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Chapter 133 – Field TripGeneral Jackson snapped, “We’re putting all of Camp Casey and the ROK on full alert, because it looks like Colonel O’Neill was right all along, and this is aimed directly at the JSA meeting starting in a little less than an hour. We don’t know when the attack will come, but expect the unexpected.”
Riley grimly said, “Yes, sir. We’re on it, sir.”
“Very good. Over and out.”
Riley hung up and gritted his teeth. “In the car. We need to be at the rendezvous early, in case the red team starts their maneuvers. Because we have an unknown number of super-powered threats out there, and we have no way of warning Klar until Colonel Park calls us.”
Jill asked, “You don’t have his number?”
Riley frowned. “He’s not allowed to carry a cell phone or a military comm system while doing these audits, and I don’t have a way of contacting his car radio without alerting everyone on their vehicle comm system, which is monitored by the NK.”
“Why would they even have a system like that?” Alex wondered.
Riley said, “So the NK can tell that the security auditors aren’t up to anything nefarious when they’re in their cars.”
Alex knew these jerkheads were paranoid, but she hadn’t realized just how paranoid they could be. This was so totally not good.
As they piled into the car, Hanna asked, “How will you alert Team Two?”
Riley smiled a little. “The easy way.” He flipped open his cellphone and said, “Dial. Niggli.”
Wait a minute, where had Alex heard that name?
Jo Lupo’s brisk voice came on. “I have one minute before we’re at stop one and I’ll have to hang up. Sir.”
Alex suddenly got it. Josephina Niggli. She was in the American Lit book, in the twentieth century authors part. Looking ahead at stuff was paying off again. So what was Riley’s code word for Graham? Maybe ‘Bell’?
“Code Red. The NK didn’t dose a bunch of spiders. They dosed two thirds of a million soldiers.”
“Oh, holy fuck!” Jo cursed colorfully for another couple seconds.
Riley kept going. “We have an unknown number of super-powered threats. Maybe two, maybe two dozen, maybe two hundred. And Grover’s doing invisible recon and we can’t warn him.”
Jo checked, “Timeframe?”
“Unknown, maybe right now, maybe later this week,” Riley told her. “Just alert the rest of Team Two and be ready.”
“On it. Over and out.”
* * *
Grover choked. Oh shit oh shit oh shit! He turned and started running as hard as he could for the JSA. There wasn’t going to be anyone to hear him running until he got a lot closer to the closest checkpoint, and this was so freaking bad!
Why hadn’t anyone guessed they’d dose themselves instead of their invertebrates? Oh, yeah, because it was an incredibly stupid idea that only a complete moron with no conscience at all would even consider.
And he didn’t have a sat phone to alert Riley. He didn’t have an earjack, either, even if he was probably outside the range of whatever comm system Riley was on right now.
This was desperately bad. He was pretty sure if the badguys started moving forward right this second, they’d run him down, because there was no way he could outrun armed supervillains, much less the motorized infantry following right on their heels. And it wasn’t like he could run off to the side of the road, because the area on either side of the road was minefields.
Minefields? These guys were nuts.
* * *
Azure Crush sat in the backseat of the luxury car and kept her mouth shut. She was feeling like … like a giant fuckhead. After all the hate she’d dumped on the pretties who had treated her like shit, she’d turned into one of them. She felt sick to her stomach.
Sure, it had been fun teasing the crap out of Mark Carlson. ‘Marky’. He was really a stick in the mud. Okay, she’d expected he’d flirt back, maybe make a couple passes at her, and give her the chance to dump him. He was fucking hot. He was like an NFL linebacker-sized weightlifter, only sexy and handsome like Conan the Barbarian.
Not that she was going to cheat on Sergei. If you found a guy who hung around centerfolds all day and didn’t hit on them, you kept that guy, because there were maybe five guys like that on the planet, and you didn’t deserve any of them. Still, feeling like you were sexy and hot was fun.
Once they landed, they drove over to a nice one-bedroom place in one half of a duplex, and Mark took the couch. Not even a hint that he’d rather get the bed with one of the hotties. Or both hotties at the same time.
Then at bedtime Lupo took Az aside. Az liked Lupo. She was a tough little bitch who didn’t take shit off anyone. And Lupo wanted to spar with her! Like she wasn’t a supervillain who tried to kill Terawatt once. Like she couldn’t slice a monster clam in half with just a ripped-up metal sign. Lupo had balls the size of railroad cars.
