by Kyle Andrews
Aaron shook his head, “Tunnels can be blocked. People would be trapped, lungs burning as they suffocated to death, with nowhere to go. They'd know this, because they've done it to us.”
The look in Aaron's eye as he spoke those words betrayed a wide range of emotions that Collin couldn't even begin to understand. Aaron had seen the other side of this fight. He had been trapped in a hospital during a siege. When he spoke of people being trapped, he was speaking of his people, and Collin could almost hear the sound of their cries in that moment.
“A helicopter,” Collin replied, trying his best to take his mind off of the Garden. “They can call out, right? We haven't cut off cell towers?”
“We can't access the cell towers,” Simon replied, never looking away from his computer screen and never slowing down as he pecked away at the keyboard.
“So they can call out, which means that they can get out,” Collin told Aaron.
Aaron agreed and said, “I thought of that too. I told Mek to tell his people, but who knows how long it will take for them to get to rooftops?”
Silence fell for just a few seconds as both men tried to think. Collin had no idea what to say next. He couldn't begin to imagine any way of getting to the roof of the hospital without having people scaling the building.
Aaron moved closer to Simon and put a hand on his shoulder. He said, “Get ready to—”
And then the lights went out. Before Aaron could even manage to finish his sentence, every computer and every TV in the room went black, along with every light. The Campus was thrown into total darkness.
35
Somewhere in that hospital, a little girl was being held. That was all the information that Justin had, and he wasn't even a hundred percent sure that it was true. What he did know was that if she was being held at the hospital instead of a proper prison facility, it was because they wanted to medicate her. They wanted to tear down everything that her parents had taught her, so they could give her a new life.
He wasn't sure whether her being so young was beneficial or not. If she were an adult, the authorities would either kill her or make her disappear. An adult could be on a transport out of the city within hours of being captured. To where, Justin had no idea. With a child, he didn't know what to expect. He had never met any children who had been in HAND custody—or maybe he had, and he never even knew it. Maybe the kids themselves even forgot about the lives they led prior to being captured.
There was no end to the horrors that Justin could imagine that little girl going through. If he could imagine those things, the authorities could probably imagine worse. He needed to get to her and keep her safe until Freedom could take care of her.
As Justin stood in the hallway, watching people running in every direction, he was very aware of the fact that he didn't have his uniform, his HAND ID, his gun, his taser, his baton, or anything else that could be useful to him. All he had to work with was a body that hurt if he breathed the wrong way, but he would make it work. He had to.
Justin walked toward the nurses station. He'd met Marti at the station in the ER enough times to know that patient charts were kept on tablets, which were connected to the central hospital database. It was a place to start, even if he wasn't sure how to access that information.
The fire alarm was still sounding, making it hard for him to hear anything or anyone around him. If someone came up to him from behind, he would be caught completely off guard. If he was caught trying to access restricted information, he could be shot on the spot.
With this happy thought in mind, Justin approached the nurses station. Two nurses were behind the desk, sitting on the floor and holding onto each other. If this were simply a fire, they might have known what to do. They would take care of their patients and try their best to get out of the building. However, this was an attack. Getting out of the building would more than likely get them killed. They had nowhere to go. There was no protocol for this.
Justin grabbed one of the tablets from the desk, as though he had every right to be looking through patient files. He looked at the device and tried to poke around through various screens of information, but what little information he could access was of no use to him. There were other files though, which were restricted to certain hospital employees. Someone would need to input a code in order to access them.
Justin looked back to the nurses. They were scared and obviously not thinking straight. If his years with HAND had taught him anything, it was that fear made people easy to manipulate.
Yelling above the fire alarm, Justin said, “I need your help.”
The nurses didn't respond. They either didn't hear him or didn't care. Either way, they didn't so much as look in his direction.
Every second wasted was one more second when Mandi Hollinger could be swept away by HAND officers and taken to a location that neither Justin nor Freedom would know about. With this in mind, Justin threw the tablet as hard as he possibly could, hitting the wall right next to one of the nurse's head.
The motion hurt every inch of Justin's body, but he ignored that pain and looked the nurses straight in the eyes as they finally reacted to his presence.
“I am a HAND officer,” Justin told them, using the tone of voice that he usually reserved for hardened criminals or constitutional extremists. “Right now, this building is under attack. We don't have time to whimper and hide behind desks. We need to focus. Do you understand me?”
The women nodded, though they still looked terrified.
Justin grabbed another tablet from the desk and moved closer to the nurses. He held the tablet out to one of them, trying not to wince with pain as he did so, and said, “Mandi Hollinger, the little girl from the stadium, was brought into this hospital today. I have been ordered to find her and transport her to a HAND facility.”
