"Well, well." The poisonous voice of the leader gripped the once calm safe alley with darkness. "Look who we have here."
"What do you want Hans," Gus spat with enough venom to match the snake in front of them.
"I want a lot of things: money, power, respect. But it seems to me that I have not be very well regarded these last couple weeks as my favorite little playmates have been avoiding me." Hans slithered around them with a heinous grace as his goons closed in on the friends. "It has occurred to me that you two need to be taught your place in the food chain." Hans snapped his finger and the shadows closed in.
Gus was ready for the ensuing fight that broke out. With a swiftness that defied his size he stepped into someone's punch offsetting the impact and threw his weight and his head into the nose of the poor fool in front of him. He adopted a boxer's stance and his cannonball of a fist met the side of another's jam with a sickening crack.
Cole wasn't having nearly as much luck, even though his pain tolerance was higher after being bullied for so many years and with Gus's training (a few basics about fighting, mostly fighting dirty). With one smooth kick into some guys groin a surge of confidence lit his eye, but that was extinguished in the same moment as someone came up behind him and wrapped his thick arms around Cole. A thick fist slammed into Cole's side as a few swift jabs hit him in the other side. With nothing to lose Cole raised his arms so that the meaty arms around him lifted up close enough for Cole to sink his teeth into them. Instinct and desperation drove Cole and he tasted blood when he broke the skin with his teeth. He heard a curse and felt the arm flail but without time to think he sank his teeth deeper into the meaty flesh until a strike across the cheek dazed him. Cole fell to his knees and buckled over gripping his sides.
"He bit me!" someone cursed, a foot seized Cole in the stomach lifting him almost to his feet. But gravity found him and pulled at him until he landed on his side on the cold stiff ground. The next thing Cole heard was a loud crack of thunder. It was impossibly loud and then it went off again followed by screaming and the hurried shuffling of feet. Why was there thunder... it wasn't raining and there wasn't a cloud in the sky the last time Cole had checked.
He looked to check the sky but all he saw were stars framed by the dim rooftops. Everyone was gone except him and a human shaped lump on the ground. Then he heard it.
"Gah-nnmm aliens. S-stay off my p-planet!" An unfamiliar voice slurred.
Looking down Alley in the direction he had come from was a disheveled man holding a gun. His bloodshot eyes traced the contours of the alley looking for scaly skinned foes from another planet. The substance he had taken rattled his mind enough to make him believe the earth was under assault and that he was the last man alive to defend it.
Cole couldn't think about what to do next but as the stranger leveled his pistol at the gasping lump on the ground Cole sprang into action from the shadows. He leapt at the man and grabbed at the gun. The man was too incoherent to keep weapon straight but he was strong enough to keep his grip. They struggled and BANG!
Cole was too busy to count his luck when the bullet went wide and struck the building. He kept the gun pointed away from him in the struggle until the man toppled over and fell on top of him.
Cole landed on the ground slamming his head into the pavement, the stars in the sky doubled in his BANG vision. The man landed on top of him as thunder that wasn't thunder clapped in his ears.
He clamped his eyes shut but maintained his iron grip on the gun, but the struggle was growing nonexistent the body on top of his went limp and a warm liquid soaked his hands making the guns slippery. One last jerk freed the gun from the clutches of the man. Cole opened his eyes to see the grungy hair in from of his face. After a long pause cognition began to return to Cole he quickly panicked and scrabbled out from under the man with gun in tow.
He patted his hands over his torso to check for the source of the blood that covered him, later it would bother him that he was covered in blood. He found the source of the blood in the bloody hole in the man's back on the ground, the bullet must have gone all the way through him.
"Cole..." wheezed the voice of the boy on the ground a few meters away from the bloody man.
"No," Cole begged. He recognized the voice of its owner.