But Lupo explained about Sergeant Mark Carlson and what his deal was. Carlson had been a big three-sport star in high school, and he was going to marry Corinne, the hot blonde head cheerleader, right after graduation. Then he was going to go be a superstar linebacker for Penn State and have a big career in the pros. But that didn’t happen. After the bachelorette party the night before the wedding, when Corinne and all her gal-pals had had way too much to drink, Corinne’s maid of honor crashed the car. Two dead, two seriously injured. Mark married Corinne while she was still in the hospital, and he enlisted right away to make a better life for her, but she didn’t just get a few broken bones. She lost her right leg a couple inches below the knee. She picked up serious scars on the right side of her face and her right arm.
Lupo had paced back and forth as she explained, “Corinne doesn’t have a lot of confidence in herself anymore. Back that up. She doesn’t have any confidence in herself anymore. She worries constantly that Carlson’s going to cheat on her, or divorce her. Knowing that he’s off on an assignment with a Hustler centerfold is making her crazy.”
Az had muttered, “Sorry. I didn’t know. I figured …”
Lupo frowned. “Yeah, me, too, but Corinne used to be the prettiest one, and now she thinks she’s the ugliest one. And she knows he’s meeting some of the hottest women on earth. How would you feel if you knew your boyfriend was out running around with Terawatt?”
How would she feel? She’d want to punch him into outer space, that’s what. If she was some ordinary chick … maybe an ordinary chick who couldn’t even walk anymore without help … It would tear her apart inside.
Fuck. She’d turned into the person she hated the most in the whole fucking world. She’d turned into Libby Clemens. She hoped those fucking North Koreans had a whole fucking army of monster spiders or squids or whatever, because she really wanted to beat the holy crap out of something today.
She looked at her hands. That Captain Fisher had come up with this dodge, and it was working pretty damn good so far. It was a skin-colored spray latex makeup that covered up her blue skin. They’d sprayed it on her hands and wrists. They’d put her real hair up in a tight bun, glued on a latex baldcap, and sprayed her face and neck with the latex before giving her a big, poofed-up blonde wig that looked like it belonged on Miss Texas in the Miss America pageant. Then they’d sprayed colors on her face like makeup. Brown and gray eyeshadows, black eyeliner, bright red lipstick, brick-colored rouge, the whole shebang. She looked pretty much like Didi from the neck up. Maybe Didi’s much taller and slightly younger sister. But she looked like a regular centerfold now. She was wearing long sleeves and opaque tights to hide her blue skin, so she looked like a 6'4" blonde centerfold. Captain Fisher hadn’t even given her a second glance once he was done with the makeup touch-ups. If he wasn’t as gay as Mardi Gras, she’d eat her hat. Even if Carlson’s wife was some hot blonde, she’d still be fucking jealous given how Az looked now.
She’d never thought she’d ever look hotter than Libby Clemens. She’d never thought she’d end up being a bigger bitch than Libby Clemens.
She really wished she could go back in time and punch the shit out of the idiot she was a year or two ago. Okay, she mainly wanted to punch the shit out of the idiot she was a day ago, on the jet coming over here.
She looked out the car window and tried to think about the buildings they were driving past, instead of about what a fuckhead she was. It wasn’t like you could just say ‘sorry for being a complete fuckwad’ and things would be okay again.
* * *
Grover was feeling pretty happy about Riley Finn right then. If Riley hadn’t made him do those punishment runs every morning with Hanna, he never would have gotten into shape. Okay, if Cindy hadn’t liked what all that running did for his stomach and his legs, he wouldn’t have kept up the running. After all, Hanna was a lousy running partner unless she was stuck in a tactical vest with enough lead weights in it to sink a rowboat.
He was running at his standard PT pace, and he could go a lot farther than a mile or two at this pace if he had to, since his normal morning PT at this pace was six miles. But he’d been more than halfway to the far edge of the DMZ, and he’d had to get past three checkpoints in that stupidly short interval.
If he hadn’t seen that the North Koreans had women soldiers on guard duty alongside the men, he would have been majorly surprised when he saw the attack force.
