ToppleDane 2 1 0 1

Roster: Heavymetal. Lady Midnight. Painter. Switchblade. Coldblooded. ToppleDane.

ToppleDane looked at the roster for the mission and realized that Admiral Halman had put the original team back together from Trefelgah. Okay? Some while ago they started calling each other by their stage names. It made things more exciting. They were an elite unit to be sure. Each one got their name from a real world something or another. ToppleDane got his from an Aussie that told the story about him toppling down a mountain and somehow it ended up ToppleDane. Dane was his last name. He'd barely survived that too. But that was Trefelgah and six years ago. A time when they could have contained the entire mess had they just nuked the area. Leave it to the United Nations to muck that up too. Today they were at a remote facility in Wisconsin. Base camp was four armored vehicles the size of a double wide on wheels.

ToppleDane knew what needed to be done. Within the abandoned complex, abandoned by humans, was something called Icormengillium. This stuff could prevent additional mutations. Problem was the personnel at the complex were over run and killed. The icormengillium was just sitting and waiting to be used. This stuff also had a nasty habit of killing the daylights out of the horrors that had come from the WMD set off my Iran. The stuff became known as the purple gas. It infected cats and dogs and animals related to them as well. About ninety percent of the wolf population was really no longer wolves. Instead they were semi-bipedal monsters with gnashing teeth, deadly claws and a thirst for blood. Right out of a horror movie. Plus they seemed to breed quicker too. Luckily rabbits had not been altered by the gas. Humans were fine too. ToppleDane understood how hard this would be. Scans showed them outnumbered fifty to one. Of course that was just a good estimate.

ToppleDane was a tall man with a deep tan and huge bulging muscles. Of course he was not as big as Heavymetal. Topple sported short blond hair and clear blue eyes. After a moments thought he moved out of the tent that was a scant hundred yards from the fence line of the small complex. Outside was the rest of his team.

Lady Midnight was dress all in black and her raven hair fell long and silky over her shoulders. Her hour glass figure was decked out with several handguns and a couple grenades for accent. Her violet eyes were a product of nano-tech. Infra red.

Heavymetal stood almost seven feet tall. His skin was black and his arms, legs and chest were massive. His eyes were deep brown and he sported no shirt but did wear chest armor. He stood behind Lady Midnight making her look more like a girl than the woman she was.

Painter was thin and sleek. He was decked out in green and had numerous laser sights attatched to his guns and could easily coordinate air strikes with the technology strapped to him. His reflex times was only slightly behind Coldblooded. Their speed and accuracy was envied by everyone that knew them and feared by those that they were sent after. Painter had an irish accent and always looked a little too thin.

Switchblade carried over fourteen knives on him at all times. He was neither tall nor short and altogether average.

Coldblooded was thin and strong like Painter but with a bit more heft to him. His eyes were dead cool and the color of his eyes were as washed out as his soul. Spiked short black hair made his untanned face even more stark to look at. The fastest fellow ever to be recorded by the neuro-machine.

"Okay, only Coldblooded and Painter are going in on this mission."

Everyone else looked totally shocked. But they said nothing. They waited. "We need the element of speed and lightning beatdown. Plus we only need one canister of the Icor to make loads more. Reto-engineering should not be too hard. Okay, guys take off."

Coldblooded snatched up two Hellmare 440 nanosmart machine guns from the weapons table and took off running toward the fence perimeter. Painter cursed and headed after him. As Coldblooded moved between the trees of Wisconsin, already out of sight, a tech operative shouted, "They have not been tested."

Coldblooded reached the fence and put up his Hellmare weapons and drew two Paleblade hand pistols. Painter arrived a moment later holding a vibro-pistol, a sonic weapon, and sporting the new force shield glove. The glove had not worked so well in testing. Of the three prototypes Painter had the only one that was not trashed. What the government didn't know. ToppleDane and the group knew he saved the force glove from trash. That was all that mattered.

