As he approached the docks, the Engineer quietly stepped forward, pushing an electric cart with a pair of speakers loaded onto it. He glanced back at the odd figure with the guitar on his back; a Family associate named Raid, the child of a supervillainess by the name Siren; nodded; and when the boat came to a stop, the man started to play.
The loud, discordant melody; some sort of heavy metal music; blasted out. At first, the nearby dockworkers looked up in confusion and irritation. The mercenaries and Eyeball stood at the open hatch, looking outward... as the looks of confusion faded. Slowly replaced by a trance; a dull, mindless visage as they turned, and started walking towards the sound. Some stumbled over obstacles. One even fell off of the docks, splashing into the water; Engineer glanced over the side to see the man treading water after a few seconds, trying to swim closer.
One of the man started absently walking forward, until his companion smacked him on the side of the head, and adjusted his headphones. He stopped, looking a bit sheepish. The Engineer turned back to them. "All the women who still have their minds intact. All the children. If you see any soldiers, stunned or not, hit them."
The men nodded. One soldier; a Family member with unusually stretchy, rubber-like limbs who, of course, was simply called Stretch; remained with the boat, assembling a heavy machinegun and a few armor plates together into a defensible position on the guard rail; the 20mm weapon would be effective against light tanks, meta-humans, and others; but even a few seconds of firing would render anyone nearby too deaf for Raid to keep in a trance, so it would be a last-minute thing; only for use when everything went to hell.
The Engineer and the other mercenaries walked rapidly to the facility; neatly side-stepping a few dockworkers that aimlessly walked past them; and encountered the first guards; outer perimeter workers already starting to head towards the dock. He pumped a single shell into each; and after a momentary collapse, they arose to follow the team to the door, and the now-abandoned security checkpoint.
The further they got from the docks, the less effective the music was; and it likely wouldn't work against those inside at all. The Engineer assumed more direct control over one of the guards, having him use his badge to open the door; and continued to advance; firing a Pale Gun with each hand with absolute precision; the defending guards too confused at first to return firing, seeing their own personnel walking alongside the invaders.
The Engineer made a gesture; the surgical suites, where the women who had yet to be altered, were in one direction; given an injection to wake them up, they'd likely go along willingly. Upstairs, in the nursery, however? Hundreds of infants and toddlers who would need to be carried out; preferably without being drugged. As the other mercenaries stepped along the walkway, heading for the 'storage locker' which should be filled with sedated young women, hopefully from all three facilities by now, the Engineer and one of the other mercenaries; The Horror; headed up the stairs, a few of the facility guards marching in advance.
The sound of gunfire; the Engineer kept going, just a pace behind, as bullets hit the guards; the wires bound to their nervous systems driving them onward even as they sustained fatal damage from their colleagues; and he casually used one man's shoulder as a brace to strike his companions; striking one in the throat, unfortunately crushing his windpipe; meaning that that particular Pale One would be a walking corpse within minutes; while the other instead hit a lightly armored belly.
Both men fell; only to rise again, one of them a grisly display as his obviously shattered throat spilled blood over his uniform vest. The alarm had been sounded; there was shouting throughout the facility; but no more guards between them and the first nursery.
The Engineer looked out at the room. Hundreds of children, each with labels on their crib, denoting whatever genetics had produced them, carts designed to carry a dozen at a time, monitors, steadily beeping; and a few nurses, standing with their hands raised; two men and a woman, all in scrubs. The Engineer leveled the Pale Gun on them, the guard with the ruined throat standing beside him.
"You will help us get the children out of here safely. If you do it willingly, you'll survive the experience. If you delay or resist, you will die, but still help us." The three of them stared at the walking corpse, the cyborg, his gun... one of them started to back away towards the alarm button; likely an instinctive response, since the alarm was already sounding. The other two started to gently load the children onto one of the carts.
"You... won't get away with this. There are hundreds of soldiers nearby! Nowhere to go!" He seemed to have realized there was no point in hitting the alarm as he glanced at the already flashing red button; but he glared at the Engineer, defiant.
The Pale Gun shell impacted his left eye; embedding directly in his brain, sending blood splattering across dozens of children; many of whom began crying in fear at the strange noises and sensations awakening them. The other two nurses both looked for a moment at the body starting to slump... before it rose up.. and started to grab children with distinctly less precision than its living companions, shoving them onto the cart.
The three loaded bawling children onto the cart, and at the Engineer's direction, started to push them outside; only for the two nurses still living to just keep pushing, heading towards Raid, as the Engineer heard gunfire further into the complex.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
***
By the time the holding cell was reached, the team was... angry. They'd just walked past a surgical suite and seen a woman already surgically altered but not completely, one arm still intact, a visible scar on her forehead from a lobotomy; the leader, a long-time Family metahuman called Granite, one of thousands of metahumans who had a rocky flesh and some level of inhuman strength, took the lead; absorbing what few shots were directed at the team and almost casually converting everyone that showed their face into a Pale One; and when he looked into the chamber he was, momentarily, stunned.
