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“So I had a weird dream last night–”
“I’m going to stop you right there, Doug.” Bryce was busying flying the vehicle and making sure they took a path near the least explosions. “That doesn’t sound like the beginning of a statement either of us are going to care about.”
“But it wasn’t like a dream. It was just the Devil talking to me and he said–”
“The Devil?” Lulu asked. “Like with horns and a pitchfork?”
“No, he looked like a regular person.”
“So how did you know he was the Devil?” Bryce said.
“Did you ask for ID?” Lulu added.
Bryce scoffed. “Doug wouldn’t know what proper ID would look like.”
“Yeah,” Lulu admitted, “and I bet IDs are very easy to forge in dreams.”
“Lucky for us, they’re also easy to forge in real life.”
“You guys are making fun of me, aren’t you?” Doug said. “You know, I was perfectly happy not committing treason today.”
“Calm down. We’re just about there.” Bryce slowed the vehicle and began a descent. “It going to mainly be on you, Tri-Lu, since you have the real ID.”
She held up Chen’s badge with photo. “I really don’t think I look too much like her; I’m much cuter. Hopefully they’ll just be looking at my chest.”
“I never look at anything else.”
A bit panicked, Doug raised and waived his hand. “What am I supposed to do again?”
“Follow us. Not talk.” The vehicle came to a rest, and Protectors — presumably real ones with guns — converged on it.
Lulu got out and flashed her ID. “As you can see by my close resemblance to this photo, I’m Major Chen. We have business here and we need to be quick about it.”
“The base is being evacuated soon,” one of the Protectors warned.
“We know,” Bryce said. He got out of the vehicle as well, and Doug decide to follow and stay behind him. “That’s why we need to a quick inventory of the armory.”
“And who are you?”
“I’m with the government.” Bryce flashed some ID quickly. “As you can tell from the gunfire, we don’t have a lot of time for stupid questions. We’re heading to the armory; you can follow if you want.”
“But…” one of the Protectors started to say, but Bryce and Lulu were already walking away with Doug quickly following. The Protectors stood back watching for a moment, but soon went back to more pressing matters as gunshot and explosions grew near.
“So far so good,” Bryce remarked.
Lulu giggled. “I like ordering people around. I’m going to do that more to the next people we encounter. How do I tell if I outrank them?”
“We can ask Charlene when we find her.” They were outside in the main part of the base, and most people were running around quite purposely. Bryce kept scanning the people around them. “I forget where the armory is anyway, so we probably need her. Think she has her phone on her?”
Doug spotted a petite young woman walking nearby in fatigues and carrying a tray of coffee. He was about to shout out, but then he remembered his no talking directives. Instead, he tapped Bryce on the shoulder and pointed towards her.
“Good work, my mute manservant.” They headed towards her, Lulu reaching her first.
“Give me my half-caf, puke!” Lulu shouted.
Charlene turned around to do a quick salute, but her face changed to shock when she saw Bryce and Lulu. “What the hell are you doing here? Where did you get that uniform, Lulu?” Doug stumbled a bit as he caught up to them. “Is that Doug?”
Bryce laughed. “They have you doing coffee runs while the city is about to be burned to the ground? I guess sucking up to the Hollow ones really got you the respect you wanted.”
Lulu looked over Charlene’s uniform. “They make you wear that baggy thing? And do you even have a gun?”
“They’ve trained me with one and I will be issuing me one today so I can be a part of this defense.”
“They are already evacuating, you nitwit,” Bryce said. “Asmod’s forces are going to arm some of the Last who are dumb enough to stay fighting to give them more time to escape.”
“Won’t it be fun being one of them?” Lulu exclaimed. “Yay dying for people who hate and despise you!”
Charlene’s expression was a mix of anger and hesitancy. “You don’t know that.”
“Come on, Charlene, you’ve been training to be the tiniest soldier for how long now?” Bryce asked. “And what do they have you doing?” He knocked the coffee from her hands. “Stop working so hard to be a pawn, okay? This place is going down, and it’s best we find our own way out.”
“So I’m better off with you losers? Is that my choice?”
“You don’t have a choice; that’s the point.” Bryce said. “We don’t like each other–”
“I like all of you,” Doug interrupted.
“…and we all especially hate Doug,” Bryce continued, “but there’s no use pretending we have anyone else to turn to. We’re earth’s Last Children; the world hates us.”
“They say we can all be no more than liars and thieves, so we respond by being liars and thieves?” Charlene asked.
Bryce smiled. “Yeah, it’s a vicious cycle; what are you going to do?”
