“What’s going on, sweetie?” I whispered through clenched teeth.
“Things are going to get exciting,” Angel said with satisfaction.
“Define ‘exciting,’” I said cautiously.
Angel thought. “Everyone freaking out?” she offered.
“Uh...in a good way?”
“In an exciting way,” she said, watching the crowd.
“Now we come to the definitive battle,” the Director said into the loudspeaker.
Right then, all heck broke loose. The best way to describe it would be to say that suddenly everyone drank crazy juice and went haywire. Mutants spontaneously began fighting with one another. Some of them had clearly been trained to be soldiers, but there was quite a bit of catfight face-slapping and shoving going on too.
“People!” the Director yelled into her loudspeaker. “People! What is going on?”
“They don’t want to be here anymore,” Angel said, watching them.
“We don’t want to be here anymore!” the crowd yelled.
“They’re tired of being treated like numbers and experiments,” Angel explained.
“We’re not numbers!” I heard angry voices cry. “We’re not experiments!”
“Hmm,” I said, scanning the area, looking for ways to escape.
“They feel like pawns,” Angel went on.
“We’re not just pawns!” the mutants yelled.
“They’re people too, even if they were just cloned and created,” Angel said, stepping closer to me and taking my hand.
“We’re people too!” voices shouted. “We’re people too!”
“O-kaaay,” I said, and quickly gathered Nudge, Angel, Ari, and Total. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll make our way to the wall and go along it till we see a way to break out.” They nodded and we began to move through the crowd, dodging flying fists and angry shoving.
“Robots!” yelled the Director, and everywhere, the robots stood at attention and armed their weapons. “Get this crowd under control!”
120
Yeah, because it wasn’t bad enough, with everyone fighting. Now we had to get the bloodthirsty robots involved. And they had guns.
We continued to push through the crowd, trying to reach a castle wall. I saw Flyboys starting to wade into the crowd of angry, fighting people.
“Why are they fighting each other?” Nudge asked, close to my shoulder. “They should all gang up on the Flyboys.”
Angel looked around. “Oh. Yeah.”
She stood still for a minute, her brow furrowed with mighty concentration. Then, one by one, all around us, mutants slowed down in their fight, looked around, then turned to attack the Flyboys.
I grabbed Angel’s hand and started to push through the crowd again, keeping low. “You are a scary, scary child, you know that?” I asked her.
She smiled.
I almost walked right into a thick line of Flyboys. Looking up, I saw solemn Eraser faces with glowing red robot eyes.
“You must stop,” intoned one.