttered Al compromisingly, and snapped his fingers to get SUZI's attention. "Hey. SUZI. Go into infiltration mode Feral." He tossed her what looked like a Rosey's skin, skirt, and bow, all made of cloth. It had come with the kit, and needed at least a good thirty more stitches here and there.
"YAY! Dress-up!" The robot obediently detached itself from Zoey and floated over to the pile of cloth. In a matter of seconds, SUZI had extended a pair of hydraulic stumpfeet and zipped herself into an incredibly unconvincing Rosey costume, complete with paraskirt and bow. Her eye-screens promptly reverted to the lizardlike green and black slit pupils of a chu larva's.
Allie and Jexis couldn't help but smile. It really was a brilliant idea. The disguise wouldn't fool a loyalist mercenary, but Sonichus, Rosechus, and their children were all equally horrible at facial recognition, and would most likely accept the LIESA unit as one of their own kind. If SUZI's combat mode was any good, they now had the perfect tool for hunting ferals through the sewers without having to worry about getting swarmed. It wasn't as good as one of the newer model LIESAs – all of which were equipped with advanced holographic cloaking technology – but the Jerkops had to work with what they'd been given.
"Wosey!" Suzi cooed happily in an imitation feral Rosey voice. "Goo-goo! Sey!"
"Switch to Homebred."
"YAY! Wets pway Pwetty Pwincess!" The twee-speak dialect was absolutely perfect – just the right amount of irritating larval drivel to fool any Sonichu or Rosechu who might happen to unsuspectingly pick up the robotic Rosey.
"There, you see?" Zoey patted SUZI on her head, prompting a barrage of vapid giggles and another "YAY!" from the little support drone. Perfectly in character for a homebred. "We'll still need to get her combat tested, though. How much longer before that stuff finishes installing?"
"Thirty-five minutes," replied Al. "Until then, I want everyone to get their trap kits together. We'll take her over to the training grounds and test out her weapon systems. SUZI?"
"YEEESSSSS?"
"Just…" The Legend sighed. "Just go to sleep."
"Yawwwwwn," said SUZI, and promptly passed out.
CWCville east side, Wilderness HQ
The industrial district bordering the east city wall was not a particularly well-populated place, and the few EHPF cruisers that patrolled the area were mostly just there for show, or were otherwise assigned to check up on the citizens and make sure they were all living docile, obedient, and most importantly, straight lives. A handful of poor human families still lived in the apartment blocks and tenements, and most of these had been selected by lottery to be designated "nannies", or rather, caretakers for unclaimed Sonees and Roseys…of which there were many.
On any other day, Kevin might have expected Steve to take them inside one of said buildings for some good old-fashioned "winning the hearts and minds of the people" like they'd done with the whole rescue operation orchestrated by Dexter Booth, but at the moment there was a downed plane and some precious cargo out there beyond the wall that needed retrieving. And the only way the Honey Badgers were going to be able to get out of the city was through their civilian liaison and the other Jerkop squad.
"What do you think happened to Dexter?" asked Kevin as he and Matt made their way through a large rusted chain-link fence that surrounded an abandoned factory and continued following Steve and the others. "Do you think he made it out alive somehow, or…"
"There's no way he survived." Matt shook his head sadly. "I liked him. He didn't deserve that."
Kevin nodded. "Slumberland's probably still sorting through all the prisoners. Hopefully, a few of them decided to join up."
"Just a few?" piped up Amanda. "Hell, I'll be surprised if any of 'em don't join up. I mean, check out the benefits we got. Free food, big guns, all the Sonees and Roseys you can kill…"
"Or eat," Steve muttered, and winked at Kuri.
"I heard that. You two are just gross, that's what." Amanda made a face and pretended to stick her finger down her throat, prompting a chuckle from Serge and Matt. "You wanna keep eatin' those fuzzy lard balls, that's fine by me."
Kuri rolled her eyes. "Yeah, whatever. More for us. Hey Steve, did I ever tell you that I made Rosey sashimi one time?"
"Really?" Steve looked impressed. "Do I even want to know how that turned out? I don't think I could eat one raw…unlike some people."
Matt glanced at his feet in embarrassment. The Honey Badgers still hadn't let him forget the live Rosey he'd devoured while high during Spring Break.
"They taste different when they're raw," Kuri remarked. "Not as juicy, plus you can actually taste the corn syrup in their blood. I'm not joking. That stuff's friggin' sweet."
"Yeah, I'm gonna pass on larval sushi," said Steve, and pointed to a staircase. "That's gotta be it. I haven't been back here since…I think it was 2002. Al and I were with a few other Slumberland Jerkops and we had to take cover in Wilderness to avoid the EHPF. That was way before they turned it into a factory, though. All I'm gonna say is that I'm pretty fucking glad that Walsh made friends with Robotnik."
Steve led them down the flight of stairs and through an underground corridor to a metal utility door with the red PVCC logo spray-painted on. Kevin imagined the base had several levels, unlike Slumberland, stretching throughout the entire building and a pair of adjacent warehouses. Wilderness was indeed the largest facility in control of the CWCville resistance, and was also where Dr. Ivo Robotnik had set up his base of operations. All of the SAV units and unmanned combat drones were stored here, or so he'd heard.
"Okay, I think they're expecting us." Steve knocked four times on the door. Instantly, an intercom crackled on.
"You guys from Slumberland?" a female voice asked.
"No. Honey Badgers, from Menchi-Nasu."
"Hang on. Just gotta verify…okay, come on in. Follow the hallway to the assembly room."
A sharp buzz sounded through the corridor as the electronic locks clicked open on the other side of the door. Steve pushed it open and led the squad through, nodding to a pair of heavily-armed Jerkops that Kevin assumed were there to greet any unauthorized intruders with a warm welcome of AA-12 shotgun shells and stun grenades.
Beyond a short corridor lay what had once been the factory floor – a massive open room that stretched a good three stories up off the ground. Trucks, Jeeps, and a mixture of larger vehicles were parked along the walls, while groups of Jerkops, technicians, and other PVCC personnel migrated from place to place on their various assignments. Looking up, Kevin was surprised to see three rows of heavy steel docking clamps running the length of the ceiling, all of which were attached to dozens of blue and orange fighter jets.
"Are those Robotnik's UAVs?" he asked.
Steve nodded and motioned for the Honey Badgers to follow him to the assembly area. Sugar obediently trotted along behind him. "Yeah. Crackders. We'll have plenty of air support once they're all ready for combat. Apparently the good doctor also managed to reverse-engineer some of the loyalist Transformer technology into them, so they can revert to mech form as well."
As he spoke, Kevin noticed a group of technicians lowering one of the jets down to the floor on a crane. One man tapped a few buttons on a nearby control panel, and the Crackder seemed to split apart with a metallic grinding sound. But it didn't simply fall to pieces. In less than five seconds, the entire jet had become a thirty-foot bipedal Transformer mech, complete with a massive arm-mounted cannon and missile pods. The technicians nodded in approval and began running diagnostics on the massive vehicle.
"So, the time travelers finally arrived. Impressed, Honey Badgers?" a voice with a thick Spanish accent addressed the squad.
Kevin turned to see a tall, very muscular man with a buzz cut and a short mustache and goatee approaching from what looked like the Wilderness armory with another AA-12 slung across his back. A squad of Jerkops followed him closely, all armed with an assortment of MP5 submachine guns, a single RPG, and two SCAR-H assault rifles that must have been scavenged from dead mercenaries. In fact, a lot of the squad's equipment seemed to have once belonged to the mercs. Thankfully, the standard loyalist blue and black uniform had been replaced by dark green Kevlar armor and forest camo fatigues. Appropriate, given the terrain they'd be hiking through on the way to the crash site. If any Jerkops were going to stick out like sore thumbs in the jungle environment, it would be the Honey Badgers.
Steve grinned and stepped forward to shake the man's hand. "Joshua Martinez. I've heard good things about your squad."
"You heard right. Allow me to introduce Los Chupacabras," chuckled Martinez, and gestured to the operatives behind him. "Formerly based in Hogwash, Arceus bless 'em. This is my own squad leader, Lori Lopez."
A female Jerkop promptly pulled off her combat helmet and shook out a good deal of long black hair, revealing a stunningly beautiful face. Kevin could have sworn he'd seen her on TV or in a magazine…no, that had been Vanessa Hudgens. But this woman could have passed for the High School Musical star's twin.
Steve shook Lopez's hand as well. "My pleasure, Miss Lopez."
"Please. All mine," replied the woman. "I don't think you knew it, but your squad's got celebrity status over here. It's an honor to be working with you, Mr. Morrison."
"Uh…thanks." The blond Jerkop sounded rather surprised, but smiled all the same.
"So, we're just waiting for this liason?" asked Martinez as the Honey Badgers and Los Chupacabras quickly exchanged nods and greetings.
"Yes." Steve adjusted his eye patch. "Did the admins get you anything on the crash site itself?"
"No idea. If the Crackders were ready, we could've sent up a few to recon the area. As of right now, we're gonna have to make our way through about five to ten miles of dense jungle full of dangerous wild Pokémon, poisonous plants, and probably a whole bunch of merc soldiers, too. And no offense, but I don't think your squad's cut out for that…even if you did survive hell."
"It was the Warp. Not hell, but pretty close." Steve gave him a confident stare. "And you'd be surprised at what they can do. It's your call, Commander."
"Josh," Martinez corrected him. "We'll lead the way, but don't expect us to babysit you."
"You're gonna need to get past the city wall first," announced an all-too-familiar voice. "And it just so happens that I'm the guy who discovered the way through."
Kevin had heard enough of R-PAT to recognize Patrick Ryan's distinctive tones anywhere. The radio announcer was dressed in khaki pants and a red Kansas City Chiefs jersey, with sunglasses and a Royals baseball cap completing his outfit. It was more than obvious as to which part of the country he hailed from.
The Honey Badgers and Chupacabras let out a collective murmur of approval. Ryan was something of a celebrity among the PVCC operatives, and not just because of his radio show and his clever, charismatic personality. The Carnival of Carnage event and the Sonee and Rosey deathmatches leading up to it had proved to be a massive source of much-needed profit for the resistance. As it turned out, there were quite a lot of citizens who were willing to fork over an admission fee and some wager money to watch the creatures they hated so much being forced to slaughter each other in a bloodbath like no other. It had taken the EHPF and their cleaning crews a full week to remove all of the chu bodies from the streets and alleys of the abandoned zone, and resulted in the PVCC gaining a massive profit, a brand new HQ inside the CWCville Public Library, and the respect and admiration of countless restless citizens.
Kevin nudged Amanda. "He's our liason?"
"Looks like," muttered the Jerkop. "I don't care how good he is at makin' all that Sonee/Rosey Fight Club shit…I ain't sure it's too good an idea to be bringin' a civilian into combat like this."
"Shush." Steve leaned back and glared at them while Martinez shook Ryan's hand and explained the basics of their mission to him. "Keep quiet, you two. This is serious."
Amanda rolled her eyes. "Serious bullshit, that's what. What're we gonna do with a goddamn anchorman; have him throw burritos at the mercs? He's gonna get himself killed out there."
"Probably," growled Steve out of the corner of his mouth. "But he's also the best PR resource we've got, and we're stuck keeping him alive, whether we like it or not. So unless you want to make this squad look like the BattleAXEs, pipe down and follow your orders."
"Got it," Kevin spoke up quickly, unwilling to fan the flames of the argument any higher. The last thing anyone wanted was to be compared with the BattleAXES, who had held the highest death-to-kill ratio of any Jerkop squad for nearly five years now. Amanda merely gnawed at her lip in disapproval. She obviously didn't like the idea of an escort mission one bit, and Kevin had a pretty strong feeling that Steve shared that dislike. Lost in thought, he found himself unconsciously fiddling around with his AK-47's new red dot sight.
"Okay, listen up!" Martinez announced loudly, and waved to the assembled operatives. "You know the drill! We're moving out ASAP, so stay close to your squad leaders and fall in! With luck, we'll be back by nightfall. Make sure you have enough food and water for a day, and above all, nobody wander off. We're finding that crash site, even if we have to burn the whole fuckin' forest down. Dismissed."
Kevin's jaw tightened in hesitation as he and his squadmates followed Steve to the Wilderness supply depot to stock up. Considering the kind of resistance they were likely to face out in the mountain/jungle region beyond the east city wall, burning the forest to the ground was probably one of the more likely things the Jerkops could hope to achieve on such a perilous mission.
North of Menchi-Nasu, zapbud fields
Allie squinted up into the afternoon sunlight and brushed a few strands of hair out of her face. Beads of sweat had formed on her brow and forearms, and already the collar of her t-shirt was well on its way to complete soakage. It was an absolute scorcher – definitely one of the hottest days of the year so far. And out in the middle of the open zapbud meadows beyond CWCville, that same sun had been beating down on the five Jerkops and their faulty LIESA unit with merciless force for the past ten minutes of their hike.
I wish it could just burn all these wretched weeds away, the young woman thought angrily as she crushed a pair of zapbuds beneath the heel of her boot and ground them into the soil. Most of her squadmates, including Kevin, didn't see anything wrong with their presence, but Allie flat-out hated the plants. To her, their ugly pink petals, blue stamens, and jagged yellow pistils were an assault on the eyes, and furthermore, they smelled exactly like high-fructose corn syrup: sickly, cloying, and artificial. But what she detested the most about them was their connection with CWCville, Chandler, and the feral population of Sonees and Roseys…a few dozen of which were now frolicking and playing together in the field of flowers around her and her squadmates.
The zapbud was a hybrid variant of the chrysanthemum species that had first been introduced to the area around CWCville in the days before the Electric Hedgehog Pokémon occupation, when the Virginia region was still known as Kanto. Barbara Chandler, the wife of Mayor Robert Chandler, had commissioned the species to be bred by city botanists as a birthday present for her son Christian Weston Chandler, who at the time was fascinated by Electric-type Pokémon, in particular Pikachu. Chris kept the flowers for about a day before losing interest in them in favor of his Game Boy Color. But one thing led to another, and before too long, airborne seeds from these discarded zapbuds had spread beyond the city limits. An aggressive species, they quickly began pushing out the native flora, resulting in vast fields just like the one outside Menchi-Nasu.
But all that Allie really cared about were the sparse packs of fuzzy, garishly-colored blobs squirming through the sea of garishly-colored flowers. Through an unbelievable coincidence, Sonees and Roseys – feral and homebred alike - were naturally drawn to zapbuds as a source of food and entertainment. The flowers produced sweet, edible syrup that the ferals could eat, and both ferals and homebreds absolutely loved to play around in the midst of so many colorful things that smelled like candy. Chu families would often go on picnics in the zapbud meadows, just to let their children run around and enjoy the sweet, saccharine scent of the flowers.
"Sixty," Allie muttered to herself as a pair of Roseys waddled by, squealing with inexplicable joy and batting their eyelashes at any Sonee they happened to pass. She'd been keeping count of how many ferals the group had passed, just as a way of keeping herself from drawing her knife and going on a complete killing spree. She might have been more level-headed on the whole than, say, Kuri, but that didn't mean she didn't tolerate the little chus any more than her squadmates did.
Truly, the fields were a perfect place for the Jerkop squads of Menchi-Nasu to practice larval extermination tactics like trapping and baiting, test out their LIESA units' weapons systems, or just get a few hours of R&R by killing any chus they could catch. With so many feral Sonees and Roseys clogging the veins of the city and with so many zapbuds to attract them, they were assured a near-constant supply of victims. Even better, the EHPF would never find out about the killing grounds, thanks to native predators and Pokémon who were more than eager to dispose of any fat little corpses the Jerkops left in their wake.
"Okay, this looks like a good spot to test her," announced Al, and held up a hand. The group halted. "SUZI, give me a head count of every Sonee within a fifty-yard radius. Only Sonees."
"YES MASTER!" SUZI's eye-screens turned red and her head swiveled a full 360 degrees around, performing a rapid infrared scan of any small mammals in the vicinity and identifying the longer-eared and larger-footed larvae…all in less than five seconds. Whatever Robotnik had put inside of the little combat drones, it was incredibly powerful, and accurate, too. "I count one hundred and three larval male Navitaricius targets. WHAT ARE YOUR ORDERS, SIR?"
"Let's see." Al flipped open a dusty, dog-eared instructions manual and began reading a passage out loud. "Weapons Systems. Each standard LIESA unit has been equipped with a basic customizable weapons loadout for combat, stealth, and support operations. A miniaturized dual-barreled light machine gun is housed in the drone's right armstub, along with a retractable blade for close quarters combat. Ammunition is stored in the LIESA's torso, as well as a small fuel tank for the flamethrower in its left armstub…"
"What?" Allie laughed. "Hold it. Hang on a sec. Did I hear that right? She has a flamethrower in her armstub?"
"You know what? Fuck it." Al slammed the book shut, loudly. At the sound of the sudden noise, a mixed crowd of ten nearby feral Sonees and Roseys looked up, startled. Their tension quickly turned to joy as the disgusting pink and yellow creatures noticed a new Rosey playmate standing right next to these big people.
"Goo-goo!" cried a Rosey happily, and pointed with her armstub. It was more than obvious what she was saying to her fellow ferals. The group all shuffled and stumbled after their leader, cooing and squealing and munching on zapbud petals and basically behaving just like the insipid little balls of artificial childhood that they were. Allie shuddered and instinctively reached for her pistol, but stopped herself just in time. Thank Arceus she hadn't brought Trogdor the Burninator along, or the whole field would probably be burning right about now.
"Goo-goo!"
"Goo-gaa!"
"Gaa-goo!"
"SUZI," muttered Al out of the corner of his mouth. "Feral infiltration."
"YES MY LORD!"
The larvae waddled up to SUZI and stared blankly at her, somehow entirely missing the fact that the new Rosey's eyes had just changed color from blood red to a flickering, static green. Even though it was more than obvious that the combat drone was only wearing a stitched-together Rosey costume with an even more obvious zipper running down the front, their little minds couldn't tell the difference. Nor did they care. All they wanted to see was if their new friend wanted to go waddle around and play tag and patty-cake and give some nice warm fuzzy-wuzzies to the Sonees like all the other feral Roseys did.
"Wosey," the leader Rosey said, and took a few more waddling steps toward SUZI. The other nine Sonees and Roseys followed suit, filling the air with a barrage of annoying baby-talk.
"Sonee!"
"Gaa-gaa!"
"Wosey!"
"Go on," growled Al through clenched teeth.
