The three of them step out onto a grassy hilltop as Sarah is re-sheathing her sword. “And one more,” Sarah says as she prepares to open the next portal.

  Wolf files out of the portal and begins sniffing at the air as the wind sweeps across the hills around them. They undulate as if covered in hair and submerged underwater amidst a lapping tide. The sun, seeming so much brighter, causes Wolf to squint as he turns his nose into the wind.

  “It smells so much better here,” Wolf starts, “but still seems dirtier somehow too.”

  With hilt in one hand and scabbard in the other, Sarah pulls free a cyan blade, then opens a new portal.

  “You’re not wrong, Wolf,” Sarah says, turning to meet his gaze. “But we can’t stay right now. It’s too—”

  Jack puts his hand on her shoulder, cutting her off. “We need to go,” he whispers, then gestures to a neighboring hill.

  Her eyes follow his gaze, and she turns to see several portals opening less than two-hundred-feet away. A pair of werewolves emerge to sniff the air, then howl, echoing one another. The undead begin falling out of portals in piles like ground beef being forced through a strainer. They are shoved aside as a larger figure makes its way onto the hilltop, its Robocop helmet turning to look their way.

  Wolf stands upright and reaches back to unlatch his sword tip from its cradle. “Just say the word, Sarah,” he says, glancing back to her, then does a double take. “Sarah?”

  Sarah’s eyes are distant as they look at the emerging horde, the tip of her katana noticeably bobbing as the blade shutters within her white-knuckled grip. Her lip keeps attempting to climb into a snarl, but something isn’t right in her eyes and the sorrow there quickly stamps out any rage before it can build to consume her. The result is a mild state of shock where both of her fight and flight mechanisms decided they didn’t know what to tell her.

  “Something’s wrong,” Wolf says, looking past Sarah to Jack.

  The Robocorpse begins to run down its hill with the two werewolves at its heels while the undead gather themselves and follow after.

  Jack leaps in front of Sarah, taking her by the elbows. “Sarah?” Jack asks, then shakes her. “Sarah, look at me.” She doesn’t respond, instead pointing a blank stare to the approaching figures. Jack shakes his head and kneels to fold her over his shoulder. “Wolf, we gotta go.”

  Wolf passes a nervous glance between Sarah and the inevitable fight that is trying to arrive too soon. He looks back to Sarah as she’s about to be towed through the portal. With an absent gaze, she screams, the primal sound coming unbidden and having an inflection at the end; one part being fury, with the latter being unsure of that anger.

  Wolf drops back to all fours and follows them through, crossing into a modern city. The busy sidewalk they emerge on is in front of a towering commercial building. The locals quickly part to pass around them but do nothing to stop their accusatory glances. They are a mixture of humans and humanoid robots where some of the robots stop to pay attention.

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  Jack sets Sarah down and pries her katana from her hand. She doesn’t resist outside of her clenching fist that just happens to be around the handle. He takes it and points the tip towards the portal, shaking it and slapping the side of the hilt as if it were the tv remote and the batteries were dying. “Come on,” Jack pleas, trying to grip the handle with varying amounts of pressure.

  “You need to do something now, Jack,” Wolf protests as he looks anxiously at the portal.

  Jack doesn’t acknowledge him as he becomes transfixed in looking over the diamond shaped openings within the braid of the katana’s grip. His finger moves along them, each in turn, before turning it over to find one with a small opening and a pin inside. It seems depressible, but it doesn’t budge at his prompting.

  Robocorpse jogs towards them with a machete in hand, the fragile oval between them threatening to offer no resistance to its crossing. The monster is close enough to count the stitching along the ‘Y’ incision on its chest.

  Wolf’s jaw clenches as he watches helplessly, his fangs becoming visible as they overlap his bottom lip and his hands curl into fists.

  “Greetings, citizen,” a robot calls from behind Wolf. “I’m detecting elevated levels of stress.”

  Wolf’s ears lie flat as he tries to shut it all out. The cacophony of noise and smell from both sides of the portal is like a railroad spike being driven into the nerve center of his senses, each hammer blow to the spike causing his right eye to twitch as the spike is driven further in.

  He tries to ignore the words of the robot behind him, and the grating sound that is coming from between the adjoined plates that cover its body, and the scrapping sound from the ball bearings within its shoulder as it reaches to lay a hand on his person, and the whining of servos within the monster beyond the portal, and the gurgling from within its throat as its vocal chords interplay with a speaker, and the gossip from the passersby, and—

  That’s when the robot brushes against Wolf’s tail.

  Wolf spins to face the bot, his mouth agape and his upper lip drawn back to show all his front teeth. He leaps onto the bot and begins swinging his paws in wild, alternating haymakers. His claws rake across its metal body, opening rents across its head and torso as panicking locals begin to shriek and scatter.

  Jack doesn’t respond to this, instead looking up from studying the handgrip. He turns back to Sarah as she clenches her fists and shakes them in front of her own face. He grabs hold of her hand, then places it on the katana’s handgrip to manipulate it into pressing on the button.

  The button depresses.

  Jack looks back up to see the monster just beyond the portal as Wolf moves in a flurry of motion to the side.

  The creature’s weapon slides through the portal as it prepares to step through. “Destroy Dux,” it says as the blade of its machete crosses planes.

  Sarah’s mouth contorts downward as a wail twists out of her throat. She looks at the creature with horror and attempts to jerk herself free of Jack’s grasp.

  Jack folds both of his hands around her grip and swings her arm within his, causing the portal to close and shearing the tip from the machete. The triangle shape of rusted metal falls and clatters to the ground as Sarah pulls from his grip and falls away from him.

  With the portal closed, Wolf regains some of his senses and turns away from the deconstructed robot. He drags the tip of his sword behind him as sparks crackle along the edge contacting the concrete.

  Jack tries to pull Sarah from the ball that she had retreated into, but she keeps pulling away from him. Wolf moves to stand by Jack, beginning to growl as he sees her behavior.

  “What the fuck is wrong with her, Jack,” he asks, eyes accusing.

  Jack shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Well fix her. We can’t stay here,” he says as he looks to the other people and robots converging on them.

  Jack tries pulling her up by the arm, only to have her wail and kick as he lifts her feet off the ground. With one arm around her waist, he reaches inside the flap of his jacket and retrieves a palm sized metal tube from an interior pocket. He verifies the pink liquid in the side viewing glass, then slams the metal object against the back of her shoulder. The pink fluid vanishing before she goes limp.