Kolt was out of it for a while. He could sense things happening around him, hear nondescript noises, but his brain was just too weak to understand. Six months under, huh? Geez… a lot can happen in half a year.
And a lot DID happen.
The ambulance pulled into the parking lot next to the police station, and Winter kicked open the rear doors and jumped out, Theo following as well. The fold-out ramp that helped stretchers get into the ambulance was pulled out, and the paramedic pushed the stretcher that had Kolt’s semi-conscious body out, Winter holding onto the other end of it and pulling it onto the concrete. The paramedic closed the rear doors of the ambulance, and a few seconds later the ambulance drove forward and made a U-turn, leaving the pair alone (well, trio, but only two of them are standing). “Let’s get him inside.” She glanced at Theo, who was busy staring off in the distance down the road.
“That’s, odd.” He commented, and Winter looked down the road too, and raised an eyebrow in similar confusion. A couple of GSS Gendarmerie were setting out some orange-and-black striped roadblocks, along with a sign saying ‘ROAD WORK AHEAD’ in three different languages. “Winter, do you… hear any road work? Any, jackhammers or heavy machinery?”
Winter turned and looked down the other road and oddly felt relieved that it was empty. This whole situation REEKED of suspicion. She turned back to look at the roadblock, and one of the Gendarme was staring at the pair, who stood there next to a stretcher with the still-barely-conscious Kolt Saudwell on it. They cocked their head and adjusted their cap, squinting at the pair. “Theo, we need to get inside, now.”
“Good plan.” The two pushed Kolt’s stretcher through the parking lot and behind the police station, where they pulled him off and looped his arms over their shoulders, Winter doing most of the carrying due to Theo being much shorter than her or Kolt, and, upset at his inability to hold onto Kolt efficiently, let go of him when Winter began to shuffle towards an emergency exit on the rear of the building. She didn’t even notice the added weight. With one arm wrapped around Kolt’s side, she pulled a keycard out of her pocket, given to her by the police department in case of emergencies (such as having to hide after possibly enacting some street justice on some fools) and swiped it through the lock on the door.
They dragged Kolt into the locker room of the police station, a few odd looks being given by a few of the officers as they briefly passed through the main work space of the police station but considering that they weren’t paid to care, no one did, and Winter laid Kolt on a bench. “Christ… maybe there’s some, I don’t know, extra clothes here?”
“Like this?” A deadpan voice called out from the doorway leading into the locker room. A clone with GSS markings walked up to the trio with a folded uniform in his hands, and held it out. “Do not ask why I have this. Make him wear it.”
Theo apprehensively took the folded-up Privateer outfit and placed it on the bench near Kolt’s motionless head, before looking back at the clone with a tilted head. “And your name is?”
“I do not have a name.” The clone’s mask slightly bobbed as they spoke. “A friend of yours sent me. All you two need to know is that things are about to get very dangerous, and the padlock code to the gun racks in the armory is zero four five one. Goodbye.” The clone promptly turned around and stiffly walked out, leaving the pair looking at each other in confusion. There was a lot of confusion going on today.
Winter scratched her head before asking, “…I assume that the code to the weapon racks in the armory is something that’s soon going to be, important to us?”
“I gue-” Theo glanced down at Kolt, or at least, where Kolt was, and stopped mid-word.
His eye trailed upwards and locked onto the back of the Aldearian’s head, and Kolt finished rolling down the Kevlotton shirt, adjusting the shorts wrapped in the outfit, and Kolt turned around, placing his knuckles on his hips. “Did’ja miss me?”
{A}
Theo instantaneously made his body collide into Kolt’s sternum in an action known by some as a ‘hug’ and others as ‘physical assault’. Kolt chuckled as Theo slammed his face into the taller alien’s chest, ruffling his teal hair and giggling, “Heh, nice to see you too. Sorry for making you two worry, just, had to take one last short nap.”
Theo pulled his face from Kolt’s chest and looked up at him pleadingly. “PLEASE tell me you’re not going to do anything like that ever again?”
“Do what?”
“Try to kill yourself.”
Kolt laughed, and ruffled Theo’s hair again. “Don’t plan on it little buddy. Head hurts like hell though, are my good looks still intact?”
“That’s subjective,” Winter teased as she crossed her arms, “Glad to see you on two feet, don’t know why though; I still don’t care much for you.”
