Chapter Forty-One - Extinction of a New Sort

"And it came to pass that as the earth was plagued by the sins of man, extinction rates did rise and the creatures of the land and sea were lost. For their genomes were coveted by those with greed in their hearts, and taken for selfish gain. And so it was that the great sharks were lost, for they were cloned to satiate the desires of the wicked. And their genomic samples were locked away, hidden behind walls of technology, protected by the very greed that caused their downfall. Thus did biodiversity perish, one sinful act at a time."

--The Ecoterrorist’s Manifesto, page 41, verse 12

***

I ran over to the building Manic was hiding in just as I heard a very strange but very unique sound, the charge up whine and bassy boom of Manic’s sound gun going off. Some of the windows at the front of the building clattered apart, sending sheets of glass tumbling onto the street and alerting every alien in the area that something was up.

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath as I double-timed it into the building. Behind me, the stirring mass of aliens was starting to move in the same direction. I was sure a few would notice the front door opening and closing on its own, but there was nothing for it.

I ordered up a grenade with a laser tripwire and some sticky shit on the side of it and pressed it to the wall next to the entrance before running deeper in.

“Need a few more of those,” I said as I started to go up the stairs. I left one at every landing. They’d be a nice gift to any aliens trying to run up behind me.

Manic was on the fourth floor, and when I reached her, I found the woman with a boot pressed up against the front of a model five, her other shoe slipping backwards as she levelled her bass cannon into the alien’s mouth and fired.

There was that familiar whine, then a single loud ‘borf’ sound that made all the dust on the ground skip up and ripped the alien apart from the inside out.

She stumbled backwards, regained her footing, then started looking for the next target.

There were a few model threes rushing across the open room, but before she could aim at them I fired at the lot in full auto, and was suddenly reminded that I didn’t have the stealthiest kind of bullet loaded into my gun. Still, I nailed the three with four shots, then ordered up a resonator and tossed it into the corner of the room where it released its high-pitched squeal.

“You good?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Manic said. She flicked a strip of alien meat off her gun. “Gonna want a shower after all of this.”

“I thought the ‘covered in gore’ look was very punk,” I said.

“Eh, I’m all for doing shit just for the vibes, but like, aesthetic’s important but fuck if hygiene isn’t important too, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Slept with this one guy once. Real rocker sort. Fuck the system. He ended up in jail for molotoving some rich fuck’s ride. Anyway, guy was cool, but he smelled like those ecigs all the time.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, less interested.

She gave me a look. “What? Squeamish?”

“About fucking? Not when it’s two women, like how God intended.”

She blinked. “But guys squick you out, really?”

“Hey, we all have our hang ups,” I said before I slipped past her and looked outside. The aliens were crowding by the bottom of the building and a number of them had taken to the skies. “Shit, I was hoping to wipe a few out if they were closer to the explosion.”

“More for me to kill. So, gonna detonate that thing?”

“Give me a second, I’m savouring it,” I said.

She scoffed, then checked on her gun while I used my augs to select all of the acid bombs I’d left in the basement. Once they were all connected, I tapped the detonate button.

There wasn’t a huge kaboom, which was expected. The acid bombs down there would be releasing a fine, rapid-spreading mist of very acidic... chemical stuff. I didn’t know what kind of chemical, and if Myalis had told me I’d forgotten already.

It would start eating anything it could, organic and not, and was probably not very healthy for the aliens down there, what with them not being acid-proof as far as I could tell.

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Those bombs alone, I imagined, might be enough to take down the building. I wasn’t an architect, but I was pretty sure that melting all the pillars in a building’s basement wouldn’t be ideal for its structural integrity.

Then I selected all of the more conventional bombs, held my breath, and tapped on detonate.

The floor rumbled beneath me and a massive cone of dust shot out from the building. Then the entire thing just collapsed. The floors above crashed into those below as the bottom gave out. Chunks of cement broke off and rained down towards the street, ripping through an expanding cloud of dust and smoke and a little bit of fire.

The rumble continued for a few long seconds, then subsided.

I let go of the breath I’d been holding in. “Oh yeah, that was nice.”

“You getting off on this?” Manic asked.

“Nah, but I think I know what Gomorrah sees when she lights the world on fire. There’s just something real beautiful about destroying things, you know?”

“Hmm, I’ll stick to music and sex.”

“Your loss,” I said. The aliens below didn’t seem to expect the big explosion, and a number of them were taken out by falling bits of masonry. Not all of them though, not even half, really. “We should go down there. I saw them leaving through another building, so we might want to go blow that one up too.”

“That’ll mean fighting through all of that,” Manic said.

“Mhm,” I agreed. Then I stuck my head out of the window (was it a window if it didn’t have glass anymore?) and looked straight down. We were more or less above the entrance, so I ordered up a handful of grenades and let them fall, then chucked the pins down after them. “That should keep them distracted for a second,” I said.

I could hear detonations in the stairwell already, so they’d found the bombs I’d left in the landings.

We waited a minute or two up above. Manic was muttering something, presumably to her AI because eventually a box appeared next to her and she opened it up to reveal a mask that she slid under the visor of her helmet and which clamped up to the back of her neck. “It stinks,” she explained.

Fair enough. My own air was filtered, so I wasn’t enjoying the wonderful odour of burning buildings mixed with pulped aliens.

Then she bought a pair of strange metal devices that she clamped around her biceps and over her leather-like jacket. It gave her a bit of a weird look. I couldn’t begin to guess what those were, not until they slid open and revealed a set of speakers on the inside.

A smaller version of her bass cannon? Placed the way they were, they’d blast all around her.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Yeah. Debating getting some boots.”

“Nice boots are nice,” I said. “Might as well get pants though. You don’t want some alien getting into yours, you know?”

“I don’t think they’re interested in that,” she said.

I shook my head. “It’s all fun and games until you see one of those tentacle ones up close,” I said.

Manic paused. “Actually, yeah, give me like, two minutes?”

“Sure,” I said.

She slipped into one of the rooms nearby, and I went over to guard the stairs, giving her a bit of room. When she returned she was wearing very flattering pants that were made of some sort of smooth, shiny material. Same old boots though.

“Nice,” I said. “Make your ass look fine.”

“My ass looked fine already,” she said. “We heading down?”

“Yeah. I just need to disable the bombs I put on the stairs. The ones that didn’t go off already.”

I could do that from afar, fortunately, so that wasn’t a big deal. There weren’t many that hadn’t gone off, just the ones on the last landing. As we started to make our way down, I discovered a slight issue though.

“Ah, shit,” I said as I looked at where the stairs should have been.

The bomb had torn them apart, leaving a hole that led two floors down.

“Nice job,” Manic said.

“Hey, not my fault this place is basically built out of cardboard. I swear, how cheap can they get?”

“We’ll just have to go around,” Manic said. It clearly didn’t bother her all that much.

To be fair, I just wanted to get to the ground floor to start killing shit, but I supposed going about it in a roundabout way wasn’t so bad.

***