The men following him were covering before and behind them, at first not noticing what had made him stop; but when they did, they went from a calm, professional demeanor; this was just a job, they were here to rescue some people, a bit out of the ordinary for them but not that strange; to... rage. Granite tapped his throat mic. "Anyone walking around, convert into a Pale One. We'll order them to run out and cause chaos when we go, and clear the facility itself with the neurotoxin. Don't go for kill shots. They deserve to suffer for a while before they go down."
A few doors past the surgical suites, Granite broke down the proper door; where the still unmarred women were temporarily stored before being lobotomized; inside...
Hundreds of women. Some naked, some wearing just a surgical gown; all of them unconscious, lying on closely-packed beds; only one of them was awake, restrained to her bed; with a guard, his uniform in disarray, kneeling behind her bed, using it as cover.
Granite took in the scene. The woman; the boots and pants lying on the floor beneath the bed. The guard, firing a few shots; nice, high-caliber, armor-piercing rounds that were painful when they splattered off of his rocky flesh but didn't penetrate the skin; he walked forward, glaring down at the guard, who just kept firing until the weapon ran out of bullets; and let out a scream when Granite grabbed him by the arm, lifting him into the air.
He was a pathetic sight; still wearing his uniform shirt, but just boxers and socks down below, liquid running down his legs as he seemed to have pissed himself; Granite would smile if his face were that flexible. "You little fucker. I know this isn't a Chinese thing. I've met hundreds of your people over the years, and nine out of ten are better than the Americans I usually work with. Decent, hard-working people. Its hard to believe you're even the same species, much less come from the same place."
He pointed the gun at the man's crotch, firing the Controller directly into his flesh at point-blank range. The sound that emerged from the man, aside from a horrific gurgle and tearing of flesh, was one of the loudest screams Granite had heard a man make; before he dropped him. The man twitched on the floor for a few moments, before rising to his feet. Granite turned to the door. "Start dosing the girls. I want them awake and headed for the boat."
He looked down at the girl on the table, snapping her restraints. "We're here to rescue you, and kill everyone left in this place. If you can get outside, just follow the music; we'll get you on the boat."
***
The Engineer set a group of Pale Ones to guard the perimeter as he started pushing the carts; designed to go down hallways, from the 'storage' rooms to elevators, and then out to delivery trucks, rather than on the street, so a bit clumsy for the purpose, threatening to tip over if they weren't careful. There were more nurses inside; and when he reached the second nursery room, he was somewhat surprised to find... three women, already loading children onto the carts.
When he opened the door, they stopped; one simply holding the child in her arms and stepping forward. "Are you here to shut this place down?"
He tilted his head, looking at the three women; scrubs, name-badges.. aside from being Han they were the right age to be victims of this place just as well as nurses; if they'd been born somewhere else they'd have a very different experience. "Yes. I'm loading all of the children on a boat and putting the surrogates out of their misery."
"...If we help, can we go with you?"
***
Eyeball looked at the controls for a moment; carefully balancing what he could predict with what he could feel from the craft in real time, as he visualized an incoming missile; and began dodging before it was launched, swooping down between the nearby buildings, the missile slamming into one of them as he struggled to control the dive.
He was able to time these dodges perfectly; the three incoming helicopters hadn't been able to hit him, yet; but every time he had to dodge it put a desperate strain on his poor piloting skills. With every passing minute he drew closer to the coast; but he saw another incoming attack; bullets this time. He swiftly sorted through dozens of options, different manuevers, things he could do... but none of them ended well. He yanked on the stick; the chopper's main rotor scraping against a nearby building, sending the craft skidding across a rooftop as it shuddered to a stop; and then fell twenty feet to the ground as a burst of fire scattered across the street along the path he would have taken.
His last thought before slamming face-first into the control panel with enough force to knock him out... was that he really needed to learn how to fly better.
The ordinance on the helicopter; ordinance he didn't have the right codes to fire, and didn't have time to hack or guess; abruptly went off on either side, sending fire and shrapnel scattering in every direction, setting off the fuel tank; and if Butcher hadn't grabbed Eyeball, tearing a hole in the craft to make an escape route, would've likely turned him into scattered bits of burning meat.
As it was, the two were launched from the wreckage, training smoke; and slammed into a nearby building, forming a Butcher-sized crater in some poor couple's living room; Eyeball unconscious, Butcher almost completely unharmed as he kneeled over the man, stripping off one of his armored gauntlets so he could check for a pulse... as he heard the sounds of helicopters, the roaring of tank engines; they were surrounded by what sounded like a whole army, and, at least for now, he was alone.
He dragged a nearby couch, hiding Eyeball between it and the wall. First, deal with anything that was a threat right now. Then, grab his friend and run for the coast.
He hopped out of the hole in the apartment building; ignoring the still, somehow, alive form of General Zhou laying on the concrete; and withdrew his massive blade from the magnetic sheath on his back. Lets see. Three tanks. Probably built to help kill metas. At least half a dozen combat helicopters. And of course probably hundreds of soldiers.
Piece of cake, right?