Theo let go of Kolt, and Kolt sighed, “Yeaaaah I expected that, but hey, now that i’m conscious, I should have an easier time convincing you to like me! That’s slightly hard when you’re asleep for, what was it, six months?”
Winter raised an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”
Kolt shrugged. “Just do.”
“Well whatever the re-”
The window above the lockers to the trio’s right suddenly exploded into shards of glass as a red cylinder was thrown in. Theo and Winter were both too stunned to notice the cylinder, which had hit against another locker with a clank and fell to the floor, rolling around in front of them. Kolt crouched down and examined it.
“Incendi-” Kolt had only read half of the black lettering printed onto the cylinder when Theo punted it at at the wall behind Winter, and the grenade bounced off of it at an angle, flying behind another set of lockers and promptly exploding into a quite literal pile of flame, but the lockers shielded the trio.
Winter pulled open her jacket and drew out her P220 as Theo reached into his trenchcoat and drew his 92SB, while Kolt reached for his waist out of instinct, and pouted when he realized his gun wasn’t there. “We need to get out of here.” Winter said in a frank tone as she peered around the line of lockers to see the small inferno erupting on the other side. The room was getting hotter with every second. “We need to get out NOW.”
Theo grabbed Kolt by the shirt and yanked him along as Winter ran out of the locker room. They heard another boom, and the sprinklers went off, fire alarms screeching and emergency sprinklers activating and soaking the trio. Kolt pulled Theo’s hand off of him and stopped for a moment as the pair trekked ahead, leaning back and letting the water soak him, hopefully ridding most of the filth he had acquired in the sewer. He closed his eyes and held out his arms, letting the water roll down the deep scars on his hands and arms {A}. Theo, realizing Kolt wasn’t following them, turned around and saw this, and stopped for a moment.
Kolt opened his eyes and looked down at Theo. “What? My previous experience with water today was falling in sewage.” Theo just rolled his eye, and Kolt followed him as he turned the corner.
Winter was waiting there. “Enjoying your shower?” She scoffed, “I know I am. Now you don’t reek as bad as you did earlier.”
“Fuck off Hillary.” Theo snapped, taking her aback and making Kolt cover his mouth to hide a goofy smile that instantaneously sprung onto his face. “Kolt’s been in a coma for six months, give him a little respect alright?”
“Fine, but I can’t believe i’m surprised that you’re defending him from jokes.” Kolt wasn’t; he’d known the shorty for seven years, and he knew about how protective he was towards his friends. The trio continued down the hall, jogging towards the main room of the station, and the trio walked into a surprisingly calm situation.
Most of the fires had been extinguished, large scorch marks adorning the carpeted floor, and a few officers were blasting the smoldering remains of the few spots that still flickered. But if they weren’t trying to stop the remaining fire, they had their guns drawn on any and all entries into the building, a mish mashed mix of old revolvers and military surplus semi-autos pointed at windows, doors, and even vents. The majority of the officers were watching the front door, prepared to lay a wall of fire if anything came through.
Winter grabbed one of the officers who was extinguishing a tiny fire by the collar and shook him. “The hell is going on?” She growled.
“D-Dunno ma’am, the phones are cut and someone threw incendiary grenades through a couple of the windows! We haven’t seen anyone yet though, b-but no one’s leavin’!” She shoved him away and stomped into the middle of the room, turning 180 degrees and examining the entire situation. She pointed to Kolt and motioned for him to come. Kolt did so, and Winter reached over a short cubicle, plucking a discarded Walther PP, probably owned by one of the officers on fire duty, and handed it to Kolt.
“Hey that’s mi-” Winter turned her head and glared with the intensity of a thousand suns at one of the officers, who quickly shut up and went back to blasting the scorch marks on the carpet. She turned back to Kolt and asked, “You still know how to use that, right?”
Kolt patted the barrel against his ‘new’ hand. “What, Theo didn’t tell you that I owned one of these? I’m sure I can remember how to use a gun.” As Kolt brought his head up to look at Winter, he noticed a… faint humming noise from the north, outside the building and far far away. “Do you, hear that?” He asked in a hushed tone, listening intently.
“Hear what?” Asked Winter, not having heard anything but the blasting of fire extinguishers and quiet crackling of roasted paperwork in cubicles that had been absorbed with flame.
“That… humming noise.” He pointed at the southern wall of the police station. “From that way.”
