XCOM 2- Resurrection

by Greg Keyes

  “Okay,” Thomas told Lena. “Start asking.”

  “What do you mean?” Lena replied.

  “There was a bombing here, right?” Thomas said. “People died. You were on your way here for a reason.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I wanted to see it. See where she died. I wanted to try to understand.”

  “Go to it, then. Amar will see to your safety while I meet with the local Natives. The rest of you—take the night off, but stay on your toes. Keep your earpieces in.”

  Lena looked around for a bit and then walked over to a stand where two teenagers were selling watermelon juice. It turned out they were expected to have their own cups, and when they didn’t Amar had to spring for a pair of plastic tumblers.

  “Where are y’all from?” one of them, a girl with uneven, blackened teeth, asked.

  “We just came from Greenville,” Amar said.

  “That’s a long way,” the boy said. “I’ve never been that far.”

  “Why are your teeth like that?” Lena asked.

  The girl recoiled. “Ain’t too polite, are you?”

  “So you came up from Greenville,” the boy persisted. “Were you there for the bombing?”

  “What?” Lena said her brows arching up.

  “Yeah,” the boy said. “A bunch of people killed, according to the vid stream. Of course, my daddy says the vid stream ain’t worth much. Says a hognose snake knows more about the world than folks that watch that.”

  “No,” Lena said slowly. “The boming was here. My sister was killed in it.”

  “In Helena?” the boy said. “Weren’t no bombing. Hell, what’s there to bomb in Helena?”

  “But …” Lena trailed off, uncertainly. “Did you know a woman named Jules Bishop? Looked a little like me, two years older, with blonde hair?”

  “Jules Bishop?” The two looked at each other. “Peculiar woman,” the girl said. “From Gulf City. She used to help out at the school, but she ain’t been around there for a year or two.”

  “Where is the school?” Lena demanded.

  “It ain’t open right now.”

  “Where?”

  * * *

  The school overlooked the river, a single-room building surrounded by a porch and mounted on pilings so it stood well above the waterline. There were no lights on, but two men were passing a bottle between them. One was Sam.

  “I figured someone would direct you here sooner rather than later,” Sam said. “But I wanted you to get here on your own.”

  The other man was little older than Sam, maybe thirty-five. He had a narrow face set in sorrowful lines. He stood up and stared at Lena.

  “God,” he said, “you look like just her.”

  Lena looked back and forth between the two men.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m not doing this. For all I know, one of you crossed the river early and set this all up for my benefit. I don’t know why you would bother, but I’m not—”

  “She was my wife,” the man said.

  Lena closed her eyes. “I’m. Not. Doing. This.”

  Amar felt his fuse sputtering up its end. Did Lena think she was the only person in the universe who had lost someone? Who did she think she was?

  “Right,” he said. “I swam over here and coached the whole town to lie. I’m bloody amazing that way.” He swept his arms about. “Helena isn’t all that big. Did you see anything that resembled a blast radius? Really, what is wrong with you?”

  “We corresponded,” Lena erupted. “Don’t you think she would mention a husband?”

  “No,” the man said. “Jules wouldn’t. My name is Laurent Gerox. ADVENT has been searching for me for years. Jules wanted to make certain they didn’t find me through her. Any communication you had with her was recorded and analyzed—if not before she joined the resistance, then certainly after.”

  “This is all absurd.”

  Laurent sighed. He put his hands on his knees. “She liked the little things,” he said. “A funny turn of phrase. The color of the sky on a clear morning. Cherries—she really loved cherries.”

  “Stop it,” Lena said.

  “Her favorite color was aquamarine, and she was very firm about it—not blue, not turquoise, not teal—aquamarine. If you ended a sentence with a preposition, she would always correct you. She once told me that when you were little, you were afraid that some sort of monster lived under your tub. A sewer snake? No, that wasn’t it. Something like that, though.”

  “Slewer snake,” Lena said. Her voice was thick, and tears had begun slowly tracing down her face. “That’s how I said it, and it stuck.”

