"What the hell are you DOING?" screamed Donna, but by that point he was airborne.
He landed with a *CLANG* as his combat boots deformed the unsupported steel roof of the van. He bant his knees as he hit, so he wasn't hurt too bad, certainly nothing he couldn't shake off.
Hotaru wasn't shocked or surprised -- she was incapable of such things now -- but she did turn her head to see the source of the noise, and when she did Haruka took the opportunity to grab her by the wrist and twist her arm in an atttempt to force the girl to drop her weapon. Hotaru didn't cry in pain when her arm was twisted over 360 degrees, she just turned to look at Haruka agin.
Haruka and Michiru could only stare in horror at what happened next. Like a piece of wet clay, Hotaru's arm reshaped -- from the V shape it was forced into, it became straight, though Hotaru did not move. Her wrist seemed to be connected to her arm by just a few threads, and it didn't move as the rest of her arm rotated. Her elbow became flat bone, then bent the opposite way. The changes were disgusting to watch, but when they were done her arm looked perfectly normal.
Her grip straightened, Hotaru took this opportunity to pull the trigger of her dart pistol, sending a dose of powerful sedative directly into Haruka's neck, by means of a hypodermic cartridge.
Outside the vehicle, Setsuna drew her own weapon, identical to Hotaru's, and deliberately aimed it at Wheeler. Taking a split-second to determine where any bystanders were, Wheeler dropped into a controlled roll over the windshield and hood of the van and onto the street below. He fell towards the sidewalk, imposing the GMC between himself and his Sandman foe.
After countung three beats -- how long he estimated it would tkae the cyborg to decide to start walking toward him -- he popped up with his gun drawn and took three quick shots.
Inside the hotel, three un-infected humans were running down a flight of statrs as fast as they could, both running to aid their team member and escaping the noise of Sandmen-converted travelers emerging from their rooms to destroy them.
The first shot went wide, ripping a piece out of the rearview mirror of Setsuna's car. The second struck her in the right elbow, causing her hand to spasm and drop the weapon. The third clipped her chest, sending up a spray of blood and metal filaments.
She didn't react, she simply stood there and looked at Wheeler emotionlessly. Wheeler jumped the hood of the van and ran at her, grabbing a switchblade from his pocket with his left hand in case she decided to engage in melee combat.
He couldn't kill her yet, not without a clean head hit, and she soon demonstrated why. As she stood, the ligaments, tendons and blood vessels that hung from her blasted arm slowly snaked back together, connecting and mending before his eyes. Skin slowly crept over the joint to cover her wound. Wheeler didn't want to kill her, though, as much as his machismo said otherwise. He just wanted to get the two people they held in their vehicle and then get very, very far away from her. As he closed on her, he faked left and then ducked low, snagging the tranq pistol from the ground with his knife-hand. Kill her or not, taking her weapon was always a good idea.
Inside the car, in her last act before losing consciousness, Haruka fell forward onto Hotaru's weapon, pinning it under her body. The girl pushed Haruka off of her, but in the time that took Michiru had grabbed her other hand and yanked it outward, pulling Hotaru backwards. In the split-second she was off-balance, Michiru yanked the gun from her hand, kicked away her grasping hands, and fired it twice into Hotaru's torso.
Just about when her finger let up on the trigger the second time, and as the hotel doors were pushed open, Wheeler hit the side of the car and screamed into the closed window, "We've got to get out of here RIGHT NOW!"
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(Posted Sat, 06 Sep 2003 20:55)
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