"Uuuuuuhhhhhhhhhh…" SUZI trembled, scratched her cloth headspikes for a few seconds as if trying to ponder what Al could possibly want her to do…then shrugged and promptly toppled forward, directly on top the Rosey who had stepped up for a hug. LIESA units weighed a full forty pounds apiece, having been pretty much made out of stainless steel, circuitry, ammo, and fuel. Against a weak little flesh and blood Rosey, there was no contest whatsoever.
"WOSEEEEEEEEY!"
CRUNCH! SQUISH!
Allie's mouth dropped open as the combat drone's weight smashed the Rosey against the ground, pancaking its torso and lower body into a burst mess of rapidly-uncoiling intestines, blood, and various revolting, terribly-designed internal organs. The little chu's spine shattered with a satisfying crackle of bone. Instantly and completely paralyzed by the impact, the Rosey could only stare up at the sunny skies in horror as her life and innards spilled and leaked out beneath her.
"Sonee?" asked another curious feral. The new Rosey had just given his sweetheart a big, fuzzy hug. She obviously wanted to give him one too! With a happy "YAY!", he waddled forward.
A pair of menacing red eye-screens locked onto him as SUZI immediately righted herself with a pressurized burst from her armstub hydraulics. The front of the little robot's disguise suit was completely soaked in blood, and shredded scraps of fur and meat clung to one side of her head.
"HI THERE, little pork chop!" she squealed, and promptly extended a blade the size of a large box cutter from her right armstub with a menacing rasp of steel on steel. "I brought sugary doom for EVERYONE!"
"NEEEEEEEE!" screamed the Sonee, and turned to waddle away. He hadn't gone two stub-steps before a crimson slash appeared across his entire midsection, cleanly separating the little chu into two fatty halves. Giggling like a little girl, SUZI pulled the Sonee's torso and head right off of its lower body with a horrible crunching noise, causing its bowels to instantly unload into the grass.
"Holy FUCK." Nick sank to the ground, nearly choking with laughter. Jexis merely looked on in horrified fascination as the robotic Rosey tore her Sonee victim's head off and lobbed it at the shrieking, fleeing mob of ferals with enough force to crush another Sonee's skull into paste on impact. The spasming feral collapsed, and only stopped moving when SUZI cut open its belly and set its ample fat reserves on fire with a tiny burst from her flamethrower's pilot light. In seconds, the ridiculously flammable adipose tissue went up like a match head, burning the Sonee apart from the inside out.
"WAAAaaAAAAaaiiit! Come back! I just wanna play with yoooou!" SUZI wailed, and set off after her prey at a ridiculously fast waddle. Zoey and Al glanced at each other, then took off after the combat drone as she and her prey disappeared into a thick cluster of zapbuds. A rattling burst of gunfire and the dying screams of feral larvae echoed across the field, punctuated by the malfunctioning LIESA unit's incredibly disturbing samples of random-access humor.
"WAAAAAAAAHHHHH! WOSEEEEEEEY!"
"GOO-GUGUGUHGHGUGUGHUGHGH!"
"SONEEEEE! GOO-GEEEEEEE! SONEEEE!"
"NOOOooooOOO! Why do you run from SUZI's guns of HAPPINESS?!"
A sickening ripping noise sounded from the field, followed by a shower of gore and a single tattered, spasming armstub that sailed a ridiculous fifty feet up into the air and smashed into the ground near Al's boot. Undaunted, the Legend looked on as SUZI exploded out of the zapbuds on her little repulsor jets, her costume burnt and shredded and a single green eyeball impaled on one armstub. With her other, she was currently holding up a Sonee by the ears and smiling as she hovered five feet off the ground. The feral gasped and shrieked, wriggling like a fat fuzzy maggot and flailing around helplessly with its armstubs. Its oversized sneakers banged against the drone's steel exoskeleton, leaving no damage whatsoever.
Allie smiled and sat down to watch the rest of the carnage. For a first field test, SUZI hadn't just exceeded her expectations…she had taken those expectations, ripped them in half, chopped them up, shot them, burned them to ashes, and finally stomped said ashes into the dirt. As prone to fits of spontaneity as she was, the LIESA unit might have just surpassed Sugarplum Fury in terms of combat effectiveness.
"Your ridiculous feet make you weeeeak!" observed SUZI happily, and unsheathed her armblade once again. "They must be removed…FOR SCIENCE!"
CRUNCH! SHICK! CRUNCH! SHICK!
"SONEEEEEEEEEEAAAUUUUGHGHGHAA HHGHUUHHHGHHH!"
Allie couldn't help but wonder if Kevin was having anywhere near the kind of fun she was having right now.
CWCville east outskirts, beyond the city wall
"That," Kevin groaned as he helped Matt up out of the old smuggler's tunnel that Ryan had just led them through, "was horrible, and I never want to do that again. You know how fucking lucky you are? They could've used Razor Leaf on you."
"Aw, come on," replied Matt with a smirk, and held up a fistful of the strange-smelling leaves he'd "harvested" from the subterranean Plautistics they'd passed on their way out of CWCville. "This stuff's as pure as the Squirtle's stash – I can tell just by smelling it. Kuri, I can't believe you don't carry extra Poké Balls. You know how much a breeding pair of those things would be worth?"
"If I carried extra Poké Balls, Matt, we would never have had to go through all that horrible stuff in the sewers for Project Asperchu. That scar from Angelica's never going away." Kuri climbed up the ladder and out of the hole, then waved away Kevin's offered hand. "No, I'm good. Get Amanda."
"Any thoughts on our new friends from Wilderness?" asked Matt. "I…well…they keep looking at me like they were expecting…I don't know, magic or something."
"They're expecting something more than just a Jerkop." Steve and Sugarplum Fury rejoined them while Kevin busied himself with pulling Amanda up from the dark, cramped tunnel. The squad leader had been conversing with Martinez, Lopez, and Ryan…most likely going over their route to the crash site. Beyond the sparse forest they'd emerged into lay untold miles of thick jungle wilderness, infested with all manner of dangerous creatures and Pokémon. "Look at it from their point of view. If someone just up and vanished for four years, then reappeared from what was essentially hell…you'd probably wonder what kind of rampant badassery they had to pull off to get out of there alive." He touched his eye patch gingerly. "Get used to disappointment. And don't get too friendly with the goatsuckers, understand?"
Kevin looked up, confused. "Goatsuckers?"
"Chupacabras. Spanish for goatsucker. It's this supernatural creature down in Mexico…" Steve sighed. Kevin had never heard him sound so aggravated, and frankly, it was making him uneasy. "Fuck this. Listen, just…I'm not gonna lie, I'm pretty damn angry with the admins right now. They could've sent another full Wilderness squad instead of us, but now that we went all Bill and Ted on the whole conflict, they put us out on the line for morale." He spat into the grass. "Fuck morale. We're Jerkops, not celebrities."
"Easy, Steve," Kuri cautioned him optimistically. "Look, I get it, you're just nervous about going out into the jungle. That's it. Don't worry. I know all sorts of wilderness skills we can use."
"That's not the problem," Steve replied, "but yeah, that'll come in handy. We're gonna move out in a few minutes, so check your gear one last time. Kuri, I'm making you my secondary for this mission. Everyone else, if you've got a question about survival or navigation, you ask her. Otherwise, go pistols only unless we're under attack. And above all else, stay within hearing distance of the other squad. It's gonna turn dark really fast out there, and the last thing we want is to get split up."
"First you tell us not to get too friendly with 'em, now you want us to stick close to 'em?" Amanda shook her head. "Make up your mind, Steve, 'cause it sounds like it's not in the right-"
"Shut up! I know!" snarled Steve. Startled, Kevin glanced at Matt, then Serge, then back to the squad leader. Amanda and Kuri both looked about as confused as he felt right then. Out of the corner of his eye, he spied a few of the Chupacabras staring at them with interest. Maybe they'd been doing that the whole time. He didn't know, and frankly, it didn't matter one bit.
"Grrrowr," commented Sugar, and nuzzled her master's ankle.
Steve took a deep breath. "Sorry. I didn't mean to snap like that." He looked over his shoulder apprehensively. "Guys, I'll level with you. I don't want to do this…at all. This was a mistake. I shouldn't have said yes, but I did, and for all I know, we might be out here until tomorrow afternoon, or even later."
"We're out of the city," Matt suggested. "Couldn't we just evacuate all the citizens through here? Leave the chus and watch everything go to hell without Chandler?"
"You forgot Big Brother Chu," said Amanda. "We start moving enough people and eventually that purple motherfucker's gonna find us and bring down the Combo on our heads. Master of Anticlimax to the rescue."
"Crazy shock-pig took down the plane by thinking," muttered Serge. "He could take down Steve, Al…even Serge by thinking." He patted Baba Yaga. "But no one out-thinks a bullet. Not even the crazy shock-pig."
"We're aware of that, Big Bear," added Kuri. "Arceus willing, you'll get to test that someday."
"Steve!" Joshua Martinez waved from the edge of the forest. "You ready to move out?"
"Do we have a choice?" Steve growled, then promptly switched his voice to one of disingenuous enthusiasm. "Affirmative, ready when you are!"
"Good man! Jerkops, on me!" roared the squad commander, and drew a black tapanga machete with a sawblade insert running down the back. It looked like it had been looted from a hunting supply store, and was pretty much the most threatening-looking bladed weapon that Kevin had ever seen in his life, other than the Red Devils' Evisceraker.
"On me," repeated Steve. He removed his kukri from its sheath and gave it a quick practice slash. "Just stick close, watch for movement, and we'll be back before midnight if we're lucky."
If we're lucky. The last three words rang over and over in Kevin's head as he followed Steve and the others toward Martinez's squad. He'd learned many things during his time at the PVCC. Some were useful things, like how to hold a feral Sonee or Rosey so it couldn't bite, or how to wear down a merc squad by attacking from the safety of buildings. But the thing he'd learned first and foremost, on that fateful assignment with Jake, was that luck wasn't exactly the kind of thing a seasoned Jerkop placed his trust in.
North of Menchi-Nasu, zapbud fields
"I made lots of new friends today!" SUZI boasted with childlike glee, as if she'd just returned from a long day of kindergarten instead of a half-hour of nonstop and ridiculously brutal feral slaughter. She'd surprised everyone by displaying a new trick that they'd never seen a LIESA unit use before – discarding her damaged costume and replacing it with the bloodstained fuzzy hide of a Rosey she'd held down and skinned with her stub-blade. Upon seeing his sweetheart somehow come back to life after he'd heard her getting so many Prickly-Wicklies from the mean Steel-type Rosey, a Sonee had immediately waddled up and tried to hug the little robot. What remained of the little chu's severed, roasted pickle now lay a full fifty yards away from his corpse, which SUZI had literally turned inside out after castrating the baby Electric Hedgehog Pokémon by tearing out his internal genitals with her bare armstubs and setting them on fire.
It was probably the most gruesome example of a wolf in sheep's clothing strategy that Allie had ever seen, but she didn't care. She would have taken another robotic larval extermination any day over having to sit next to Kuri at dinner. Quite frankly, the formerly-feral Jerkop's table manners and diet both disturbed and appalled her. Not that she'd ever tell Kuri that, anyway.
"We can get more of those fake skins, right?" asked Jexis, keeping pace with Al as he carefully peeled strips of sticky, bloody pink Rosey fur off of the combat drone. SUZI sighed dejectedly in his arms, but let the Legend remove her impromptu costume nevertheless.
"I'm sure they've got a whole pile of them in some storage room," Zoey replied. "The new model LIESAs don't need them, so we should be fine."
"SUZI, open your head," commanded Al. The robot Rosey obediently stiffened, and a muffled click sounded through the smoky air. Al upended her, dumping out a gooey mess of Sonee and Rosey eyeballs and undeveloped brains encased in pure cholesterol. It appeared as if she had attempted to stuff the inside of her head cavity with her victims' body parts.
"AAaawWWwww…" moaned SUZI, and slumped over limply as Al shook the grisly collection of viscera out of her head. "I was saving those! I wanted to make you an eyeball necklace!"
"Why does she even have that?" Nick leaned in to inspect the cavity and winced as the sickly sweet corn-syrupy smell of chu blood reached his nostrils.
"I don't know." Al flipped SUZI back upright and slid her head-latch shut with another click. "Zoey, could you clean her off when we get back? I'm going to find out what the hell Steve's doing all the way over in Wilderness."
Menchi-Nasu loomed ahead. The former high school had been built right on the northern edge of CWCville, and was conveniently located right inside the blind spot between a pair of watchtowers. Chandler, in his infinite wisdom, had ordered that the city limits be rigged with these security measures to "keep homos and jerks out". Every human who lived in CWCville and had an ounce of common sense knew the truth, though. The watchtowers weren't there to keep people out – they, Magi-Chan, the EHPF, and the loyalist border patrols were the only things keeping the suffering citizens from packing up and leaving in droves.
Even in the mayor's absence, the blockade hadn't faltered one bit…in fact, if anything, it was even stronger than it had been under Chandler's supervision. Anyone who tried to escape was fair game. All too often the Honey Badgers heard stories of entire families who'd tried to sneak or bribe their way out of the city, only to be targeted and captured or gunned down before they could get twenty yards past the border. That, and it was impossible for the PVCC to ferry people out through the gap beyond the high school. The psychic inhibitor spells that Count Graduon had placed around each HQ could only protect so much, and the one on Menchi-Nasu only stretched as far as the zapbud fields. As for the secret smuggling tunnel that Patrick Ryan had located, well, that led right out into the mountainous jungle area, and a bunch of unarmed civilians wouldn't exactly be prime candidates for a mass exodus into terra incognita. The only flaw with Chandler's setup was that the towers' fields of view didn't cover Menchi-Nasu or the route to the zapbud fields, meaning that the incredibly expensive and high-powered automated sentry turrets had no way of locating or targeting any Jerkops who wanted to leave for a few hours of R&R.
No surprise there, thought Allie as Al led them through Menchi-Nasu's outer gate and back into the city. As much as she hated to admit it, she missed the days when Chandler reigned supreme. At least then the PVCC had the advantage of their enemy being ridiculously incompetent. Now with the Chaotic Combo and the city's board of directors running the show, things were quite a bit more difficult for the beleaguered resistance.
They made their way across the practice yard, passing a few groups of Jerkops who were either training their LIESAs on an obstacle course with live ferals, practicing knifework, or else trading punches and kicks while Mypoe supervised. The martial artist had certainly proved to be a valuable asset to the PVCC since the Honey Badgers had rescued her from the Mal-Wart district, and she was more than happy to train the Jerkops in hand-to-hand combat…a field they were admittedly outmatched in when it came to fighting the EHPF. Sonichus could be gunned down easily enough, but close and moderate range was where they truly excelled. Every Jerkop knew from experience what a high-powered Spin Dash could do to an unprotected human body on impact, and the aftermath wasn't exactly easy to fix.
"Al? It's Steve. Come back, over."
Al reached for his walkie-talkie and clicked the transmitter. "Yeah, I'm here. Where are you? I've been trying your frequency, but all I got was static."
"Underground. Didn't the admins tell you we've been reassigned?"
"What?"
"Wait, they didn't tell you? You saw the plane go down, right?"
"What plane? What are you talking about? All they said was that you were being sent over to Wilderness for some…"
Steve cursed under his breath. "Well, that's great. Listen, we left the Battle Bus in Slumberland and we probably won't be back until late tonight. Can you send someone over there to get it? We're probably gonna need a ride eventually."
"I'll see to it. First things first, though…where are you?" Al sounded about ready to snap, and to the best of Allie's knowledge, he wasn't under the influence today. This was a rarity for him.
"Well you're probably not gonna like this, but right now we're…"
East of CWCville, mountain/jungle area
"…walking through the middle of the fucking jungle," muttered Steve as he hacked off a low-hanging branch with his kukri and pushed through the thick undergrowth ahead of Kevin and Matt. "Magi-Chan just took down a plane from 4-cent about an hour ago, and we got reassigned to accompany Joshua Martinez and his squad to the crash site. Apparently there's something really important on board, and-"
"Josh?" Nick interrupted eagerly at the mention of his cousin's name. "Is he there? Can you put him on?"
"We're kind of busy now, Nick," added Kuri as she grabbed Steve's walkie-talkie and saved him a few more levels of stress. "Maybe once we're in the clear. Anyway, Al, we'll give you a call if anything big happens…over."
The other end of the channel remained silent. Kuri tapped it, shook it, held it up to her ear, then finally handed it back to her squad leader with a shrug. "I think we're out of range."
"Yeah. Fine. Awesome." Steve took a ferocious swing at a large colorful flower and cleanly chopped it in half at the stem. "The hell with it, anyway. Let's keep moving."
The sun was beginning to edge toward the west, but beneath the dense canopy of trees and large plants that covered the eastern jungle, it might as well have been dusk. Only a few rays of light shone through from above, barely illuminating the area of wilderness surrounding the two squads. There weren't very many feral Pokémon here – all Kevin had seen so far were a pair of large Tropius peacefully browsing the trees in a clearing, a swarm of Wurmples feeding on a dead Ivysaur, and a single Pichu that Steve, thinking it was a Sonee, had almost shot on sight. The birdcalls echoing through the trees around them were much more plentiful, though – Swellows and Chatots and even an occasional Xatu, all adding to the chorus around the Jerkops.
Los Chupacabras, having a greater number of operatives in their squad, had elected to follow the Honey Badgers, staying within earshot, as a sort of rear guard. Steve didn't object at all – putting a smaller group in back would have made it easier for predatory Pokémon to single out a target and attack. Even so, Kevin was still somewhat curious about the Wilderness Jerkops. It didn't feel right to keep ignoring the fact that they were here on a cooperative assignment. It wasn't the fault of Martinez or any of his operatives that the Honey Badgers were here, and it certainly didn't make sense for Steve to keep insisting on separating them from the other squad.
The going was rough, and worse, it was uphill for the most part. There were no paths or roads to follow, and the closest thing to a GPS they had was Kuri's Murkrow, Aldo. Every so often, she would send it up to scout for the plane's smoke trail and make sure they were heading in the right direction. This was uncharted territory, after all, and right now, the bird Pokémon was the Honey Badgers' best hope for finding their way to the crash site. Luckily, Aldo was very smart.
Even in the afternoon, the jungle heat was intense and very humid. Kevin's shirt was already soaked in perspiration, and he felt as though he needed a drink every couple of minutes. Kuri had instructed the squad to ration their water in case they couldn't find a river, but it was a lot harder than it sounded when he was constantly sweating so much of it out. All he knew was that if they somehow happened upon a water source, it would be the best thing to happen all day.