Okay, next checkpoint coming up. He slowed to a fast walk and made sure to breathe through his mouth so he’d be silent. It was just a roadblock with an ordinary boom barrier you could raise or lower, like at a railroad crossing. This one just happened to have a bunch of armed guards at it, including a concrete bunker on one side where four female soldiers were sitting with anti-tank weapons in case anyone didn’t want to cooperate.
He walked up to the barrier, ducked under it when the guards walked past him, and walked on toward the JSA. Piece of cake. As long as you were invisible and silent. He wondered if what he was doing counted as the asymmetric warfare Riley was talking about, because using a team of supervillains as the head of your attack force sure did.
He quickly walked another hundred yards until he was sure he wouldn’t be heard, and he took off running again.
* * *
Grover was past all the checkpoints, and he was closing in on the North Korean side of the JSA. Fortunately for him right now, all these checkpoints were busy keeping people from coming in from the South Korean side. All these soldiers, and they were all looking in the other direction.
At least, until he got past the first picket line of soldiers, and then he’d have people staring right at him.
He moved along the road, catching his breath so he wouldn’t give away his position. He just had to make big detours around each soldier, so he could be sure if someone moved suddenly they wouldn’t bump into him.
He turned the last corner, around the ugly blue buildings. He skirted past the last three North Korean soldiers and crossed the line into South Korea. He didn’t make any noise or get careless, because getting shot to death by a South Korean soldier would be just as bad as getting shot to death by a North Korean soldier, only way more embarrassing and ironic.
He made his way right to Colonel Park’s car. The colonel was standing there making notes and chewing out some officer in Korean, so Grover had no idea what he was saying.
Grover tapped the colonel on the shoulder, and the guy twitched. But he didn’t give the game away. He just said something that was pretty clearly ‘dismissed’ or ‘get the hell out of my sight’, because the officer immediately turned and marched off toward the buildings.
After a couple of seconds, the colonel opened all the doors on his car like he was airing it out, and then sat down behind the wheel. He acted like he was filling out sheets of paper on a clipboard.
Grover slipped into the shotgun seat. He whispered, “Colonel Park, we have a big, big, BIG problem. The NK’s getting ready for their assault. And they didn’t dose their bugs or their seafood. They dosed other Koreans. They have half a dozen supervillains at the forefront of maybe a battalion’s worth of troops in jeeps and canvas-sided trucks and stuff. I didn’t get a good look at all of it. But if they’ve moved up into the DMZ now, they’ve got to be getting ready to launch their assault.” He grabbed a sheet of paper and made notes on it. “Read this to Major Finn.”
The colonel groaned. “Very well. I cannot inform your people until I am out of the DMZ and can reclaim a cellphone. I dare not make an announcement over the car radio system, because we know they routinely monitor the system. I will go back and tell the two men I trust to be ready to evacuate the important people as soon as there is the first sign of an attack. Then I will hurry to where I can alert your teams.”
Grover took a deep breath. “Good. I’m going back across the border.”
The colonel looked alarmed. “You cannot. You have no weapons. No armor. No offensive or defensive systems of any kind.”
Grover nodded, even though the colonel wouldn’t see it. “Tell my team. But somebody’s got to slow these creeps down.” He swallowed hard and said, “If I don’t come back, they’ll have an idea on how to find my body, okay?”
Colonel Park drove as rapidly as he dared. He used his car radio and lied, “Attention, this is Colonel Park, codeword Tokyo, my brakes are not working, please raise barriers and prepare a crash location at Position Tango.”
Position Tango was just inside the very southern edge of the DMZ, and would put him within a hundred yards of the designated meeting place with Major Riley Finn. He could cover that distance in seconds, if he could get past the security guards who would want to question him about the car.
* * *
Riley Finn listened in on the colonel’s car radio broadcast. “Something’s up. Colonel Park is claiming his brakes have failed, but he’s driving our way instead of taking the car off the road. We suit up now.”
He pulled off the glasses and suit coat and clip-on tie. He grabbed his shirt at the third button with both hands, and he pulled open the shirt and padded vest to reveal the distinct pattern of an urban camo t-shirt. He grabbed the hidden seams on his pants and pulled the threads. The pants gave way down the seams, so he could pull them off without even getting out of the car seat. And once the pants were gone, the spandex camo leggings and the combat boots were visible. He felt a little silly wearing a spandex-kevlar stretch thing instead of standard camo pants, but these fit under his disguise. And Captain Fisher had needed to step out of the room to keep from laughing when Riley had complained about how he looked.
