“So what’s the plan?” I asked her, scooting over on the stone bench so Chloe could sit beside me.
“Nothing, really.” She said, accepting the seat. “I’ve been going through the attack reports over the past month trying to decide which route I should take entering the city. I figured you running around in an S-16 for a few minutes wouldn’t hurt anything.”
Smiling, I went to take off my glove, “You’re the best, Chloe.”
Then something horrifying caught my eye.
The screen on my glove was black--something I’d never seen before. Not being like a laptop or anything, in a LOT more ways than one, meant that I had never actually powered the thing down before. I mean, why would I have? It never did anything but glow and look awesome since I unearthed it on my hiking trip of destiny. Thoughts like batteries or charging, in my defense, were lost to whoever looked at the glove, really, because it just appeared as futuristic as it was.
But I didn’t know everything about it so maybe my battery had finally gone out.
Which wasn’t a bad thought, really, because I suppose if it had to run out of juice, running out just before I swapped it for another one was about as awesome of a timing as I could think of.
“Say, Chloe?”
“Yeah?”
“I hope you got some D batteries for this thing, ‘cause I’m thinking my Coppertops have finally run their course,” I said, extending my glove to her.
She glanced at it, gasped, grabbed it, and said in a low cold voice, “Why is the screen off?”
Frowning and furrowing my brow a little I stated that it was her dad’s gizmo that she’d helped create so maybe she should have asked herself that question.
Chloe had removed the glove by this time and was freaking big time, man. Jabbing at the screen, Chloe started spouting Russian, which was kind of her thing, you know, when she got really mad or upset. Only this time I was able to understand everything she was angrily muttering and I was one-hundred percent correct on my first analogy of this being some not-so-nice things she had been saying before.
After not getting any results with her finger jabbing, Chloe raised the dead glove above her head and would have slammed it on the stone table had I not snatched it out of her hands first.
“Easy, Chloe! Chill out, man.”
“No!” She screamed, darting her fingers to her glove. Her screen was on, but barely and flickering out quickly.
Then it was all quiet except for Chloe’s ragged breathing. I looked at my dead glove, “Any ideas?”
“The EMP grenade.”
Oh. And I’d thought it was just your average flash-bang grenade. Man, I really needed to get with the times.
“My father warned me about heavy electric fields. He told me not to get too close.” Chloe was on the verge of- something. Not tears, exactly, so I’m not sure what she was on the verge of. “He said that too much electrical current was one of the only things that could penetrate the scandium casing.”
“So I’m thinking that a whole grenade of the stuff wasn’t good for my baby?” I asked.
“Neither of our babies.” Chloe corrected, standing.
“Whoa.” I told her with my hands held up, “We’ve known each other for way too short of a time to be discussing children already.”
“My father is the only one that can fix them,” Chloe said, either not hearing the joke meant to lighten the mood or choosing to ignore it.
I don’t know where my mind had been the past two minutes but apparently it was gone to some faraway land because the gravity of the situation finally hit home. “Your father…?”
Chloe, who I was guessing just caught on to the apparent fix, too, looked at me and simply nodded.
“The same father being held by some crazy guy with an army of gun-wielding sociopaths?”
Again, Chloe just nodded, looking at me the way a soccer mom looks at her kid when she has to tell him that he won’t be getting that ice-cream stop he’d been expecting.
Not knowing what else to do, I sat back down.
Let me interject here that I am a strong-willed kind of guy. I mean, it takes a lot to shake my focus. Or that not a whole lot shocks me. Time travel will do that to a guy, let me tell you.
But since it, in fact, wasn’t time travel but the lack thereof that I was presented with, things were starting to look bleak.
“I can still get into the city, Jericho, but you’re now presented with the only options you have left.”
“And those are?” Asked the dejected hero of this sad yet true tale of awesome.
“These shelters have blast doors that seal from the inside and aren’t easily damaged. You could wait here while I free my father and fix the gloves. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“So the blast door will hold off whoever happens upon the shelter that’s normally open to the public and the fact that its sealed shut won’t make them want to crack it open?” I asked the reasonable question.
Chloe shrugged, something that I was expecting to see.
“That’s what I thought. And behind door number two?”
“You come with me.” She said simply, “Although it will be dangerous, you can leave as soon as the gloves are fixed.”
I shook my head, standing, “Hold the phone, woman. Your dad isn’t chilling in his lab in the backyard. He’s on freakin’ lock down by the guy you have to bring the glove to. Something tells me he’s not going to like getting his prize broken.”
“It can’t be helped. I’ll tell him it was damaged in the retrieval and that my father can fix it if it comes to that.” Chloe told me, walking to one of the chrome cabinets across the room. When she opened it, I saw that it contained- you guessed it--more guns. “I'm not planning on coming in the front door, anyway.”
“Good God, do you people ever have something other than deadly weapons behind doors?”
“Most of the time, no,” she said as she pulled out a few of the bodacious assault rifles I’d seen the demon troopers packing. “You’ll see why in a minute.”
I caught the rifle she’d tossed to me and turned it over a few times. “I’m guessing it works like the guns back home? Like, point it at baddies and squeeze the trigger?”
Chloe walked back to me and gave me the rundown on my new piece, showing me how to turn the laser sight on and off, how to reload and how to switch to the frag launcher. I nodded throughout the lecture on ballistics, watching her.
“What?” She asked after she’d finished and noticed me staring at her.
“You’re extremely hot when you spout your gun knowledge, you know that, right?”
I wasn’t ready for the punch she delivered to my shoulder in what I was hoping was the same way most girls punched guys in the shoulder. You know… the whole giggly, “Oh, stop it, you handsome man, you.”
But since we were both rocking the S-16s, Chloe’s playful punch was heard more than felt and the sharp steel-on-steel sound resounded around the room after she delivered it.
“Awesome,” I said, cocking the assault rifle, “Glad to see that I’m not the only one who’s hitting on someone around here.”
Chapter 15
What.