“I don’t hear anythi-”
“Shhh, shh shh. Shush.” He brought the hand that he was pointing at the wall with to the side of his head, making a funnel over his left eardrum and closing his eyes.
As he focused, the humming transformed into swishing, then what sounded like rapid flapping. Blades, cutting through the air. The flapping split into three different audio signatures, close to each other but obviously from different sources. Kolt hadn’t heard the sound many times before, but he definitely knew what it was.
“I think… there are gyrocopters closing in on us from the south.”
“What? The city limits are a no fly zone!”
“Doesn’t seem like whoever’s flying them cares.” He continued to listen, his eyes sealed shut, and suddenly picked up a very odd noise. Something detached from something else, and then PHOOOOOOOO-
“Get away frOM THAT WALL!” Kolt screamed as he ducked for cover, the officers near the rear wall of the police department slightly confused, and Winter just stood there scratching her head.
“What fo-”
The rear wall exploded into debris before she could finish her sentence. Dust filled the air as sunlight shined in from the car-sized hole in the wall, and the humming noise, now audible to everyone, got closer and closer. A few officers had been knocked to the ground, but it seemed like everyone was okay, if a bit shaken up.
Winter, deafened and ducking behind a cubicle, popped her head up and said, “Well that wasn’t so b-”
Men in green armor holding assault rifles started funneling through the hole, firing on whatever they saw and deafening everyone in the room even more. Winter ducked back down the cubicle and yelled, “WHY DOES EVERYTHING INTERRUPT ME!”
The death squad started systematically executing the officers who had fallen to the ground, most too dazed to even see their death coming. One grabbed their revolver and shot one of the death squad soldiers in the vest, but it only caused a white puff of fiber and smoke to come off of it, and they too were riddled with bullets. Kolt, his eardrums having adjusted to the constant gunfire, got up off the floor and brought up his Walter. Three of the soldiers turned and looked at him, their mouths agape under their masks. Kolt Saudwell? The gunfire stopped, and an awkward silence began, the soldiers staring at Kolt, who stared back. {A}
“Surprise, assholes!” He shot one in the face, their visor shattering and one of their eyeballs exploding outwards as a bullet slammed through it.
Winter popped up, her own handgun in her hands. “Yeah, surprise!” She shot one in the neck, causing a fountain of blood and them to drop their rifle in a futile attempt to stifle it.
The ones who shook off their amazement brought up their rifles and started shooting at the pair, who dived to the ground and huddled behind their respective cubicles. Winter was completely deaf, her ears still ringing from the explosion, and she put her hands over them as bullets punched through the top of the plastic wall she hid behind, the rest being stopped by the thick metal desk on the other side. Kolt however, could hear perfectly, Aldearian’s having eardrums that could adjust to different frequencies, and began to crawl around the other side of the cubicle, attempting to flank the soldiers. Winter stayed where she was, and when the ringing quieted enough for her to hear more than just the thunderous gunfire, leaned around the corner and fired twice at the soldier standing between the cubicles, hitting them in the crotch and the leg. He fell back and flung his rifle across the room, muffled screams coming from his face mask as he convulsed and spazzed on the ground, legs flailing as blood gushed from both the hole in their thigh and the matching one where their family jewels used to be.
Winter popped out again and fired twice again at the wounded soldier. One bullet hit them in the vest at an angle, causing it to tear into it but stop right below their neck, but the other hit them in the inner thigh, the bullet travelling through their pelvis and ripping up any internal organs that were in its way. The soldier went limp, and Winter went back into her cover.
“Fuck fuck fuuuuck!” She cursed as she pushed back the heel-mounted release on her pistol, counting the witness holes on the magazine before slamming it back into her gun. Kolt shimmied around one of the soldiers, and as Winter emerged from the cubicles, he saw that the officers near the wall that weren’t immediately executed had stumbled to their feet, one pressing the barrel of their Hi-Power to the neck of a soldier pre-occupied with shooting at Winter and blowing a hole clean through their trachea. They didn’t have any sort of peripheral vision, Kolt thought, it must be the goggles! Why do bad guys always have one big weak point, Kolt internally laughed.
Kolt sprung to his bare feet, adopting a two-handed Weaver stance with his PP (hehe) and plinking a soldier who turned to shoot him in the neck, and they continued to fire their gun into the ceiling as they went down. Two soldiers remained, and they actually attempted a tactical retreat, shooting at any movement they saw in the darkened police station; the power was knocked out by the blast.
