Hurricane // Danger Days (Book 2)

01.

People escaping Battery City on their own is really rare. BLI is very successful at keeping people inside their walls, and most of the people in the city are too brainwashed to try and get out. However, the Killjoy army often needs new recruits, so they get them out themselves. The main way that new Killjoys get out is through patrols.

A patrol works like this: an informant in the Lobby would get into Better Living Industries' records and send a list of possible recruits (people who have disobeyed BLI by showing signs of creativity) to the Killjoy General, Atomic Alien. General Alien would then send a group of existing Killjoys to sneak into one of BLI's "reformation centers" (which was just code for "place where we brainwash people into not having any emotions or free will") and rescue all of the people on the list. They would then take the recruits into the Zones and integrate them into the Killjoy society.

Now, our story begins with one particular patrol in the summer of 2021. A Juviehall (a rebel who lives in the old subway tunnels under the city) named Dustin had found a firewall blocking him from hacking into one specific part of BLI's main laboratory. So of course, he tried for hours to bypass it. And eventually, he succeeded. What he found was, well, revolutionary. He sent the data to General Alien. This is gonna be good.

When Alien got the transmission from the city, she was nothing less than ecstatic. She called in her best group of patrollers and gave them a copy of the file. The group consisted of Silent Storm, who was to be the leader, Night Hunter, a hacker, and Dr. Benzedrine, a medic.

The first thing that Storm said when he saw this was "Holy shit."

The file was about an experiment that BLI were performing. Apparently, three children had been taken from their parents, and BLI had tested an age-acceleration prototype on them. The file said that they had all been born in 2018, and that they had aged seventeen years by the current year, 2021.

It was clear that the company was intending to make these kids into weapons for their benefit. But if the Killjoys could take that away from them... Storm gladly accepted the mission; he would to anything to disadvantage BLI. It had taken so much from him.

Benzedrine was a bit doubtful of the mission. He'd been on many a patrol, but never one of this scale of importance. He went along with everything, however, because he knew a medic would be necessary for the mission if they ran into any trouble.

Hunter didn't really have an opinion on the matter. However, he was a hacker, and he knew that his skill was critical to getting into the building. He was also loyal to Alien, at any cost.

And so they set off.

Getting into BLI's lab was relatively easy; they knocked out some high-level Scarecrows, stole their uniforms and IDs, and waltzed right in. The hard part came next.

They had no idea how these kids would react to someone breaking in. This was a rescue mission, but they didn't know that. BLI was all they'd ever known. The file did say that "Subject VA1" disobeyed them, which gave them a sliver of hope.

Storm dutifully led the group to the location that Alien had told them to go to. The Scarecrows' IDs didn't work on the doors that led to their quarters, do Hunter had to mess with the coding so it would let them in. Fortunately, he was successful.

Getting them out was fairly easy. They had all thought that they were inside a simulation, which kind of made sense, but they had gone willingly anyways. They had never taken BLI's zombifying medication due to the fact that it might "slow their development" so they were able to realize that BLI was actually really bad.

And they were tortured regularly when their test results weren't good, so there's that.

Anyway, they didn't run into any complications on the way out, which was good. The "subjects" also received their Killjoy names: Val Velocity, Volume, and Volt. Usually Killjoy aliases had two words, but some things had changed in the two years since... Let's not think about that right now.

Anyway, they rode in General Alien's minivan out into Zone One, and the recruits' faces were priceless.

Val looked shocked, but a grin was slowly beginning to take over his face. Obviously, none of them had ever seen any of the world outside BLI's lab in person, so he was ecstatic.

Volt seemed to be fascinated with the sun. She commented on how the light from it was heating up her skin, and how that never happened with artificial lights.

Volume seemed to be more attentive to the car than the view outside. He bombarded Hunter with questions about how it worked. He only really knew how to work computers, but he was the only one in the car who was able to give Volume basic information. He eventually prodded Storm to turn on the radio to shut the recruit up so he could focus on driving.

Storm complied and switched on the radio.

"-motorbabies, this is Dr. Death Defying, comin' at you from 109 WKIL, your Eye in the Sky!"

Dr. D then graced them all with the song "Bang Bang" by Green Day. The three recruits had never heard music before in their lives. They all looked incredibly confused at the sound at first, but they soon warmed up to it and began to dance along to the beat.

These kids are in for one hell of a ride, Storm thought, laughing to himself. He and his sister Sunset Flash has gone through the same ordeal, but they had already lived in a non-BLI infested world for a while. These kids had never seen anything other than the inside of that godforsaken lab.

Storm looked forward to teaching the kids the basics, though. They were about Sunset's age (in BLI years), maybe they'd get along with her.

He knew Alien would go crazy with the idea. She would be a great teacher for them, as she had been with him, but usually, new Killjoys were taught by the people that had patrolled for them. And she had her usual General duties to deal with.

In the file about the "subjects", Volt was described as having amazing motor skills and ability to work under pressure, which all sounded like serious medic material.

The bad part of that was the fact that she also reminded Storm a lot of his friend Violent Vendetta.

He definitely did not want to think about any of what had happened that week, so he just tuned in to the music on the radio and the conversation between Volt and Benzedrine about the sun.