Big Damn Heroes
Ever since seeing Marcus, Bryant had been seeing red.
Seeing the dog had inexplicably added to his anger. He had only the vaguest recollection of the canine but it was still so bloody wrong to see it here. The word 'wrong' had been applicable to just about everything that he'd thought and felt since he'd woken up and found he had Marcus' leg.
Except Kessie. Kessie wasn't wrong. If he had to be going through this, he was glad they were together, and not only because he was relieved not to be alone. Bryant could trust Kesiah; she'd said she was in this with him 'til the end, wherever it took them.
Now it had taken them to these... watchers. Now it had brought them here.
These weren't the aliens from what still felt like a nightmare, not the ones that abducted him or the shadowy forms above him in surgery. Of the lot of them, these were the least frightening in appearance. Something of the shape of them made him think of ruddy beach balls. Ridiculous toys made by the bigger badder monsters, maybe, to keep watch over their rotting flock. Bryant didn't care that his metaphors were bleeding together in his mind; he felt lucky he was functioning at all. He'd had to shove the sniveling, frightened creature he normally was way down deep behind the anger and the great big hurt pervading his life right about now.
Bryant nodded when he heard Kessie's voice go taut, getting her meaning from the tone rather than the words. When she broke their contact, Bryant notched up his pace to stride with her.
There were maybe a hundred of them but Bryant set his sights on one bulbous little creeper a dozen or so paces from them. It was times like this, when he'd prefer to cower, that Bryant could remember that he was bigger than the average person, that he could be intimidating. He was strong, too; he'd had to build his upper-arm strength to move the wheelchair on his own, then to use the crutches that braced to his arms so he could haul himself about. His legs were strong, too. Marcus' leg had the benefit of being younger, more fit.
So when he wrenched the alien away from its monitor, that was the leg Bryant used to dropkick the thing away from the others, away from himself and Kessie, making a sound that was very much a snarl as he did it.