  “She was in my detail,” Sam said softly. “She died protecting me. We had to leave the bodies, and this is what ADVENT does. It lies. All of the time. About everything.”

  “Why?” Lena asked softly. “Why?”

  “Because,” Laurent said, “they have something to hide. Because if people knew what they were really up to, more would rise up against them.”

  “What are they really up to, then?” Lena asked.

  Sam cleared this throat. “That we don’t actually know,” he said.

  “My sister died for that?” she said derisively. “For ‘We don’t really know?’”

  “Yes,” Laurent said.

  “Then she was an idiot,” Lena said. She turned and walked away.

  “She’ll be okay,” Laurent said. “I’ll see that she gets back to Gulf City, if that’s what she wants.”

  “Good enough,” Amar said. As long as she wasn’t his responsibility anymore, he was happy.

  * * *

  They were still flush with fuel and supplies when they left Helena. Now that they were across the Mississippi, they could turn south toward their as-yet-unnamed destination. Their path carried them deeper into a contagion zone than Amar would have liked, but he didn’t see anything out of place. Everything looked very much as it had on the other side of the river. The few aircraft they saw were very high and far away.

  That night they parked the trucks inside an old farm building of some sort. Dux and Toby began unpacking, and a few minutes later they were again treated to the big man’s impressive vocabulary of obscenities.

  Amar trotted over to see what was happening, and there was Lena, looking up at the redhead with a defiant glare in her eyes. She had apparently stowed away on one of the pickups by crawling under the tarp.

  Before Dux got too out of hand, Amar took Lena by the elbow and escorted her to the edge of the camp.

  “Why?” he demanded. “Laurent said he would take you back to the city. Or you could have stayed there.”

  “You’re not telling me everything,” she said. “Until you do, you’re stuck with me.”

  * * *

  Thomas put Lena under Chitto’s guard and called a meeting, out of earshot of the two. Dux got his opinion out immediately.

  “We should leave her here,” the big man said.

  “It’s a long walk back to Helena,” Amar felt he should point out.

  “That’s her problem. She’ll be fine if she sticks to the road.”

  “Sure,” Nishimura said, slapping at a mosquito. “If a snake doesn’t bite her. Or a cougar. Or whatever the aliens are scared of doesn’t get her. Or an ADVENT patrol, for that matter. Leaving her here alone might be a death sentence.”

  Thomas agreed. “I’m not going to leave her in a contagion zone.”

  “We can’t take her any farther,” Sam said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  She turned to Sam. “It’s time you told us where we’re going.”

  “It’s classified,” he began.

  “Do not tell me that again,” Thomas snapped. “Conditions change. We adapt. That’s what you do when you’re in the field. Obviously your old squad knew where they came from. So now we’re your escort. You haven’t gotten new orders because it’s not possible, right? Are you in contact with your superiors?”

  “No,” Sam admitted.

  “So you adapt,” she sna
pped. “Where the hell are we going?”

  He took a deep breath and settled his shoulders. Then, reluctantly, he began to speak.

  “There is a base,” he said. “Near here. Not just any resistance base. An XCOM base.”

  To Amar, he might as well have just said they were going to meet Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, or Ravana, lord of the Rakshasa. Or King Arthur. XCOM was a thing from legend—another time, another world, even.

  “I don’t find that likely,” Nishimura said. “After all these years? Where have they been? Why haven’t we heard from them?”

  “The time wasn’t right,” Sam said. “The world wasn’t ready. But soon …”

  “The name you mentioned,” Thomas said. “You’re sure?”

  “I am completely certain,” Sam replied. “You don’t know me that well, but I hate to lie. It almost makes me physically ill to lie.”

  “So instead you don’t tell us anything at all,” DeLao complained, pulling off his ball cap and fanning himself with it. “Where is this base? You say it’s only about a day away. That puts it somewhere just outside of old Houston—basically jabbertown central.”

