The Witching Hour Part II

Neon lights ran across her face: bright blue, bright purple, bright red, bright yellow. Her heart was racing, as with her vehicle. She glanced to her speed meter, one hundred and eighty meters per hour. She pondered in a panic the fastest way to go to the Mayor's office, and whether or not the army of androids was still chasing her. The faces of Y-14, Y-0, and Adam flickered in and out of her mind. Hagar must be focused, tried to picture the solar system, finding her inner calmness, but suddenly everything went dark.

She hit the brake and her vehicle skittered to the left from the sudden stop before finally hitting something hard, probably another vehicle. She didn't notice anything until after a couple of seconds. She found herself in the defensive posture, her both arms crossing above her ducking head. She noticed pieces of her shattered vehicle's front window. She realized now that her vehicle was totaled, but she couldn't quickly assess the situation from the minimal vision, as all the city lights around her were now shut down.

A terror crept to her mind as she tried to feel her legs. She worried that she injured her leg in the collision. But after some moments, she was convinced that she was generally okay. She struggled to come out through the passenger door, and by both two arms grabbed hold to the edges of the seat, she pulled herself away from the vehicle and let herself fell slowly to the asphalt. She muttered a curse under her breath while slowly trying to get up. No pain anywhere, she didn't break any bones.

People around her were panicking, shouting to other people. Those who were still in their vehicle were furiously hitting their klaxons as if the act would undo the sudden darkness and chaos.

She then leaned forward to find the thumb drive she put on the vehicle's front cabinet. The cabinet was stuck because of the bent shaped by the collision, so she tried to forcefully shake its handles. It didn't move. She then took her hand blaster from the upper cabinet, which could be opened, thank the Goddess. She fired five shots at the stuck cabinet. It created a hole in its handle area. She then grabbed the hole and struggled to pull the cover. The edges of the hole created by the blaster dug into the skin of her fingers, as she could feel the pain. Despite it, she managed to create enough opening to let her hand reach in and feel the whereabout of the thumb drive inside.

When she finally grabbed the thumb drive, she heard a distant explosion, followed by the screaming of people. She stood and looked to the general area from where she drove from. With only the lights from the vehicles that got stuck in the traffic, she could see silhouettes of giant spiders, walking slowly towards where she was while blasting away all of the vehicles that they deemed as obstacles.

Y-14's army was still hot in their pursuit of her.

"Fuck," she muttered. She put Y-0's thumb drive to her pants' pocket, readied her hand blaster, and started to run.

'This is still too far from the Mayor's office,' she thought to herself while trying to navigate her escape route, now full of people running to and fro and bumped her around. She also leaped and slid over several stuck vehicles' hoods.

Those spiders were huge with long stretches of limbs, she had no hope to outrun them on foot. She could hear them getting closer, as the explosion voices were getting nearer. She needed to change her course, as she was sure that those things would catch up to her if she kept running straight. She looked to her left and right and darted towards the first alley she saw. It was narrow enough the monstrosities would be having a hard time following her.

When she got inside the alley she turned her terminal on, just to light her way inside, and to see where she was relative to her destination. There were only tall walls along her sides, which felt narrower the deeper she entered the alley. She consulted her terminal and saw that she was still kilometers away from the Mayor's office. The alley's ground was wet with puddles and littered with various objects, she could only hope she wouldn't step on anything sharp.

Then suddenly it was bright, she snapped her head behind and saw that one of the mechanical spiders was shining its white beam towards her. A set of smaller red lights shone on top of the white beam. They were its eyes. She was been spotted! She kept on running thinking that the alley was too narrow for the spider to squeezed through.

But she forgot that they can transform back to their human form, which was exactly what the spider behind her did.

"Hagar Eshtar!" the androids called. It used its voice enhancer, so that the calling reverberated on the alley walls, "stop right there! You are the enemy of NPD!"

She turned around and shot her blaster. Three times. She could see that she hit its head, and it was slumping forward before dropped dead on the wet ground. She was free, for now.

But then it was bright again, brighter than before because there were several white lights shone from three parts of the alley. She could see that there were two spiders on the rooftop on each side of the alley, looking down on her, and another one emerged from the mouth of the alley, where the first spider detected her.

"Hagar Esthar!" the three of them called at the same time. Their combined voices hurt her ears, and she could see that the walls and the ground were shaking from the sheer loudness of the voices. She fell to the ground and her blaster slipped away from her hand.

"Fuck!"

"Stop right there! You are the enemy of NPD!"

An explosion boomed in front of her when she tried to move to find her missing blaster. She squealed.

"Don't move, or we shoot!"

Then almost without a beat, she heard other blasts coupled with streaks of blue lights. She then heard the shrieks of pain from the machines, followed by the parts of the machines falling around heard. Someone or some people shot them down.

"Quick! Follow us!" she heard a girl's voice calling from the end of the alley. She hesitated.

"My blaster!" she yelled back.

"Forget it. They are still pursuing you!" the girl yelled back.

She could see their silhouettes at the end. Three adults with rifle blasters and a tiny girl in the middle of them, she stood and ran towards them. The group started to run away from her, leading her somewhere.

"Wait! I need to go somewhere else," she yelled while still running behind them.

"That needs to wait," one of them said, a male voice.

"Who are you?"

"We're the Callisto," the girl answered, "Follow us now, questions later."