Chapter 2

We were all hanging out in our base. An old abandoned warehouse in the poor district, that we hacked into the system to give us power and vidnet. Hell we even created a phony vidnet account so we could be vidconferenced for jobs. Mickey did that, another rat hybrid like me. Not so adept at killing, but a real whiz with electronics.

Our group consists of me, my name is Mark. Then our bear buddy Mikey. Our resident genius Mickey. And our latest couple Mary(a cat hybrid) and Mitch(a dog hybrid). How they became a couple, I will never know. Even though I am friends with Mary, I still have some sort of a instinctual fear of her. Makes me shiver sometimes.

If you are wondering why we are all named with an M, in the military we were a group. And for us hybrids, since we are still looked upon as less than human no matter what kind of paper you wave in front of anyone, they like to group. We were the "M" group. A specialist squad that I joined for my last two years.

Mikey was the muscle or hand to hand/heavy weapon specialist. Weighing in at 480lbs and over 8ft tall, he was one big guy. Mickey was the brains. Communications and Electronic espianoge. I was the leader, having came in after their old squad leade, r named Mark as well, died. Then there is our long range specialist, Mary. I deadly sniper if you ever saw one. Could wait for days to get the right shot. And Mitch, the mechanic, driver, fixer. He could drive or fly just about anything, if it wasn't running, it would be before you knew it. Mitch was our last guy. As we started getting more dangerous missions, they decided we needed to be self sufficient. Or as I like to say, here you go don't bother us again. If you don't show up, we guess your dead. If you do, here is your next assignment. Not a bad shot either. Though for some reason he always felt he had to protect Mary. I don't know why he didn't feel that way about me or Mickey, but what are you going to do.

After the tour we all decided we were going to retire together and start our own business. So we mustered out. Got special dispensation to retain some of our gear. And headed out to make our way in the world. We bought ourself this warehouse for cheap. It was in a bad neighborhood. But we kindly showed the local gangs that we weren't an easy mark. And they have left us alone. Hell we actually trained them and made them semi-respectable. They still are a gang of drug pushers and killers, but at least they go by their own code. And don't just do random killings. They even hired us for the last job. Apparently they were a little too good for their own sakes. They caught somebodies attention and they took one of the gang members kid sister for slave trade. They took care of the punks that did it(after they hired us an we told them who they were) and we traced it back to who found them. They are a little wiser now and a lot better armed.

They put us on retainer, to help out the neighborhood if something went down. Since we like it here, we did it pretty cheap. The law doesn't come out here unless it is something huge. I have never seen them. When we first got here, there was a random killing about every two hours around here. Schools windows were all shot out, only about 30% actually went there. They were still funded the same with kids or no kids.

When we arrived here, it was actually in the middle of a shoot out. Everyone was scurrying along, ducking for cover, hiding where they could. Except for us. We did a few dodges here and there, but we knew they weren't after us really. One gang took exception to that.

On our second day of unloading, we began setting up an area to hold our weapons, and breaking through the concrete to get at the underground cables to steal our electricity and Vidnet from. We had most of our guns shipped here and we were taking them out cleaning them, checking for any malfuctions, oiling them for the ballistic weapons, when someone drove by and started shooting at us. Before we even knew it all of us had our weapons and were crouched behind something, scanning for who did it. We heard the car drive away and I went out to check it out. Mary looked through her scope and saw one of the people from the previous days shootout was a passenger in the car. She of course wanted to take a shot, but I told her that we were going to teach them a lesson.