“Anyway, we just brutally murdered Major Chen and left your DNA all over the crime scene,” Lulu told Charlene. “So you don’t have any choice but to go with us.”
Bryce gave Lulu a look.
“I’m just trying to speed things up. This uniform is itchy.”
“You really a part of this, Doug?” Charlene inquired.
He shrugged. “I just found out about this like an hour ago and I’m still not quite sure what’s happening. I really think you should come with us, though, because it is looking pretty bad. I don’t want to die here if that’s what’s happening. I especially don’t want to get tortured by Loch… I don’t want that happening to you either.”
Charlene looked in pain pushing down so much anger. “If things go wrong, I’ll kill you before they can. So what are we doing?”
“Just take us to the armory and act like everything is fine,” Bryce said. There was an explosion nearby. “Well… not fine, but no worse or no better than everyone else thinks it is.”
Charlene motioned them to follow. “Go team Hellbender!” Lulu yelled, getting an audible sigh from Charlene.
“Stop right there!”
They spun around to see five Protectors running towards them. One of them pointed at Lulu. “You’re not Major Chen.”
“But I have an ID an everything,” she whined.
“Which Chen just reported was stolen.”
Bryce rolled his eyes. “There goes that plan.” The Protectors were quick with their guns, but Bryce was quicker, pulling out his revolver and putting it to Lulu’s head. “Hands up!”
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“We’re going to steal arms from the military.”
Bryce Worthington said it as if it was some genius idea, but Doug didn’t quite see the appeal. He looked to Lulu Lui, but she seemed okay with the concept. Then again, she was wearing a military officer’s uniform for some reason. He turned back to Bryce. “Isn’t that treason?”
Bryce scoffed. “Come on; everyone does it. It’s like the jaywalking of treason. You ever jaywalked, Doug?”
“Yeah, but I got yelled at.”
“Well… if that’s the worse that happens, then I think we’ll have come out pretty well.”
“Would an officer wear this much eye shadow?” Lulu checked out her face and uniform in a mirror. She wore it quite well, but pigtails wasn’t the most authoritative of hair styles. “Eh, what do I care what other officers do; I’m my own person.”
“Where did you get that uniform?” Doug asked. Bryce was in a new suit, but Doug knew there was no point in asking him about it.
“I decided to join the military, and they thought I was so cute they went ahead and made me a Major.”
“So why does your nametag say ‘Chen’?”
“When they made me a Major, they decided to give me a name more officiery.”
Doug looked around the room. It had a very nice view of the city. “And whose apartment is this?”
“Doug, what’s with all the questions?” Bryce took on an angry tone. “You’re unemployed, so it’s not like you have anything better to do than help us rob this military base. Didn’t you just get replaced at your factory job by a monkey again?”
“Isn’t that like the fourth time you’ve been replaced by a highly trained monkey?” Lulu asked Doug.
“Third,” Bryce corrected. “The monkey that replaced him in his packing job was only marginally trained.”
“I hate monkeys!” Doug shouted. “I’m always getting replaced by monkeys or robots! They keep taking the jobs of honest humans like me and it’s not right!”
“I wonder what would happen if they made a robot monkey.” Lulu said.
“Then he’d totally be screwed,” Bryce said.
The thought horrified Doug. “That would be the worst thing ever!”
“Well, Doug my boy, it’s time to show the world you can do what monkeys and robots can’t.” Bryce tossed Doug some clothes. “Namely commit treason.”
Doug looked at the black uniform. “Isn’t this like the uniform for one of Asmod’s Protectors?” They were the government’s elite soldiers and very scary.
“Just put it on,” Bryce said. “No more time for questions.”
Doug really didn’t want to become an enemy of the state, but peer pressure was hard to resist. He headed off to the bedroom for a bit of privacy, but then he noticed something odd. “Why is there a half-naked woman tied up in here?”
“I don’t know,” Lulu answered, “but one thing is for sure: Her name isn’t Chen.”
She wasn’t moving. “Is she alive?”
Bryce looked slightly worried. “None of us have the medical experience to make a pronouncement on that matter.”
“Bryce was supposed to drug her drink,” Lulu explained, “but he screwed that up so I had to bash her over the head with a chair. It was a very sturdy chair.”
Bryce shrugged. “We’re kinda new to this espionage thing, so it’s well chalk this up as a learning experience.”
Doug figured they were already in pretty deep, so he might as well go along and put on the uniform. “Was this the woman you were dating, Bryce?”
“One of them.”
Doug shook his head. “You’re really horrible to women. You gotta work on that.”