One backtracked onto the rubble, but their masked snout promptly exploded into gore as a resounding CRACK was heard from behind Kolt {A}. Kolt turned, and saw Theo’s diminutive form wielding a scoped rifle that was about half as long as he was tall, lowering it to work the right-handed bolt handle. The de-snouted soldier gurgled and choked on their own blood as they laid strewn over the rubble, and the other one just turned and ran. The ringing in Winter’s ears had subsided, and she stood up with her gun pointed at the hole in the wall with a snarl on her face, but relaxed when she saw that the soldiers were all dead.
Well, save for one. Kolt walked up to the mortally-wounded death squaddie, stepping over the body of a feline police officer before crouching down in front of them. He pulled off their helmet, revealing bright orange fur, and plucked the shredded remains of the mask off their face. The fox’s eyes were full of tears and staring directly at Kolt, and their snout was replaced with a bloody stump with a blood-soaked lower jaw under it, tongue and teeth visible {A}. “I’d ask who you are and who sent you,” Kolt queried, “But it seems like, you’ve bit the bullet.”
Theo groaned from across the room, and the fox just looked at Kolt with terror in his eyes. Kolt imagined pressing the barrel of his PP to his forehead and examining the pattern the back of his skull made afterwards, but, he relented, instead sitting down and putting his five-fingered hand on their head. “There there, there there…”
Winter, Theo, and the surviving officers all looked at Kolt with silent confusion {A}. Everyone was getting confused today. The fox’s arms, which were jutting upwards at their sides as they convulsed, slowly eased down onto the rubble around them. They gulped and gurgled as they suffocated on their blood, and Kolt just stroked the side of their head. “There there…” He cooed, and the tears in their eyes stopped flowing. Their choking stopped, and they blinked once before their struggling ceased forever.
Kolt closed the fox’s eyes with a swipe of his hand, and stood up, gripping his now-empty handgun and looking through the newly-created hole in the wall.
“Kolt!” Winter exclaimed as she ran up to him. That was uncharacteristic of Kolt. “Why didn’t you just, yah know, shoot him instantly? They were a death squad soldier! I thought these guys were fictional…”
“Winter,” He turned and looked at her, and Winter saw, instead of the gruff mercenary she knew of from six months ago, a slightly scared and weakened man, and she was actually taken aback by how he looked. Was this still Kolt? “I, I really, don’t know.” He stuttered as walked past her, towards Theo, and asked in a less shaky tone of voice, “Let me guess, the armory?”
“You are correct.” Theo slid the rifle over his shoulder and slung it against his back. “The clone was right with the code, follow me.”
As the trio left the room, the living officers looted assault rifles from the courses and took up positions around the room, watching any sort of entrance and ESPECIALLY the aforementioned hole in the back wall. Theo led Winter and Kolt down a side hallway and into a previously-locked room, the wooden door shot around the handle until Theo could just pull the door knob off and push the door open. There were four gun racks, and Theo had opened one and pulled a bolt-action rifle from it. “Word of warning,” Theo stated as Kolt and Winter went to examine the guns in the rest of the racks, “They’re all old.”
And he was right. There were only two scoped hunting rifles in the rack Theo opened, he was carrying the third, and two of the racks had ancient surplus bolt-action rifles that probably dated back to the Second Great War.
The last rack had a few old bulletproof vests, probably weaked from age and useless, but Kolt’s attention was drawn almost entirely to a brown wooden box pushed up against the back wall in the room. A padlock kept it shut, and Kolt wondered aloud, “I wonder what goodies are in here? Theo, have a lockpick?”
“Why the hell would I have a lockpick?”
“Bobby pin?”
“Sadly, this is one of the days when I DON’T wear a ponytail.”
“Winter?”
The burly fox shoulder Kolt out of the way. “Stand aside bugbreath.” She raised one of her strong legs into the air and stomped on the lid of the box four times, stopping when the top of it cracked right open. Winter put one of her feet on the wall, and chuckled, “I always have a pair of lockpicks on me, heh.”
Kolt just responded, “That was corny, Winter.”
Winter pouted as Kolt bent over and pulled the cracked lid apart with his Aldearian strength which, while heavily weakened due to how degraded his muscles were, still allowed him to rip it apart like it was wet toilet paper. As Theo and Kolt leaned in to look at the contents, Winter got a glance of what was in it and gasped, shoving the two guys out of the way as she stuck her hands into the box. “Yes yes yes yes YES YES YES!” She repeated as she stood up and turned towards Theo and Kolt, holding up two Second Great War Danuvia submachine guns.