One of the nurses took the tablet, and looked Justin in the eyes. Having a task presented to her seemed to give this nurse some more focus. Justin could read distrust in her eyes.
“You're a patient,” the nurse said. “You don't even have a uniform. Why would you be given orders?”
Justin hardened his look and told the woman, “If you'd prefer that we take one of the fully armed, completely mobile officers away from the front lines of this little battle so that he can walk a little girl down a hallway, I'd be more than happy to go back to my bed.”
After a moment of hesitation, the nurse looked down at the tablet and tapped a few commands into it. She skimmed through information quickly before looking back to Justin and saying, “We don't have any records of a child being admitted today.”
Justin was surprised by this response. He asked, “You haven't admitted a child to the hospital all day?”
“This isn't a family hospital,” the nurse shot back, seeming to regain more snark by the moment.
“You're sure that there hasn't been any children? Nobody with the name 'Mandi Hollinger?'”
“Not in the files that I have access to.”
Justin wished that something could be easy for once in his life, but he wasn't going to start whining about it in that particular moment. Instead, he closed his eyes and tried to think.
Earlier in the night, Marti left his room to go pass a message to Freedom at the coffee shop. When she left Justin's hospital room, she didn't seem to know about the kid. If she did, she never gave Justin so much as a hint to suggest that she had vital information. And when she returned, she had drinks that weren't originally part of the plan.
Taking a rather large leap and assuming that Marti figured out that the Hollinger girl was in the hospital as she left the building, Justin could assume that Mandi was either on the floor that he was on now, or the first floor, which Marti would have passed through on her way out.
Since the first floor was far too public, Justin moved away from the nurses station and started to walk down the long hallway, against the flow of people that were reacting to the Freedom invasion.
He passed by his own hospital room, as well as m
any others as he went down the hall. In some of those rooms, patients were slipping into their uniforms, so they could help defend the hospital. Most of them were weak and injured, so they would probably not last very long.
Eventually, Justin came to a set of doors that divided the hallway. When Justin pulled open those doors and walked through them, he was looking down a hallway with more patient rooms, leading to another set of doors. To either side, there were more hallways, presumably leading to even more patient rooms. The girl could have been down any one of those hallways, or none of them at all. Justin had no idea how he could even begin to figure out which way to go. What he did know was that for the first time in six years, he was working toward helping someone who deserved it. He couldn't remember the last time that he had felt like himself and not a the villain that his job required him to be.
No matter what it took, Justin would find that girl and he would make sure that she made it out of the hospital safely.
36
What had once been two women running down the street toward the HAND building had become a river of people. With each step they took, their resolve grew. These were not members of Freedom who had found ways of claiming their own lives in one way or another over the years. These were people who had been too afraid to speak their minds. These were people who had always gone along with what the authorities demanded because they were too scared or too beaten down to refuse their masters.
Now they were free. For the first time in their lives, they knew what it was like to run wild. They had their first taste of independence and it was the sweetest, most addictive sensation that they could imagine. The air was charged with that energy.
Dor had lost track of Tracy long ago. Presumably, Tracy was leading the pack of newly liberated citizens toward the HAND building to join the fight. Dor was taking her time, because this moment was just as vital as anything that was happening in the battle. This was the moment when everything changed. These people would never go back to the way things were before, and their numbers just kept growing.
As she turned a corner, Dor came across a HAND vehicle that was stopped in the middle of the street. It was one of the newer vehicles, with thick armor that would scare the rebellion out of most people based on looks alone.
Citizens had swarmed the vehicle, pounding on the side of it and rocking the vehicle until finally it flipped on its side. One woman, an average citizen who couldn't have been older than thirty-five, was lying dead in the street. Blood was pooling on the ground around her. Not too far away from her, there was a younger man sitting on the curb, holding his bleeding leg.
The HAND officers who had been driving in that vehicle had opened fire on the crowd. They had tried to put those people back in their cages by waving guns in the air and even firing on some members of that crowd. But the people would not be scared into submission, and now those officers were pinned against their own vehicle, begging for mercy from people who had stolen their guns.
Dor watched this scene play out, unable to walk away. All she could do was stand there, waiting to see what would happen to those HAND officers now that the people had found their voices. Would they be shot? Would such a quick and painless death be enough to appease the crowd, or would those officers be beaten to death, or torn limb from limb?
The people in the crowd were enraged, spitting at the officers and throwing random debris at them, but only two of the people in the crowd were holding guns, so those two appeared to be in charge of the officers' fates.
Raising her camera, Dor took a picture of that scene and studied the image as it appeared on the camera's preview screen. She felt a sudden surge of pride as she realize how the tables were turning. After all of the pain and suffering that had been inflicted on the people of that city by HAND, those officers were now holding their hands in front of them, as if they could stop the bullets from killing them by swatting them away.
