red warning.
A bomb. Ah, hell.
No time to explain. No time for anything except escape. Bundling her over a shoulder and ignoring her scared query of “What’s happening?” he charged at the door, exiting her condo even as the ominous ticking got faster and faster.
If it weren’t for his speed, he doubted either of them would have made it out alive from the condo. As it was, he’d barely lunged into the hall and to his left when the explosion rocked the building. The floor underfoot shook. Smoke billowed from the portal he’d just escaped, and the ominous crackle of flames let him know there was nothing for them behind.
Nothing but destruction.
Someone wants me dead. Me, or is it the doctor they’re targeting? Either way, they needed out of here. Fast.
A quick glance at the elevator showed it two floors away and rising. Would it stop here and disgorge a team to check on results and finish them off?
He didn’t stay to find out. While he could handle a lot of damage, the fragile female over his shoulder, body wracked with coughs from the smoke, wouldn’t fare well against bullets.
Tearing down the hall, he ignored the various heads poking from doorways, all asking the same thing.
“What’s going on? Is there a fire?”
He snarled, “Get back inside,” a futile attempt to save them from a possible culling by a follow-up death squad. However, human curiosity meant they milled out in the hall, voices high-pitched with excitement as they debated the best course of action. He hit the stairwell just as the fire alarms finally began to peal, and yet their strident sound couldn’t hide the screams and the ominously shouted words of, “Oh my god, they have guns,” for him to realize he needed to move faster.
“Hold on tight and don’t say a word,” was the only warning she got before he clamped one arm even tighter over her suspended thighs as he vaulted over the railing, letting himself drop several stories before reaching out to grasp the bar of the landing leading to the fourth floor.
Why not go all the way to ground level? Because a properly organized operation would have men stationed on the door exiting the stairwell, waiting to pick off anybody who emerged.
Cyborgs, being more durable and eminently smarter, would have waited in the stairwell and aimed upward, shooting anything that moved. Casualties, especially of the innocent, were an unfortunate side effect of this method.
As he burst onto the fourth level, a firm and quick kick snapping the lock meant to prevent people from entering the building, not exiting, he took a moment to analyze his surroundings. Despite the lack of smoke on this floor, the alarms here blazed as well, which meant there were people thronging the hall, all asking the same useless questions.
Some spotted his partial military uniform and soot-covered countenance and naturally assumed he had the answers.
“What’s going on? Are we supposed to evacuate?”
Given the more chaos the humans caused, the better chance he’d have at slipping notice, he did the responsible thing. “Get out! Fire! Use the stairs.”
The fact that he sidled along the wall, in the opposite direction, seemed to pass unnoticed, except by one human, who’d, up to now, remained quiet.
“Adam, where are you going?” a raspy-voiced doctor asked.
“Out.”
“Isn’t out the other way?” she inquired much too calmly. Good and bad. Good because it made her easy to handle, bad because he’d wager, once the shock set in, things could get ugly. Histrionics weren’t something his kind was really programmed to deal with.
“Not for us,” was his enigmatic reply.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He didn’t immediately reply as he chose his moment when no one appeared to pay them any mind and slipped into a condo, whose door had been left ajar by a fleeing inhabitant.
Shutting the portal behind him, he dropped Laura to her feet and took a quick stock of their situation. The condo itself
A bomb. Ah, hell.
No time to explain. No time for anything except escape. Bundling her over a shoulder and ignoring her scared query of “What’s happening?” he charged at the door, exiting her condo even as the ominous ticking got faster and faster.
If it weren’t for his speed, he doubted either of them would have made it out alive from the condo. As it was, he’d barely lunged into the hall and to his left when the explosion rocked the building. The floor underfoot shook. Smoke billowed from the portal he’d just escaped, and the ominous crackle of flames let him know there was nothing for them behind.
Nothing but destruction.
Someone wants me dead. Me, or is it the doctor they’re targeting? Either way, they needed out of here. Fast.
A quick glance at the elevator showed it two floors away and rising. Would it stop here and disgorge a team to check on results and finish them off?
He didn’t stay to find out. While he could handle a lot of damage, the fragile female over his shoulder, body wracked with coughs from the smoke, wouldn’t fare well against bullets.
Tearing down the hall, he ignored the various heads poking from doorways, all asking the same thing.
“What’s going on? Is there a fire?”
He snarled, “Get back inside,” a futile attempt to save them from a possible culling by a follow-up death squad. However, human curiosity meant they milled out in the hall, voices high-pitched with excitement as they debated the best course of action. He hit the stairwell just as the fire alarms finally began to peal, and yet their strident sound couldn’t hide the screams and the ominously shouted words of, “Oh my god, they have guns,” for him to realize he needed to move faster.
“Hold on tight and don’t say a word,” was the only warning she got before he clamped one arm even tighter over her suspended thighs as he vaulted over the railing, letting himself drop several stories before reaching out to grasp the bar of the landing leading to the fourth floor.
Why not go all the way to ground level? Because a properly organized operation would have men stationed on the door exiting the stairwell, waiting to pick off anybody who emerged.
Cyborgs, being more durable and eminently smarter, would have waited in the stairwell and aimed upward, shooting anything that moved. Casualties, especially of the innocent, were an unfortunate side effect of this method.
As he burst onto the fourth level, a firm and quick kick snapping the lock meant to prevent people from entering the building, not exiting, he took a moment to analyze his surroundings. Despite the lack of smoke on this floor, the alarms here blazed as well, which meant there were people thronging the hall, all asking the same useless questions.
Some spotted his partial military uniform and soot-covered countenance and naturally assumed he had the answers.
“What’s going on? Are we supposed to evacuate?”
Given the more chaos the humans caused, the better chance he’d have at slipping notice, he did the responsible thing. “Get out! Fire! Use the stairs.”
The fact that he sidled along the wall, in the opposite direction, seemed to pass unnoticed, except by one human, who’d, up to now, remained quiet.
“Adam, where are you going?” a raspy-voiced doctor asked.
“Out.”
“Isn’t out the other way?” she inquired much too calmly. Good and bad. Good because it made her easy to handle, bad because he’d wager, once the shock set in, things could get ugly. Histrionics weren’t something his kind was really programmed to deal with.
“Not for us,” was his enigmatic reply.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He didn’t immediately reply as he chose his moment when no one appeared to pay them any mind and slipped into a condo, whose door had been left ajar by a fleeing inhabitant.
Shutting the portal behind him, he dropped Laura to her feet and took a quick stock of their situation. The condo itself
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