Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

71 - Crack in the Kill Code

Piper nearly jumped in after him. To have come this far, only to have Osric slip away – it almost sent her over the edge and into the nothingness. She had no idea what waited at the bottom. Even if he could get to the ground level and back out of the elevator shaft, the streets still swarmed with an army of corporate security. He had nowhere to go.

But the screaming stopped her. She spun back around to a scene of carnage and panic. The first of the lurkers dispatched its prey and began scuttling through the space, bullets snapping at its heels. She could feel the coils of AmpCore energy reaching out to try and catch it, but the lurkers didn't react like anything was supposed to. Their dead hulks gave no purchase.

"Blast them!" Piper screamed, gathering a veritable fireball into her right hand. "Combustives!"

Even as she yelled the warning, another lurker burst down through the ceiling, plunging four arms right down on top of one of the Code-Vector operatives, killing her instantly as it landed. A third came exploding from one of the supposedly empty crates, only for Nevay to blast it at almost point-blank range with her stun-gun. The gangster screeched and scrambled away, shooting it three more times as it twitched and writhed.

Piper launched herself into the fray. Three more of the creatures came scuttling from the shadows, slicing up the corporate security detail effortlessly as they moved. She caught up to one as it disembowelled another of the unfortunate troopers and before it could properly face her, she leapt up onto its rear housing, grabbing its corpse-skull with both hands.

Blades flailed at her, and she twisted her body sideway to avoid having her guts sliced open, just long enough for her to burn the lurker from the inside out. She pumped a violent torrent of combustive power out of her hands and through the monster, melting and fusing circuits; charring what little skin remained inside it.

It fell down dead and she toppled off of it, hitting the ground with a gasp. Looking at her palms, she saw scorched and blistered skin where the backwash had torn through her. Her head pounded – it was getting more and more difficult to stop her implants from overloading and cooking her alive.

Panting, she levered herself to her knees and looked around. Off to her left, Odiye put another lurker down with blazing crescent of white hot energy that cut the thing in half. It also set fire to the room, sending a lurid orange glare through the gloom.

"Hey, hey!" the rough hand suddenly on her on her shoulder belonged to Nevay Jennings, and she looked up into the gangster's eyes. "Nice fry," she continued, nodding to the dead wraith. "You okay?"

"I don't have my amplifier," Piper choked out, struggling to one knee. "It hurts."

"Shit, nothing to control all that wildfire with, eh?" Nevay broke off, blasting off two wild shots at a dark scuttling form as it rushed past.

Piper didn't reply, her eyes caught by Treysi grappling with another of the crazed machines, back to back with Kirk, who was shooting frantically at anything that moved. She managed to snap one of its blades off at the joint, only for the lurker to surge forward and slam the blunt of its head into her human side.

Treysi was cannoned backwards, slamming into Kirk and sending him sprawling, his stun-gun clattering away across the floor as he hit the ground face first. The lurker ignored him, sidling forward with sickening fluidity of movement as it loomed over Treysi.

"Nevay!"

"Busy here!" Another snarl from Nevay's gun was the only response she got after that.

As the creature reared up over Treysi, Kirk surged upright. With his weapon somewhere in the mess of debris, he stood holding a length of broken metal in his right hand. He let out a screech of effort and swung, aiming to smash it down onto the thing's barely human head.