Dor shifted her focus to the HAND vehicle, and to the seal that was painted onto the front door. The logo of hand, which had been the symbol of their strength and power for so many years was now obscured by burn marks and bullet holes.
She snapped another picture.
As she took that picture, all of the streetlights around Dor went dark. Every TV screen and every window that had once been filled with light from within the homes of the city's residents were suddenly black. The only light in the street came from the fires burning around the HAND vehicle, and the torches that some of the citizens were carrying with them.
Dor hadn't even noticed the torches before. These were actual fire on the end of a stick torches that people were carrying as they stormed the HAND facilities. There was something bold about that fact—as if those people weren't simply planning to retake their city, they were planning to purify it by fire. They were done playing it cool and safe. Now they were showing the authorities that they were a threat.
Or maybe Dor had read too many of the books that they had printed up at the Campus. Maybe there was no meaning behind the torches at all. Maybe the citizens of the city simply couldn't afford flashlights. Or maybe they wanted to set the HAND building on fire, just to see what it would look like.
Dor turned and looked down the street. In the distance, she could see an orange glow. The battle was already in full swing and she was watching one HAND vehicle and one standoff. What kind of journalist was she?
She left that scene behind and ran as fast as she could through the streets, weaving through the sea of people that were trying to make it to the HAND building.
As she ran, an explosion shook the street around her. She turned and saw two more HAND vehicles burning, but she didn't stop to document that image.
Since before Collin's address to the people, she had prepared herself to find the battle of the HAND building taking place, or the attack on the HAND hospital. What Dor had failed to understand was that there wouldn't be only two battles being fought that night. All across the city, HAND stations would be attacked by angry citizens. Patrol vehicles would be intercepted. HAND officers would shoot at citizens or try to run them down with their cars, but how long could those officers last when hundreds or thousands of citizens were rising up against them?
Somewhere in the back of Dor's mind, there was a memory of something that Collin had printed in an issue of the Secret Citizen. It was a line about how laws were only effective if the people were willing to obey them. If enough people stood up against unjust laws and the people who enacted them, there was no way that they could be enforced. If an entire city stood against an oppressive government, there was no way that the government could stand.
Of course, not every citizen would be taking part in this battle to reclaim their city. Some citizens might even fight on the side of the authorities. But there were far more citizens than there were HAND officers, and if even a quarter of those citizens rebelled against the system, that system would collapse.
Her mind was racing with ideas for how she could present the scope of this event in writing, with only a few pictures to illustrate. She was beginning to think that she could write volumes on that one night alone, not to mention everything that had led them to that point.
As she got closer to the HAND building, Dor could hear gunshots being fired, people yelling and glass breaking. When she was finally close enough to see what was happening in front of the building, she stood in awe of it. The sea of people, both Freedom and HAND, shooting, punching, kicking. From a distance, the chaos almost looked like one perfectly synchronized and well rehearsed dance.
There were cars that had been driven right into the building itself. Those cars were on fire, and those fires were spreading. Smoke was rising into the air and the glow of the fires gave that smoke an almost magical appearance.
In front of the building, there was a statue of Lady Justice that had been standing watch over the city for decades. That statue was now being pulled down by citizens who had grown tired of seeing Justice swing her sword in one direction alone.
As she got closer, the violence took on a different appearance. Everyone was lit by the flickering of firelight. The twisting of limbs around limbs, and faces distorted by pain and anger reminded Dor of old Renaissance paintings, depicting the Biblical battles between good and evil.
In her mind, she was creating the narrative. She was creating the heroes and the villains. She was painting pictures with words, and figuring out how to properly set the emotional atmosphere of the piece. Now she was standing in the middle of this chaos, dodging people as their fights poured into her area, stepping over debris and puddles of blood, and snapping pictures all along the way.
And then she looked down, and every image in her mind suddenly shifted. The glow of the fire took on a new light. The screams around her became less exciting and more chilling.
On the ground by her feet, there was a man lying dead. He had dark hair, cut short. He was muscular and clean-shaven. He was young, and made to look even younger by his wide, lifeless eyes. His mouth hung open, revealing broken teeth. In the dirt on his face, Dor could see lines where tears had fallen before his death. Blood soaked through his HAND uniform, and it wasn't monster blood. It was the same color blood that ran through her own body.
Dor looked down at that dead officer—the bad guy—and she saw a human being. There was no art to what she was looking at. There was no poetry. This was a person. How could she have not realized that before? How could she have failed to see what was taking place right before her eyes? How could she have overlooked the enormity of the situation?