He checked that Valentine and Action Girl had done the same, and that Terawatt had done her morphic quick-change into her super-suit. Then he headed for Position Tango.
* * *
Colonel Park drove full speed into the crash barrier at Position Tango. It was a series of rows of tall cylindrical water barrels. Each barrel would explode on impact, shooting water upward and absorbing a large amount of kinetic energy. They had tested this, and the crash barrier would stop an armored personnel carrier. It would stop an Abrams, and the enemy had nothing as impressive as an Abrams M-1 tank.
At the last second, he twisted his wheel so his car skidded sideways into the barrels. The water jetted upward and all over the car, so he had to wait a few seconds before the downpour stopped. He had a sheet of paper to deliver, and he didn’t want it to get wet.
He clambered out of the car and ran for the guard station. “I need my security phone immediately!”
And Captain Finn’s Hyundai SUV came roaring up, almost as if Finn had gotten a psychic bulletin that he needed to be here.
Wait, Finn was traveling with at least one superhero, wasn’t he? Colonel Park had seen Finn on the television giving a press conference with Terawatt about the Umbrella catastrophe, and Finn had been in other footage of Terawatt in action. Not that a large number of people knew Finn well enough to recognize him in full battle gear, but Colonel Park had been part of a South Korean group that had just barely survived a disaster in Siberia. That was when he had met Finn and Finn’s sarcastic leader Colonel O’Neill and Finn’s teammates. It was possible that Finn really had been given a psychic bulletin just now.
He watched as Terawatt flew out of the SUV and began pulling equipment out of the back of the car without touching anything. Finn hopped out of the driver’s seat looking more like a hero in an action movie than a regular soldier. The woman who leapt out of the other front seat looked far too attractive to be a regular soldier, either. And the smaller woman in the back seat wearing the mask …
Finn had brought Action Girl and Terawatt both, plus whatever this other woman was. Had the man known ahead of time what the Northerners were up to? Someone was going to have to answer some hard questions after this was over.
He rushed over to Finn and handed him Klar’s notes. “Klar wrote this for you. I do not understand the codewords. He told me the attack is coming, and it is led by super-powered threats.” He glared. “You could have given us more warning.”
Riley read Grover’s note aloud. “Attack of the fifty-foot woman. Firelord. Wendigo. Tigra. Sandman. Yuki. A couple more, one flies. And maybe a battalion but some of the regular troops aren’t.”
He glanced over at Terawatt and Action Girl. “Do I need to call the colonel to get this decoded?”
Terawatt flew over and hovered behind his left shoulder. “Okay, the first one is easy. They have a giant. Then we’ve got Marvel characters. Firelord’s a flying fire-guy. Wendigo’s a huge, hairy, super-strong ape-like thing. Tigra’s strong and fast and she looks part-tiger. Sandman’s a living pile of sand who can do shapeshifting. Boy, I never thought being able to interpret Jack-and-Acid-Burn snark would help in the field. You already know Yuki, so they have an ice thrower. So then a couple more superpowers, another flier, and a ton of troops.”
Riley said, “Maybe a battalion, so we have to assume several hundred armed soldiers. And if some of the regular troops aren’t regular, then we have to figure a lot of them are mutated in some way, maybe with lower-level powers.” He turned to Colonel Park. “I don’t know what plans you already made, but you should get key personnel out of there ASAP before the JSA turns into a war zone.”
Terawatt looked like she was ready to jet off northward, but he stopped her with a hand on her arm. He didn’t know if anyone had ever told her this, but he figured he’d better do it now. He warned her, “Look, Tera, when you’re flying around fighting one ground-based supervillain, you have an advantage. When you’re flying around and there are a hundred armed soldiers shooting at you with everything from rifles up to anti-aircraft missiles, you won’t. You’ll have to be really careful up there.”
She handed him his bulletproof armor and his tac vest, and he quickly strapped himself in. She looked worried behind that mask. “Okay. Do you want me to go on ahead, or stick with you?”
An attack wave of six helos zoomed by overhead. Immediately after that, four tanks and four armored personnel carriers raced by them. That seemed to settle the issue. He told her, “You may want to back those guys up.” She took off after them.
He still needed a few seconds to signal his team, jump back in the SUV, and move in pursuit. He only just barely managed to get on the road fast enough to be ahead of Lupo.
