Battle Cry (Freedom/Hate Series, Book 4)

by Kyle Andrews

  A bomb went off on the second floor. Dor could feel the vibration of the explosion, even from a distance. Windows that hadn't been blown out up to that point now washed down the side of the building like water. The people below fell and undoubtedly bled. Smoke poured from the building and the flashes of gunfire resumed inside.

  Dor pushed away from the wall. She needed to get closer. She needed to get pictures of what was happening. She needed to take notes and remember what it was like to stand in that place on that night.

  The roar of the crowd was so loud that it seemed like one noise instead of thousands. She could smell sweat and blood. Before that night, Dor didn't even know that blood had a smell to it, but as she walked through the fighting, it struck her on a primal level and she knew what it was without question.

  A scream from off to her side caught Dor's attention. Somehow, that scream rose above the rest of the crowd, demanding that she look.

  When she turned her head, Dor saw a young girl on the ground, crying and holding her arm up to defend herself against a female HAND officer who was beating the girl with a baton. Dor watched as the girl was struck over and over again, and tears formed in her eyes.

  She looked around the area, wanting to find someone to help that girl, but there was nobody available who wasn't already fighting their own battle and trying to save their own life. Nobody except for Dor, who was supposed to document the fight but not become a part of it.

  That girl was going to die. Dor could have spent time wondering why a kid was even there in the first place, but this question would have been coming from the same girl who had gone out to see someone get killed years earlier, and who somehow wound up being dragged into the riot that followed. Dor would have been dead if someone hadn't given their life to save her.

  As a child, Dor watched a woman who saved her life get shot and die while Dor did nothing but scream and run away. She wasn't a child anymore, and she would be damned if she was about to let some other girl die because she was supposed to be a journalist and not a soldier.

  Dor started walking toward the HAND officer, not even thinking about what she was going to do once she reached her. Fortunately, she had a strap on her camera, which she slung over her head. She moved it around back, so it wouldn't be damaged in the fight.

  The fight. The words sounded strange in Dor's head. Was she really going to do this?

  Dor looked around for a pole or a rock or something that she could use as a weapon, but she saw nothing. This didn't slow her down.

  The closer she got to the officer, the faster she went. Eventually, she was running and screaming just as loudly and as savagely as anyone else in the crowd. She jumped onto the officer's back, grabbing the baton before the officer could strike that girl again.

  The officer spun, trying to throw Dor off of her back, but Dor wrapped her arm around the officer's neck and squeezed as tightly as she could.

  An image flashed across her face. It was the image of the HAND officer that she saw on the ground earlier, dead. Though her body was attacking the female officer, her mind was asking what the cost would be of taking a human life. She hadn't even considered it before. She had leaped into action to save that girl from the HAND officer and now she was in a position where she would either kill that officer, or the officer would kill her. The scariest part of this was that she still didn't believe that she could do it. No matter how bad the officer might be, Dor couldn't bring herself to believe that she would actually kill that woman. She didn't want to live with that mark on her soul. She didn't want to see that officer's face every time she closed her eyes.

  The officer continued to twist and turn and try to throw Dor off, but Dor held on tight. Eventually, the officer started to slow down. Then, the officer dropped to one knee. When this happened, Dor caught a glimpse of the girl that the officer had been attacking. Nose obviously broken. Teeth missing. Hair soaked with blood and clinging to her face. The girl's eyes were rolled back and she was breathing very shallow breaths.

  Dor saw that girl and she pictured her younger self in that same position, if only someone hadn't stepped in. She pictured Collin being tortured. She pictured all of the people that they had written about in the Secret Citizen. All of the people who had been shipped off or slaughtered by the hands of loyal officers like the one she was struggling with now. She pictured the woman who saved her life, bleeding on the ground. A hero, dying alone and scared.

  She couldn't make sense of it. These officers were human beings. They should have had souls. They should have been good on some deep and basic level. They were not genetically altered. They were not surgically altered. There was no computer chip controlling their brains. Dor saw that girl on the ground and she wondered how a human being could inflict such damage on someone else—on a child! What kind of coward chose a child, out of every citizen in that battle, to beat and murder?

  How could this be the work of a human being?

  The information didn't make sense to Dor. It hurt her to consider the level of ugliness that one person could inflict on another. It physically hurt and there was nothing that she could do to ease that pain.

  The officer slumped onto the ground, no longer holding onto the baton. She was clawing at Dor's arms, trying desperately to get free. Dor wanted to let her go. She wanted to end this all right now, but she couldn't.

  Both of them were on the ground and Dor was wrapped around this HAND officer, feeling something inside of her shifting as the life slipped out of the officer.

  When it was over, Dor let go and pulled herself off of the ground. She looked down at the HAND officer's wide, dead eyes as they stared into nothingness.

  This was a person who had once been a baby. She had been a child who giggled and played. She had felt joy and pain and nervousness. She had thoughts that she never spoke aloud. She had wants in life, no matter how loyal she was to her bosses. The woman must have been twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old. How many days was that? How many minutes? And all of it led to this.