"What do you think's in that plane?" asked Kevin to no one in particular. "I'd guess something like an ammo shipment, or food, or guns…"
"If that's the case, they wouldn't have sent us on foot with all our gear," Amanda replied. "There's no way we're carryin' a whole bunch of boxes back through this damn jungle." She swatted a large mosquito that had landed on her arm. "Get off! It's gotta be some of those 4-cent guys or something."
"…and like I was saying, they're pretty much the BattleAXEs of baseball," explained Patrick Ryan a few yards back, who had been talking sports with Matt and Kuri for the past fifteen minutes. "I mean, they fucking suck. You guys are more like the Chiefs – not too good, but not awful either. No offense."
"None taken," chuckled Matt. "As long as we do better than the AXEs in terms of squad ranking, I'll be happy. Jesus, I still can't believe those morons survived for four years. Where the hell did they keep getting recruits from?"
"Let me just put it this way," Steve cut in with a pitying laugh. "Al once told me that the entire squad was founded as a joke, just because all of the other Slumberland squads…including this one…had some black sheep they wanted to get rid of. So they went to the administration and asked permission to start a new 'special task force' of selected recruits. Bam. BattleAXEs."
"That…actually, that makes sense," commented Amanda, and scratched her head. "I never thought about it that way."
"Is Jerkop dumping ground," added Serge.
"Exactly." Steve smiled and hacked a cluster of vines out of his way. "So whenever someone shows up to volunteer and mouths off to the administration, they just throw them in with all the other losers and jackoffs and self-centered narcissists who think they're better than everyone else in the resistance just because they're…I don't know, they played lots of military shooters or paintball or something like that. It's not a death sentence – they get the job done, all right. But it's not the administration's fault that their own idiocy gets 'em killed all the time."
"Wouldn't it be more helpful to just assign each one of them to a better squad?" asked Kevin. "I mean, that way they'd be forced to learn from a better example and…"
"It's a good idea in theory," replied Steve, "but then again, we can't afford weak links in this conflict. And believe me when I say that these guys…are the absolute weakest of the weak. Mr. Ryan here knows, don't you? I remember that interview you did back in February…would you mind telling us what the hell you were thinking?"
Ryan shuddered. "Can we please not talk about that? The admins wanted me to stop focusing on the really good squads all the time, so they pretty much forced me into it. I'm pretty sure I lost half my audience the second those…monkeys…went on the air."
"You know, I don't think we've ever been interviewed on R-PAT," added Kuri in a not-so-subtle suggestion. She turned to Steve. "Have we?"
"Al and Zoey and I and a few of the old squad members were on, once." Steve glanced back at Ryan. "Look, I won't press you on the BattleAXEs interview if you don't tell them anything about mine. Deal?"
"Deal," laughed the radio announcer, and wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. "If I'd known it was gonna be this hot, I'd have stayed in that tunnel and let you guys do all the dirty work. At least there's enough entertainment down there."
Matt grinned and patted his jacket pocket where he'd stashed the Plautistic leaves. Kevin turned back around and concentrated instead on staring ahead through the dense jungle. Eventually, the conversations around him seemed to fade away, leaving him with nothing else but his thoughts.
Something had been bothering him night after night – a vague, confusing montage of memories he kept experiencing either in dreams, or else simply out of nowhere. It was always there, burning at the back of his mind like a candle that refused to be extinguished.
A sound of cruel laughter…Count Graduon's laughter.
Just before he and his squadmates had been sucked into the Warp and trapped for the equivalent of four years, he'd heard the ancient spirit laughing in his head…as if their disappearance had been the plan all along. Kevin was no conspiracy theorist, but then again, that incident hadn't been the only time he was able to hear the ethereal voice. It seemed to project itself only to the people Graduon wanted to speak with, mainly Mary Lee Walsh, but for some reason, he was the only one who could hear it all the time. Granted, he still needed to be within earshot of the staff, but when he'd asked Steve, Zoey, Allie, and the other Honey Badgers if they'd ever heard Graduon speak, the answer was always a definite no.
Kevin had kept the knowledge to himself after that, believing that he was somehow losing part of his mind. He'd followed orders and concentrated on the tasks at hand, like a good obedient Jerkop, but the mystery still remained. Was it even possible that he could have been imagining Graduon's voice all along? Or was it something else? Had it really all just been an accident…or something far more sinister than anything he could have possibly…
…or fuck it, maybe it's all just aliens, Kevin thought, and rolled his eyes. Well, it made more sense than some of the stuff he'd been coming up with in terms of explanations.
"I saw that," Steve muttered. "Look, if you're not gonna take this assignment seriously…"
"What?" Kevin snapped back to reality and glanced over at his squad leader. "No, I…sorry, I lost my train of thought."
"Don't blame you," added Amanda. "This mission's just one big pile of boring. We didn't even get to kill any ferals."
"We don't always have to kill ferals," Steve sighed, and wiped the plant juices on his kukri off on his sweater sleeve, where it stained the white cloth. "Granted, it is fun as hell, but I'm pretty sure they haven't spread this…"
"Goo-gee!"
"Sonee!"
"Seeeeee! Seeeeeee! Wosey!"
"…far?" finished the blond Jerkop as he raised the Nepalese knife and reached for his revolver. The all-too-familiar squeals of feral chu larvae seemed to be coming from the base of a fallen tree a dozen yards away, obscured by a thicket of ferns and dense undergrowth.
"The fuck?" Kuri stepped forward, next to her squad leader. "Is that what I…"
"No way. No way," breathed Amanda. "Not out here. They wouldn't last ten seconds out here."
"Maybe, maybe not." Steve checked his Python to make sure the cylinder was full. "But I know a pack of ferals when I hear one. Kuri, Kevin, you two come with me. Everyone else, stay here and watch the trees. If Josh's squad catches up with us, tell 'em to keep quiet. Sugar, follow. Safety on."
At his feet, Sugarplum Fury sniffed twice and bared her teeth as the sweet, artificial smell wafted through the thick and fragrant jungle air. There was no mistaking it – she had most definitely picked up the scent of chu prey.
Kevin drew his AK-47 and flipped up the red dot sight, while Kuri silently strapped on her tekko-kagi and retrieved her Beretta from its holster. Neither Jerkop had any idea how a group of ferals could have escaped the city and survived out in the wilderness for so long, but they were going to remedy that, for the sake of Virginia's ecosystem.
And he had no problems with that whatsoever.
North CWCville, Menchi-Nasu HQ, Honey Badger barracks
"I want everyone loaded up for a standard patrol," ordered Al as he inserted a full clip into his M1911 pistol and pulled the slide back to chamber a round. "If anyone asks, we're going to the Get-Tar district to test out SUZI on some more larvae. I've already squared the assignment with Walsh – she agreed that it's about time we moved up to homebreds."
"Isn't that what we're already doing?" asked Jexis. "And what do you mean, 'if anyone asks'?"
"That's what we're doing." Zoey buckled on a grey flak jacket over her leather coat and pulled her hair back into the ponytail she always wore on combat missions. "You, on the other hand, are going with Al and Nick to get the Battle Bus from Slumberland. After that, well, that's the part where you don't tell anyone what we're up to."
"So how come you guys get the awesome Rosey death machine?" the cadet pouted, and looked down at SUZI, who was busy gleefully eating Jolly Ranchers out of a feral bait box.
"Mostly because she's going to cause the single biggest distraction we'll need if I'm ever going to pull off something on this scale," muttered Al. "Those lying motherfuckers. If they want to send Steve off on some jungle trek mission without telling me anything…well, two can play at that game. SUZI, put those back and get ready to leave."
Huge digital tears welled up at the bottom of the little combat drone's eye-screens. "But I LOVE them! They taste like pudding and make me sleeeeeeeepy!"
"No. No, they don't taste like pudding. Put them back in the box."
SUZI's eyes flickered back to red. "YES, EMPEROR OF BOOZE! INDUCING EXPLOSIVE BULIMIA IN 54321HUUURRRRRGGGGHHH!" Her head split open and fired a geyser of Jolly Ranchers into the air, pelting the Honey Badgers with several dozen wrapped hard candies.
"In the box!" shouted Al. "No, don't do th…SUZI! NO! PUT THEM BACK IN THE BOX!"
Allie picked a watermelon-flavored Jolly Rancher out of her hair, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth while she adjusted Trogdor's valves for optimal wide-spread bursts. "So it's just you and me and the Larvaenator today, Zoey?"
"That's the plan." Zoey leaned down and picked up SUZI, who was giggling uncontrollably as Al, Jexis, and Nick set about gathering up all the spilled candies. "We're taking one of the old pickup trucks out to Get-Tar…there's an apartment complex on the east side of the district that has a few chu families with homebreds. It's the best place to start training for the Sonichu brats." She grinned longingly. "Oh, if only. It's going to be a good day when that finally happens."
"Agreed," said Al, and shoved a handful of Jolly Ranchers back into the bait box. "For now, just make as big of a mess as you possibly can. The more backup Menchi-Nasu sends, the better. But tell them that we're still bogged down in the slum district, no matter what they ask. Play dumb. We're gonna need about four hours tops. Think you can stir up the hive for that long?"
"Sure." sighed Zoey. "Both of them."
East of CWCville, mountain/jungle area
"Careful, careful," Kuri cautioned as Steve hacked away at the ferns with his kukri and cleared away the growth around the source of the Sonee and Rosey cries. "Don't disturb them. We'll want to catch them off guard."
"Right." The blond Jerkop knelt down and pushed away the cut vegetation, revealing an area of disturbed earth leading underneath the fallen tree. "Clever little shits. They must've been living here for a while now."
"But on what?" asked Kevin, puzzled. "They couldn't fend for themselves out here. Not without Feeding Days and candy supply drops."
"There's your answer," announced Steve triumphantly as he pointed to a tiny oval-shaped footprint – no wider than a W-Quarter - in the soft dirt. "Newborns. This has to be a nest or something. But wait…" He scratched his eye patch in confusion. "That would mean there's gotta be a Rosechu out here, then."
"You mean, a feral Rosechu?" Kevin had heard stories of feral larvae who, by circumstance, had actually lived long enough to evolve into wild, savage killing machines. He'd never thought one would actually be living outside of the city, though…and he'd certainly never expected the Honey Badgers to stumble upon an actual Electric Hedgehog Pokémon nest out beyond the CWCville wall.
"Looks like Mommy's not home," added Kuri in a lighthearted voice. Her eyes, though, were anything but mirthful. "Steve, I don't like this. Maybe…maybe we should leave them alone."
Steve stopped. "Okay. Where's the real Kuri Tatsuno, and what did you do with her?"
"Funny. Very funny." Kuri knelt next to Steve and pressed her ear against the ground like a Native American tracker. "They're right inside the log. If we get it out of the way, we should be able to…"
Steve reached into his pocket and drew out a piece of strawberry Laffy Taffy.
"…or we could just bait them," finished Kuri as her squad leader placed the fragrant candy at the entrance to the nest hole and wafted the scent inside. A few seconds passed before the squeaking and "goo-goo"s died down. Then came the cries of joy.
"YAY!"
"Goo-gaa!"
"YAY!"
"Hell yeah," chuckled Steve, and plunged his kukri into the ground while he readied the other to catch the first chu larva to show its face. "Here we go. Don't worry, Sugar, lunch is on its way."
"Grrowr," agreed the honey badger, and licked her chops hungrily.
The sounds of shuffling stubs and tripping Sonees grew closer and closer, as the unseen larvae made their clumsy way over to the source of the sweet smell. The grin on Steve's face could have belonged to the Cheshire Cat.
"Sonee!" a tiny voice called out from inside the log. "Goo-goo! Sonee!"
"Come on, come on," Steve urged between clenched teeth. "Come on out, you little…"
"Nee!"
As Kevin watched in amazement, the absolute tiniest Sonee he'd ever seen waddled out of the small hole and immediately tripped over its own bare feet, landing flat on its pudgy belly with a muffled "Oof!" It had to be only four inches tall, yet this chu definitely wasn't a typical newborn. It was fully developed, its eyes were open, and it simply resembled a massively scaled-down version of a regular feral Sonee. And even stranger still…its fur was completely green. If anything, it resembled the larval version of Wild Sonichu as portrayed in the despicable Sonichu Babies TV show, only without the leafy bud for a tail and the vine-slinging armstubs.
Steve and Kuri managed to sum up Kevin's reaction with one simultaneous exclamation.
"The hell?"
"Sonee!" whined the tiny chu as it gazed up at the three big unfamiliar faces towering overhead. It glanced back to the candy, then to the hole in the log, then to the candy, then back to the faces.
Unexpectedly, it did the smart thing and headed back into the log with a cry of "WAAAAHHH!"
"OH NO YOU DON'T!" yelled Steve, and leapt forward, plunging his hand in after the fleeing baby Electric Hedgehog Pokémon. "Ha! Gotcha! Come back here, you little HOLY FUCK! OW! OW! FUCKING HELL! GET OFF ME!" He wrenched the arm back, pulling out the struggling Sonee…and about half a dozen other tiny Sonees and Roseys in a mixed variety of pink, yellow, and green coloration, all of whom were clinging to his sweater and gnawing away at the exposed flesh of his hand and forearm like tiny fuzzy piranhas. Their baby teeth were fully formed – a physical quality that no chu larva less than three years old possessed.
These creatures weren't newborns…they were fully-developed baby Sonees and Roseys. But not a single one of them stood more than four and a half inches tall.
"SONEE!"
"WOSEY!"
"GOO-GOO!"
"GET THEM OFF ME! GET THEM THE FUCK OFF ME!" roared Steve, and squeezed the Sonee in his hand as hard as he could. The little chu's head popped right off with a final gurgling shriek, while its tomato-sized plump body burst open like a bag of chips, splattering its intestines and organs all over the log. Reaching for his kukri, the enraged Jerkop skewered a Rosey through the brain, bisecting its skull and killing the larva instantly.
"SUGAR!" Kevin yelled in panic as he fought to restrain the struggling Steve so that Kuri could pull off the biting chus. "SAFETY OFF!"
Under normal circumstances, the honey badger would never have listened to a relatively low-ranking Honey Badger like Kevin, but her master was in danger, and there were Sonees and Roseys to kill. Bite-sized Sonees and Roseys. She didn't even need to think twice.
"GRRROWWWRRR!" Sugar snarled, and climbed up on top of the log in a flash of black and white fur. With a single leap, she landed on Steve's chest, sinking her claws into his flak jacket to steady herself without hurting the Jerkop. Realizing what the honey badger was up to, Kuri grabbed Steve's arm and forcefully pushed it right next to Sugar's mouth.
SNAP! CRUNCH!
"SONEEEEEEEE!" shrieked a yellow baby chu, and immediately let go of his would-be victim as the honey badger's flashing teeth and powerful jaws ripped off his entire lower body in one savage bite. It dropped to the ground, squirting blood from its midsection, and began squirming around and wailing helplessly until Kevin stomped it flat against the dirt. Unlike the normal-sized Sonees, however, this one easily fit underneath his entire boot and thus was fully crushed.
"HOLD STILL!" yelled Kuri, and sliced a Rosey into three bloody pieces with one swing of her tekko-kagi. Bits and pieces of chu flesh rained down as Sugarplum Fury viciously eviscerated another Sonee, tearing its lungs, heart, and ribcage right out of its fatty torso and spitting them right into its face as the larva fell dead to the ground. Roaring and growling, she sank her teeth into a Rosey's head and pulled it clean off, letting the decapitated corpse drop free of Steve while she crushed the chu's skull between her jaws.
The last Sonee was biting and tearing at Steve's thumb, oblivious to Kevin as he reached out and tore it right off of its aggressor. Holding the larva tightly in his fingers, the Jerkop reached down, grabbed a rock, and shoved it right into the Sonee's mouth, then pounded it once on the head as if he were playing a game of Whack-a-Mole. CRUNCH! The Sonee screeched in pain as its teeth shattered and broke loose, leaving it unable to do any more damage than a homebred chu.
"Holy fuck that hurt!" cursed Steve as he clutched his bleeding arm. "Son of a bitch! Those things don't fuck around." He glared at the one in Kevin's hand. "Give me that little shit! I'm gonna skin him alive and make him eat his own fur!"
"What the hell just happened?" yelled Matt as he, Amanda, Serge, and Ryan arrived on the scene, their weapons drawn. "Steve! What happened?"
"This happened," replied Kevin, and held out the tiny, squealing Sonee to show them. "We found them hiding under the log. There's probably some sort of nest in there, and…"
A crackling, splintering sound shook the jungle as Serge dropped Baba Yaga and pulled the entire segment of rotten log up off the forest floor, revealing a deep, bowl-shaped depression that had been dug into the moist ground. Leaves had been packed together to form a soft bed, and a tiny makeshift trough lay set into the side of the large enclosure, filled with filthy water and small insects. The hollow log had only been the entrance, but this…this was the nest they'd been looking for.
And squirming around inside said nest were no fewer than fifty miniature Sonees and Roseys, all as tiny and stunted as the ones who had attacked Steve. The little chus had no shoes, skirts, or bows, and were all either busy sleeping, waddling around, drinking from the trough, snacking on a meaty bone that had been placed inside the burrow, or clustered around a large mass of filthy pink fur and sucking on what looked like…
"Oh, God," Matt swore as the giant pink thing rolled over and sat up, revealing itself. It was a Rosechu, but like no other Rosechu the Honey Badgers had ever seen before. The female chu's naked body was lean, scrawny, and riddled with old scars, not curvy and sleek like a regular Rosechu. Her ears had been chewed to ribbons, and the bolt on her tail looked sharper and much more dangerous, as if it was meant for use as a weapon. But most disturbing of all were her eyes. They shone with a savagery unmatched by her vapid, city-dwelling, homemaking, salad-eating cousins, a primal maternal fury that only grew when she looked up and saw one of her children grasped tightly in Kevin's hand.
"Rose…CHU!" the feral Rosechu snarled, and leapt up onto all fours, ready to spring. The tiny Sonees and Roseys nursing at her breasts dropped off one by one, squeaking in surprise as their mother abruptly cut off their milk supply. Her fused eyes narrowed in vicious hatred as she zeroed in on Kevin and let out a bloodcurdling roar. "ROSE! ROSECHU! RO-"
BANG!
The Rosechu slumped over, spasming horrifically, a bullet hole punched straight through her head. Shocked, Kevin glanced to the right to see Steve holding out his smoking revolver with his one good arm while Kuri hastily bandaged the injured one. The look in the Jerkop's eyes was one of cold, unforgiving disgust, amplified by the pained expression on his face.
"Abominations," he spat, and stowed the Python in its holster. "Kill the rest."