Those guns were more ‘automatic carbines’ than submachine guns, firing powerful 9mm Mauser Export rounds, and there were two inside the box, along with four loaded magazines each and a ‘samurai’ style magazine vest. “Ohhhhohohoho I remember shooting one of these in training! Heehee, these are mine, get out of here and go pick up an assault rifle from the other room, I… I need a moment.”
Kolt and Theo both looked at each other worryingly, before simultaneously shrugging and waltzing back to the main room. Kolt pulled an assault rifle out of an officer’s hand and flung the Walther PP over his shoulder, holding the gun up so he could examine it in the sunlight coming from outside. “STG45(M), ehh? These little guys are rarer than an Aldearian with hair, but, i’d expect nothing less from a group of,” He kicked the corpse of a death squad soldier and grimaced a little due to the fact that he did that with no shoes on, “Oww, a group of trained killers.”
Theo looted a Walther P88 from one of the dead soldiers along with a few magazines, commenting, “Hey Kolt, have you realized that this probably means the GSS wants us dead?”
“Probably, but i’m too popular to kill, at least I HOPE I am. How many newspaper articles did The Galactic Outsider run about me while I was under?”
“Only four, and one was just a list of famous people you legally killed.”
“Okay so they definitely are trying to kill me. Oh, hey Winter.” Winter stomped past Kolt with both Danuvia submachine guns strapped over her chest, up to the body of the soldier who Theo de-snouted, and stuck one of her hands into a pocket on their cargo pants. She drew out a bulky GSS military officer’s PDA, which was about three times larger than the ones the Privateers gave to their ‘employees’, which Kolt had kept after he left, and she turned it one by twisting a knob on the side of it. The screen buzzed to life, everything displayed in bright green on a pitch-black background, and she flipped through the memos, notes, anything that would give her some inkling of information about why a bunch of unmarked soldiers just tried to kill an entire police station.
She found nothing, just some generic orders: ‘ELIMINATE KOLT SAUDWELL AND ANYONE WHO INTERVENES’. “Well that clears things up.” She yawned as she threw the PDA onto the face of the snoutless fox. Kolt meanwhile had pulled the least blood-flecked boots off of a dead soldier and slid them over his feet, tightening them until they were nice and snug. He had no socks, but they definitely helped protect against all the shrapnel and glass shards laying about. He then looted the black gloves of another, but found that he could only wear a glove on his right hand due to his extra digit on his left one. As he looked at his left hand and wondered again why he suddenly had an extra finger, a gloved hand stuck under his face, holding a five-fingered right hand glove that matched the one the soldiers wore.
Kolt looked up and directly into the eyes of the GSS-marked clone. “This is what you want, correct?”
“Y-Yeah,” Kolt took the glove from them and slid it over his left hand, stretching out his fingers. “Uh, thanks?”
“You need to get out of this building and off the planet.” Winter and Theo walked up behind Kolt, listening to the clone too. “The GSS is after you but won’t admit it. Look for the sewer manhole behind this building and head eastward, you’ll make it out.” The clone turned to leave, but Kolt put his hand on their shoulder.
“Why are you helping us? I mean, you told Theo the code to the locks on the gun racks. Wait why did they only have one code on all of the-”
“I’m helping you because I was ordered to. Follow me, i’ll just show you the manhole.”
The trio followed the clone out of the destroyed hole and into the parking lot of the police station. Everything was silent, but as Kolt stopped and focused his listening, he could just faintly hear the blades of the gyrocopters in the distance. The clone led the trio to a manhole cover and Kolt yelled, “NO. No no NO. I am NOT going back into the sewer, NOPE.”
“Yes you are, Kolt.” Theo shoved Kolt. “I doubt they’ll be looking for us there.” Winter and the clone lifted up the manhole cover, and Theo clambered in, stuffing his new P88 into a pocket on his coat, secretly upset that he’d be staining it with sewer stench. Kolt grumbled but followed him, and Winter was last.
As the clone went to move the manhole cover to block them in, Winter asked, “Seriously, why are you helping us?”
“Those are my orders.”
It slid the cover over their heads, and they were enveloped in darkness.
PseudoSaga 