Martin shrugged. “I suppose. It doesn’t make me nervous, like most people.”
“That’s ninety percent of the battle, glad to hear. If you can give us about twenty more minutes we should be all wrapped up.”
Tony’s voice came out dismissive, the rest of his team still not looking up as they were swimming in their work. Martin took the hint and vanished from the kitchen. His team had a lot to do, but he did not, leaving him anxious as the morning dragged. He went back to his bedroom to lie down and let his mind run circles, thinking of the days ahead.
Once he delivered the speech his life would change forever. That seemed to happen more often than not since he first took the Juice from Chris. He wondered if everyone who had joined the world of time travel had experienced so many drastic shifts in their lives. It had felt like he was falling down one rabbit hole after another. Surely there was someone with the pleasure of enjoying life as a time traveler and not having to worry about saving the world or fighting off bad guys.
For Martin Briar, though, he’d never have a chance to settle down, thanks to the target on his back. He wished he wasn’t a Warm Soul, the lone reason he was thrust into the middle of this war. He wished he had never taken his mother to the Wealth of Time antique store. Sure, he might have lived out his life never knowing the truth about his daughter, but he had ways of coping with that pain. Life had been simple and straight-forward, and he missed that basic structure. Now, every day felt like a battle for survival, hoping to not catch a bullet to the head any time he stepped outside, praying Chris wouldn’t slip into his house in the middle of the night and shred his body like he had done his mother’s.
“Your old life is gone,” Martin said to himself. “This is your life now.”
He thought back on his life like a slideshow of memories, tears streaming down his face as he braced for the unknown future.
34
Chapter 34
Chris had returned to Alaska with the agreement he wanted from the Liberation. He foresaw a bright future with his new friends, and vowed to send an immediate message to assure the Liberation that he meant business. Plus, it was always a joy to destroy anything related to the Road Runners.
He felt confident, leaving the barricades down and daring the Road Runners to make a move on the mansion. His soldiers had grown a bit panicked at the prospect, but the Road Runners had no resources, having gone into hibernation after watching their own Council run for the hills.
That didn’t mean Chris still couldn’t have some fun. He had rounded up his soldiers in the mansion’s living room and asked for one volunteer for a mission that would certainly end in death, but also leave a lasting legacy for the Revolution.
“Figure it out among yourselves, and have the chosen patriot come to my office.”
Chris had spoken these words an hour earlier and now sat across from Bobby Francis.
Bobby had long twigs for fingers that rapped on the chair’s armrest. The rest of his body was equally skinny, showing a bulging Adam’s apple as he gulped.
“Are you nervous, Bobby?” Chris asked. “You don’t even know what the mission is.”
Bobby’s light green eyes seemed to tremble in his sockets as he returned a stare to Chris. His grip on the armrest tightened, turning his knuckles white as they stretched his pale skin to its limits.
“Of course I’m nervous, sir,” Bobby said in a cracking voice. “Everyone said goodbye to me like I’m for sure not coming back.”
“It would be a miracle if you returned,” Chris said sternly. “Did you not understand the cost of this mission?”
“I understood that my life would be at great risk.”
Chris shook his head. His soldiers weren’t exactly Ivy League graduates, making them much easier to brainwash. He could have chosen anyone for the mission and they’d oblige, but he decided to let them choose. Poor Bobby. Never saw it coming.
“Unfortunately, there’s only one way to pull off what we need to accomplish tonight. And it does involve you sacrificing your own life.” Chris stood up and circled to the front of the desk, leaning on it as he spoke mere inches from Bobby. “You’re doing an honorable act today, and the Revolution will forever be indebted to you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Nice and robotic. Perfect.
“This might be long overdue,” Chris continued. “But what better time than the present? We’re going to blow up the little hideout the Road Runners have across the way. They’ve been camped out there, watching me for years like I’m some sort of zoo animal. But now they’re hiding. And scared. And, oh, how I just want them all dead!”
He threw his head back and howled like a loon.
“And my job is to go in there and kill them all?” Bobby asked, bracing himself for the obvious answer.
“Yes, but it’s so much more than that,” Chris said, unable to wipe the smirk off his face. “We can kill Road Runners whenever we want—that’s not the issue. What we’ve never had the chance to do is kick them while they’re down. Partly because they’ve never been down—not like this, at least. They consider this Alaska location as their main headquarters, even more important than the building that went up in flames in New York. Bobby, you’re going to send them into a total frenzy, and you have my word that we will not waste the opportunity.”
Bobby still trembled in his seat, yet Chris sensed a calm swarm over his dedicated soldier. Let’s go, young man.
“I appreciate the explanation,” Bobby said. “So what exactly will I be doing?”
Chris grinned hungrily. “Let me tell you.”
* * *
Bobby rode in the backseat of their van, two soldiers in front, while two in the middle hung out of the rolled down windows with assault rifles sticking out to the world.
“Expect some company,” Chris had told them before they departed. “Just because they’re hiding doesn’t mean they won’t defend their ground.”