* * *
Jo felt stupid rushing toward a battlefield in a luxury car, but that was what she was driving. At least she’d had a chance to pull off the floor-length disguise-dress and the wig, and grab the body armor and tac vest. She still had the latex disguise makeup on her face so she looked mostly Korean. The stuff on her eyelids was irritating, but the stuff on the sides of her face that made her face look rounder was just plain itchy. She had no idea how people in Hollywood put up with having crap like this on their face for ten or fifteen hours a day. Maybe getting paid a hundred thousand bucks a day was enough incentive.
Captain Fisher and his people were damn good at their job, but really, how did a guy that obviously gay get all the way up to captain without getting booted out of the armed forces? The guy spray-painted a stark naked Azure Crush for over an hour and never once stared at her tits. That spelled ‘gay’ in giant neon letters as far as Jo was concerned.
Azure Crush was in the back seat helping Carlson get out of his suit and into his gear. Az just kicked off her shoes, pulled off her blonde wig and latex disguise, and then ripped off her dress. Then she was in nothing but an exercise bra and spandex exercise shorts. Maybe if you were bulletproof and you’d showed off everything you owned in a centerfold, that did count as battle gear.
* * *
The ROK captain reacted as soon as he got the signal. Colonel Park had been very specific, and very angry. And the colonel was someone you did not cross. So there were two armored personnel carriers with their engines already running just outside and awaiting the signal.
He yelled at his team and had them drag the diplomats and generals out of the building and into the APCs. He would have to take the heat for his men who had to strongarm a couple of uncooperative generals, but it had to be done. The APCs roared southward toward Camp Casey, and the captain moved to delay the attacking forces until he could feel sure his people were safe.
And there were loud noises outside. A consistent thump-thump-thump that sounded almost as if the area was being shelled but none of the incoming was detonating. He had no idea what it was.
When he saw what was coming his way, he nearly dropped his .45. He needed a second to regain his self-control and begin firing. It couldn’t be real, but he was seeing it.
The last thing he ever saw was a brilliant flash of searing white light.
* * *
Riley still couldn’t see the incoming forces because of intervening terrain, but he could see when the six choppers opened fire.
And he could see what happened when they did. He managed not to wince while he was driving. Valentine cussed up a storm.
He could tell by the curve on the tracer ammo that something was pulling a Terawatt and curving the choppers’ firepower back at them. The large caliber rounds and the missiles mercilessly ripped into the choppers. Three exploded in mid-air. A focused beam of white light about a foot across sliced through a fourth, making it explode, too.
The fifth chopper fared just as badly. Its rotor crumpled like tinfoil until it was a mangled mess maybe a foot across, and the chopper dropped like a rock.
The last chopper tried to wheel out of the line of fire, but another beam of blistering white light sliced through the front fifteen feet, taking out the pilots and anything else up front. The chopper dived into a building and detonated spectacularly.
Then the red team opened fire on the advancing tanks.
* * *
Alex gasped in horror as she rose up over the building that was screening her from the enemy forces, and she saw what she was facing.
All six helicopters had been blown out of the air or else had crashed and burned. The tanks and APCs were already being destroyed.
Boy, she really hated asymmetric warfare. Even if she was asymmetric warfare.
There was a ninety-foot tall giantess dressed in what looked like a couple of huge canvas tents, and she was firing at the remaining tanks. She had a cannon. Or a howitzer. Or something. It looked like the biggest tank gun Alex had ever seen, and the giant was holding it like you’d hold an AK-47.
The giantess had a sort of chair fastened on top of her right shoulder, and there was a soldier strapped into it. He had odd hair sticking straight up in the middle of his crown like a fin. He was pointing his arms at the last APC, and a vicious beam of bright white light was punching through the whole personnel carrier like a laboratory laser burning through a balloon.
About forty feet above the giantess and fifty feet to the left, there was a flying woman. She was either purple or wearing purple. Over her whole torso she was wearing a shining suit of metal armor. She waved her hands as the last tank fired, and the tank’s round just circled around the giantess to punch right into the top of the tank. The top part of the tank launched upward as the whole tank exploded out to the sides.
And there was one more threat. A flying guy covered in flames, but obviously not in agony from them. He was hurling car-sized fireballs at every ROK soldier trying to take cover in the buildings that hadn’t yet been destroyed.
