6. Partner Up to Beat Level One

A. Dmytryk didn't plan past step two, relies heavily on explosives.

6

 

The first sealed lockdown door that they came to was ripped apart by a strip of stick explosives courtesy of A. Dmytryk, Junior Plastics Engineer. The second sealed lockdown door, Ada ran into full speed as Dmytryk skidded to a stop to pull out more explosives. The heavy metal frame barely dented, and she backstepped a few meters to give herself running room to hit it again. On the third full-bodied ram, Dmytryk cautiously tapped her shoulder and held up a strip of stick explosives. She nodded and with clumsy fingers helped him peel them off the strip and paste them to the now slightly warped door frame, then stood back as he pulled out the spray can and connected the explosive stickers with a spray painted line then ignited it with his laser cutter pen.

 

He jumped back, but the explosion still knocked him on his a*s. His ears were ringing. Ada helped pull him to his feet. No time to stop now, he knew, they were almost to the surface. Where they’d go from there, he had no idea. He hadn’t quite covered all the bases. He had covered some, though, like grabbing a portable signal blocker to mask their tracking chips. Everyone who worked there had a tracker chip, and he was assuming Ada did too. Until he could figure out how to remove them, they had a temporary fix.

 

It was getting pretty near time for him to figure out what they were going to do once they got outside. In fact, it was time. They burst through the double doors and out into the pouring rain, both of their hearts pounding. He looked both ways before pulling Ada around the corner of the building and towards the vehicle lot. He pulled out one of the badges he’d snatched from the doctors in Ada room and swiped it to start one of the armored trucks. He had no idea what he was doing, but Ada was in the shotgun seat with a seatbelt already clicked across her lap. He handed her the taser staple gun. Shutgun seat got the gun, obviously, even if someone as drug-addled as she was shouldn’t be trusted with anything remotely damaging. That thought was almost funny, considering she was probably more dangerous with her bare hands. Kicking the truck into drive, he floored it and took off towards the back of the lot.

 

It was doubtable they’d make it through any of the guarded gates, so they’d have to go through one of the walls instead. In this van, they might even be able to just ram it. He grimaced and clicked his seatbelt on. This was stupid. He hit the wall at top speed. Ada, for her part, did her best to clench her jaw, brace herself, and not scream. They crashed into the alley on the other side of the wall and Dmytryk swerved hard left to avoid driving full on into the next warehouse.

 

From the outside, the HIRA Labs compound didn’t look like anything special, it just looked like another warehouse in the trainyard district. In fact, the actual hangers had train tracks in them for storage or maintenance or whatever the property had been used for before HIRA Labs had moved in and tunneled out two underground towers beneath it. At least two. For all Dmytryk knew, there were more. It wouldn’t surprise him.

 

The sound of hounds barking echoed from inside the compound. Ada and Dmytryk shared a look of confusion and horror. She had no idea what exactly they did in the compound, but had undoubtedly seen enough to know that sound could only mean terror. To be fair, Dmytryk knew very little as well. But coming from HIRA, he knew they couldn’t be normal hounds. Dmytryk immediately took back every hope or wonder he’d ever had about having a chance to see the rumored, near-legendary humanoid beasts of biomorph. Now that they’d been set on him, he had zero interest in ever seeing them at all.

 

Looks like he’d end up a body in the harbor after all. Dmytryk turned the truck out of the alley and onto one of the shoddy broken-concrete streets in the direction of the harbor. They’d obviously figured that they either weren’t from HIRA at all, or had managed to disable their trackers, so the dogs would be tracking them by scent. If they took a dip in the harbor, which this time of year and in this weather might kill them all by itself, the dogs wouldn’t be able to track them. Or so his theory went. Maybe it would work. It was better than anything else he could think of. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do out in the wild so nobody could follow your trail? Go through the water? Boyscouts taught him to walk in creeks, not jump in the harbor in October, but given the situation it was the best he could do.

 

He took a sideways glance at Ada. This was incredibly stupid. He’d just ripped her out of a science experiment that would certainly have killed her, but it was entirely possible that it was going to kill her anyway. She had the look of someone heavily drugged, and while the adrenaline had overcome it for a while he could tell she was starting to nod off. He’d have to figure out something else.

 

Which would be difficult considering it wasn’t terribly hard to track a smashed armored truck. They couldn’t exactly just outrun them, right? Considering he’d just driven through a wall, the truck wasn’t even in great condition. He swerved onto another cross street and Ada swayed then sunk further into her seat. Yeah, she was checking out. He had no idea what kind of drugs she was on, or what exactly the “primer phase” she’d been through entailed, but she was definitely strong enough to put a visible dent in an armored door, and that was light years from normal. Would cutting her off from the drugs cold turkey kill her? Dmytryk hadn’t actually thought that one out.

 

They were heading towards the south warehouse district, which was actually north of the train district, and Dmytryk knew without a shadow of a doubt that the only reason they’d managed to get this far was the tracker block. HIRA hadn’t expected that. Of course, they probably didn’t expect a Junoir Plastics Engineer to lose his s**t and bust one of the test subjects out of biomorph, steal a truck, and run off. That was probably the last thing they expected, actually. He could hear the hounds closer. Which meant they were faster than the truck.

 

There was a drawbridge over one of the canals a few blocks up. The thought occurred to him suddenly and he cut left at the next intersection to get over to where the bridge was. With any luck he’d be able to get across then… threaten the bridge operator with a gun to raise the bridge. Or just ask him nicely, because frankly the white robo cop suit was intimidating enough on its own. Yep, that was a foolproof plan. They were fucked either way though so that put him in the desperate place where he would actually try something like that. As far as he knew, that was the only bridge on the canal. If they could cross and get the bridge up behind them, the dogs would have to go at least a mile out of the way to get around.