By now, the Sonees and Roseys had figured out that something was wrong with their mother. She had stopped moving, and wasn't giving them any more Fuzzy-Wuzzies like she was supposed to. Whining and pawing at her limp body, the tiny baby chus clustered around her, squealing for more milk and trying to suckle at whatever they could get. Before ten seconds had passed, the suckling had turned to nibbling, and the nibbling quickly gave way to biting, until the little Electric Hedgehog Pokémon larvae were tearing off tiny chunks of their own mother's flesh and gobbling them up greedily like a swarm of hungry maggots on a day-old deer carcass.
"Do it," growled Steve. Matt obediently stepped forward and racked a shell into his shotgun, then took aim at the largest cluster of miniature Sonees and Roseys.
BOOM! Click-click! BOOM! Click-click! BOOM! Three blasts rang out through the jungle as Matt opened fire without mercy, splattering the nest of larvae into a sickening mess of bloody meat, fur, and viscera. As their brothers and sisters were shredded to oblivion in the blink of an eye, the surviving Sonees and Roseys could only wail and scream in terror and agony before they too were torn to pieces in the unrelenting hail of buckshot and death. Finally, as the last of the thunderous reports faded into silence, a new, far more annoying sound split the air.
"WAAAAAAHHHHHH! WAAAAAAHHHHHHHH! WAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!"
Five of the tiny larvae were still alive and intact, all clinging to the Rosechu's mutilated body and wailing at the top of their lungs as they cried out in fear. Around the nest, a green Rosey's stumpfoot had been blown clean off, while another was missing part of its eye. A Sonee had been completely shredded from the waist up, and its lower body now lay in a puddle of blood and urine, still weakly kicking in its last moments of life.
"Sugar," continued Steve as he knelt down and patted the honey badger behind her ears. "Eat."
"Grrowr." Sugarplum Fury stalked forward, a look of satisfaction on her face as she opened her jaws and plucked the five baby Electric Hedgehog Pokémon one by one from their mother's corpse and devoured them, silencing their final screams in a cacophony of gnashing teeth and wet splattering sounds. One Rosey tried to waddle to safety while her siblings died around her, but Sugar merely trotted after her and bit off her stumpfeet, leaving the tiny chu to feebly pull herself away by her armstubs for a few seconds, then snapped her up and swallowed her whole.
"Holy…shit…" breathed Amanda. Serge looked like he was about ready to vomit. Even he hadn't been able to tear his eyes away from the slaughter. Matt silently stowed his shotgun and leaned against a tree, staring off into the distance while Kevin and Ryan continued watching the last surviving baby chus shudder and die around the nest. Kuri was still working on bandaging Steve's arm, and for a while, no one spoke.
"What are we gonna do with this one?" Kevin finally broke the silence after a minute had passed.
"Put him inside a canteen or something," replied Steve. "We'll give him to Walsh. She needs to know the ferals got beyond the wall. They all need to know. Once we find the plane and get the Chupacabras back to Wil-" The Jerkop's eyes widened instantly as he realized that the second squad was no longer with them. "Oh, fuck me." He grabbed for his walkie-talkie and clicked the transmitter furiously. "Chupacabra Command, Honey Badger Lead, come back! Josh! JOSH!"
Far away, through the trees, the harsh rattle of gunfire shattered the silence.
West CWCville, Get-Tar district
"The wheels on the bus go RAINING BLOOOOOOOOOD!" SUZI half-sang, half-roared as her malfunctioning audio processing unit skipped between cutesy schoolyard songs and one of Steve's combat playlists that she had automatically ripped off of his laptop. "WE'RE ON THE HIGHWAY TO HELL-o operator, give me number nine, and if you disconnect me, I'll DRIVE OUR SHIPS TO NEW LANDS, TO FIGHT THE HORDE, SINGING supercalifragilistiexpiali-"
"SHUT! UP!" screamed Allie and Zoey simultaneously. The robotic Rosey stress-sighed and slumped forward in her little car seat, crossing her armstubs and pouting as the Jerkops' truck swerved left and right through the heavy traffic in the streets leading to CWCville's massive Target superstore. Shoppers (mostly Rosechus) filled the streets, all laden with big bags of whatever.
"Are we there yet?" asked SUZI impatiently, and began playing Pong against herself while using her eye-screens as a display. "I hate road trips. You're both pretty. Can I have a book?"
"Don't you already have a book?" growled Zoey, and turned off into a side street, nearly running over a homebred Sonee on a leash that was waddling slowly after its parents. Unfortunately, she missed. "Just download a new one and read that! We're thirty freakin' seconds away!"
"I don't like downloading…stuff…" mused the combat drone, and opened up her head to retrieve a severely bent paperback copy of A Game of Thrones. It had been Steve's…once. "Hey! Hey! WhyyyYYYyyy are there Lannisters in my head? I don't like them…"
"Are you trying to be annoying?" asked Allie, and glared over her shoulder.
SUZI's eye-screens reverted back to an innocent digital blue. "Yeah…do I win anything?"
"Uh, yeah. Sure. Why not. Here." Allie passed her half of a stale muffin that one of the Spikes of Blue had most likely forgotten when they last used the old truck. SUZI squealed happily and immediately began trying to cram the rock-hard muffin into her head, oblivious to the fact that it wasn't nearly soft or small enough to fit in there.
"Okay, this is it," announced Zoey as she pulled the truck into a small parking lot in front of a human-run donut shop…a rarity in such a heavily chu-populated district. Right next to it lay an apartment block from which a chorus of "YAY!"s, "WAAAHHH!"s, and twee-speak emanated in a cacophony of artificial childhood. "Grab Trogdor. We'll go in through the side entrance and start working our way through the apartments. SUZI?"
"Heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheee eee! I mean, YES MILADY?"
The Jerkop smiled and placed SUZI's stitched-together Rosey costume in front of her.
"Infiltration mode…Homebred."
"YAY!"
East of CWCville, mountain/jungle area
"Does anyone…want to tell me…why there were ferals outside the…what the fuck?" panted Matt, freezing in shock as the Honey Badgers, Sugarplum Fury, and Patrick Ryan burst into a devastated patch of jungle that could only have been a staging ground for whatever horrific firefight the squad of Wilderness Jerkops had been in. Beyond the edge of the clearing, several trees had been reduced to splinters, and small fires blazed in the undergrowth, throwing up clouds of smoke and ash as they greedily ate their way through the ample leaves and bushes and dead wood that blanketed the forest floor. Without a word, Serge and Amanda began stomping out the burning plants. The last thing any of them needed was to be trapped in the jungle with a potential forest fire all around them.
Three Jerkops – a middle-aged man, a young woman, and a young man with long black hair – lay strewn around the battlefield, as limp and lifeless as the dead leaves blowing across their corpses. Clenching his teeth to hold back the nausea building in his stomach, Kevin stepped forward to examine the bodies. The woman's broken body lay at the base of a tree with her spine bent backwards around the trunk. She had been decapitated cleanly, her head sliced off with near-surgical precision. The older man seemed to have been shot multiple times with a high-caliber rifle, for his chest armor and torso bore several gaping holes that were now exuding blood into the dark sticky pool beneath him. A ragged wound had been slashed across his face, but the cut itself looked strange. If anything, it looked like something had used a whip on him.
Releasing his chewed-up arm, Steve grabbed his walkie-talkie and clicked the transmitter.
"Josh," he coughed, sounding as if he were right on the verge of a panic attack. "Chupacabra Lead, Honey Badger Lead, come back. We've got three Jerkops down, possibly more. Over."
A cruel laugh sounded from the speaker, instantly confirming the Honey Badgers' worst fears.
"We know," the man replied, his voice distorted by the air filter of a combat mask. "Believe me, you little shits, we know. Thanks, by the way, for taking the bait."
Steve glanced up and mouthed loyalists to Kuri, who immediately whirled around and began scanning the tree line with Steve's P90. She'd taken the gun at her squad leader's insistence – there was no way he could possibly fire it with only one good arm. Amanda, Serge, and Kevin followed suit, while Ryan drew his pistol and Matt began sliding new shells into his shotgun.
"Look, I'll level with you," the merc continued. "We've got no idea where you are, and we're really not all that interested in you at the moment…not since your friends rabbited, that is. So here's the deal – you go find all your little rebel buddies and hop on back to CWCville, and we'll just take whatever's in that plane as our fee for letting you walk."
"Uh, no." Steve raised the walkie-talkie half an inch closer to his mouth. "Lies. If you don't know where we are, how'd you get that radio?"
"A friend dropped it off for us," chuckled the loyalist. "The same friend who killed those three."
Kevin believed Steve could have very well crushed the receiver in his hand at that moment.
"Tell me," the blond Jerkop replied, wincing in pain and anger as his wounded arm shifted again. "Does the Combo really let you all fuck Bubbles at once, or is it more of a conga line?"
"I could ask the same thing about you little fuckers and Mary Lee Walsh. Anyway, we're done here. See you at the crash site, pussy."
"FUCK! Son of a BITCH!" shouted Steve, and hurled the walkie-talkie away. Matt quickly dashed over to retrieve it. "Everybody stand down. They're not here. They were never here."
"Then who took out these guys?" asked Kuri, bending down to examine the last Jerkop's corpse.
"I should've guessed." Steve pulled a clump of green Sonee fur from his mauled sweater sleeve and flicked it away in disgust. "So all those babies…oh, that's just fucking perfect."
"Arceus…" swore Matt as he handed the radio back to the squad leader. "So what do we do?"
"GAAAAAHHHH!" yelled Kuri, and leapt backward as the young man sat bolt upright beneath her, his eyes wide with fear and his long black hair riddled with dirt and bits of twigs.
"What the-" Steve automatically reached for his revolver, then stopped himself. "Holy shit."
"Not…dead…yet, honey," coughed the Jerkop, and pushed himself up onto his knees. Blood ran down his face from a cut just above his eye, and the front of his shirt was speckled with red droplets. His mouth was bleeding, too. It looked like he'd been repeatedly struck in the face by something hard and blunt.
"Easy, easy. Stay there. You're okay," Kuri assured the Chupacabra operative as she knelt beside him and checked him over for major injuries. "You're okay. What's your name?"
"Yeah…it's Adrean. Ow!" The man flinched as Kuri peeled back part of his shirt to reveal a deep bruise on the ribs. "Ow! Watch it!"
"Sorry…"
"What happened to your squad, Adrean?" asked Steve calmly, and pointed to the two dead Jerkops. "You knew these two, right? Where's Josh and the others?"
Adrean turned, and noticed his fallen squadmates for what must have been the first time. His eyes grew wide with shock, and Kevin could almost feel the surge of sadness and anger sweeping through the man's heart as he realized what had happened. There were no words to describe that hollow feeling of disbelief and pain…the same thing he himself had felt when he'd watched Jake die in the sewers back in 2004. Steve must have known it too, for he allowed Adrean half a minute to grieve before resuming the interrogation.
"I'm sorry," the squad leader said kindly, and sat down next to Kuri. "Who were they?"
"Joel and Cally," replied the Jerkop tearfully. "Our medic and our sniper."
"What happened?"
"We were following you…we heard someone firing off a shotgun and-"
"That was me," interrupted Matt. "We found a chu nest and a feral Rosechu with some midget larvae. Show him, Kevin."
Kevin popped open his canteen and withdrew the baby Electric Hedgehog Pokémon from inside. It immediately screamed "SONEE!" and loosed off a Spark into his hand, but the Jerkop ignored it and stuffed the tiny chu back into its plastic prison.
Adrean spat out a mouthful of blood, sniffed, and rose to his feet, assisted by Kuri. "Good God, why didn't you just kill that little freak?"
"Evidence." Ryan pointed at the canteen. "Those little freaks are physically mature. If it's a new breed, and they've spread outside the city…you've got to tell Walsh. Whatever the case, this is gonna make for one hell of a broadcast once we get back."
"We've got to get out of here first," Adrean corrected him, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
"No. First we've got to get to the crash site," Steve insisted. "Where are Los Chupacabras?"
"How should I know?" growled Adrean. "For all I know, they're probably dead too. And yeah, if you think the Homo Bear's gonna let those loyalist assholes get to the plane first…" He staggered over to a bush and withdrew a wooden baseball bat stained with what must have been several months' worth of chu blood. "…prepare to be sorely disappointed."
Steve stepped back and paced around the clearing, holding his bloody arm. Kevin could tell exactly what he was thinking. There were only two choices now: either give up the mission and start looking for Joshua Martinez's squad, or continue on to the crash site and hope Los Chupacabras could fend for themselves against whatever had slaughtered their operatives. And really, there was only one call that the squad leader could possibly make in a situation like this.
"Right," growled Steve after another ten seconds of weighing the odds. "We'll keep moving. Kuri, how's our GPS look?"
Kuri glanced skyward and raised her arm. "Aldo!"
"KAW!" The Murkrow dove through the treetops and spread his wings, fluttering down to the offered perch. He promptly raised his head and pointed southeast, then clicked his bill once.
"We're close." Steve smiled, stood up, and reached for his revolver. "Adrean, looks like you're with us until we find your squad. Now come on. Let's get out of this damned jungle."
West CWCville, Get-Tar district, apartment block Dorazio
SUZI toddled into the apartment without a care in the world, her green eye-screens flickering with static as she made her way over the fire escape and through the open maintenance window. She hadn't even needed to use her repulsor jets to get in. Zoey and Allie had told her to be mindful of security, but judging by the two incredibly lazy EHPF guards she'd winked at down in the lobby, the chus didn't consider Dorazio to be a particularly at-risk locale. She'd hacked into the building's mainframe wirelessly in less than a second, and quickly downloaded all the floor plans and schematics she'd need to complete her mission. According to a few manifest files she'd discovered, the building housed about forty to fifty Electric Hedgehog Pokémon families, as well as a dozen or so unfortunate humans who had voluntarily agreed to participate in CWCville's Nanny Program in order to cover part of their ludicrously high rent.
Well, all that was about to change.
SUZI blinked, shifting her eyes back to the deep blood red of her combat/surveillance mode. Through her infrared vision, she quickly picked out a slew of targets, both large and small, around the apartment, and automatically bookmarked them for later. Once the scan was complete, she turned and headed right for what looked like the best prospect to start some mayhem…that was, the one apartment where her sensors had picked up the greatest number of tiny heat blobs. Her owners' plans all revolved around larvae – taking them out loudly and messily would result in a ripple effect, spreading chaos quickly, efficiently, and…
CRACK! POP! A shower of sparks burst from the LIESA unit's left ear as a fuse burst in her head. For a few seconds, all she could think of was strawberry ice cream. Then her secondary protocols kicked in, and the delicious images vanished without a trace.
"DING DONG!" SUZI yelled, even though she had already prepared a special sound clip of a doorbell just for that purpose. When no one answered the door, she waddled over and pounded her armstubs against it, leaving a dozen little dents in the wood. Still no reply. Cycling through her options, SUZI scanned the apartment again…both stories, this time. Upstairs, two large heat blobs seemed to be hovering above the floor and slamming together again and again. All of the smaller blobs were downstairs, and most of them were clustered in what she assumed was supposed to be the living room. Chu architecture was notoriously misleading.
Frustrated and impatient, SUZI found herself wishing for a plasma cutter instead of her stub-blade. She couldn't just blast her way in – Zoey had insisted on stealth for this mission.
The answer to her dilemma came in the form of a small foot-and-a-half-tall hinged opening and knob in the middle of the door, much like a doggy door or a cat flap. It didn't take a genius to determine what was meant for. Larval access doors, or "baby knobs" as they were collectively known, were a common installment meant to be used by Sonees and Roseys, all of whom were unable to grasp regular doorknobs and too short and weak to open full-sized doors.
In short, it was the perfect way in for something as tiny as a LIESA unit, too.
SUZI ripped the smaller door right off its hinges and waddled into the apartment, humming the theme from Robocop to herself as she approached the highest concentration of heat signatures. Just before entering the living room, she remembered to switch her eye-screens back to the disguised green color with reptilian pupils. She didn't want to blow her cover too early, after all.
The living room was, for lack of a better term, infested with homebred Roseys. Tiny sleeping bags, as big as oven mitts, lay scattered around the floor in front of a TV playing Mary Poppins, while the little chus wandered around from place to place, laughing, squealing, giggling, playing patty-cake, playing around with an Easy-Bake Oven and other toys, hugging each other, and babbling about the most sickeningly "girly" things that actual little girls would never say.
"Tee hee! I wuv sweepovewrs!" stated a Rosey, hopping up and down with joy. "YAY!"
"Do I wook pwetty enough fow da Sonees ta wuv me?" asked another, concerned.
"Hee hee hee!" a third one giggled, while trying to stuff what looked like a cupcake into the little toy oven. "Tee hee! Cooking's fun! Wosechus cook wots of tings fow dere hubby-bowts!"
"My mommy says I'm gonna be da best Wosechu evuh wen I find a Sonee ta be my sweetbowt!"
"We'we awl gonna be da best, wike no wun evuh was! YAY!" another Rosey announced.
"Wat awe you doing?" asked SUZI in perfect twee-speak as she waved and smiled to the baby chus. At the sight of this new playmate, the group of Roseys let out an eerily collective "YAY!" and immediately stopped what they were doing, then waddled over to greet her.
"We'we havin a sweepovewr!" exclaimed the foremost one. "I'm Susie Wosey an it's my biwfday! Did you bwing me a pwesent? Whewe's my pwesent? I wanna pwesent!"
"Uhhhh…" SUZI glanced around the room in confusion, then waddled over to a random My Little Pony toy, picked it up, and dragged it over to the Rosey. "Hewe you go! Happy biwfday!"
"YAY! I wuv pwesents!" the little chu squealed in delight, and hugged her. "You can be my best fwiend now! Wanna go spy on da Sonees an give dem da Fuzzy-Wuzzies?" She smiled knowingly. "Woseys awe 'sposed ta make da fiwst move in da wee-lay-shun-ship, so dat da Sonees don't get awl stwessed owt! Den dey can be owr Sweetheawts fwom da Gwownd-Up!"
SUZI smiled and nodded, even though her built-in translator was nearly melting from the vicious barrage of twee-speak. "Dat sownds fun! YAY!"
"YAY!" echoed the two dozen other Roseys, and began making their way out of the living room and into the hallway. SUZI was about to join in when Susie and one of her friends stopped her.
"You can't find a Sweetheawt yet," cautioned the horrid mock-baby, and wiggled her armstub in a "no-no" gesture. "We gotta give you a makeovewr an den you'll wook pwetty fow da Sonees!"
"Ima pwetty Wosey awweady!" replied SUZI in irritation. These Roseys were keeping her from her mission! They had to be removed, or else her owners would be compromised…or something like that. She didn't remember. "Wet me go! I wanna find a sweetbowt ta take care of an wuv!"