In the gulf between the fence and the small three room compound were about forty or so monsters. They were breeding, some, and others were chasing a big cat. Looked to be a mountain lion. One of the blacker "wolves", the biggest, with muscles and a torso more like a man took down the lion. After moment of caterwauling and blood flying the cat was dead and the monsters were eating. More packed near the kill. Now was the time to move in.

Painter took point and scaled the fence quick like a bunny. Coldblooded just managed to be on the other side. Painter hated how that happened. Every damned time he never saw the boy climb a fence or do other things to cross barriers. He knew Cold did...just never saw it happen.

The two men raced along the ground managing to get more than half way to building Alpha-2 before three of the monsters saw them. They were each the size of a pony and and all three bounded after them. Painter thought of his girlfriend Elise as the monster roared, all teeth and hatred, and signaled others to attack the intruders. Coldblooded thought of death and then he leaped into the air, held out both guns, and fired away. The bladed bullets split into five parts just after release. In a tight formation the blades churned up carnage. The first monster was struck in the chest and neck. Its black blood exploding outward. The creature spun in agony and slammed down on its right side, skidding to a halt. Coldblooded was in the air, in hang time, with his weapons pointing to the ground and his feet toward the bowl of the sky. Painter took a knee and fired both sonic pistols. He aimed low. The running beasts one was once a cat were struck as ripples of sonic force threw them to the ground. The dirt and grass churned up in the wake of the blasts. Coldblooded landed, hit the ground hard but still standing. behind him the creature he palebladed and in front of him the beasts knocked down by Painter. Painter was up and to Cold just before he blasted the downed creatures to finish them off. They broke apart easy enough.

With a pale smile Coldblooded said, "Look." Behind them were more than forty monsters. Both men began to run. They fired as they ran. Painter opened the door and easy enough there was the Icor chambers in the center of the room. The monsters started smashing through Windows and crawling through ducts to get at them. As the creatures came in Coldblooded and Painter spun dodged and blasted their way with one gun or another. It was like a ballet of death. As one gun became empty another was pulled. The sonic guns were half out of power and one beast had managed to disarm Paint of one pistol. It got to bite the other, scrambled brains. Finally the men were out of ammunition except for the Hellmare weapons and a small conventional hand pistol of Painters. More of a back-up than anything.

Coldblooded turned to Painter and said, "We got them all." As an answer the beast that took down the lion entered by bursting down the rear door. In came a flood of monsters behind it. The only way for Coldblooded to survive was to fire the Hellmare weapons. Problem was, Painter was in the way. Cold drew the weapons as Painter spun and created a 2 foot square force shield from his palm. "Don't shoot." Painter fired his last round into the charging "wolf" but it paid the attack no mind. Swarms of them came at him as Cold opened fire. The bullets chewed them up. Cold waved the guns back and forth as they spit untold bullets at tremendous velocity. Blood and gore rained down on Painter. As the huge alpha beast leaped on him, its teeth smashing against the yellow shield but its arms grabbing his shoulders. Wicked claws cut into him and bullets danced all around. The beast fought with him a moment and then ripped away the hand shield. The Hellmare weapons were empty and smoking and even Coldblooded would not be able to reach his friend in time. The monster opened an elongated snout filled with two rows of razor teeth, its jaw disjointed like a snake. Painter screamed. The beast jerked, once then twice, three, four and five time. Each time seeming more perplexed than the last. The thing that straddled him was at odds about eating him? Or was having some kind of duh moment? The beast fell on him, dead. Coldblooded ran over as Painter looked over the shoulder of the black misshapen monster. Five blades of various design protruded from the back of the beast. Switchblade never obeyed orders.

Later back at base camp Painter was telling the story about the Hellmare smart weapons and how they don't target people that register as human. The weapon suppresses and then starts up again the second the bullets can't hit human flesh. About the third time he told the story, leaving out Switchblade, a tech guy came over and explained that three percent of the time the weapons misread and will still hit any target. Once hearing this Painter went to go find Coldblooded and ask him a thing or two...

The end.