  “It’s safe,” Sam said. “When we get there, we’ll be safe. Then this whole mess will be out of my hands, and you can take your concerns up with someone much more highly placed than me. Okay? But we have to lose Lena.”

  “Not here,” Thomas decided. “Somewhere closer to the coast, where she has a better chance of being found.”

  “What if she doesn’t want to be found?” Amar said. “What if she wants to join up? You let Chitto in pretty easily.”

  “Chitto isn’t a brainwashed New City brat,” Dux said. “Who knows what she’s got kicking around in that brain can of hers?”

  “My point is this,” Sam said. “If she goes with us much farther into this, letting her go isn’t going to be good enough. Do you understand? I’m serious. This is for her own good.”

  “She stays with us until we’re out of the contagion zone,” Thomas said. “There are settlements outside of Houston. We’ll leave her at one there.” She glared at Dux. “And next time, we’ll check the vehicles before we pull out.”

  * * *

  Midmorning the sun shone hot and bright, but in the west it was beginning to darken. The trees along the highway first shivered and then began to sway in sporadic buffets of wind. Rain began, like liquid gold in the sunlight.

  “Devil’s beating his wife,” Chitto murmured. They were in the pickup, and Amar was driving.

  “What?” Amar said.

  “When it’s raining and the sun is still out,” Chitto explained, “we say the devil is beating his wife.”

  Amar thought about that for a second, wondering when he’d had this conversation before. “We used to say the fox is marrying the crow,” he said.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Chitto opined.

  “And yours does?” he retorted. She shrugged.

  Then, he remembered. “Rider used to say it was a ‘chicken carnival’,” he recalled, “which makes even less sense.”

  “Uh-huh,” she replied as the rain began to hammer so hard the ancient wipers could no longer clear it.

  “I’m not her, I know,” Chitto said, after a moment, “but I will watch your back as best I can.”

  Amar nodded, feeling his breath tighten. “Thanks,” he said, as the wind tried to yank the truck from the road.

  “I wonder,” Chitto said, “why they don’t just call it ‘sunny rain.’”

  “Oh, yeah,” Amar remembered. “Hujan panas. Some people back home do call it that.”

  “See, that makes sense,” Chitto said. He nodded his agreement.

  But by then it wasn’t sunny rain anymore. Clouds darker than soot rolled over them, and thunder began pounding their ears. They were forced to slow to a crawl, the taillights of the minivan ahead of them the only thing Amar could see. Then they stopped entirely for fear of driving into something too deep.

  They needn’t have bothered—the deep came to them. First, Amar felt a sort of tug. Then the wheel turned in his hand. The yellow water outside was rising very quickly, he saw. Then the truck lifted and turned half around.

  “Oh, crap,” Chitto said.

  It wasn’t like sea waves, coming and going. This just kept coming, now horrifyingly quickly. The truck raised completely from the road as water began to gush in from the floorboards and seams of the doors.

  Then something hit them—a log, another car, he didn’t know, but the truck began flipping over, driver side down. His window shattered, and water poured in as the truck continued to roll.

  After that, he only remembered water churning everywhere as he gasped for breath, clawing his way out of the window even as the truck turned again. He couldn’t tell up from down anymore. All he could feel was a pull like the strongest riptide he’d ever experienced.

  Then his head struck something, and he blacked out.

  CHAPTER 6

  WHEN HE CAME to, something was hanging onto him from behind. He struggled wildly, in a total panic, as lightning limned everything in white and thunder exploded in the same instant, leaving his ears ringing and a long red stripe on his retinas.

  He realized then that it wasn’t just ringing in his ears. Someone was talking to him. After a moment, he understood that it was Chitto, and that she was behind him, holding his face up out of the water, not dragging him into it. She was holding onto something else with her other arm.

  “Your armor,” she gasped. “Get if off, or we’ll both go under.”