  Now that woman's life melted into the past. Her belongings belonged to nobody. Her unspoken thoughts ceased to exist. Dor looked down at that woman, that officer, that savage, that monster. She was a person, yet she had to die.

  Looking around, Dor saw a field of people, good, bad and in-between. She looked at the faces that were twisted in anger, and imagined them all as children.

  On the ground, the young girl's breaths grew more shallow and less frequent. She coughed once, spraying her own face with blood. Then, she stopped breathing entirely.

  40

  The clock was ticking. The building was burning, guns were firing from both sides, and that little girl from the stadium could be killed in any number of ways at any moment.

  Justin had been up and down two different hallways, searching for Mandi, but he hadn't found her. He didn't know whether she had been moved. He didn't even know for sure that she had ever been on that floor.

  As he made his way back through the hallway from which he had come, glancing back into rooms that he had already searched, he heard gunfire. Freedom had reached the fourth floor. As happy as he would be to see them take that girl out of the hospital, he needed to make sure that she was safe until they reached her.

  He returned to the doorway that he had originally come through, which was only one short hallway away from where the fight was taking place. There was only one hallway left to search now, and he didn't waste any time before rushing in that direction.

  Patient rooms gave way to offices and labs. Several of those rooms held nothing more than desks, computers and paperwork. Body scans and 3D images of human organs were displayed on monitors, but there was no sign of the girl.

  After rushing in and out of several rooms, Justin finally came across an office where a woman in a lab coat was hiding behind her desk. When he entered the room, she gasped in fear.

  “I'm with HAND,” Justin assured her.

  The woman looked up at him. She was nervous and obviously w
asn't made to feel any better by the fact that he wasn't in uniform and had no weapons.

  “Listen to me carefully,” he told the woman in as calm a tone as possible. “Right now, there are violent criminals breaching this facility. All available officers are working to hold them off. I have no weapon and I am in no condition to fight, so I have been ordered to find the girl from the stadium and transport her out of the building. Do you understand what I'm telling you?”

  The woman nodded, still scared and not looking at him even once as he spoke to her.

  “Where is she?” he asked her.

  “She was being held for evaluation by a social worker,” the woman told Justin.

  “What room?”

  “4323,” the woman replied quickly, in a breathy whisper. “It's locked down. You can't get in without a badge.”

  “Good,” Justin nodded. “I will need your badge.”

  The woman didn't respond at all. Justin saw her badge resting on her desk and he grabbed it. Without wasting another second on the woman, Justin rushed out of the room.

  A short distance down the hallway, there was another set of doors which had an electronic lock on them. Justin hurried to the doors and swiped the badge. Fortunately, the locks were connected to the backup power and they opened for him.

  He walked through and started down the hall as the doors started to close behind him. He could still hear the guns firing and men screaming in the distance, but those sounds were beginning to fade as he got farther away.

  “Justin!”

  He heard the voice above all of those other noises. It was Sim, and Justin could tell that he was rushing down the hallway to catch up.

  Justin didn't turn around. He pretended that he didn't even hear Sim calling after him as the doors shut between them.

  Sim pounded on the doors, calling Justin's name, but Justin kept moving. If Sim managed to get through those doors and found Justin before he could get Mandi out of the building, he would have to take Sim out, and he didn't feel like killing one of his friends that night.

  The hallway grew darker and darker as he moved through it. Emergency lights were on, but smoke was beginning to make its way into the air. Where that smoke was coming from, Justin wasn't sure, but it wouldn't change anything even if a fire were burning right in front of him. He ignored it and kept moving.

  This experience was too familiar. When Justin's eyes were open, he was focused on the hallway in front of him and the mission at hand, but every time he blinked, he was back in the Garden, trying to find Ammo while people screamed around him.

  He needed to focus. He needed to put memories out of his mind. To get bogged down by the past could get an innocent girl killed.

  Each of the rooms in this stretch of hallway was secured with a lock of its own. Whether this was to keep people in or keep people out, Justin didn't know for sure. He'd never heard of adult prisoners being taken to a HAND hospital before, but he doubted that he was told about any number of things that the authorities did to prisoners. It wouldn't surprise him to find an entire ward filled with prisoners who were being experimented on and altered in all kinds of creative ways.

  Room 4323 was secured by a door that had no window, so Justin couldn't see inside. He swiped the badge and unlocked the door, pushing it open slowly. The yellow glow of an emergency light filled the room, but Justin couldn't see much as he stood in the doorway.

  “I am an officer with HAND,” he called into the office, letting any officers inside know that he was one of their own.

  “Four-four-one-three,” came a response.

  “Three-one-one,” Justin replied. He hated the number identifications, but the authorities preferred their officers to be nameless and faceless.

  “Come on in,” the voice said.

  Justin stepped into the room and found three HAND officers aiming handguns at him. He knew two of those officers, and they lowered their weapons when they saw him.