Susie stomped her little foot, annoyed and stressed that SUZI wasn't doing exactly what she said. It was her birthday, and since she was such a special Rosey, she deserved to have everything she wanted! And this new Rosey needed a makeover! Why was she giving her so much stress?
"I WANNA GIVE YOU DA MAKEOVEWR!" she screamed. "YOU WET ME MAKE YOU A PWETTY WOSEY WIKE ME OW I'M TEWWING MOMMY! STAWP STWESSING ME!"
"I don't wanna wook wike you," replied SUZI smugly, turning the Rosey's own outburst and self-absorbed attitude against her. "You'we an ugwy Wosey! She's a pwettier Wosey den you!" She pointed to Susie's friend and smiled. "You'we a pwetty Wosey! I wike you mowe den Susie!"
"Tank you!" cried the Rosey, and curtsied as best she could with her stubby arms and feet.
Susie's harelip mouth dropped open, and she clapped her armstubs over her ears. "STAWP IT STAWP IT STAWP IT! I'm da BIWFDAY WOSEY! I'm mowe pwettiewr den Gina Wosey!"
"No, I am!" yelled the second Rosey. Unnoticed by either one of them, SUZI had grabbed the Easy-Bake Oven and was dragging it noisily across the floor toward the bickering Roseys.
"You'we a diwty wying twoll!" bawled Susie. "WAAAHHH! MOMMY!"
"WAAAAAAHHHHH!" answered Gina.
"Wanna make sum cookees?" SUZI popped the oven door open with one armstub, revealing a mess of sticky half-melted goo that had once been a plastic cupcake. It was more than obvious that the Roseys had tried to bake the toy…with horrible results. Surreptitiously extending her blade from the other armstub, she drove it into the battery and sent an amplified charge through the toy's heating element, quickly increasing the interior temperature to a more suitable level.
"YAY! Cookees!" The two homebreds immediately stopped crying and waddled toward the oven, eager to prove their skill in the kitchen. After all, Rosechus always cooked lots of tasty things for their sweethearts, and when they grew up, they couldn't wait to bake all sorts of-
CRACK! POP! Another malfunction surged through SUZI's systems, automatically reverting the combat drone right into her preset Extermination mode. Before Gina knew what had happened, SUZI's hydraulic armstub had lashed out and snared her by her sensitive belly fur, wrenching the fat little Rosey off her stumpfeet and into the air.
"YAY-EEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!" shrieked Gina in absolute agony as SUZI whirled her around and squished her plump body right into the Easy-Bake Oven, breaking her spine in the process. The door slammed shut, trapping the dying baby chu in an excruciating tomb of melting plastic and metal. Susie screamed in terror and waddled away from the vicious LIESA unit, but only managed to get a few stub-steps into the hall before SUZI switched out her stub-blade for the dual machine guns and took aim. The "birthday Rosey" never stood a chance.
CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK
"AAAAAAAUUGGGHHH! WAAAAAAHHHHHH!" Susie wailed and toppled forward as her stumpfeet vanished beneath her, reduced to scraps of meat and bone shards by the barrage of miniaturized lead. SUZI speed-waddled up to her victim and stared down blankly, scanning the Rosey to see if she counted as a potential obstacle to the mission anymore. She didn't.
Leaving the legless Susie to crawl and flail around while Gina's body slowly caramelized into a bubbling, greasy, sweet-smelling blob of meat inside of the oven, the robotic Rosey activated her skirt repulsors and jetted over to the room where all of the tiny heat blobs had congregated. This time, there was no need to make a subtle entrance. She had them all where she wanted them.
"DEAD OR AWI…uh…DEAD OR DEAD, YOU'WE COMING WIF MEEEEE!" she roared, and burst through the larval-sized door with her machine guns and flamethrower drawn and loaded.
"YAY!" an enormous crowd of homebred Sonees and Roseys cried simultaneously, and temporarily stopped giving each other little hugs and kisses and other Fuzzy-Wuzzies as SUZI ripped the door open, her eye-screens flashing between red and green. Due to the sudden malfunction of her processor, the robotic Rosey was trapped in what could only be described as the most passive-aggressive state imaginable, and whatever happened, it was definitely not going to go well for any baby Electric Hedgehog Pokémon involved in her incoming rampage.
"HI DERE!" she squealed, and waved. Her eye-screens flipped to red, and stayed that way. "I wanna hug yooOOooUU an YOU'WE AWL GONNA DIE! WETS PWAY TEWMINATOWR!"
Upstairs in the bedroom, the Sonichu and Rosechu continued their loud hanky-panky, oblivious to the sounds of gunfire, flesh ripping, and horrified screams coming from the floor below.
East of CWCville, mountain/jungle area
"That's it," Kuri confirmed as Serge lifted her down off the large boulder she'd been using as a lookout point. "There's a line of broken trees up the hillside and a smoke trail coming from down there." She stowed her binoculars and grinned with savage relief as the smell of burning fuel reached her nose. "I sent Aldo ahead to watch for loyalists. If he spots them, we'll know."
"Fantastic." Steve patted her on the shoulder with his good arm, then quickly resumed clutching his hurt one. "Fuck. Ow. Let's get down there fast – I've got dibs on any first aid kits we find."
"No argument here," said Amanda. "Yo, Anchorman, you stay in the middle with Steve. Don't want you gettin' shot up or anything if there's mercs here."
"For the last time, I'm not Ron Burgundy," grumbled Ryan, but complied nonetheless. "So this is…this isn't what you'd call a normal assignment, right?"
Steve made a sound halfway between a laugh and a pained shout. "Midget larvae, feral Rosechus, plane crashes, MIA squads, and mercs? Yeah, this is actually pretty standard fare compared to what we went through in the Warp."
In a flash of rustling pages, the radio announcer's notebook was in his hand. "Mind giving me a few good quotes about that for tomorrow's show? We've got a whole lot of people calling in and asking me what the hell happened with you guys. I mean, Jesus, you were in there four years."
As the group of Jerkops made their way down the hill toward the crash site, Kevin did his best to keep his mind focused on the task at hand. Given the fact that his squad leader and Ryan were locked in an interview/retelling of their sojourn in hell, this task was far more difficult than it normally should have been. Jolted by memories of that unforgettable day, his mind kept wandering back to the Graduon mystery…and even further, back through what seemed like a thousand years, all the way back to the time when he'd still been living with his family…when he'd just been so eager to get out of his hometown and make a name for himself in the world.
Kevin Shaw, Electric Hedgehog Pokémon Slayer, he thought to himself with a chuckle. Yeah…no. I don't think Dad would like that.
Come to think of it…what had happened to his parents and his brother and sister? It had nearly been a full decade since he'd left home, and Lucy must have grown into a young woman by now…probably the same exact age as he was due to the four years he'd lost in the Warp. And speaking of that…how old was he? He'd been eighteen in 1998, add six years to reach 2004, subtract the three that were suspended in the first time rift, add the four he missed…
After a few minutes of deductive reasoning and trying to figure out the various problems with time travel, Kevin simply gave up and silently decided that he was twenty-one years old, physically. It was far less stressful than another attempt at marrying logic to time travel. He might as well have asked himself how the Combo's eggs could have been sent back in time by the same rainbow that had spawned Sonichu and Rosechu. It just wasn't worth thinking about.
What was worth thinking about, on the other hand, was Mary Lee Walsh's role in the Dark Mirror incident. Al, Steve, and the rest of the Honey Badgers seemed content to silently blame her for the malfunction and for stealing four years of their lives…but then again, they couldn't hear Count Graduon's voice, either. It was all starting to come together now. For some reason unbeknownst to the Honey Badgers, the ancient spirit had either needed to get them out of the way…or perhaps the Warp was their intended destination after all. But why?
Dusk was approaching fast, and it was already hard enough to see things through the thick curtain of tree trunks, vines, and bushes. However, Kevin could just barely make out a large white and grey object, surrounded by flickering firelight, at the base of the hill. The trees around it had all been knocked down in a telltale line from where the plane had smashed into the canopy. Unbelievably, the cockpit and chassis still looked intact, but had taken some severe damage all the same. Survival of at least a few passengers wasn't out of the question. Kevin just hoped those survivors hadn't done anything stupid, like wandering away from the crash site.
"Right, hold up," ordered Steve as soon as the squad had reached the thirty yard perimeter around the downed airplane. They had darkness on their side, but even so, any sudden movement would give away their positions in a flash. Fortunately, the firelight was low on one side of the crash, giving them a window to infiltrate unseen. "Kuri, can you run recon?"
"I think so," whispered the Jerkop. She raised her P90 and screwed on its silencer, then took a few cautious steps down into the clearing. "Okay, everyone follow me."
Matt and Adrean complied, then Kevin and Ryan, then Steve, Sugar, and Amanda, and finally Serge. Taking care to make as little noise as possible, the operatives crept across the clearing step by uneasy step. Kevin followed Matt closely, his heartbeat quickening with every rustling sound from the trees overhead. Every distant shadow was a loyalist sharpshooter, and every half-hidden tree stump was an EHPF officer lying in wait. Kevin had no idea just how much of CWCville's military the Chaotic Combo and the city board of directors had sent to secure the crash site, but he had a feeling that he and the rest of the Honey Badgers were going to find out soon enough.
After what seemed like hours, the entire group had safely and silently assembled beside the wreck. Crawling on all fours with the P90 slung across her back, Kuri moved up toward the back of the chassis, beneath the patch of torn metal that had once been its left wing, and peeked around the corner before beckoning to her squadmates. What remained of the plane was little more than a midsection and cockpit. The tail was gone, leaving the contents of the chassis exposed like the mouth of a metal cave. It was anyone's guess as to what lay inside.
"Sugar," whispered Steve as he lifted her up to one of the plane's broken windows and gently dropped her inside. "Scout."
"Grr," replied the honey badger, and vanished into the darkness.
A minute of silence passed while the Jerkops and Ryan waited for Sugar's return. Then another, and another. After four minutes, Kevin was more than convinced that something had gone wrong. He glanced at Steve, who by now looked about ready to simply give up and cut their losses if Sugar didn't show up soon. The whole mission was just one giant montage of failure, that much was plain to see. They'd found two dead Chupacabras and lost the rest of Martinez's squad, an unknown number of loyalists were closing in with every passing minute, and anyway, the items and personnel they'd been sent to retrieve might not have even survived the crash.
To put it lightly, Kevin didn't have too many reasons to hope for a quick and peaceful resolution to this clusterfuck of an assignment.
"That's enough," muttered Steve at the five minute mark, and gave his revolver's barrel a vicious spin. "We're running out of time. Kuri, Kevin, Adrean, Matt, stack up and get ready to clear the wreck. Everyone else, watch the trees. Ryan, stay down."
The radio operator nodded and sat down with his back against the plane, clutching his pistol. Kevin obediently squeezed between Adrean and Kuri to create a makeshift breach line, lining up right on the edge of where the vehicle's midsection had been torn open. For good measure, Steve accepted one of Amanda's flashbang grenades and held it at the ready by the open window, in case there was anything inside that needed to be stunned and blinded.
"Ready," hissed Kuri as Matt took his place at the end of the line. She switched the P90 to full-auto, and Adrean followed suit with his MP5. Kevin felt his fingers tighten around the grip of his assault rifle. If anything hostile had managed to make it into the plane, it was about to come face to face with a wall of angry Jerkops and bullets.
Steve nodded. "Go!"
Kuri gritted her teeth, switched the P90's side-mounted flashlight on, and swung around the edge of the broken chassis. Keeping the submachine gun's stock against her shoulder just like Steve had taught her, she quickly swept the wreckage for targets, then stepped forward, into the plane.
Kevin followed her in. The plane's midsection looked like the aftermath of an in-flight bombing – chairs had been crushed, small fires blazed in the wreckage, and two men in 4-cent_garbage uniforms sat dead in their seats. Their spines had most likely broken on impact, and if that wasn't enough, the deep shrapnel wounds in their faces and chests would have finished the job. Kevin winced as he imagined what the crash must have been like for the plane's occupants. To have their wings torn away in the blink of an eye by Magi-Chan…they'd never stood a chance. But then again, no one stood a chance against the psychic Sonichu.
"Arceus," swore Adrean as he knelt beside a bloody footprint leading towards the plane's cockpit. "Look at this. Someone survived."
"Let's hope," replied Kuri with a grim smile, and turned to the window. "Steve, we're clear."
"Good. Check the rest, we'll set up here. Let me know if you find Sugar."
The Jerkops pressed on further into the plane as Steve, Ryan, and the other Honey Badgers began filing into the midsection to start making camp in the wreckage. Night had well and truly fallen, and it was more than obvious that no one would be leaving the jungle during the prime hunting hours for predatory Pokémon.
For now, all that the Honey Badgers could do was to find what they came for, and hope that the loyalists didn't find them first.
West CWCville, Get-Tar district, apartment block Dorazio
In just two minutes, half of the members of the slumber party had been eviscerated, burned, blown to pieces, or otherwise dispatched in excessively cruel ways by the malfunctioning LIESA unit. So far, SUZI was doing a fantastic job, even at thirty glitches per second.
"WAAAAAAHHHHHH!" wailed a Sonee, and immediately tripped. SUZI waddled over, grabbed him by his tiny tail, and quickly administered a flamethrower enema with her other armstub, incinerating the screaming chu from the inside out as fire exploded out of his mouth and nose and melted his hideous lizard eyes. Hurling the barbecued homebred through the wall and into the kitchen, she spun around like a top and gunned down another Sonee, shredding his misshapen head and one armstub into ribbons of flesh. One Rosey tried to heave her incredibly dense body up the stairs so she could tell the adult chus about the mean Decepticon Rosey who was shattering everyone's Heart Levels, but before she could even get to the second step, SUZI sliced through her back fat and ripped out her entire spine, leaving the larval Electric Hedgehog Pokémon completely unable to move. For good measure, the combat drone punched her victim in the face, driving her hydraulic stub right through the Rosey's skull and into the stairs.
Over on the other side of the room, a pair of homebreds – a Sonee and a Rosey - had managed to squeeze their fat bodies under the bed and were now hugging each other and crying in fear. The Sonee was slightly less scared, because he had his heartsweet there to protect him. As long as she was his GodJesus-chosen Sweetheart from the Ground-Up, there was no way any big mean people or dirty trolls could…
"NOOOOOO! HEWP MEEEEEEEEE!" the Rosey screamed as SUZI grabbed her by both stumpfeet and pulled, instantly dislocating the bones. "WAAAHH! WAAAAAAAAHHHH!"
POP! POP! CRUNCH! The Sonee whimpered and immediately shit himself in a stress overload as the Decepticon Rosey wrenched his heartsweet away from him and began ripping her limb from limb. His Heart Level had been shattered…but then again, he could always find another Rosey to build it back up again with Fuzzy-Wuzzies and hugs. The other Roseys would surely be impressed by his courage once he zapped to the extreme and defeated the evil Decepticon Rosey that was giving the true and honest copyrighted Sonees and Roseys so many owies and Prickly-Wicklies, and they would all bat their eyelashes at him and want to be his new sweetheart!
Finally, the screaming stopped. The Sonee sighed in relief, knowing that he had been smart and brave enough so that the mean Rosey couldn't possibly find him. He'd just rest a while, and then he'd go and use his spunk and speed to zap her and make her apologize and bring all the Roseys back so he could have more Fuzzy-Wuzzies. It was foolproof! He just needed some time to rest.
"Is da mean twoll gone?" asked SUZI, who by now had regained control of her systems and was crawling under the bed toward the Sonee. Naturally, the little chu didn't recognize her at all.
The homebred nodded. "I tink so. Can you hewp me zap dat mean Decepticon Wosey? We can be wike da Cayotic Combow! You'wl be Wosechu an I'm da twoo an owiginaw Sonichu!"
"Okay!" cried the LIESA unit, and scurried out from under the bed while the Sonee followed eagerly. She pointed to where Susie Rosey was crawling across the room. The legless Rosey had somehow managed to drag her mutilated body down the hall and through the door, and was now screaming at the top of her lungs for someone to help her. "Dere's da twoll! Wet's get her!"
"WAAAAHHHHH!" wailed Susie as she looked up and saw the Decepticon Rosey and a Sonee waddling toward her. Instantly, her face scrunched up into a hopeful smile. A Sonee! He would be sure to save her from the mean Decepticon Rosey, because all Sonees were so strong and brave and speedy and…
ZZZAP!
The Rosey toppled over backward as her sweetbolt let loose with his strongest Spark, zapping her right in the face and making her heady hurt. As Susie rolled around, crying in pain, the Sonee approached her and began kicking her helpless little body with his sneakers. It didn't hurt as much as the electric shock, but she didn't understand why he was giving her Prickly-Wicklies! Sonees were always supposed to save their heartsweets from danger…except when they were too stressed or it was too hard. Then it was up to the Roseys to save themselves and the Sonees.
"STAWP IT! WAAAAAAAAHHHH!" she bawled, thrashing around in misery as the baby chu continued weakly kicking her. SUZI giggled and quietly slit the Rosey's jugular with her stub-blade while the Sonee was busy declaring himself a "hewo", leaving her to bleed out and choke and cough to death on the floor. The last thing Susie saw before the life left her eyes was her sweetbolt's foot colliding with her ample belly and her own blood rushing out of her fat throat.
"YAY! You'we my hewo!" cooed SUZI, and hugged the Sonee joyfully. He squealed in happiness. Finally! He'd found his true and honest Sweetheart from the Ground-Up, just like his mommy and daddy kept telling him he would! Now there would never be any more stress again!
"YAY! I wuv you!" The Sonee leaned in for a kiss, shivering with glee. He'd beaten the mean Decepticon Rosey, which meant his heartsweet had to give him lots of Fuzzy-Wuzzies now!
"I wuv you too!" SUZI's eye-screens changed back to red, and in that single, horrifying moment, the Sonee realized he hadn't won the game at all. She'd cheated! She'd cheated and made the game too hard to win! Well, if the Decepticon Rosey apologized for cheating and conceded that he'd won after all, he'd give her back some of the Respect Points she'd lost after she…
SUZI pressed her face into his, smashing the Sonee's fat head against her cheekspot speakers. A loud click sounded through the apartment, followed by the loudest, most terrifying sound the homebred had ever heard in his short life. A high-pitched sonic screech reverberated through his skin, his flesh, his fatty organs, and into his very bones themselves, penetrating every single molecule of his body in a cacophonic barrage of auditory pain. His eardrums ruptured and popped like tiny balloons, and he felt his bowels release again of their own accord. This time, however, it wasn't because of the stress.