And there was more stuff coming along behind those four threats. Open trucks and canvas-covered trucks and trucks that were mobile weapons carriers. And the open trucks in front had even more super-threats. There was something that looked like an orange sasquatch, only a lot wider and even taller. There was a woman covered in snow with spiky white hair. There was a woman who looked like someone had spliced her DNA with a big cat. There was something that looked like half a ton of mud. And there was a purple guy who looked like there was something wrong with his face. Of the five, only the purple guy was wearing a tac vest and carrying weapons. Not that you could wear a tac vest when you were a half a ton of mud.
She clicked her comms with her TK. “Engaging now. One giant, one laser-guy, one fire-guy, one TK-girl. The giant’s firing a howitzer. Behind them, just what Klar said. Don’t engage these guys, because they’ll shoot back, maybe with your own ammo.”
She dived down to rooftop level, hoping to get a lot closer before they spotted her. It didn’t work. Laser Guy saw her and pointed his arms at her.
She didn’t wait to get blasted. She’d had enough of that the time she saved Az from the four killers. She went silvery and dodged to the side as she jetted forward.
The white beam sliced into a rooftop where she’d been a second before and cut a burning line through the whole building.
She zigzagged before Laser Guy had a chance to correct his aim.
The giantess fired her gun, which went off with an enormous boom and missed even worse than Laser Guy. Flame Guy launched two massive fireballs, one of which would have toasted her if she hadn’t used some TK to knock it to the side in a little guide parry that Jo would have appreciated.
The TK woman stared at Alex and waved her arms. And …
… nothing happened? Huh?
How did you just ‘miss’ with telekinesis when you were looking right at your target?
* * *
Riley spun the wheel, yanked on the emergency brake, and slid the car sideways into the shelter of a now-destroyed building. There was a mostly-intact wall, some rubble blocking the view from the side, and a fair bit of overhanging roof, so they would be completely out of sight until the first enemy wave moved well past the rubble and thought to look behind them.
He gave Team One the hand signals to advance with him, and he moved across the street into the shelter of another ruined building. With the giantess stopping to deal with Terawatt, the advance guard was momentarily stopped and the second wave had caught up. He used a spec ops periscope to get a better look down the ruined street.
The forward trucks were obviously carrying more super-powered threats as the support team. They were now only a few hundred feet behind the feet of the giantess, which Riley thought was too close to the first wave for threats this powerful. The giantess had to be ninety feet tall, so even if she just fell over backward, anything within ninety feet of her could get crushed.
Already off the trucks and moving forward was a ten-foot-tall sasquatch that had to be six feet wide. Right behind him was a woman who looked and moved like she was half cat. Oozing off the truck was a mobile pile of clay or dirt. Still on the trucks were a woman who looked like she was covered in ice, and a purple-skinned soldier in a tac vest who was carrying an AK-47. And there was a double picket line of armed soldiers, all of them looking mutated in one way or another. A lot of them looked freakishly lopsided like Dr. Deemer had before he passed away. Some of them looked like Dr. Deemer’s assistant after he’d turned into a weird caveman-like thing which had died soon afterward. And behind that were the heavy weapons carriers, which looked pretty makeshift even for North Korean forces.
As far as Riley could tell, the red team had successfully wiped out all the ROK soldiers and security forces, but the evac of the high-level South Koreans had been a complete success. So all he had to do was stop an entire team of supervillains backed up by an infantry battalion toting enough heavy weaponry to defend against another helo assault wave and another heavy armor assault and probably a jet fighter squadron.
His earjack clicked. It was Lupo. “Team Two in position and moving toward you.”
If they could give Tera time to stop the advance guard and they could keep the support weapons off Tera, then they could focus on the second wave afterward. But until Tera could stop the advance guard, more blue team forces would just be ground up and blue team firepower would be redirected in painful ways. Even worse, until that TK threat was addressed, they had nothing useful they could fire at the advance wave.
What he really wished he could do was have Azure Crush support Terawatt directly, then he’d take on the second wave with Valentine and Action Girl, and use that as a distraction to insert Lupo and Carlson behind the picket lines to take out those heavy weapon carriers. But he didn’t have enough personnel to try something like that, and dividing up his forces so finely was just asking for trouble.
