Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [58]
Half of the ’Chine were down, sprawled out powerless or scattered in body parts or mechanical parts. Flames danced in the lower tree branches, leaping across the area as it sought out ropes of hydraulic fluid that had spread through the trees and brush. More fires pooled across the ground.
Hella morphed one of her hands back to normal, and she plucked an HE grenade from her belt. She pulled the pin with her teeth, slipped the spoon, and heaved the high-explosive sphere into the mass of ’Chine. “Grenade!”
Stampede threw an arm up over his eyes. Riley’s face shield would automatically darken to protect him from the flash.
Turning, Hella dropped over the side of the boulder to take the protection it offered. She morphed her hand back into a weapon, closed her eyes tightly, and ducked her face into her right elbow.
The grenade detonated and filled the immediate vicinity with bits and pieces of ’Chine and roasted prairie dog. When she dropped her arm and blinked her eyes open, a slavering prairie dog with its back sheathed in flames lunged at her. Hella fell to the side, and the creature crashed into the boulder. Before the fear-enraged animal could recover, she shoved a hand to the base of its skull and fired a round that emptied its head.
She got to her feet and fired into the flaming mass of ’Chine at ground zero. Despite the flames clinging to them and the fact that many of them were burning down, the survivors continued the attack. Most of the prairie dogs lay in smoldering heaps.
“Ready, Red?” Stampede sounded calm, but his voice was hoarse with the smoke.
“Yeah.” Hella knew her system was still processing firepower just fine, but the backpack she carried and siphoned raw materials from was running low. If she didn’t get another backpack from Daisy, she’d have to rely on her rifle.
Stampede lifted his foot and stomped the ground. A quiver ran through the earth and buckled the ground where the surviving ’Chine stood. They flew in all directions as the ground betrayed them.
Blinded by the HE grenade, Daisy pressed back against the tree line with her forepaws raised in front of her. Anything that neared her would get crushed.
Hella took a breath and focused. Before the ground had completely stopped quivering, she ran forward. As she let the nanobots flood her mind with information, push away her human senses, and rewrite her reflexes and responses, she grew afraid. All her life, all of it she could remember at least, that programming lay on the fringes of her mind, ready, willing, and able to take over. Allowing the nanobots to interact with her on that level was easy. Pulling back from them seemed to get harder each time.
Fleet as a deer, she ran across the buckled earth and the dead bodies. Totally locked into the nanobots in her body, she was a flitting gun sight. Ranges and cross hairs burned into her vision, and she reacted with precision and speed that nothing human could ever equate. When she fired, ’Chine died or ApZeroes shattered.
A ’Chine caught her left foot. Before the dying thing could lock its hand, Hella threw herself into the air and flipped, arms thrown wide as the nanobots filled her head with target acquisitions. As soon as she fired, she flicked her wrists and found the next target, blasting away as soon as she’d locked on. When she landed on her feet on a bare patch of ground, she’d killed the ’Chine that had seized her and blasted three prairie dogs that closed in on her like heat-seeking missiles.
When she stood finally, shaky with the adrenaline that filled her and warred against the control demanded by the nanobots, Hella was the only thing left alive in the fire zone. The burning trees and grass lit up the gruesome scene. The stench of burned flesh and cooking hydraulic fluid filled her nose with acrid smoke that made her sneeze. She forced the nanobots’ control back from her mind and body, and that was the hardest thing she could ever remember doing.
Pistols at the ready, the rifle slung over his back, Stampede walked forward