When Dr. Ivo Robotnik had invented the LIESA unit's first iteration, he had made sure that every single system and subsystem of the robotic Roseys could be used as a potential weapon, including their built-in speakers. During the testing phase, he'd discovered that not only could the legendary Brown Note be used against Sonees and Roseys to make them shit themselves on command, but another frequency existed on the opposite end of the spectrum…one that only worked at a very close range, and was much, much more effective than the Brown Note. It had originally been known as the SDS, or Sonic Disintegration Scream, but like most military technology, its users had granted it a different, much more effective nickname…the Death Note.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEE
SPLURCH! SPLAT! The Sonee literally melted in SUZI's armstubs as his molecular structure collapsed, reducing the little chu to a soupy red and pink pool of goo on the carpet. SUZI giggled and splashed around in the gore like a child playing in rain puddles, then waddled off elsewhere.
Up in the bedroom, the Sonichu and Rosechu lay side by side, relishing the afterglow from their long hanky-panky session. This peace was promptly shattered when a screaming Sonee exploded through the floorboards and pancaked on the ceiling, showering the couple with a deluge of syrupy blood and killing the hoglet instantly. SUZI poked her head through the hole, waved cheerfully, and ducked back down to find more prey while the lovehogs shrieked in terror.
East of CWCville, mountain/jungle area
Kevin kicked open the bathroom door, half-expecting to find a 4-cent_garbage employee dead on the toilet. Thankfully, the room was empty.
"Find anything?" Matt called from further up toward the cockpit. Kuri and Adrean were busying themselves with opening each overhead compartment in search of whatever precious payload the transport plane had been carrying. So far, they'd swept everything but the cockpit and the cargo bay, finding nothing but more dead personnel and members of the flight crew.
"Nope," responded Kevin, and slammed the door shut. "How's it look over there?"
"Lots of debris, lots of blood." The Jerkop winced and turned away from the corpse of a woman whose head had been crushed against the wall, most likely on impact. "That purple fucker."
"We'll get our chance soon enough," Kuri assured him as she and Adrean rejoined Kevin and Matt. "Anyway, the midsection's a no-go. We found clothes and stuff, but nothing too valuable. We'll take the cockpit – you guys head to the cargo bay."
"Right." Kevin gestured to his friend and headed for the ladder hatch opposite the cockpit. The plane had obviously been converted for transport rather than passenger comfort by 4-cent technicians, so much of the internal structure seemed to have simply been welded on. Case in point, the hatch. Part of the floor had been removed, and a ladder welded in its place so that personnel up top could reach the cargo bay. And seeing as how the entire bottom half of the chassis lay embedded in the ground, it was quite possible that some passengers had been able to survive down there.
Matt wrenched the steel trapdoor open and shone his flashlight into the darkness, revealing a cluttered mess of broken crates. The floor was blanketed with scattered ammunition, medical supplies, and other necessities that the beleaguered resistance sorely needed.
"Jackpot," the Jerkop said, and grinned at Kevin. "I'm gonna grab one of those kits for Steve."
"Okay. Watch yourself," cautioned Kevin. Circling around the hatch, he knelt down for a better vantage point and propped up the AK's barrel against the edge. Matt shouldered his shotgun, drew his Beretta, and stepped through the hatch and onto the ladder. Hand over hand, the Jerkop climbed down to the cargo bay, snatched up the nearest intact first aid kit, and heaved it back up to his squadmate. "Here! Get that over to Steve!"
Kevin shook his head. "He'll be fine for now. I'm not leaving you alone down there." Grabbing the ladder, he slid down and landed in the mess of supplies next to Matt. "Fuck. There's no way we're getting all of this back to Menchi-Nasu without a truck or something."
"Where were they even going to land this thing?" Matt asked as they made their way down the aisle of crates toward the back of the cargo bay. "Charlottesville-Albemarle, you think? Then they'd send this stuff through by smugglers. It makes sense."
"Yeah, I guess. That's not happening now, though." Kevin picked up a .50 caliber bullet and pocketed it. "Wow. No wonder Magi-Chan took this thing down. Look at all this stuff…there's gotta be…holy shit!" He pointed to what looked like a large open suitcase with what looked like a disassembled sniper rifle inside. "This stuff's serious. What the hell are they doing?"
"I don't know and I don't care," replied Matt. "All I know is that…wait, hold on. Get over here." He beckoned to Kevin, then raised his pistol and flashlight toward a pile of crates on the far end of the storage room. "PVCC! Rise, resist, remember Tennessee! Confirm!"
"4-cent, thank Arceus!" A tall, brown-haired man with glasses stood up from behind the crate barricade and waved to them, his voice heavy with relief. "You guys came from CWCville?"
"Yeah!" yelled Kevin, and placed his AK-47 back in its shoulder strap as he and Matt made their way down the aisle. "How many of you are there? Anyone hurt?"
"We all got pretty banged up on the way down," replied the 4-cent_garbage operative as two more people – an Indian man and a blond-haired woman – stood up beside him, cradling shotguns in their arms. "Good thing we had all this medical stuff, though. What the hell happened? I thought that fat fuck didn't have AA."
"You want to blame someone, blame Magi-Chan Sonichu," Matt growled as they reached the man. He smiled and offered his hand. "Matt Clark, Honey Badgers Jerkop squad."
"Nathan Shaw, 4-cent liaison for Dr. Robotnik. Call me Nate."
Kevin blinked, thunderstruck by the growing revelation that had just dawned on him. "What?"
"Yeah, I used to work for him as an engineer," Nate explained. "Then all this bullshit with CWCville and these…Electric Hedgehog Pokémon starts, my little brother disappears off the face of the earth, and the next thing I know, Ivo's become best friends with your little rebellion. After that Rosechu bitch put Jason in the hospital, Clyde and Jack decided to send me here with some goodies for you. There was a bit about a 'June Offensive' or something, but I wasn't really paying that much atten-" He stopped. "You okay, man? I didn't get your name."
A single tear rolled down Kevin's face as he stepped toward his older brother. "Kevin Shaw."
Silence fell, and lingered throughout the cargo bay for a good ten seconds. Neither of the two men, nor Matt, nor the other 4-cent personnel, could even speak. Nate's mouth dropped open with shock, and it looked as though he had just been told he'd won the lottery.
There was nothing more that needed to be said. Kevin and Nate lunged forward and hugged each other fiercely, tears spilling unchecked from their eyes. Matt simply stood back and watched with a shocked smile plastered across his face.
"What…the hell…happened to you?" gasped Nate as they broke apart. "First I get a call from Mom and Dad saying you were in some kind of terrorist attack, then you end up with Kel, then you've got a job as a mall cop…"
"Yeah, that's where we both started out," added Matt, and glanced at Kevin. "Let's just say it didn't end up too well for any of us."
"Yeah," agreed Kevin. "Look, I know you're probably wondering why I'm still alive…"
"Understatement of the century," replied Nate.
"…but we're kind of, well, to put it lightly, we're standing right in the middle of what's probably going to be the biggest clusterfuck we've ever seen." Kevin pointed to the two armed operatives. "And we need to get out of here, now. Who are you?"
"I'm Jessica," said the woman, "and this is Dev. We're their escort. Well, we were, anyway."
"We'll have to leave most of the heavy supplies," Dev explained. "Unless you brought a truck, there's no way we're getting all of this back to the city."
"Well, we can't leave it here for the loyalists, either," stated Matt bluntly. "So what do we do then, blow up the wreck?"
"And waste this much ammo?" Kevin gestured to the boxes behind him in disbelief. "Nate, you said something about a 'June Offensive'?"
Nate nodded. "Right. I think that was something relating to you guys. The PVCC, I mean."
The puzzle pieces fell together in Kevin's head in less than a second. "That's it. That's why they sent us all these weapons and supplies. An offensive. We're finally going to take the city."
"Well, we're not taking the city if we blow up this stash, and we're not taking the city if we give it to the mercs." Matt sat down and clasped his head in his hands. "Kevin…guys…look, I really don't see a way out of this that doesn't involve us not taking the city. Look, all I want to do is just get the fuck out of this jungle and…"
"Actually…" Kevin patted his friend on the shoulder. "You just answered your own question."
Matt looked up, puzzled. "What?"
Kevin grinned and tossed him an AA-12 automatic shotgun from the adjacent crate. "Option Two. We give it to the mercs."
East of CWCville, mountain/jungle area, plane crash site, passenger section
"Sugar," Steve gasped in a distant-sounding voice, leaning against the wall betwixt the plane's passenger section and its front half as his eye drifted up and down. "Sugar? Here, girl."
"No luck up in the cockpit," Kuri reported as she stepped through the doorway. "The pilot's dead and there weren't any…" The Jerkop froze in her tracks, her mouth hanging open with shock as soon as she laid eyes on her delirious squad leader. "Steve? Steve, what's wrong? Let me see."
"Bites," coughed Steve, and held up his bandaged arm. Dropping her P90, Kuri hurriedly sat beside him and began gently peeling the soaked cloth wrappings away, revealing…
"Oh, Arceus," she swore as a sixteen-inch patch of torn bloody flesh appeared beneath the bandages, dotted with tiny puncture wounds from where the tiny Sonees and Roseys had sunk their teeth into Steve's arm. The worst of these were about the size of a C-Quarter, and swollen up with yellow pus like infected boils or malevolent tumors. Kuri was more than willing to bet that the miniaturized ferals' bites were similar to those of Komodo dragons – their saliva held so many pathogens that anything they bit would become seriously diseased and weakened. In any case, the progression of Steve's injury had now made their situation much more dismal.
"Okay, you just stay here and rest," Kuri instructed, trying to keep her hands from trembling too much as she wrapped up the infected wound again. Steve mumbled something unintelligible and grasped her arm with weak fingers, but she gently pushed it away, grabbed the P90, and rose to her feet. "Wait here. I'm gonna see if Kevin and Matt found any medicine."
Fighting to keep his fevered eye open, Steve leaned back and listened to Kuri's footsteps fading away into the plane's interior. Serge and Amanda were back there with Adrean and Ryan, and Kevin and Matt were down in the cargo bay. That left him as the sole lookout, and he didn't even have Sugar to keep him company. The honey badger was nowhere to be found, that was certain.
Outside, the jungle might as well have been pitch black. The Jerkop could just barely see through the darkened trees with his one remaining eye, and even then, the parts he could make out were the ones illuminated by firelight from the burning plane wreckage.
Then came the shadows on the slope.
"Base Control, Predator Lead," snarled a filtered voice from up ahead. Steve had to strain his ears to decipher the words. "We've got a confirmed visual on the crash site. Snipers from Bravo team are in position along the ridge and we're heading in to check for live ones. Over."
Swimming in what seemed like the absolute worst drunken haze he'd ever endured, the Jerkop quietly reached for his belt and unbuckled the strap on his revolver's holster. There was no point in trying to yell for help. Not when they were so close.
"Yeah. Copy that, Base Control. Out," the loyalist finished. "Right. Silencers on. Stay on me."
Steve let himself go limp, closing his eye just enough so that he could see the mercenaries making their way into the plane. There were four of them, all heavily armed with SPAS-12 shotguns and SCAR-H assault rifles and wearing camouflaged riot gear. One appeared to be female. They hadn't noticed him yet, probably counting him among the dead for now.
"Damn," swore the merc closest to Steve as he prodded a 4-cent_garbage operative's lifeless corpse with the snout of his assault rifle. "Magi-Chan really did a number on these bastards."
"Wish he could've set it down somewhere closer," growled another loyalist. "This fuckin' jungle's giving me crotch rot. Another couple minutes and my dick's gonna fall off."
"For Arceus's sake, Lou, you can go take a piss once we're done with this room," sighed Predator Lead. "Just keep an eye on the door – if they're here, they're probably waiting for us."
Well, there goes the element of surprise, Steve thought to himself.
"Clear," Predator Lead announced after another fifteen seconds of searching. Steve hoped Kuri had one hell of a good explanation as to why finding a medical kit was taking so long. Not that it would matter if they shot him, though. At least his little ploy might still work.
"Holy shit!" exclaimed the female mercenary. Steve heard footsteps approaching his position quickly. "Is that…that's Howell, isn't it? Eye patch…yeah, that's it! We got Howell!"
"That's not Howell," spat Predator Lead. "Keep watching the doors. That's a Jerkop."
"What the fuck happened to his arm?" the woman asked, and bent down to examine it.
"We're just gonna have to make sure his friends get equal treatment," replied Predator Lead. "Bravo Lead, Charlie Lead, Zap Lead, we got Jerkops. Repeat, we have Jerkops in the pl-"
A loud clanging noise rang out from the floor next to Steve. He knew exactly what it was, but the female merc confirmed it a second later with a terrified scream. "GRENADE! GET DOWN-"
CRACK! The flashbang exploded in a piercing blast of white light, instantly blinding Steve and sending an immense stabbing pain through his left eye. Through the high-pitched whine that now filled his ears, he could barely hear what sounded like muffled drumbeats all around him. It could only mean one thing.
After what seemed like hours of waiting, the shaking stopped, and Steve's vision and hearing slowly returned. All but one of the loyalists lay dead on the floor in pools of blood, their bodies riddled with buckshot and SMG rounds. The survivor, Predator Lead, had taken a shotgun blast to the gut, and even with his riot gear, the wound was still mortal. Coughing up blood and cursing under his breath, the merc desperately pulled himself toward his SCAR-H.
Steve shot the loyalist through the head before he could reach his weapon. Considering how the Jerkop's vision had deteriorated over the last five minutes, it was a miracle he'd even been able to lift the Python, let alone aim and fire it. The skin on his infected arm felt like a whole army of ants was crawling around just below the surface. It was like poison ivy, but somehow worse.
"Sugar…" the Jerkop coughed as he blacked out. "Sugar…"
West CWCville, Get-Tar district, apartment block Dorazio, security office
"Masks on!" instructed Zoey as she tore the pin off a tear gas grenade and tossed it around the corner, then reached for her gas mask. "Grenade out!"
Allie only managed to pull a gas mask over her mouth and nose before the apartment hallway filled with white, billowing smoke. The two Jerkops waited a few seconds for the gas to fill up the corridor, then lunged out from behind cover and crept forward, holding their weapons at the ready. Around them, the cries of panicked chu and human families fleeing for safety filled Dorazio like the screams of the damned. A group of shadowy figures burst out of an apartment door up ahead, and Allie instinctively took aim with Trogdor, ready to fry them into oblivion.
"Hold fire! Hold fire!" Zoey held up a fist as a human family – a husband, wife, and two kids - appeared from the smoke, coughing and crying as tear gas filled their lungs. "Are you okay?"
The man nodded, staring at her through watery, bloodshot eyes. "What's go-cough-going on?"
"Mandatory evacuation, sir," replied the Jerkop, and pointed to the nearest fire escape. "Get inside the donut shop and keep your heads down. There's gonna be a lot of shooting tonight."
"Arceus bless you," coughed the woman, and hurried after her husband and children to safety.
Allie silently reminded herself once again that Dorazio was a shared apartment. This wasn't like the Soup Hotel purge, where they had free reign to cause as much chaos as possible. That may have been Al's long-term goal for their current assignment, but until all the human civilians were clear, she and Zoey had to be careful. She only hoped SUZI was sticking to her programming and not simply killing everything in sight…
CRASH! Zoey and Allie whirled around as the LIESA unit broke through the ceiling like a foot-and-a-half-tall steel meteor, piledriving an entire homebred Rosey into the floor and squishing the chu larva into pulp beneath her hydraulic stumpfeet as it let out a piercing squeal and died. Humming an adorable little tune that couldn't have been more inappropriate for her current situation, SUZI picked herself up off the gore-spattered floor and waddled over to the Jerkops.
"There you are!" exclaimed Zoey, and knelt beside her. "Where the hell have you been?"
"I…uh…I was…" SUZI glanced left and right confusedly, then reached behind her back. "I CAUGHT A HAMSTER!" Grinning, she withdrew a severed Sonee head, its huge lizard eyes wide open and staring up in horror at the smoky hallway. "I named him Terry McFluffers!"
"Right. Carry on." Zoey took a few steps backward, away from the gruesome scene. Allie merely smiled and gave the robotic Rosey a pat on the head.
BOOM! The Jerkops looked up in surprise as a thunderous blast echoed through the apartment block. One of the fires either SUZI or Allie had started had most likely found its way to a gas pipe or propane tank. If the PVCC didn't already know about their little unofficial operation, they certainly would now.
"Okay, that's just the kind of thing we needed," said Zoey as she and Allie continued down the hallway. SUZI toddled after them, dragging the bloody Sonee head behind her. "Walsh'll probably send a few squads to check it out – we'll rendezvous with them once the EHPF arr-"
"WAAAAAAHHHHHH! WAAAAAAHHHHHH!"
"That's more like it!" The Jerkop grinned sadistically and raised her AK-47 as a pair of adult chus burst through a door up ahead and ran, leaving their children behind to fend for themselves. Zoey fired off two bursts, one for each Electric Hedgehog Pokémon, and was rewarded with two agonized screams. The stricken Rosechu collapsed to the floor, writhing and gasping as she bled out in a matter of seconds, while the Sonichu managed to drag himself a few yards down the hall before he too joined his heartsweet in death. Zoey and Allie high-fived each other, and advanced.
"MOMMMMMMYYYYYY!" cried a pair of Roseys as they waddled out into the open, crying from the tear gas. Drawing her pistol, Allie took one down straight away with an excellent torso shot, fatally piercing its lungs and guts. Zoey ran forward and killed the other by smashing the stock of her assault rifle into the homebred's skull three times, cracking it like an eggshell.
"Look what I found!" Allie laughed cruelly as she lunged through the doorway and snatched up a little Sonee by its ears. The baby chu only had time to let out a piercing "WAAAAAHHHHH!" before the Jerkop forced the end of Trogdor's toothy mouth into its own and fired. The resulting explosion of burning flesh and fire messily ripped the infant apart, painting the doorway with a smoking slew of viscera and stub-limbs. Allie made sure to wipe off the muzzle when it cooled.
On the other side of the hall, SUZI had found an apartment that had fortunately been abandoned by its adult tenants. The familiar crack-crack-crack of her dual machine guns echoed out the door and through the corridor, drowning out the shrill death screams of the Sonees and Roseys hiding inside. Glancing over her shoulder, Zoey saw a burning Sonee waddle out of the chaos, screaming and flailing around with its armstubs until SUZI reappeared with an entire table leg and swung it like a baseball bat, crushing the larva's head into a bloody, blazing mush.