“At least I get some,” Bryce answered. “The point is we needed her credentials for this mission and I’m not really going to weep much over the fate of one of Asmod’s stooges. You ready?”
Doug’s new uniform smelled funny. “I guess.”
Bryce handed him the helmet with skull-like facemask that went with the Protector uniform. “Put this on, and as long as you don’t say anything you might actually look slightly intimidating.”
He put the helmet and almost scared himself when he looked in the mirror. “We’re going to get like executed for this, aren’t we?”
“No, the government’s hasn’t been in much of an execution kick lately,” Bryce said. “More like reeducation… or for you, I guess just a plain education.”
“They’ll make us admit two plus two equals five,” Lulu said, “which won’t be too bad except for how it will screw up the multiplication tables.”
“I don’t want to learn math.” A thought struck Doug and he became quite concerned beyond just potentially being hunted by a government armed with arithmetic. “Will Charlene be a part of this?”
“Of course,” Lulu said. “It wouldn’t be team Hellbender without stick in the mud Charlene.”
“Okay. Good.” He was trying to get himself mentally prepared for this step into the abyss, but then another thought struck him. “Does she know she is going to be a part of this?”
Bryce laughed. “Of course not.”
There was an explosion nearby and then sirens started going off throughout the city. “That’s our cue.” Bryce ushered them to exit the apartment.
Doug could hear gunfire. “What’s going on?”
“Got inside info that Serpine’s forces are attacking today,” Bryce explained while they headed to the stairway. “That’s what we had to schedule around.”
“Who?”
Bryce led them towards the roof. “Transcendent who rules the areas north of us. Vowed to destroy this city recently and has been amassing forces to do just that.”
Doug shrugged. “I really don’t follow politics. So we’re being invading?”
“Since they’re going to leave after they raze this place,” Lulu said, “I don’t think it’s technically an invasion.”
Bryce stopped and turned towards Lulu. “Actually, I think as long as they just come in mass, it’s an invasion. I don’t think the term requires them to stay.”
“So are we being invaded?” Doug asked again.
Lulu shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe.”
Bryce led them to the roof, and Doug could see fighting in the air between jet planes and flying creatures. “They got dragons!”
Bryce sighed. “Superstitious talk like that is what give us Last a bad name. There are no such things as dragons, Doug. Are they breathing fire?”
“No… they’re firing missiles I think.”
“Not a dragon, then. Probably something much more ordinary like some sort of giant, flying, cyborg reptile.”
There was a crack of thunder and the sky turned purple. The clouds swirled until they formed the face of a woman that looked down upon them all with scorn. “Followers of Asmod, this city is doomed. Asmod has been an obstacle to our progress for too long, and now this city shall burn until nothing is left. You can see your defense is already falling to my superior forces, and soon my ally Loch will be here… and I think you know that means you should be gone. If any of you survive, you should rethink your loyalties.” The face faded away, and the sky was clear again.
“I’d so hit that.” Bryce turned away from the sky and walked towards a nearby military VTOL transport parked on the roof.
“Is Loch really coming?” Doug was more than a little frightened having heard all the stories of Loch, a being of immense power who used his infinite knowledge to inflict pain. If even a fraction of the stories about Loch were true, Doug was ready to flee immediately.
“Yes, and he’s going to eat our souls! Woooo!” Lulu laughed and got in the passenger seat.
Bryce got in the driver’s side. “The Trans have their silly rules of engagement which means Loch can’t do anything until Asmod’s forces are bested through traditional methods… something that should leave us enough time to steal from the military base in the midst of the chaos. We can’t start a new life without some capital.”
Doug didn’t share Bryce confidence, but he was now quite convinced they needed to get Charlene before they fled so she didn’t get left to the mercies of Loch. He got in the back of the vehicle and sat down while doing his best not to freak out at the continued sound of fighting nearby.
Bryce took the vehicle into the air. “Now, we have to fool them that Tri-Lu is an officer, I’m a government official, and you’re an elite soldier… but we only have to fool them for a couple of minutes if we’re quick.”
Lulu smiled and giggled. “I think is going to be neat. I’m glad we’re finally doing this criminal thing because my secretary job was really getting on my nerves.”
“I thought you were a stripper,” Doug said.
“I am… but it’s not my job.”
“One more thing,” Bryce said. “If I do this…” he made a motion with his arm. “Our cover is blown and we shoot our way out. Anyway just keep calm, and this should go off without a hitch.”
“And most of all, have fun,” Lulu added.
Doug didn’t quite see the shoot everyone signal and though of asking Bryce to repeat it, but then he realized he didn’t have a gun anyway.
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