7. Give A Girl A Gun

A. Dmytryk's entire plan hinges on winging it. And shooting things.

7

 

Unfortunately, the bridge was already up when he got to it. He shoved Ada to wake her up, perhaps not as gently as he intended. She woke with a start, nostrils flaring as she looked around wildly. “Oh. Oh we’re outside.” She murmured, eyes drooping again.

 

“Oh no girly I need you to stay awake. We’re not out of the woods yet, they’re still coming.” He gave her another, lighter, shove. She nodded and straightened up. “We’re gonna have to hoof it now. Think you can do that?” He eyed her appraisingly, concerned at what an honest answer to that might be. She nodded again, and unbuckled her seatbelt, fingers fumbling with the clip for a moment before she managed to get it undone.

 

They hopped out of the truck in unison, feet splashing in the puddles in the cracked asphalt. Dmytryk handed Ada a smaller pistol and took the staple gun taser back. Again, she was probably more dangerous barehanded, but maybe she wasn’t totally aware of that. “They sent some sort of things after us, which fortunately haven’t gotten close enough for me to get a look at them but sound a lot like dogs. Coming from HIRA, I doubt they’re just that.” Ada looked at him with wide frightened eyes, but swallowed hard and nodded. “That gun should take down anything smaller than a bull moose with one shot, anything bigger, try two. If that doesn’t stop them, we’re pretty well fucked.” He reached back to pull a spare clip from the bag slung across his back. “And here, stick that in your pocket.”

 

Ada took the clip, turned it over, and immediately recognized that she wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to put that in to the gun she had in her hand. Even that she only understood well enough to assume that pulling the trigger would make it shoot. But a gun that size couldn’t do as much damage as he said. There must be something else to it. She hoped she wouldn’t get the chance to find out, but she heard the dogs too, and they were near. The white Level 12 jumpsuit had pockets she hadn’t noticed before, so she tucked them in propperly and stuck the extra clip in there.

 

“Why don’t you take this too. Just in case? I have two, anyway.” Dmytryk handed her the second laser cutter pen, which was shortly deposited in her other pocket. If they managed to find a safe moment she was going to ask him that those weapon things were actually called. Or maybe not, she knew the names she’d already given them would stick in her mind no matter what their real names were. Her head was swimming, already overstimulated without asking questions she wouldn’t be able to understand or process the answers to.  “Oh, and stay close no matter what, okay? You’ve probably got a tracker chip implant. All employees do, so I’ve got one, but I snagged a tracker block from the defence prototypes. Stick close and they won’t be able to track you, at least until I figure out how to disable them. Or remove them.”

 

“A tracker chip? They put a chip, like, implanted in me somewhere?” She looked more upset by that than by pretty much every other horrifying thing. It figures, Dmytryk shrugged. How do you get your mind around being kidnapped by a clandestine organization and used for transspecies biomorphic experimentation? He shot her a sideways glance, suddenly afraid he’d neglected to notice gills or something. She sure looked human. But he’d first seen her down on Level 12 three and a half weeks before, and from his covert research into the program, the study she was involved in had been going on for close to two months. She couldn’t still be all human, and how would a person deal with that being done to them?

 

The first of the dogs rounded the corner a few blocks up, but it was the first sight they’d had of them. They ran more upright, almost like chimpanzees. Almost like a dog that had been mutated to a humanoid form. Or, as Ada frantic, frazzled, overwhelmed brain thought with a twinge of sick humor, it looked like they were about to be run down by a stampede of half-transformed werewolves. “I have an idea.”

 

Dmytryk looked at her a bit shocked and a bit desperate. “I’m all ears.”

 

“See the channel behind us? Think you can swim that, robocop?” He could; the suit was low-density lightweight plastic, one of his own. If she was suggesting it she thought she could swim it too, but now that they had a herd of mutated humanoid dogs bearing down on them it was obvious that anything they could swim, the dogs could too. “I don’t think they’d be able to climb the ladder to get back out.”

 

Oh. Right. He looked again at the channel behind them, and indeed it would take fully functional human hands to grip the little metal rungs that protruded from the concrete wall. “Geronimo?” He shrugged, and Ada nodded, then ducked and took a running leap towards the channel. Dmytryk followed her, counting on the recent heavy rains to leave the channel deep enough that they wouldn’t smash themselves on the bottom. Someone had to think about these things, and he doubted Ada was even able to think that far ahead right now. It didn’t really look like she could.

 

The robocop suit added enough weight that he did touch the bottom, but Dmytryk looked up to see Ada already swimming for the surface. The suit was relatively light on land but dragged in the water, and he barely managed to surface, but he did finally and struggled to reach the far wall. He climbed out and reached the other side to see the mutant dogs lined along the other side of the channel, barking and howling. They’d gotten that far, but he knew HIRA well enough to know that wasn’t enough.

 

At least the plunge seemed to have woken Ada up. She looked more coherent than he’d seen her. In fact, the girl was crouched at the top of the channel wall, gun trained on the mutant dogs that had started to jump into the channel to swim after them. He figured she was probably right that they couldn’t climb the ladder, but Ada wasn’t taking chances. She missed a few shots, but hit enough that several of the mutant dogs yelped and sunk in the channel. The swim had rendered his taser staple gun unsafe to use and he hadn’t grabbed anything else that would be of use in this situation, but judging by the grimace that distorted his face he was pretty sure he didn’t want to try to take her gun from her.

 

She’d made a fair dent in the pack of dogs and exhausted the first clip before she stood and turned to him, wordlessly handing over the gun and the fresh clip. From the look on her face it was clear she hadn’t any clue how to change it. He took them with a nod. “We should probably keep moving. Find somewhere safe to hole up until we can come up with a better plan.” She nodded. “How’re you feeling?”

 

“Like I lost a high-stakes sudden death round of roofie roulette.”

 

Dmytryk couldn’t help but laugh, even given the situation. He sobered immediately and hastily checked the tracker block. It was a flat black puck, about an inch thick and three inches in diameter, and judging by the little blinking red light the swim hadn’t knocked it out. Hallelujah.

 

“Are we good?” She looked concerned, which given the situation was perfectly reasonable.

 

“Yep. Let’s go though, I don’t want to see what they send next.”

 

“Yeah, me neither.” With a shuddering glance at the few remaining mutant dogs pacing the far bank she turned on her heel and took off in the opposite direction. He followed, the heavy boots of the robocop suit clincking with each step. It occurred to him suddenly that he was actually bone-numbingly exhausted. That wasn’t good at all.