Too easy, she thought, kicking open the next door and gunning down a panicked Sonichu who was holding a Sonee in his arms. The baby shrieked in terror, but was quickly silenced when the Jerkop leapt into the apartment and snatched it by its stubby tail. Wailing and crying, the Sonee attempted to shock her, but before it could, Zoey grabbed both of its stumpfeet and pulled apart, as if tearing a sheet of paper. With a gurgling scream, the little chu was ripped in half from its crotch to its neck, its organs and intestines spilling out of the rift between its legs. Zoey dropped the spasming yellow fuzzball in disgust and set out to find the rest of the family. The muffled sobs and frightened crying from the bedroom made that particular task ridiculously easy.
"Hey! Allie!" called the Jerkop, and waved to her squadmate, who was busy setting a Rosey's skirt on fire and watching it hop around and squeal in pain. "Got an infested room here!"
Allie drew her knife and plunged it into the burning larva's throat, killing it instantly. "Copy that! How do you want 'em?"
"Extra crispy, please," Zoey replied with a cruel smile as Allie stepped past her, kicked the bedroom door down, and unleashed a blast of burning fuel at the occupants. The Rosechu flung up her arms to shield herself, but to no avail. The flames enveloped her in less than a second, setting her fur and dress on fire as the Sonee and Rosey beside her tumbled off the bed and waddled for the closet. Zoey let them get about three feet away from their dying mother before stepping in, ripping the Rosey's skirt off, and punting both larvae through the window, where they fell shrieking to their deaths on the hard concrete below.
"That'll wake 'em up," she chuckled, and wiped her bloody boots on the carpet.
East of CWCville, mountain/jungle area, plane crash site, cargo bay
"Holy fuck," gasped Matt as he eased Steve's limp body down the ladder and into the cargo bay. "He's burning up. What the hell did those little fuckers do to him?"
"Sepsis," Nate Shaw answered in a worried voice. "I don't know much about medicine, but they gave us a few classes on basic first aid back in Tennessee. He needs some serious antibiotics, and fast." He glanced up at the stunned radioman. "Ryan, give me a hand here."
As Ryan and Nate placed the unconscious Jerkop on the cold metal floor and began unwrapping the pus-soaked bandages to treat his infected wound, Kevin, Matt, Amanda, Serge, Adrean, Dev, and Jessica quickly assembled around Kuri. With Steve out of the picture for now, she was in charge of the Honey Badgers. To say she was nervous would have been a huge understatement.
"Okay," Kuri began shakily. "Okay. I'm gonna make this short. They're all around us, Steve's down, and we've got three minutes at best before this plane turns into the Alamo. Any ideas?"
Kevin raised his hand and gestured to the immense stockpile of weaponry around them. "Last stand. We all grab as much ammo as possible and kill everything that tries to get inside."
Matt nodded and patted his new AA-12. "He's right. We can't make a break for it now – they'll probably have snipers on the ridge. So we'll fend off the first wave, set up a few Barretts, do a little counter-sniping, and there you go. We save the shipment and kill off enough mercs to…"
"Yeah. Great idea," interrupted Kuri. "Except for the fact that those guys probably have stronger radios than us. We start gaining the upper hand, and they'll call for backup. The last thing we want out here is some transport chopper coming in and…" Her eyes snapped open all the way as an idea formed in her head like a colossal bolt of lightning. A wicked grin spread across her face, and was mirrored by Kevin and Matt. "Brilliant. Fucking brilliant."
"Hold on." Amanda scratched her head. "We're bettin' all of this on a chopper? Did everyone just forget that these guys have the goddamn Chaotic Combo for backup?"
"We do enough damage and injure enough mercs, they might send an extraction team before that happens." Matt smiled. "So don't kill all of them. Go for leg and shoulder shots, if you can."
"No guarantees," said Amanda, and grabbed up a six-barreled MGL grenade launcher to replace her old single-shot one. "Yo, Serge, you find anything good in there?"
"Serge found new Baba Yaga," grunted the huge Russian man as he heaved an entire M134 minigun out of a smashed weapon crate, along with a tripod. He tested the massive weapon's weight briefly, judging whether he'd be able to fire it while standing like Jesse Ventura in Predator, then shrugged and tucked the tripod under his arm just in case. "Is good."
"Right. Be careful where you point that thing," cautioned Dev. "We brought a few of those in for you guys to mount on your trucks. The ammo's over there."
"Right! Here's how we'll do this," announced Kuri. "Kevin and Matt, you cover the left side, Jessica and Dev, you take the right. Serge, set that thing up in the chassis to cover the rear. Amanda, take the cockpit. Adrean, you and I are gonna move around the plane and suppress anything we see out those windows."
"What about us?" asked Ryan as he poured a bottle of water over Steve's arm to clear out the infected pus. Nate inserted a needle into the bloody flesh and pressed down, sending some much-needed antibiotics into the Jerkop's bloodstream.
"Keep watching him," Kuri instructed. "If one of us runs out of ammo or gets hurt, you're our medics and our resupply team. In the meantime…just stay down here for now."
Nate nodded, but Kevin could have sworn he saw Ryan's jaw clench. The man was a hero to the PVCC and a known Sonee and Rosey killer – it was highly unlikely that he'd end up following an order to stay hidden when there was a potential news story in the making here.
"This isn't gonna be an easy fight," the Jerkop finished, and grabbed two extra magazines for her P90. "Let's just hope to Arceus that it works. I'll see you topside. Good lu-"
Kuri's speech was abruptly interrupted by the sudden, terrible rattle of distant gunfire, punctuated with crackling electrical discharges. Above the sunken cargo bay, beyond the fading wall of firelight from the burning wreckage, the first wave of mercenary soldiers and EHPF officers advanced in a circle toward the crash site, firing on the downed plane and closing off all remaining avenues of escape for the besieged Jerkops as they advanced.
Kevin automatically reached for yet another AK-47 magazine and clipped it onto his combat belt as his squadmates and comrades dashed for the ladder. He had a feeling he was going to need the extra ammo now more than ever…especially if the Honey Badgers intended to survive the night.
West CWCville, Get-Tar district, apartment block Dorazio
The fire alarm's shrill blare cut through the burning apartments at an earsplitting intensity, nearly drowning out the harsh reports of assault rifle fire from Zoey's AK-47 and the piteous screams of wounded and dying Sonichus, Rosechus, and their homebred spawn. Outside, a new set of loud sounds had joined the cacophony – the whining eeeeeeEEEEEEeeeeee of EHPF cruiser sirens.
Surprisingly, the Chaotic Combo and the city's board of directors hadn't deemed the assault on Dorazio enough of a priority to warrant attention from their private army of loyalist mercenaries. Either Magi-Chan hadn't taken the bait, or perhaps the hired guns were busy elsewhere. The last survivors of Dorazio, a pair of Sonees and a Rosechu, had barely managed to escape after Allie had nailed the Sonichu in the back of the head with two 9mm rounds and Zoey had bayonetted the other three babies – two Roseys and a Sonee – as they waddled away screaming. It was a perfect cherry on top of the death sundae the Jerkops had prepared for the city of CWCville.
Surprisingly, only two human casualties were reported, and both were nonlethal - the result of a panicked Thundershock from one of the EHPF officers surrounding the block. The very shaken father and his daughter were currently being treated for severe electrical burns by an on-site volunteer medical team. The hospitals themselves – the major ones like CWCville General, at least – had long ago been converted into chu-only establishments, given the species' innate aptitude for being a massive danger to themselves and those around them. Human citizens relied on these groups of vigilante doctors, surgeons, and nurses for free emergency treatment, though regular health care itself was totally restricted to Electric Hedgehog Pokémon and their babies.
Zoey was just impressed that SUZI's malfunction hadn't caused any civilian deaths whatsoever. Given that the Jerkops weren't even supposed to be wreaking havoc in the Get-Tar district, it was a small miracle they'd been able to clear out the building with minimal collateral damage. In any case, the game had now changed from slaughter to shootout, and sooner or later, she and Allie would have to deal with the incredibly likely possibility of an EHPF counterattack.
The high-pitched screech of a riot control megaphone activating split the air. Zoey sighed and rolled her eyes as she nodded to Allie and stepped toward the nearest fire escape. This was how the EHPF did everything…a long and tiresome debate, then zapping. Trying to reason with the chus was one thing…but negotiating with them…that was a whole different level of irritating.
"We…uh…we have y'all surrounded!" a Sonichu's nasal, bravado-laden voice echoed through the apartment. "Come out with your hands up and surrender all hostages! We're warning you!"
Zoey picked up a dead Rosey, drew her knife, and carved the words "YOU ARE ALL HOMOS" into its belly. Winking at Allie, she took a step forward and hurled the baby chu's corpse out over the sidewalk, where its skirtachute activated and allowed the improvised message to drift down into the city. There was a moment of silence, followed by a score of horrified gasps, angry yells, and bleeped-out curses from the Sonichus on the street below.
"I AM STRAIGHT! I WAS NEVER A HOMOSEXUAL!" screamed the negotiator. "THOSE ARE ALL FALSE RUMORS FROM THE GOD DANG TROLLS AND SUCH DANG MISLABELING PEOPLE! ALL OF THE SONICHUS AND ROSECHUS ARE STRAIGHT! I DO NOT CARE FOR YOUR COMMENTS OF MISLABELINGS!"
The Jerkops collapsed laughing, while SUZI wirelessly downloaded an MP3 file of "It's Okay To Be Gay" and began projecting it out into the city from her powerful cheekspot speakers. Allie could only imagine just how worked up the EHPF were getting…and frankly, she preferred it to be that way. It made the chus more apt to make mistakes, and considering that they had the two women outnumbered at least five to one, any additional advantages were good advantages.
"On the count of three, start shooting," Zoey chuckled, and ejected her half-spent magazine. Grabbing the curved object as it fell, she reached into her pocket and began sliding unfired AK-47 bullets in to replace the spent ones. Allie shouldered Trogdor and grabbed her Beretta, then did likewise and slid a fresh clip into the handle. "One."
"In the name of Mayor Christian Weston Chandler, the Mayor of CWCville, I demand you stop these BASELESS MISLIBEGATIONS and admit that you are WRONG, and we are STRAIGHT!"
"Two," continued Zoey, and stepped onto the balcony, clicking the AK's fire rate up to full auto.
"If you stop hurting the little babies, take back all your disgusting HOMO labelings, and confess in the sight of God and the Bear to your sins as dirty Jerkop TROLLS, we, uh, we won't zap you! You'll be given community service to make up for your crimes against the good, straight Electr-"
CRASH! BOOM!
"Thr-" began the Jerkop, but immediately stopped as a thunderous explosion and a screech of metal scraping on asphalt reached her ears, bringing with it an enormous plume of black oily smoke. Eager to see what had happened, Zoey and Allie rushed to the edge of the fire escape balcony and peered down toward the EHPF blockade in the street. Half of the cars had been smashed aside by what appeared to be an entire dump truck, which happened to also be on fire. Two EHPF officers had been set alight, their fur smoldering and blazing as their comrades tried unsuccessfully to extinguish the flames. Further back up the street, two pickup trucks with mounted machine guns screeched to a halt and disgorged their Jerkop occupants, who quickly set about raining a heavy hail of gunfire toward the panicked and surprised Sonichus.
Allie smiled in relief as she grabbed her monocular and zoomed in on the attacking operatives, noting the symbols on their badges and armbands. It was a comforting view, to say the least. If Walsh was taking this disruption serious enough to warrant dispatching both the Spikes of Blue and the Red Devils as response teams, then she and Zoey were definitely doing something right.
"Down! Down!" yelled Zoey, and vaulted over the balcony down to the lower level before Allie could say anything. Impressed by her squad leader's athleticism, the Jerkop chose the more conservative route and hurried down the fire escape after Zoey while gunshots and zaps filled the street below. They were only two floors up, and it wasn't a long way down at all.
The Honey Badgers slid down the last ladder to the street one by one and landed right in the middle of the melee. Panic and chaos saturated the night air as the attacking Jerkops hemmed in their prey in a classic pincer move, suppressing the majority of the EHPF Sonichus with a wall of flying bullets. Zoey slid into cover behind the apartment's dumpster, pressed her AK-47 to her shoulder, and added the assault rifle's harsh voice to the chorus. Allie, lacking the weapon range or skill to take down any officers from such a distance, contented herself with performing a fiery extermination on a pack of feral Sonees and Roseys who had been trapped inside the dumpster during their never-ending quest for food and candy. The phrase "fish in a barrel" came to mind.
As Allie gleefully barbecued the baby chus alive, Zoey glanced up to see SUZI paraskirting down to join them. She loosed off a quick burst of suppression fire from her AK-47, then held out an arm and caught the descending LIESA unit. SUZI's eye-screens instantly changed to their happy blue color as she giggled and clapped her armstubs together.
"Well, looks like you had fun tonight," commented the Jerkop, and placed her on the ground. She noticed that SUZI was no longer carrying the severed Sonee head. "Where's Terry McFluffers?"
The robotic Rosey sniffled, and a digital tear formed in her left eye-screen. "He moved to Kyrgyzstan and got a job as a panda!" She looked up eagerly at Zoey. "Can I be a panda?"
"No," Zoey responded flatly, and switched back to semi-auto to take a potshot at an exposed chu.
"Then can I be a sugar glider?" persisted SUZI.
"No!"
"How 'bout an anteater?"
"Fine!" Zoey fired twice, sending the Sonichu running for cover. "Sure! Go nuts! Now shut up!"
"YAAAAAAAAY!" shrieked the combat drone in immense joy, and promptly ran face-first into the nearest wall and toppled over onto her back with a loud clang.
Allie dropped down from the top of the dumpster, leaving the few surviving ferals to scream and burn to death inside their metal coffin. "Have I ever mentioned just how much I love this job?"
"Save it for the ride home," instructed Zoey. She shouldered the AK and led her squadmate and a very dizzy SUZI out into the open from behind their makeshift barricade. "I think that's enough of a distraction for Al to do…whatever." She tossed over her radio. "Call him up and give him the good news. I think I speak for both of us when I say I want some fucking answers."
Allie obediently clicked on the walkie-talkie and adjusted it to the Honey Badgers' squad frequency. "Honey Badger Command, it's us. Al, come back, over."
"Copy that, ladies," Al replied in an immensely satisfied voice. In the background, Allie could hear what sounded like muffled yells, as well as a loud thumping, as if a large group of people was banging on a barricaded door. "Don't worry. We got what we came here for."
"And…what was that, exactly?" Zoey asked loudly as the pair of them made their way back to the parked truck by the donut shop, narrowly avoiding being spotted by Ken Miller of the Red Devils. "I think it's about time you told us what exactly you've been doing while we were…"
"For Arceus's sake, stop it, Ledger!" a familiar voice shouted. "You know what's gonna happen if you send him in against…oh, hell, for all we know, you just killed our most valuable asset…"
"Listen, Evan," Al replied calmly, "I don't like the way this is going any more than you do, but for all I know, six of my Jerkops and an entire Wilderness squad are fighting for their lives out there to bring back something I don't even know about." He paused. "And on the contrary, I haven't killed our most valuable asset at all. I simply asked him to help save MY most valuable assets. And if you ask me…he seemed rather eager to see his soon-to-be brother-in-law again."
East of CWCville, mountain/jungle area, plane crash site
"Down! Get down!" yelled Matt as he leapt away from the window and pulled Kevin out of the way, just before a burst of assault rifle fire tore across the hull of the plane and ricocheted, nearly killing Jessica over on the other side. "Put another one out there on the treeline!"
Kevin was beginning to feel rather glad that he'd added an underslung grenade launcher to his AK-47 down in the cargo bay. With so many trees and the darkened jungle adding to the already poor visibility around the plane, the explosive shells were really the only way he could hit anything through all the chaos. Bracing the assault rifle against his shoulder, he held out the weapon towards Matt, who quickly pushed a fresh 40mm grenade down into the launcher's smoking barrel. Kevin gritted his teeth as more SMG rounds and what felt like a shotgun blast ricocheted off their makeshift bunker. With so much fire coming in, it would be an absolute miracle if he managed to kill something.
"Cover!" he shouted. Matt jammed the AA-12's snout through the window and unloaded a thunderous triple burst of buckshot at a group of shadows in the trees. Taking advantage of the window, Kevin rose to his feet and clicked the launcher's trigger, sending the propelled explosive up in a shallow arc toward the advancing loyalists. He barely had time to confirm at least one direct hit before one of the merc's friends lobbed a flashbang at the shattered window. Fortunately for the Jerkops, it bounced off and exploded on the ground, inadvertently blinding some of the nearby attackers and giving Kevin and Matt enough of a break to reload.
"How's it going over here?" Kuri asked as she and Adrean slammed into the wall beside them, each selecting a window to suppress the loyalist soldiers from. Kevin nodded a brief hello, then sent a shotgun-wielding merc running for cover with a dual burst from his AK. On the edge of the line of sight, he could see two more dragging a wounded squadmate to safety.
"What the hell are you doing? Don't touch the walls!" Matt barely managed to yank both of the Jerkops away from the conductive metal. Two seconds later, a Thundershock seared across the window, inches away from electrocuting Kevin as he leapt back to safety. Thus far into the siege, the EHPF support units had been working in tandem with their loyalist comrades, shocking the plane at full blast to keep the Jerkops on edge while the significantly deadlier human mercenaries rained down a lead hailstorm upon the PVCC defenders.
Through the harsh orchestra of distant gunfire and muted explosions, Kevin could hear the rattling buzz of Serge's new Baba Yaga firing away at the merc squads assaulting the passenger segment. Though it had been an absolute nightmare for him to set up, the loyalists now found themselves faced with six spinning barrels of death and a seemingly never-ending barrage of anti-personnel rounds that Ryan and Nate were feeding to Serge through a hole in the cargo bay ceiling. They'd managed to link together several dozen feed belts into one long line, meaning that the huge Jerkop could keep firing to his heart's content…or until the ammo supply ran out.
They still hadn't heard any good news from below. Steve's vitals had stabilized, but he was still unconscious and pretty much useless in his recuperating state. Kevin only hoped they could hold out long enough for the squad leader to recover and find a way to get them the fuck out of the jungle in one piece. Except…given Steve's earlier attitude toward the mission, he wasn't sure if that was even a possibility now.
What was a possibility, however, was the inevitable death of everyone on the plane if they didn't fight off the loyalist assault. There was no sign that the mercs had called in a transport chopper for backup – if anything, their numbers appeared to be endless. Kevin had to hand it to the Chaotic Combo…they were quite a lot more effective than Chandler at cracking down on PVCC activity. But that didn't mean he was any less motivated to kill as many loyalists as possible.
