Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Fifty-Four - Essentially Doomed

“The entire generation born after the year 2000 was made aware, from a very young age, that they were essentially doomed, and that no one was going to do anything about it.

So for a lot of them, the alien invasion was just a cherry on top.”

--Extract from Memoirs of a Zoomer, 2047

***

I glanced around the parking garage, helped by the spotlights from the two mecha cats that were still lingering by the entrance. “I can’t see anything left alive down here,” I said. “Except for us, I mean.”

Emoscythe nodded, flipped her sword around, then slid it into a loop on her belt. Somehow that loop coated the sword in something that looked like a sheath. “We’re done here, I think,” she said.

I asked Myalis for a few of those nano-machine grenades that ate antithesis flesh, and after activating them, I tossed the nades to the far ends of the room. The few resonators left were winding down and going quiet at last.

“That should make the area a little less hospitable for them.”

“But only here,” Emoscythe said. “Ideally we’d go floor-by-floor to ensure that there aren’t any more xenos left, but I don’t think that would be wise right now. Securing one building which is likely surrounded already isn’t going to help anyone. We’re going to have to push back the entire wave, then secure this part of the city building-by-building.”

“We’re going to have to do that everywhere,” I said. “The entire country side, every little shithole town, every cave and forest... we’re kinda fucked, you know.”

“You don’t sound depressed about it,” Emoscythe said.

I shrugged, but I wasn’t sure how well that gesture came across with my bigger armour on. “My entire life I have been acutely aware of just how fucked I am. And I don’t mean just the big-picture shit. I’ve always had bigger, closer problems to worry about than climate change or the economy.”

Emoscythe started towards the exit. “You know, I’m the one that’s supposed to be all doom and gloom.”

“Hey now, there’s enough gloom for everyone to share a bit of it.” We walked up the exit ramp and I raised my gun and fired point-blank into the side of a model three that was sniffing around. “Back to the wall?”

Emoscythe checked our surroundings, then started walking that way. “Might as well. Something tells me the defenders are going to need all the help they can get.”

“Is that ‘something’ the presence of a model twenty-something? Because I’m pretty sure we aren’t supposed to see those for a while.”

“It’s too early for them. And if a model twenty did show up, then we should have spotted it.”

“But we didn’t,” I pointed out.

Her eyes narrowed. “We didn’t. I can think of a few reasons why we might have missed one, and I don’t like any of them.”

“Sabotage?” I asked.

“Possibly. Or carelessness. Let’s not attribute malicious intent to what could simply be idiocy.”

Emoscythe bent down into a runner’s stance, then she took off in a sprint that would put the average doped-up super Olympian to shame. She hit the wall of a building, ran straight up for a bit before gravity took a hold of her, then she jumped off and flipped to the next building over. She ping-ponged her way up onto the rooftops while I watched. It was pretty impressive, the kind of shit I’d expect to see in one of those exaggeratedly over-the-top Japanese games.

I shook my head and jetted my way up to the rooftop. “Myalis, can you have all the cats in the region head over to the blockade?”

Certainly. Though a number of them have since been destroyed.

That was unfortunate, but not too surprising. The city was still being shelled, there were loud explosions in the distance and as I looked back east and towards the outer edges, I could hardly make out the horizon from all the smoke climbing into the air from some two dozen or more fires.

The other direction wasn’t so dire.

The wall had continued to expand even as the wave approached. I counted two more segments on the nearest section. Those were maybe ten metres wide, quite a bit taller, though not much. The gap in the wall was still massive, but there were people there.

“Let’s move out,” Emoscythe said. “I think the Family’s about to ask that everyone out here head back to the barricade.”

“So there’s no point in being out here?”

“It’s more likely that we can do more good over there,” she said. “We’re force multipliers. Out here, we’re only multiplying ourselves. Over there, where the wave needs to break, that’s where we can be the most useful. If that barrier doesn’t hold we’ll have aliens inside of New Montreal. It’ll be hard to defend the city while hives are growing inside of it.”

I swallowed. I had plenty of reasons not to want the alien fucks inside of my home.

We ran across the rooftops on our way to the gap. Every so often I’d glance down to the street. There were even odds of there being nothing at all or an entire mass of aliens down there. I dropped some acid bombs as a gift to any alien we crossed.

There was a massive split between the outer city and New Montreal. An entire area, maybe a hundred metres wide, where every building had been demolished. I didn’t know who was going to shoulder the cost for that. The heaps of crushed concrete, rebar and furniture was pushed back, some of it filling in the holes where basements would have been, but the rest of the debris had been built into a wall.

Past that was a second temporary wall, or rather, a dozen of them pressed up against each other. Sandbags in one spot, large metal barricades a few metres down, then further off, movable cement barriers.

The reason for the mish-mash of different styles was pretty obvious. Behind those walls were the people responsible for taking care of them. I counted seven PMC groups, and what might have been an all-volunteer group of militia.

The gear was wildly different. One group had exo-suits and heavy machine guns. They had tanks parked behind purpose-built barriers with forward facing spikes. Next to them, civilians with cheap headphones and rifles were shoring up a wall of sandbags.

It was a fucking mess.

I took note of the heaps of dead aliens around the first wall of debris. It was an effective mess… maybe.

Emoscythe took a running jump off the top of the building we were on and rolled to a landing below. I respected gravity a bit more and took my time descending with my jump jets, landing with a crunch a few steps behind her.

“You think the Family will be telling us where to deploy?” I asked.

“Likely,” she said. “It won’t be hard to see which area needs the most assistance regardless.”

That made an uncomfortable amount of sense.

I noticed a lot of guns from a lot of groups turning our way, but most were clever enough to aim elsewhere as soon as they noticed that we were human. It wouldn't be hard to guess that we were samurai, I imagined.

Emoscythe looked like a pretty plain tech-goth kind of girl. The sort of person that had no business walking out of a section of city entirely overrun by aliens without so much as a blemish on her black lipstick, and I was wearing power armour with cat ears.

We ran across the no-man’s land, around the corpses of the few aliens who had made it deeper in and over craters left behind in the dirt and mud. Someone had been using explosives all across the area. I couldn’t really blame them either.

Emoscythe jumped over one of the cement barriers, then slowed to a stop on the other side. I climbed over it with a bit less grace. Almost as soon as she stopped, a man in full combat dress ran up to us. “Ma’am,” he said with a sharp salute. “Glad to see you here. We could really use the help.”

“How bad is it?” I asked.

He turned towards me and snapped the same crisp salute. I didn’t know which PMC he was part of, the symbol on his chest read Bear but I wasn’t sure if that was the company or his group. “Things have been positive so far, ma’am. We pushed back the last wave, but they broke through in four places. We had to relocate some of the rear lines to prevent the breach from going in too deep.”

I looked past him and to the rear line he was talking about. The front had barricades of one sort or another, with the few odd tank or machine gun emplacements here and there. Then there was the space where the wall would be. Workers were pouring cement and machines were digging out holes even as we spoke.

Past that was a second line of barricades. That one had a lot more armour. Tanks, properly big ones, with temporary towers that had gun emplacements on them. A few AA trucks were parked here and there, guns aiming skywards.

“You getting paid more to be up here?” I asked.

“Combat pay and a half,” he said.

“Right.” Well, I wasn’t going to get paid like that, so I might as well make the best of it. “Tell me where the breaches happened. I’ll try to shore up those spots.”

***