Aaron and Erimentha continue to flee with their contact in tow and appear to have left the trigger happy agents far behind. But just as they open a door for a stairwell they are fired on from above, which Aaron reflexively draws his sidearm upon, but before he can fire Erimentha wraps them in the yellow lightning vaulting them down the stairwell again.
She abruptly rematerialized them at the bottom and sends them headlong into the wall. Erimentha gasps for breath and resumes bleeding through the nose. Aaron clutches her shoulders.
AARON: You can't keep this up. You'll kill yourself.
ERIMENTHA: I know. But we still need to find a way out of here.
NOAH: Follow me.
He holds open the stairwell door for them and takes the lead in the hallway. Two guards appear from further up the carpeted hallway and reach for their sidearms while one speaks into a cufflink.
GUARD: Security alert...
Aaron dispatched each with a single shot
to the chest and they keep going.
A little bit further and Aaron and
Erimentha both find it difficult to move.
NOAH: What is it?
ERIMENTHA: There's a Chosen nearby.
NOAH: A what?
AARON: We really need to hurry.
The lights cut out.
AARON: Help me with her.
Noah scrambles to take up an arm so that Erimentha is now dragged between them. She has finally drifted off into unconsciousness. Doors echo in the distance over being slammed open and the sound of possibly hundreds of boots clomping over the ground.
The lights come back up and before them at the extreme end of the hallway is a black hooded figure. With feverishly weak knees, Aaron breaks from his friends' side and stumbles toward the figure.
AARON: Get her out of here.
NOAH: What can you do?
It is then that Noah sees Erimentha has begun to glow, but she remains unconscious. Instead, Aaron's hands have become white phosphorous and he draws both pistols amidst this blur of light and sends them burning toward the malevolent stranger. Noah disappears through yet another door while Aaron marches toward his enemy who has already erected a shroud against the hail of laser fire.
The cloaked figure stomps toward him and
when the dark shield contacts the glowing
white hands they both disappear washed in a white flash.
Aaron slowly regains consciousness and realizes that he is strapped to a stainless steel operating table. His only other companion is a mechanical arm that runs on a ceiling track. It approaches him with a syringe and though he might try to recoil the needle enters and withdraws a portion of his blood into a vial.
The blood has a distinct glint and glitter to it. It is not a hard glow like what he found that turned out to belong to Erimentha. The robotic arm carries the vial to a dispensary at a bank of computers and inserts the vial and waits. After a moment the arm rises suddenly as if ordered to military attentiveness. The arm then proceeds to gently reach out for a circular saw on a tray of instruments near the computer and activates the saw as it returns to Aaron's side.
Once more the man impotently recoils, but the saw bears down on him unabated. Then it cuts through his restraints. Aaron was pulling so hard that once free he quickly rolls and falls to the floor. Still in shock, he looks up to see the arm replace the instrument where it belonged and then proceeded to traverse the ceiling track to the security door key pad.
The robot arm taps in the code and the door opens with an inviting hand for Aaron to leave. He tenderly steps passed the arm at the door and turns back again standing in the hall. The arm points a finger to his left and closes the door.
Now completely alone, Aaron takes the robot arm's suggestion and follows the hallway to the left. He passes several observation windows in which there are banks of people strapped to beds and others in water tanks.
There is one face that is familiar.
AARON: Drusus?
Floating in a tank, the man is twice the size he originally was in muscle mass and has a slight scar from where he was wounded by Aaron's explosive, but all-over is remarkably whole.
Aaron places a hand to the glass of the observation window.
Drusus' eyes burst open and immediately narrow in on Aaron.
A flood of bubbles emanates from his mouth that obscures the tank. And then he bursts through and proceeds to pound on the glass of the observation window, which is far more resilient even as it cracks beneath the force of his fists.
Aaron begins to back away, but too slowly so that he is hardly beyond the blast radius of Drusus Gaul bursting through the ten inch thick material. As the blocks skate across the floor Aaron assumes a dead run while this new hulk of a man roars his pursuit.
A lab door slides open upon two scientists departing. In their shock, Aaron pushes passed them, but Drusus throws them aside with each hand. Drusus Gaul causes a bed to tumble through the air to slam into the opposite wall to the door and Aaron drops to the floor to avoid it.
Drusus is bearing down on him at a slow stalking pace and abruptly a ceiling arm punches up the creature's chin. It then momentarily locks into a point toward one of the doors before resuming a battle with Drusus, which is loses. Drusus rips the arm from the ceiling and hurls it at the door just before Aaron can open it and he must duck out of the way.
Aaron scrambles through a door that opens out onto the street. He gasps in part at the fumes and takes in the city air. Collapsing against some railing, Aaron looks over the edge and realizes that he is high up on a skyscraper. He must have been returned to Janriel.
There is a hover car several feet away, which blinks its lights at him. He starts to run for the car, but then it suddenly explodes and he is thrown back shielding his face. Drusus explodes the wall next to the door Aaron had come through and begins to charge toward Aaron causing tremors in the building with each step of his run.
Then he is cut down by heavy caliber machine gun fire.
Aaron looks up to see Nicodemus sauntering up to him.
NICODEMUS: Aaron? What are you doing here?
AARON: What am I doing here?
Are you helping them track us?
NICODEMUS: What are you accusing me of, cannon fodder?
AARON: I just broke out of some blackops lab
because someone was showing me
the way out. They were pointing
me to that car, which you
just blew up.
NICODEMUS: I was tracking my contact who
cheated me. That was registered to him.
Let's see this lab of yours.
Just then flames engulf the interior of the building
and flare through the hole near the door.
AARON: We need to find the others.
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