Danger Days: The Escape

“I don’t think I’m ready for this...”

Mikey reached out in the dark and squeezed Lauren’s hand. “You can’t be scared, otherwise I’m going to have to be, too.”

They were outside the walls of the Battery City headquarters, hundreds of killjoys behind them, in front of them, and beside them. The killjoys around them were silent, apart from the small few who like them were murmuring about their fears or the plan.

Gerard had easily assumed the role of leader. His first action had been to split all the killjoys up into separate groups, each having a different area of the headquarters to infiltrate. That was the reason why Lauren’s only familiar companion was Mikey. Gerard had obviously assigned Frank to his own group, and sent Bob and Ray off together. Those two, Ray and Bob that is, were quickly becoming a very effective team with Ray’s brute force and Bob’s knack for strategy and information; their history at BL/IND also came in handy.

It was 2:07am – silent.

Gerard, standing at the very front of the mass, pointed his finger in three directions.

The first group, containing Ray and Bob, were to move stealthily to the left of the entrance. They would be heading around the back off the compound where they would infiltrate from the inmate courtyard. For them, their job entailed climbing over the back wall, disarming the alarm from outside, a task specifically for Bob, and entering the building without a sound. From there they had to release any prisoners, sending them over the wall, and then proceeding to the main control room to destroy all forms of their communication. Thus, this group consisted of the most tech savvy of the killjoys, combined with a few of the physically strong for protection reasons.

The second group, with Lauren and Mikey, were going to the right. They would be entering the building at the second floor. A guard tower connected to the main building through an upstairs passageway would be their point of access. Once they were inside they had the task of waking the draculoids – they weren’t to kill them. Their job was to lead them downstairs to the awaiting ambush.

Gerard and Frank’s group, group three, would be infiltrating from the front entrance. After walking through the underground passage that led to the glass doors, taking care of the draculoid on duty on the way as they were sure they would have employed one after recent events, Gerard would gain access to the building with Bob’s number, so the last of the killjoys could wait for the draculoids to emerge from upstairs. The other two groups of killjoys would join them, but they would be firing the first shots; they would start the end.

On Gerard’s command, the mass of killjoys dispersed their separate ways.

***

Ray balanced himself on the top of the wall, leaning his hand down so he could help pull Bob up onto the wall. They both jumped down into the courtyard as silently as possible. As the smallest of the three groups, only twenty killjoys had followed them over the wall, three left waiting on the outside of the compound to direct any inmates who were being set free on what they could do to help take down BL/IND. Bob quickly executed several skilful manoeuvres with a pair of wire cutters to disable the alarm system. Once he had stepped aside two of the larger killjoys barged the door open with their shoulders. Group one was in.

***

The guard tower was, to their surprise, empty when group two arrived at the bottom. They could not gain access to the inside of the tower until they had received radio confirmation that the alarm had been disabled.

“All clear,” echoed through the silence.

The simple transmission was all they needed to begin their own infiltration of BL/IND. Within two minutes they were walking through the passage way that connected the guard tower to the main building. A total of sixty-eight killjoys had entered through the guard tower and were standing readily outside the doors of the draculoid’s bedrooms.

“Three, two, one.”

And the banging on metal doors began, soon followed by alarmed outbursts and the sound of running feet on linoleum floors.

***

Bob’s radio transmission declaring the alarm off had just come through to Gerard and the rest of the killjoys, over one hundred of them, waiting out by the glass doors. He administered the code on the keypad, opened the doors, and led the killjoys inside. The group dispersed around the bottom floor and waited anxiously for the enemy to appear.

Barely a minute later and the official war began.

Group two, led by Thrill Killer, who had made quite an impression on everyone at the meeting, came running down the stairs of the interior fire escape at full speed. Only a few steps behind them were the draculoids’, angrier than ever. Korse wasn’t in the mix.
Brightly coloured laser beams erupted from the various ray guns in the room from the killjoys, being equally fought back with white beams. There was shouting and screaming and tears early on in the battle as the first killjoy went down, a young male dressed in light blue with bright purple hair that flopped across his forehead. The death only caused more lethal shots to be fired.

Ray, Bob and the rest of the first group could hear the commotion coming from the main entrance of the BL/IND headquarters. The four killjoys that were being held prisoner in the white cells had been released and were already on their way around to the front to help with the fight. Now the group was in the man control room pulling wires from power outlets and destroying switchboards and equipment worth millions of dollars. Everyone was itching to get out there and kill as many of the draculoids as they could.

Lauren had already taken out two draculoids in the space of ten minutes. Unlike the other killjoys, she’d planned out her tactics for combating them. The strategy was to stay against a wall and wait for them to come to her, that’s when she’d shoot. She could see the difference between the successes of others compared to herself; they were shooting willy-nilly hoping to hit someone and often missing, she had killed the ones that had approached her. Although she was happy that she was making a dent in the downfall of BL/IND, she couldn’t help but be worried for two reasons. The first was that Korse hadn’t made an appearance as of yet. The second was that Ray and Bob hadn’t appeared either.