  He fumbled at the catches, his fingers dulled by cold. The water pulled at him like a sea monster’s claw, and he heard Chitto groaning behind him. Finally the breastplate came off, but Chitto lost her grip on whatever she had a hold of, and they were borne off by the flood, branches and deadfall tearing at their exposed flesh.

  After what seemed like forever, the current lessened, and they fetched against something. Together they crawled up onto a bank that rose a few feet from the flood. The rain lessened, and thunder growled on, but only in the distance. The water rose another six centimeters and then began to subside.

  “Thanks,” he managed.

  “It’s all good,” Chitto said.

  “Except the bit where we just lost everything,” he said. “Weapons, supplies, the truck.”

  “Nitpicker,” Chitto replied.

  But he was right. When it was clear enough to look around, the truck was nowhere to be seen—nor was there any sign of the rest of the squad.

  * * *

  Before nightfall they found a road running generally south, although they couldn’t be certain it was the same highway they had been on earlier. Amar was relieved to discover that both of them still had their sidearms, and so they weren’t completely helpless. But he felt like a walking bruise, and his every joint and juncture felt aflame, chapped by his wet, stiff clothes.

  Making camp involved little more than finding the highest, driest place they could to take turns sleeping. They still had their radio transceivers, but they were short range, and there was nothing but static on the frequencies they used.

  The night was wet, hot, and miserable, and he didn’t get much in the way of sleep, but in the gray hours before morning, his radio finally started talking to him—not with a human voice, but with the dots and dashes of Morse code. The signal repeated six times, then gave way to static.

  “Did you get that?” Chitto asked. “I haven’t had time to learn the code.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got a rally point.”

  * * *

  In the truck, the longleaf pine and oak that was reclaiming the land blurred into a continuous screen, obscuring the contents of the young forest. On foot, you saw more. The rusting cars, the crumbling churches, the faded billboards, water towers proclaiming the names of towns few remembered ever existing.

  Oakdale was one such town. The sign cheerfully declaring they were entering it was still there, peeking through the under
story.

  “Rally point is about a kilometer ahead,” Amar told Chitto. “Near the old town center.”

  They had covered about half that distance when his radio started prattling again, this time urging him to approach with caution. It came a bit belated, because by that time he could hear the screams.

  Oakdale wasn’t like Greenville and Helena, settlements that ADVENT grudgingly tolerated. Oakdale was far too deep in a contagion zone. It should have been empty, and from the looks of it, it had been until recently. It was poor even by shantytown standards, consisting of a handful of tents, some tarps thrown over the holes in the roofs of existing buildings, and a few small solar arrays. Also glaringly present were two ADVENT aerial transports. The troopers were rounding the settlers up and marching them—or, in some cases, carrying—them into the transports.

  And not all the captives were settlers: Toby, DeLao, and Lena were among them.

  “Shit!” Chitto yelped, and then her pistol went off. He spun around and saw she was shooting at a jabber only a few meters away. It had a stun lance in its hand. Chitto fired again but came nowhere near hitting the thing. From the corner of his eye, he saw another one charging up on his right like a berserker.

  He jerked his pistol up and fired twice. The first bullet hit the jabber in the neck and the second right in the face. He was turning to fire at the second when he felt a searing pain in the back of his shoulder. His whole body spasmed, and he dropped his pistol as he fell to the ground. It felt like his blood had been pumped out and replaced with lava. Groaning, he rolled, reaching for the fallen weapon, but he knew there was no time. He heard Chitto firing wildly. The trooper raised her lance.

  Then her head came off. Dazed by the pain, he watched curiously as it bounced on the ground, and the body that had once worn it dropped to its knees.

  Nishimura grinned down at him, her small mouth bent in a devilish grin, her eyes bright beneath her sable brows, and then she was off again, bloody sword gripped in one hand.

  He picked up his weapon, trying to ignore the agony that had been burned into his flesh, but it took a few moments to regain his motor skills. He knew he was lucky that he hadn’t passed out, but somehow it didn’t feel that way.