He gave his troops the heads-up and then dealt out assignments over the comms. “Terawatt, take out the TK woman ASAP. Az and AG, engage the second wave and keep them off Tera. Lupo and Carlson, support them. Valentine, you and I keep the picket lines from moving up and supporting their second wave. As soon as their TK threat goes down, we concentrate on the rest of their advance wave.”
If they could take down the advance wave, they could call for reinforcements without worrying about everything walking into a meat grinder. But right now, that was a pretty big if.
Jo Lupo moved, but not nearly as fast as Action Girl did.
Action Girl went straight at the sasquatch-on-steroids, and just as it reached out to grab her, she did a baseball slide right between its legs and pulled out the .45 from under her armpit. She put a three-shot grouping right in the thing’s nads as she slid under and past it. Then she was up on her feet and sprinting at the half-cheetah woman.
The sasquatch roared angrily and turned to look for Action Girl, which told Jo it wasn’t seriously hurt. Any guy who could take three .45 rounds in the crotch and just be pissed off was not going to be easy to take down.
But Azure Crush didn’t seem to be worried about that. While the sasquatch was turned around looking for Hanna, Az came up behind him and sucker-punched him right in the kidney. She hit him so hard he flew a good thirty feet through the air and landed on his face.
He just got right up and roared at her. Not that Az was intimidated. She just sneered, “That all ya got? Bring it, fuckhead!”
Jo figured that in retrospect, Az might think twice about that style of fighting after today. The orange sasquatch-thing charged at her and swung a massive roundhouse. Az shoved at the arm, but still got knocked all the way across the street and through a solid wall.
Well, a formerly solid wall. That now had a large Azure Crush-shaped hole in it about six feet above the ground.
Okay, this thing was going to be a serious problem. And Jo was busy firing at the picket line of armed soldiers, trying to keep them down while not losing her head at the same time.
* * *
Alex knew she needed to take down the TK girl, but the other three were way bigger threats to her. She couldn’t even get that far over toward the TK girl as long as Laser Guy was trying to roast her. She dived down and darted off to her right to avoid a blast of fire and a massive laser beam, and then she cut over toward where the giantess wasn’t pointing that cannon. The TK girl just couldn’t seem to target her. Alex didn’t get that, since she’d seen the TK girl was murder on stuff moving way faster than a superheroine.
Dozens of soldiers were firing at her, too, but as long as she was mostly around the giantess or on the other side of the giantess, the soldiers weren’t really that much of a threat. Still, she was silvery and dodging around just in case. Getting shot wouldn’t be any more fun than getting hit with grenade shrapnel.
Then Alex felt her earjack getting yanked out of her ear. She finally realized what she was up against. Duh. It made totally great sense when you thought about what the girl was wearing.
She grabbed her earjack and hung onto it. Then she dived as fast as she could between the giant’s legs while Flame Guy and Laser Guy torched the ground below where she had been just a second ago.
She came up right behind the giantess and shot right up along her spine. No one was going to shoot at Alex while she was here, and the giantess couldn’t reach her, either.
* * *
Azure Crush scrambled out of the wreckage of the wall. She could hear Big and Hairy lumbering and roaring as it came after her. It leaned down and stuck its head through the hole it had made with her.
She hit it as hard as she could, right in the kisser. It went flying back a good twenty or thirty feet and then just scrambled back up.
She waited impatiently for it to stick its head through the hole again. But this time it charged right through the wall, tearing the wall apart and smashing her across the room. She crashed through an inside wall and hit the other outside wall so hard she cracked it apart.
Fuck, that one really hurt. If this guy was this much tougher than she was, this fight might not be so fucking great.
She pulled a steel girder out of the wall and smacked The Orange Hairball right in the stomach. She got in a really good shot and launched him up through the roof.
“Back, back, back, back, it’s outta here!”
She stalked out of the ruins of the house, her makeshift bat ready for another couple innings.
Or so she thought. She stepped through a doorway and Mister Hairball caught her by surprise. The fucker was already waiting for her, and he punched her hard enough to knock her up on top of the roof. She crashed down through the roof, through the ceiling and through a table, to put a dent in the floor. Fuck, that hurt!
The wall exploded inward as he smashed it apart with her girder. Then he tried to smash her. She rolled to the side and just missed getting brained with the thing. She ducked as he swung it high, and it smashed through another wall. She backed up as he swung it in a nasty overhand that ripped through the ceiling and the rafters.
And the whole fucking building fell in on them.