Free Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) by Jonathan R. Stanley Page B

behind her, gets my gun from her belt, and throws it like a boomerang into the trajectory of my fall just as I make a leap off the building.  I manage to catch the gun and continue down to the sidewalk using the top of a parked car to cushion my fall.  Rolling onto the pavement and coming to a stop, lying flat on my back in the middle of the street, I sit up enough to point my gun at the vehicle.  The red-eyed cyclops is in midair, heading for the car I half-crumpled, when I fire a single incendiary round into the gas tank.  The car is instantly engulfed in flames just as the monster lands on it.  As he emerges from the fire, smoldering, Bullworth intercepts him, slashing the dweller with his claws and biting into his blackened flesh as they tumble through the street with a shriek and a roar.
    Sabetha, having dismounted prior to this, now comes over to pick me up, duffle bag still on her back, though its form is floppy and lifeless without the massive machine gun within it.  We look over to see the enormous monster break Bullworth’s hold and come after us.  Sabetha begins to fire, running into the center of the road while I try to flank towards our gazer companion.  Unfortunately, I recognize this creature’s particular interest in me a second too late.  It wasn’t chasing me in the car like a dog that chases the rabbit that bolts quickest.  He was – is – after me, specifically.  That reddish eye focuses in and the arms suck me up into the tumble before I can get out of the way.
    In the next few seconds, I become vaguely aware that I am being slammed repeatedly into the blacktop, but there’s little I can do to stop it.  There’s more gunfire, a brief respite, more slamming, a pause, and then again with the slamming.
    I open my eyes to see Bullworth on the creature’s back using his powerful hind legs and his unmatched grappling abilities to roll himself over and hurl the cyclops into a speeding bus, coming head on.  The impact contorts the top of the bus’ form to a third its length, shredding it with a terrible noise and sparks of electricity.  Before the dweller can recover from the collision, Sabetha, bleeding and covered in dirt from a skirmish I was mostly unconscious for, unloads the rest of the machine gun ammunition into the wreckage like the finale of a fireworks show.  The spray strips away the mangled black flesh of the creature like it was putty.
    I let my head rest back on the tarmac in the crater I was instrumental in making and cough.  Deliriously, I ask aloud, “Why does he want to kill me?  I’m no one.”

 
 
 
Seven
    “ V al.  Bring your stuff.  I’ll explain when you get here.”  I hang up the phone and wheel myself into my room, Sabetha sleeping safely in hers.
    After the battle, gazers from Lezar’s perimeter swarmed the streets.  We were brought to our home under their supervision and, as an apology, Lezar is leaving two gazers in the area for the next few nights at our beck and call.  None of the gazer sentinels even seemed to care that there wasn’t a creature left after the battle, a detail which Sabetha and I were more than unnerved to discover.
    What bothers me even more than the lack of evidence to go on, since both our attackers’ bodies vanished into thin air, and even more than the exponentially increasing size of the creatures, is the fact that they are apparently intent on killing me, specifically.  Obviously I don’t like people trying to kill me, but this whole situation no longer seems like Gothica slapping me on the wrist for being a prick.  It looks like cyclic backlash.  It’s the difference between a parking fine and the death penalty.  Gothica might legitimately be trying to get rid of me.  It happens all the time to people going against big business, insurance companies, labor unions etc., but not to someone like me .  Sure I kill the occasional pimp and hooker, but really, I’m not threatening the city’s way of existence .