He didn’t actually know who was still residing in the underground fortress. There could be an entire army waiting to swallow up whoever might come knocking. But when no one arrived after having the barricades down for an entire day and night, he trusted his gut instinct that his enemies were indeed short-handed.
They rumbled over the uneven terrain, turning off the main road and creeping through the stand of trees that shrouded the Road Runners’ hideout. The sun had settled on the horizon, casting an orange and purple glow across the sky. Bobby sat in the back seat, his heavy breathing compressed by the vest strapped around his torso, suffocating him with its weight. Sweat made his undershirt cling to his chest like he had just been caught in a water balloon fight.
“We’re here,” the driver called out, the van’s headlights focusing on a wooden structure no bigger than a Porta-Potty.
The door burst open, three people barging out with guns pointed at the van.
“Shit!” the driver screamed, the rest of the Revolters already cocking their weapons and kicking open their doors.
Bobby sat in the backseat, frozen with shock. He was ordered to do so, instructed only to enter the fortress after any outside activity was cleared up by the rest of his crew. Gunfire rang out, echoing in the open air. The clink! of bullets hitting the van made Bobby duck down, hands clasped over the back of his skull while a stick of dynamite dug into his chin.
“Please don’t let me die in here,” he whimpered. “Not like this.”
The gunfire had either lasted ten seconds or ten minutes—Bobby would never know—but when it ceased he peeked and found his team still standing, and not a Road Runner in sight. One soldier had opened the door to the wooden shack and stuck his head in.
“Francis!” he shouted. “It’s all yours!”
Bobby gulped and felt a fresh wave of sweat bead his forehead. Instinctively, his right hand shot into his pocket where the remote waited for him to push the button that would detonate the dozen sticks of dynamite strapped to his vest. His heart drummed against his ribs as his fi
ngertips pulsed.
Deep down he had hoped this mission would somehow be aborted due to complications, but here they were, three dead Road Runners on the ground and a clear path into their fortress where death waited.
The van’s back doors swung open, letting in a gust of cold air that relieved his hot flash. His fellow soldier stood there with an arm extended to help him scoot out of the van. “We’re proud of you, Francis,” the soldier said as they clasped hands. It was Rudy, one of the longer tenured soldiers who had been at Chris’s side for at least a decade. The soldiers all conversed, but none considered each other friends, not that there was time for friendship.
While Bobby trudged toward the shack, the soldiers parting into two lines to let him pass, he wondered why they had never been allowed to develop relationships that went beyond colleagues. It seemed any time a conversation steered toward personal matters or about their past lives, Chris redirected it to business. He didn’t understand the pull Chris had on everyone, even though he experienced it himself. The thought of dashing into the woods and running away from this life hadn’t been as tempting as it was at this current moment with a suicide vest around his body. Yet it would remain only a dream because the thought of abandoning Chris made him sick to his stomach. Was that fear or loyalty? It didn’t matter, because he was going into this fortress to kill everything in sight.
Before he realized, Bobby reached the door and pulled it open, looking back one final time to the world and his fellow soldiers who would go back to the mansion and carry on their lives like nothing had happened. Meanwhile, Bobby drew a deep breath and braced himself for an imminent death. He nodded before stepping into the shack where darkness and silence swallowed him.
A flashlight was one of the handful of items found on a Revolter soldier’s utility belt, so he rummaged for his, clicking it on. The room was empty, not a single item in sight aside from a control panel on the wall that had eight different buttons. Bobby stepped toward this to examine it, and determined the buttons to all be decoys with the exception of the two basic ones this structure needed: up and down.
Okay, this is it. He tried to psych himself up, but couldn’t ignore the growing nausea that made him want to collapse to his knees and vomit his brains out. He reached back into his pocket and pulled out the detonator, clutching it tightly as his thumb avoided the trigger button. One quick push and we all go up. How ironic if I went back outside and blew up all of us Revolters. What would Chris do then?
He shook his head free of these dark thoughts. It was like Chris was camped out in his mind—all of their minds—to ensure these perfectly normal urges were never carried out.
The down button stared at him, and his finger shot out and pressed it, officially bringing Bobby to the point of no return. Goodbye, world. Goodbye, life, he thought as the building started to hum with the sound of a distant motor. The ground trembled like a light earthquake before a crack of light appeared from the edges of the floor.
The descent was slow and steady, the light growing brighter until he reached the lower level. Immediately, four Road Runners greeted him with guns drawn just a few feet away. He saw at least two dozen others crouched behind their desks, guns also aimed at Bobby’s head.
“Don’t shoot!” Bobby screamed, waving the remote in front him. “This is tied to my pulse and will detonate if I flatline.”
A lie, but one he knew no one wanted to take the gamble of finding out for sure.
“Shoot his sorry ass!” someone from the back of the room cried out, and Bobby was certain a bullet would pass through his brain within seconds, leaving him a dead, flopping fish who would never get to blow up the Road Runners. Death had become the only obvious exit to this situation, and Bobby wanted to make sure it was on his terms.
