Resilience Limitation

Bitch ordered Bentley to pounce, Mannequin raised his arm, and the deafening boom of a gun firing filled the alley.

The shot was powerful enough that Bentley was knocked off course.  Mannequin simultaneously leaped and retracted the chain that still stretched to the rooftop, swinging across the alley and escaping collision by mere fractions of an inch.

Bentley and Bitch sprawled on the ground.

I hacked at the hand that held me again while Grue threw darkness over the pair of them.

My swarm-sense gave me a picture of what happened next.  Grue dodged to one side, and Mannequin followed him, his arm unerringly moving to follow his target.  My bugs were then blown out of the air as another shot was fired at Grue and Sirius.  I could feel it spread out, hitting multiple points on the pair of them.  A shotgun?

***

Below me, Lucy and Mannequin fought, the smaller Bastard dancing around the edges, trying to find an avenue for attack, or hampering Mannequin’s movements.  Lucy managed to get on top of him.

A third gunshot sounded.  There was a long pause, where nothing and nobody moved, and then a fourth gunshot.  Lucy slumped over, crashing on top of Bastard.

***

Grue was standing, pulling the knife free from Amy’s hand so she could slump to the ground.  Bitch knelt on the ground beside Lucy, while Bentley lay on the ground, the knife still embedded in his skull, and both Sirius and Bastard hung back, limping as they moved, blood leaking from a dozen dime-sized wounds in their flesh.

A low growl tore free from Bitch’s throat.  But I knew before I looked that Lucy hadn’t made it.  Two shotgun blasts directly to the chest cavity.

***

He wasn’t even trying to avoid my bugs, so I had a sense of where he was as Grue, Bitch and I tore down the street on our dogs.  I rode behind Grue on Sirius, my arms on his shoulders, while Bitch rode Bentley, Lucy’s corpse lying across her lap.

We’d lost a couple of minutes as we helped Bitch retrieve Lucy’s real body.  It was eerie to see.  When the dogs grew, they really appeared to be adding mass, literally growing and stretching.  Somewhere in the transformation, after they weren’t recognizable as the animals they had once been, their real bodies were reformed inside a placenta-like sac.  Mannequin’s gunshot had opened a hole in Lucy’s chest and penetrated that membrane to kill the real dog within.  We’d used my knife and Grue’s raw strength to help pull the dog free in a grim sort of anti-childbirth.