"How in the holy mother of fuck did they even get out here?" yelled Amanda from up in the cockpit, and blasted a Sonichu into bloody oblivion with a pair of quick-fired grenades.
"Dropped off at the highway, probably!" answered Jessica. "Shit! Dev, get that one on the right!"
"My pleasure." Dev turned and nailed a merc on the arm, then put a prolonged burst into the man's head and neck to make sure he wouldn't rise again. "Confirmed kill! We're up to ten!"
Kevin raised his AK to fire again, but was interrupted by a pained roar from Serge. Kuri glanced over her shoulder. "Kevin! Adrean! Go check if he's…"
"On it!" shouted Adrean, and pulled Kevin after him. "Come on!"
Rounding the corner into the passenger section, both Jerkops were immediately greeted by a disheartening sight. Serge sat cowering behind Baba Yaga's makeshift emplacement, his beefy forearm dripping blood onto his pants from a deep bullet wound while a trio of mercenaries suppressed him with a concentrated volley of SMG fire.
In the split second before the loyalists noticed that their target had now gained two additional reinforcements, Kevin somehow, unbelievably, managed to drop one with a pure impulse shot as he squeezed the trigger reflexively, scoring a direct hit on the soldier's abdomen and painting the tree behind him with a splash of dark blood. The other two loyalists dropped to the ground in shock and returned fire, but not before Kevin and Adrean had successfully taken cover.
"Fucking amazing shot!" laughed the Chupacabra operative. "Were you even aiming for him?"
"I don't know and I don't care!" Kevin snatched his last 40mm grenade and slid it into the launcher. "Let's see them dodge one of these!"
"Fabulous, hon!" Adrean rose and began firing off shell after shell. "Let 'em have it!"
Grinning,Kevin squeezed the trigger and watched as the explosive round soared out of the plane and curved straight down toward the unsuspecting mercenaries. It was an absolutely perfect shot.
THWIP! BOOM!
"The fuck…" Kevin's mouth fell open as something slashed through the air like a spinning green discus, neatly slicing the airborne grenade in half and detonating it mere milliseconds before it would have annihilated the entrenched loyalists. A shadow dropped down in front of the fireball, landing on its feet and one hand as it eyed the Jerkops with a predatory glare. Adrean and Kevin raised their weapons, but the thing lashed out with what looked like a pair of tentacles and tore down the ceiling, cutting off the last avenue of escape the Jerkops could have used. Serge just managed to stumble away seconds before the falling hunk of metal would have crushed him.
"What the hell just happened?" yelled Kuri. "You guys okay? Anyone hurt?"
CRASH!
Kevin flung out an arm to steady himself as something huge and heavy rocked the plane around like a plastic toy. Amanda's horrified scream rang out from the front of the plane, and through the violent tremors, the Jerkop could see his squadmate leap out of the way before the thing peeled open the cockpit like tinfoil and leapt inside, along with two EHPF officers.
"Oh, son of a bitch," he breathed as he recognized the newcomer. Now it all made sense. The two dead Chupacabras, the ambush back in the deep jungle…
The mercs hadn't needed to call in a chopper. They'd been working with Wild Sonichu himself.
As Amanda struggled to reload her grenade launcher, Dev and Matt both instinctively hurled a stun grenade apiece at the three Electric Hedgehog Pokémon. Without even flinching, Wild raised his hands and fired out a pair of vines, grabbing the airborne explosives and hurling them out of the way before they could burst.
"None of that, Jerkops!" yelled the green Sonichu as he snapped into a ridiculous combat stance. "Zap them! Take these dirty trolls alive! We can let Bubbles have some fun with th-"
"INCOMING!" a merc's terrified scream echoed through the jungle. "SIR, WATCH YOUR-"
HRRRREEEEEEEEEE! The mechanical screech of a whining motor filled the plane as what looked like a massive whirling drill sliced up from the metal floor, right beneath where Wild was standing. As the Jerkops and the Sonichus watched in astonishment, another Electric Hedgehog Pokémon burst through the floor and tackled the Chaotic Combo member around the chest, sending both combatants crashing out of the side of the plane and into the burning wreckage.
Kuri lunged forward with her P90 raised. The foremost Sonichu reacted quickly, slamming her with a powerful kick that sent the Jerkop flying backward into the wall. Kevin was already back on his feet as the other chu unleashed a Thundershock into Dev and Jessica's bodies. Their rubber boots helped to dampen the voltage, but both 4-cent operatives were still floored by the sheer force of the electrical attack. Matt managed to fire off a single blast before the Sonichu that had crippled Kuri zapped his AA-12, forcing him to drop it.
"HEY!"
BOOM! The other Sonichu screamed in pain as Adrean unloaded a shell full of buckshot into its stomach. Wasting no time, the Jerkop hurled the shotgun at the wounded chu and sprinted toward him, drawing his baseball bat with his free hand. Kevin raised his AK-47, but the first EHPF officer was already turning around to save his comrade…
Three thunderous reports rang out as Steve appeared out of the ladder to the cargo bay and blasted the chu with what looked like a sleek-looking black revolver, scoring two hits in its chest and another in the crotch. Choking and gasping, the Sonichu sank to its knees just as Adrean slammed into his comrade and dealt it a vicious smash with his baseball bat. THUNK! The wounded EHPF officer's skull shattered beneath the first strike, spraying blood across the cockpit as the Jerkop rained down blow after blow on the weeping Electric Hedgehog Pokémon.
"Someone want to tell me what the hell just happened?" yelled Patrick Ryan as Matt helped him and Nate Shaw up the ladder. The radioman carried two handguns, his own and Steve's revolver.
"Later!" Kuri responded shakily, and rose to her feet, clutching her bruised ribs. "Why…why haven't they pressed the attack…holy shit! STEVE?"
"You mean, why aren't we all dead now?" Steve laughed as he snapped open the black revolver's cylinder and swapped out the spent bullets, then holstered the weapon and drew a brand new XM8 assault rifle from his shoulder strap. "No fucking clue. Let's go ask 'em."
"You'll never get your filthy drills on my sweetheart, you villainous troll!" yelled Wild Sonichu as he dragged himself to his feet, clutching at his bleeding shoulder to let his regenerative powers go to work. "GodJesus has brought Simonla Rosechu to me! Who are you to…"
"Who am I?" Simonchu spat, his eyes blazing with fury behind his red goggles. "I'm the reason you're even in Date Ed! Your little sweetheart's just a walking, talking copyright infringement! Without me, there wouldn't even be a Simonla! WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK I AM?!"
"You're…you're nothing!" Wild hurled a storm of Razor Leaves toward the brown Electric Hedgehog Pokémon, but Simonchu merely swept a wall of packed earth in front of the barrage. "Simonla is the true and original creation of my father, Mayor Christian Weston Chandler, and NOT the original property of the troll Evan Christopher GeeeeeEEEEAAAAAAGGGHHH!"
"Give me your wretched mate," growled Simonchu as Wild flew backward, his jaw gushing blood from where the jagged chunk of stone had smashed his face. "Give her to me and let the Jerkops go, and I'll let you live. Keep resisting, and…" Leaping forward, he activated his drill and drove it into the green Sonichu's hand, piercing glove and flesh in a whirling storm of metal.
"AAAAAAAGGGHHHHH! Die, you MONSTER!"
"Shut up." Simonchu conjured a jagged rock spear from the earth and hurled it toward an EHPF officer, impaling the chu through the gut and pinning it to a tree. Whirling around as Wild wept and clutched his bleeding hand, the armored Sonichu threw his arms out to the sides as the ground itself exploded beneath him, sending a vicious shockwave tearing through the Sonichus and mercenaries. Glancing toward the plane, he could see the PVCC operatives making their way out of their makeshift bunker and into the surrounding wreckage, firing in every direction as more loyalists closed in. Plunging back into the ground, Simonchu drilled his way over to the plane and burst forth, spinning around and around in midair like a dervish as he called up massive sheets of granite to shield the Jerkop defenders.
Two bullets pinged off Simonchu's armor as the mercenary snipers took aim from the ridge. Cursing under his breath, the Electric Hedgehog Pokémon leapt onto the plane and readied himself for a long-distance drill attack…but was immediately denied the opportunity when the frenzied Wild sent him flying backwards into a tree with a double Vine Whip.
"Ouch," he coughed, and spat out a mouthful of blood. Wild, however, was already airborne and heading right for him to deliver a crippling smash. Simonchu quickly burrowed down and came up with another rock sheet, just in time to knock the flying chu out of the air. Using the few precious seconds he had before Wild recovered, the PVCC auxiliary pounced on a nearby pair of loyalist mercenaries, annihilating both men with a savage double drill punch through their chests. Kevlar and riot gear may have worked against small-arms fire…but not against him.
"SIMONCHUUUUUUUUUU!" shrieked Wild in unmatched rage as he tore back through the jungle, leaping from tree to tree in a manner more befitting a spider monkey than a hedgehog. "I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL BREAK YOU DEAD, YOU TRAITOROUS TROLL!"
"And I'll show you," Simonchu snarled, raising his bloody drills, "the power of the human race."
"Thank fucking Arceus for Project Asperchu!" yelled Steve in utter gratitude as he leaned the XM8 out from behind the rock shield and gunned down a panicked Sonichu. "Ryan, you are gonna have one hell of a story when we get home!"
"Damn straight, Morrison!" Patrick Ryan shouted back. Out in the open and armed with akimbo handguns, the radioman was far more dangerous than Kevin would have expected. Already Ryan had scored a pair of merc kills, and judging by his aim, was well on the way to adding a Sonichu to the list.
His heart pounding with relief and exhilaration, Kevin spun from left to right, firing his AK at anything yellow that he could see, while Nate blasted away at the distant merc sharpshooters with a night vision-equipped Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle he'd dragged up from the cargo bay. Adrean and Kuri had taken cover on the left side of the crash site to suppress the enemy advance, Serge was busy trying to set up Baba Yaga in the plane's cockpit while Amanda covered him, and Jessica and Dev were quickly proving 4-cent_garbage's value in the war effort with a fierce and unrelenting assault on the panicked and confused loyalists. They weren't out of the frying pan yet, but the fire had been severely doused by the arrival of their powerful reinforcement.
As the battle raged through the jungle, Simonchu and Wild continued their vicious duel, only pausing when the auxiliary chu took a few seconds off to kill another merc or EHPF officer foolish enough to get too close. Kevin tried to focus on the firefight at hand, but found it nearly impossible to concentrate while the two Electric Hedgehog Pokémon clashed again and again around him and his comrades.
"YES!" Matt punched him on the arm with vicious glee and pointed to the sky as the distant sound of rotors filled the air. "CHOPPER! CHOPPER COMING IN, NINE O'CLOCK!"
A thunderclap sounded across the crash site as Nate fired the Barrett again, nearly decapitating a merc who was running for cover behind some trees. "Holy Arceus…we did it."
"Almost," replied Kevin, and popped the empty magazine out of his AK-47. "Good shooting, Nate. Get a bead on the pilot as soon as it lands. Steve!"
"Yeah?" The blond Jerkop quickly swapped his XM8 for the black revolver and blasted what appeared to be an incendiary round away into the night sky. Only when the glowing projectile exploded in a geyser of white phosphorous did Kevin realize it was some sort of miniature flare.
"What are we gonna do about that chopper?"
Steve dashed over to him while loading another flare shell into the revolver. "I just let them know where we are. Who do you think they're gonna try and help, the shadowy guys with the guns or the shadowy guys with the guns who sent up a rescue flare? How's our guest?"
Kevin smiled and patted the canteen with the miniature Sonee inside. "He's alive…and scared shitless, judging by the smell. What about you? You sure you're okay?"
"Believe me, I've been worse," replied Steve, and pointed to his eye patch. "Much worse." He glanced up as the transport chopper – a dual-rotor Chinook - descended through the trees and into the clearing, its spotlights scanning the crash site. If all went well, the loyalists on board wouldn't realize they were landing right on top of the Honey Badgers until…
"COMO ESTAN, BITCHES!" yelled Joshua Martinez, and leapt out of the Chinook's rear bay with Lori Lopez hot on his heels and cradling an RPG in her arms. Kevin and Steve watched in utter disbelief as the Chupacabras disembarked and took up positions around the wreckage to reinforce the Jerkops and their allies as their chopper touched down. "Adrean! ADREAN!"
"Where the hell have you been, you utter bastard?" Adrean shouted as he sprinted forward and nearly tackled his squad commander with a ferocious hug. "How did you…"
Lopez chuckled and patted the rocket launcher. "We forced it to land and took out the guys they sent to take you out." She pointed to the approaching Simonchu, who by now had successfully forced Wild to beat an unceremonious retreat. "Looks like you already got some help, though."
Steve rose to his feet, a look of utter gratitude on his face as he stepped forward and offered a hand to the Electric Hedgehog Pokémon. "Steve Morrison, Honey Badgers."
"Simonchu," the auxiliary chu replied, and stowed the drill on his right hand to shake Steve's. "Your commander sends his regards. Apparently, he thought your lives were valuable enough to risk breaking into the Asperpedia labs." He glanced around at the chaos and grinned. "For what it's worth…I'll vouch for Ledger if Mary Lee Walsh court-martials him. That was fun."
"Well, I can see you certainly enjoyed it," commented Steve, and looked down at his savior's bloodstained drill. "If you wouldn't mind taking out the rest, we can start loading the chopper."
"With pleasure." Simonchu reactivated his right drill and submerged himself into the dirt once again. Kevin followed the small tremor with his eyes until it crossed out of the line of sight, then turned back to his squad leader expectantly.
Steve nodded to him, then waved to Joshua Martinez. "How much weight can that thing take?"
"The chopper?" Martinez glanced at the Chinook. "A lot more than us and your squad. Why?"
"There's a shitload of ammo in the cargo bay of that plane," the blond Jerkop explained with a grim smile. "And if it all fits inside your chopper, I'd say we're all in for one hell of a mission accomplished…SUGAR!"
"Grrowr," snarled the honey badger as she emerged from a burrow beneath the destroyed cockpit and trotted over to Steve, then began nuzzling his leg. She'd been hiding there for the duration of the firefight, most likely after she'd caught the scent of the incoming loyalist forces.
The Jerkop knelt and picked up the honey badger, petting her fur affectionately. He looked up at Martinez. "Sorry about that. By the way, do the words 'June Offensive' mean anything to you?"
A grim expression spread across the squad commander's face. "Nope. But I've got two dead Jerkops who need avenging, though. Today was a start. June…we'll see, Morrison. We'll see."
Kevin nudged Nate as Steve and Josh shook hands and began planning out the loading procedure for their new cargo. "Okay. Now we can start catching up."
"Thought you'd never ask, little bro," replied Nate with a smile.
April 30, 2008, north CWCville, Menchi-Nasu HQ, administrator meeting room
"You put a lot of lives at risk with that stunt," Mary Lee Walsh said in a disapproving tone, pacing back and forth behind her podium as she shuffled through an immense stack of shipping manifests the Honey Badgers had recovered from the plane wreck, along with the truly immense load of weapons, ammunition, and other supplies the resistance would need to launch a massive strike at the very heart of CWCville. "I'm surprised at you – disobeying a direct order like that. You never struck me as the rebellious type. That 'soldier side' of yours must be wearing off."
"To the best of my knowledge, ma'am, no such direct order was ever given," replied Al. "As a matter of fact, one might say we were rather…lacking…in the specifics of our assignment. I simply filled in the blanks and used my best judgment on how to proceed. That's what we were trained to do in tense combat situations during Desert Storm." He smiled. "Of course, like I said, I take full responsibility for my actions in disrupting the progress of Project Asperchu, as well as…hmm…compromising…our finest Electric Hedgehog Pokémon support unit."
"Cut the façade, Ledger," continued Walsh impatiently. "This…" she pointed to the sheaf of papers, "…is the sole reason we haven't assigned your entire team to a month's worth of recon. That, and the June Offensive." She stopped, and gazed at the Jerkop commander with stern pride. "Yes, I'm sure your lieutenant or one of his operatives already told you what that engineer told them. The shipment was meant to touch down at a nearby airport just outside of the city, where the 4-cent_garbage personnel would then sneak the supplies in through the tunnel Patrick Ryan found on his little underground excursion. That's why we needed him as the civilian liaison."
"Makes sense." Al scratched his chin. "That's a step in the right direction, then. I trust we'll be briefed well in advance for this June Offensive? I'd hate for us…" He narrowed his eyes. "…any of us…to have to improvise a more radical solution due to our lack of information."
"Duly noted. Please don't do that again," cautioned Walsh. "It makes me feel like Chandler. Of course, he's got Magi-Chan running things now, so what do I know about the way retards' and recolors' brains work? In any case, we just brought up a good point concerning how a lack of information could apply to the chus." She clenched a fist, popping her knuckles. "Magi-Chan Sonichu. Take him out, and we sever all links between the Combo. That's the mistake Silvana made when she pulled that little embarrassment at the beach. Without Magi-Chan, we could've taken out Bubbles and regained control over Blake. That's why I'm sending Silvana after the Great Anticlimactic One himself…and you're going to be her ground support team."
"Us?" Al was taken aback. "Just us?"
"Well, you, the White Medallions, maybe another squad or two. It depends on how well Silvana does against Magi-Chan. You'll have full air support if need be – provided Angelica doesn't keep them all too busy." Walsh allowed herself a faint smile as she ended the lecture. "Ledger, I know you're not happy with the way things have been going since you and your squad stepped out of the Warp. Believe me, none of us are. I'm actually surprised you didn't try something like this earlier." She shrugged. "Guess it was just my luck you decided to go rogue on the one day we needed a bit of independence. Now get some sleep, and don't bother setting your alarms."
"Thank you, ma'am." The Legend saluted sharply, turned, and walked to the door. Could have been worse. Matt Devoria worse. Good Arceus, remember those idiots he forced to clean the…
"Al?" Mary Lee Walsh's voice changed as soon as she clicked the recorder off. It was no longer the voice of a PVCC administrator, but rather, the voice of a kind and understanding teacher who had been forced to bear the weight of an entire resistance organization on her shoulders.
Al turned around. "Yes, ma'am?"
"Good job out there today," finished Walsh. "As far as I'm concerned, your operatives can keep the weapons they found. Morrison would throw a hissy-fit if I took away his new toys, anyway. And help yourself to one as well. Arceus knows, you're going to need it for June. Dismissed."
"Thank you, ma'am," repeated the Legend, and turned to leave again.
"One more thing, Al."
Al could have screamed. "Yes, ma'am?"
"Enough with the 'ma'am's. We've known each other for four…eight years. My name is Mary."
The Jerkop commander smiled. "Yes, Mary."