“Don’t shoot!” he pleaded again, arms shaking as he held them above his head, sliding his thumb over the trigger. “Chris sent me here to do this—I don’t want to. Please help me.”
“Then hand over the remote,” the Road Runner in the front barked. He was a large man who could easily wipe Bobby off the planet with his bare hands.
“I can’t!” Bobby cried. “The remote is what’s connected to my pulse. Please just get me out of this thing.” He offered a quick stream of tears that weren’t exactly fake.
The four Road Runners who were closest—clearly their version of soldiers, judging by their military-grade outfits and assault rifles—looked at each other in confusion. Surely this specific situation had never arisen in all of their preparation.
“Don’t move a fucking muscle!” another shouted before leaning in to whisper with his team.
Bobby obliged, remaining frozen as he looked out to the several guns pointing at him. They weren’t going to shoot him, that much he’d decided because they would have done so already. He studied the back of the room, judging it to be roughly one hundred feet to the back wall. Chris assured him the bombs covered a seventy-five-foot radius.
It didn’t appear anyone was outside of that range. The Road Runners were too defensive to simply back away like cowards, and this would work against them.
One of the four soldiers stepped forward, rifle still locked on Bobby’s forehead. “Okay. If what you say is true, we can help you out of that vest. Lower your hands slowly and let us come to you.”
The words fell deaf on Bobby’s ears. He couldn’t stop thinking about how this room would fall completely silent in just a few seconds. How his own bones would become part of the lethal shrapnel blasting across the room to pierce organs and arteries.
They say your life flashes before your eyes just before you die, and Bobby experienced this phenomenon as his hand holding the detonator steadied. He saw his teenage self, kicked out on the streets after telling his parents he wanted to date other boys. He saw himself crying next to a storm drain, rain beating down on him as he contemplated sliding into the drain with no intent on coming out. Then he saw when he joined the United States Army, turning his life around after learning how to live independently at the age of eighteen. These memories, along with countless others seemed to flood his mind in unison, dizzying his head, the room spinning.
His throat tightened to the point of barely being able to swallow, but he managed his final words through gritted teeth.
“Long live the Revolution,” he said, and pressed the trigger.
35
Chapter 35
Antonio had slipped into the living room for an urgent phone call while Martin rehearsed his speech for the fourth time. He liked it, and they did fantastic work in making it sound like things he’d actually say.
“Let’s go, people!” Antonio commanded when he stepped back into the kitchen, his cell phone clutched in a death grip. “We have to leave right now.”
Urgency clung to every word, and everyone sensed it, wasting no time as they snapped their laptops shut and stuffed papers into their backpacks.
“What’s wrong?” Martin asked.
“I’ll explain in the car, but we need to leave right now. Don’t ask questions—just grab what you need and get out of the house.”
Martin obliged, dashing up the stairs to snag his flask of Juice, speech papers still clutched against his chest. Is this really my only prized possession? he thought as he returned downstairs.
“Move, move, move!” Antonio barked, forcing the campaign team out of the house like a mother rushing her kids out the door to get to school on time. “We will meet at the downtown office. Do not enter the building until Everett and I have a chance to sweep the property.”
They all nodded as they jumped into the car they had rented, Martin and his two guards leaving the house last.
Antonio broke into a light jog toward their car still parked on the curb from the night before. It was a few minutes past eleven in the morning, the sun nearly directly above their heads as it beat down on them.
They filed into the car, Antonio wasting no time starting the engine and skidding away.
“What the hell is
going on?” Everett asked, the slightest tinge of fear audible in his voice.
“They attacked us.”
“Who?”
“The cocksucking Revolters, who else? They just blew up the Alaska headquarters.”
Martin gasped, struck by memories of being held a no-restraint prisoner in Chris’s mansion, to his sprint through the woods until he found safety in the form of Bill and Julian looking to bring him back the aforementioned headquarters. Bill and Julian were both dead now, due to an ugly turn of events that the organization was still recovering from today.
“Did anyone survive?” Martin asked from the backseat. He had spent enough time there to know everyone by name. Alaska housed the Road Runners’ sharpest minds. That particular group worked continuously to ensure the organization’s safety, and he wondered how many of that team had gone into hiding after the attacks in New York.
“Twenty-seven dead, plus the Revolter. Zero survivors. Suicide vest.”
“What does this mean?” Everett asked.
Antonio shrugged as they reached the freeway, moving the vehicle to a tick above eighty miles per hour. “I don’t know what this means long-term, but we have a major problem. Our New York and Alaska offices are out of commission. Our two main hubs. New York kept us afloat with guidance, Alaska had our best people. We’re in trouble.”
“Chris is moving to end the war,” Martin said. “We can’t give him any more daylight. We have to retaliate or all of our buildings will be gone. Once that happens, do we have faith that we can rebuild again, or will people just try to live normal lives and spend the rest of their days looking over their shoulder, waiting for a Revolter to wipe them out?”
Keeper of Time (Wealth of Time Series, Book 4) Page 21