  “You're out of uniform, officer,” one of the men, Walters, quipped.

  “You should have seen me a little while ago,” Justin replied, dryly.

  He looked toward a bed in the room and saw the little girl lying there, sound asleep. He studied her as best he could from a distance, trying to see if there were any obvious wounds. He didn't spot any.

  “So, you guys are doing the hard work,” Justin said quietly, still looking at the girl.

  “Orders are orders,” said the other officer that Justin knew, though he couldn't remember the man's name.

  “I hate to break it to you, but the guys who give the orders are kinda busy at the moment,” Justin told them. “I've been ordered to get the girl out of here. You three are needed in the fourth floor lobby. Freedom's breached this level. Only a matter of time before they get to the fifth floor. The VIPs.”

  “We haven't gotten those orders,” Walters replied.

  “Have you gotten any orders?”

  “Not for a while.”

  “Well then, it looks like I'm telling the truth, doesn't it?”

  “Not until we get the call. You know the drill.”

  Justin turned toward Walters, looked him in the eye and said, “That's smoke outside the door. It's getting thicker by the minute. Freedom soldiers are killing our wounded, and you're sitting here watching a little girl sleep.”

  Walters nodded and narrowed his eyes before he said, “That's the second time you've done that now.”

  “Done what?”

  “Referred to them as Freedom.”

  Walters was looking Justin squarely in the eyes, accusing him of being a traitor to his government. It was a crime that was punishable by death on the spot. No arrest. No trial. It was an accusation that Justin didn't like, true as it may be.

  Justin took a step toward Walters, still looking him in the eye. He moved slowly and with his hands up.

  He said, “You've got me, Walters. All this time that I've been kicking your ass in training and bringing in more arrests in a week than you do in a month, I've actually been spy for the bad guys. You know how I get those arrests? I walk up to them, flash my little Freedom decoder ring and ask them if they'll come with me so that I look like a real officer in front of the guys.”

  He said it with enough sarcasm to make it sound untrue, but decoder ring aside, it was more or less accurate.

  Walters didn't say anything. He and the other HAND officers stood silently, as though they were waiting for Justin to cave in and reveal himself to be a member of Freedom.

  Justin had never been so exposed before. He was usually so careful and so good at maintaining his cover. He was usually in control of how people saw him, but he had slipped up. He made a stupid mistake and now his life and the life of an innocent little girl were on the line.

  Every injury on his body was aching. Every muscle was tense. His head was pounding. His throat was dry.

  Justin knew that it was over. Those officers knew exactly what he was. For the first time in years, someone saw him. The real him.

  He looked to the ground and nodded, letting them know that they were right. He had nothing left to hide, and it actually felt kind of good to get that weight off of his chest.

  Walters' hand tensed. He was about to pull the trigger, and that was what Justin was waiting for.

  He grabbed Walters' hand and pushed it out of the way just as the shot was fired. The bullet struck the third officer, who Justin had never met before. That officer stumbled back, firing a shot that landed in the wall behind Justin.

  Still holding on to Walters, Justin swung him around and threw him into the other familiar officer. Both of them stumbled and fell back. Walters' gun was now in Justin's hand.

  The officer who had been shot was getting up already. Justin turned and shot him in the chest twice more. Then, upon realizing that the man was wearing a bulletproof vest, he shot the officer in the head.

  As he turned his attention back to Walters and the other officer, he realized that Walters was on his feet and swinging
his baton at Justin. It knocked the gun out of Justin's hand.

  Broken or not, Justin's ribs were on fire. Each breath he took was like a hot poker being run through his chest, but he had no choice but to keep fighting, because that was what he always did.

  As the gun hit the ground, Justin grabbed a bedpan off of a nearby table and threw it at the second officer, preventing him from taking aim. Justin could handle a baton, but dodging a bullet was another story.

  While the second officer's aim was thrown off, Justin lunged at Walters. Walters brought the baton down on Justin, but that didn't stop Justin from throwing all of his weight into the man. They both fell to the ground.

  Justin landed close enough to the gun on the ground to grab it. As Walters struggled to get up, Justin shot the second officer, and he fell to the ground, knocking into Walters as he went down.

  Walters might have been able to knock the gun out of Justin's hand once again if it hadn't been for that second officer falling into him. That officer bought Justin a couple of seconds, and that was all it took for Justin to shoot Walters dead.

  As he pulled himself off of the ground, Justin looked toward the girl who was still sound asleep on the bed. She was obviously heavily medicated and would need to be carried out of there, which was not great news for someone who could barely raise his arm without causing great pain.

  There was a crash outside the door. Justin held his breath, listening to the noise. The door to the room was still locked, so whoever was out there couldn't get in very easily. Still, someone was out there and that was not good.

  Justin looked around the room, at all of the dead officers. If Sim was out there, Justin would have no way of explaining himself.

  He swallowed hard and looked down at the gun in his hand. Like it or not, there was a good chance that he would be killing Sim that night.

  41