"Is it ready yet?!" Erik yelled after snapping off two shots through one of the firing slots and hitting nothing. How these things could possibly be so fast in snow, he had no idea.
"No, dammit!" Ron growled with his body stuffed halfway into the disassembled dashboard as he fiddled with the rat's nest of wires that hinted at the vehicle's past as lowest-bidder crap.
"Can you pick up the pace, dude?!" Thad asked, voice cracking slightly. There was a blue flash and the student across from him suddenly locked up and fell backwards. "Crap!" the jock squawked as he practically dove to catch him.
"It's a delicate goddamn process, boy!" Ron snarled back. "I cross the wrong wire and the whole damn thing'll burn out as soon as I turn the key!"
"You can be as 'delicate' as you want," Lizzy said as she dragged the student to the back of the best with the other five who'd looked out the wrong window at the wrong time,"but unless you wanna find out what happens when there's no one left to make those things back off, I suggest you LOCK-THE FUCK-IN!"
Normally Ron would've given the girl something to chew on for talking to him like that, but he knew she was right. The kids were dropping like flies. They had tried ignoring the creatures and letting the armor plating do its job, but all that did was give the things time to figure out that they could get their claws in between the panels and start to peel them away from the weaker metal they were welded to. So the only option was to fight them off. But to shoot at them, you had to look at them, and that's how they got you.
"Alright, dammit, I got this!" Ron said as he got back to work. "I got this. I...I got this..."
As much as Ron liked to think he was good under pressure, the fact of the matter is that he had never been under this kind of pressure before. So as he stared at the wires that were starting to blur together, and reached for them with hands that were starting to shake, it was starting to become clear that he did not have this.
Ron shimmied out from under the dash and sat on the floor of the bus glaring and muttering curses at his hands.
"Move over," a flat, downright bored voice suddenly ordered.
Ron looked up to see the Teacher, of all people crouched in front of him.
"The hell do you want, Bruce?" Ron grumbled. He knew the man's story and had no respect for him.
"Move over," Bruce repeated.
"Oh, so you're a mechanic now?"
"No, but clearly this is a job for someone with steady hands," Bruce held out his right hand to emphasize the point. He could've held a glass of water without putting a single ripple on the surface.
"But you don't know what you're doin'!"
"Then tell me. Your mouth works just fine."
"You...Fine. Don't know why I'm tryin' to talk you outta makin' yourself useful anyhow," Ron grumbled as he stood up and switched places with the emotionless husk of a drone.
*****
Uzi froze as another unidentifiable noise echoed in the distance. Her lapse in concentration made her Solver deactivate, dropping the bent and lumpy metal rod it had been holding up in front of her, which she just barely caught.
?*#&@: Focus, Host Uzi.
'Kinda hard when you're stuck in an evil lair with a psycho who has a hate-boner for you specifically, her pet raptors and who the hell knows what else!' Uzi snapped back mentally.
While she was still wary of the entity that claimed to both be her Solver and NOT the Solver at the same time, Uzi admitted she owed it a huge debt. Yes, it had hijacked her body without her explicit permission, but had done so to save N. A worthy cause if ever there was one. In fact, it was the reverence "?*#&@" seemed to have for N, and N's own inexplicable surety that it wasn't a threat, to them at least, that convinced Uzi to trust it at all.