The armed battle had been going on for about fifteen minutes when group one charged into the scene. Their ray guns were raised high and they meshed into the brawl easily.

As the cold hearted battle proceeded to unfold before her eyes, Lauren took the opportunity to glance around the room in search for her friends – her family. She hated that she was seeing so many lifeless coloured figures littering the floor, some of which had been part of her group, but she was overjoyed to see that all of those who she was closest to were still upright, still fighting. But the relief quickly left her, turning her face pale – there was a draculoid approaching Mikey very quickly and he hadn’t noticed them yet.

“Mikey!” she shouted across the room in a bloodcurdling scream as the impending draculoid aimed the barrel of the white weapon at his chest.

As if it was unfolding in slow motion, Thrill Killer, who had heard the scream, lunged forward into the miniscule gap between Mikey and the draculoid. She aimed her gun high and shot him in the chest from the flat of her back where she laid on the floor. Her waist length brown hair was flung all over the place, her cast had been cracked when it smashed against the floor in her spectacular dive, and her aviator sunglasses had snapped in half, yet she still managed a cheerful smile at Mikey, who was cemented to the spot in shock, before getting up and returning to the battle.

Within half an hour twenty-three killjoys had died, but more draculoids had gone down. Korse still hadn’t appeared at this point, but they knew he would enter the battlefield soon because there was no other way out that wasn’t being monitored by killjoys.

2:57am – Korse entered from the elevator. In all the noise and disorder, no one had noticed his presence, leaving him able to pass through the throng of people quite easily. He was headed for the main control room with the intention of calling in reinforcements from the surrounding zones.

Bob had been targeting draculoids from behind, unmasking them first then killing them while they were vulnerable. He had been proud to have succeeded in eliminating six draculoids. At 2:58am he was looking for his next oblivious draculoid when he caught a flash of grey heading down the corridor he and the rest of group one had used earlier. Korse, he thought to himself, I will kill him.

Frank landed on and slid across the hard linoleum floor. He was about to be struck by a draculoid’s muscular arm when Gerard had turned just at the right moment and been able to push him out of the way, then firing a series of deadly shots at centre of the brutish man’s chest.

“I’ll never let them take you from me,” Gerard yelled over the noise, pulling Frank up to his side. He kissed his lips briefly, just needing the contact.

They ran together, hand in hand, back into the centre of the battle. Their minds were set on taking out as many draculoids as they could so they could get out of there and be together.

***

“They’ve ruined everything...” Korse said aloud to himself, his tone disbelieving.

“That’s right, we ruined everything.”

Korse turned around, a low chuckle escaping his throat as his eyes landed on the only other person in the main control room. Their ray gun was aimed at him. “Bryar. Do they pay you as well as I did?”

Bob ignored his sharp comment about his new alliance with the killjoys. “It’s Neon Nightmare now. Take one last look around at your world’s demise, Korse, cause you’re about to meet the same fate as those dead killjoys out there.”

Another chuckle erupted from Korse, this time more joyful than demonic. “Oh, yes, my wimp of an assistant is going to be the one to kill me. I may die tonight, but the beam won’t come from your ray gun.”

The two men stared at each other. Bob’s face emitted anger, while Korse simply stood with his arms folded across his chest, an overly confident smirk adorning his lips.

The door to the main control room slamming open interrupted the standoff between the two men. Bob turned his head to see who had entered – bad move. Korse took the opportunity to rip the purple and black ray gun from Bob’s hands and turned it onto the figure that had entered.

“Well, well, well,” he crooned. “Raymond, my killjoy-turned security officer-turned killjoy. Do you think you’re going to kill me, too?”

“Jet Star,” Ray corrected as he stepped forward, his own ray gun raised. “And yes, I do think I’m going to kill you.”

Although both men had ray guns at the ready, no one moved, no one even attempted a shot. The room became eerily silent, even the noise of the fight happening so close seemed to go dead quiet. It was if the whole building was suddenly aware of what was going on in the main control room.

The next thirty seconds passed in a blur.

Lauren had retreated to the ventilation system one final time once she’d seen Ray running toward the main control room. When she’d arrived over the top of the vent she’d found Ray and Korse facing off, Bob standing still and shocked just a few feet away from ray. She couldn’t let them die, so she did the only thing she could think of. She removed the vent cover and leapt down, knocking Korse off balance. Ray had run at him, ready to shoot, but tripped over a stray cable that had been left carelessly on the floor when the killjoys had destroyed the room, sending his ray gun flying across the room. As Lauren was about to make a move for it Korse delivered a powerful kick to her thigh, stilling her motions. He had the purple and black ray gun aimed right at her and then BANG!

Korse was still on the ground, dead, and Bob lay a few feet behind him on his stomach, with Ray’s blue ray gun still aimed at the villains figure. He’d done it; he’d killed Korse.

Both Lauren and Ray were shocked into silence.

Bob got to his feet slowly and stood over the figure in grey. He knew he was dead, but he still had to, for the first time inside BL/IND walls, have the last word. “You were right, Korse. You didn’t die from my ray gun, but I did kill you.”