The Children of the Sun

by Christopher Buecheler

  “You think it’s a guard?”

  “Either that or someone who enjoys spending their time in a featureless stairwell,” Theroen said, his voice dry. Two elbowed him gently in the side.

  “Don’t be a jerk,” she said, and Theroen glanced down, smiling at her.

  “Very well.”

  “What do you think … try to take out the guard or risk the elevators?”

  “The latter idea horrifies me,” Theroen said. “The former does not thrill me either, but it seems our only option. We need to get out of this hallway.”

  “Maybe there’s another staircase in the warehouse?” Two ventured.

  “There was nothing like that on the floor plans, and at any rate it would likely be guarded as well.”

  “True. So what do you want to do?”

  Theroen bent down and began to murmur into her ear. When he finished his instructions, Two nodded. “I got it.”

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Ready as I’m gonna be.” She handed him her satchel, and he slung it over his shoulder with the one he already carried. Making as little noise as possible, she pressed the handle on the fire door and slipped it open, sliding through into the stairwell. Theroen remained where he was, but he placed his foot in the path of the door to keep it from latching behind her.

  Two walked along the concrete path to the edge of the stairwell and then sat down. Summoning up the acting skills she had been forced to develop in her previous life, she crossed her arms over her knees, leaned her head against them, and began to cry.

  “Hello?” A male voice said almost immediately, and Two guessed it came from three or four floors down.

  “I’m up here,” she said between fake sobs. “I’m sorry!”

  “Sorry? Who the hell—?” The voice began, and Two heard him begin to ascend the steps.

  “There was an open window,” Two said. “My friends dared me to climb in here from the roof, but I can’t get back out. Please don’t call the cops! My parents will kill me!”

  The soldier was visible now, making his way up the stairs. Two kept her head down.

  “Hey, kid, don’t you know this is private property?” he asked.

  “Yeah, it’s just … they dared me, and I thought it would be easy to climb back out, but it’s not, and the doors are all locked … and …”

  The soldier had reached her level and come to stand beside her. He put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Look, relax. No one’s calling the cops. Come on, stop crying. I’ll open the front door and let you out, but you gotta promise not to come back, all right?”

  “OK,” Two said, sniffling, and now she looked up at the soldier. He was young, maybe twenty years old, and wearing a pair of black combat pants and an unmarked grey T-shirt. There was a pistol strapped to his belt, but he hadn’t even unlatched the holster. He met her eyes, and she saw his widen.

  “Hey, what are … Jesus, you’re a fuckin’ bat!” he exclaimed, and now he went for his gun. Two saw Theroen come up behind him and grab his hand before he could pull the pistol from its holster.

  “Yes, she is,” he said, and without further hesitation he covered the man’s mouth with his other hand and sunk his teeth into the soldier’s neck. He wasn’t being careful, or gentle, and blood sprayed off to the side, splattering against the wall. Two heard the soldier screaming, the noise muffled by Theroen’s hand, and then his eyes rolled up and his knees went weak. In a few moments more, Theroen detached himself.

  “Is he dead? Two asked.

  “Yes,” Theroen said, letting the body slump to the ground.

  “Gross.” Two felt mildly ill. Fighting with someone in the heat of battle and killing them was very different from luring them to their death in such a cold and calculating way. She tried to remind herself that the man had been reaching for his gun and would no doubt have shot her in the face if given time.

  Theroen seemed to pick up on her thoughts, and he gave her an apologetic smile as he reached down to grab the guard underneath the arms.

  “Where are you taking him?” Two asked.

  “The bathroom in the hall. I suspect it sees little use on Saturdays.”

  “Right, good idea. Do you … do you need help?”

  “Just hold the door,” Theroen said, and in a single motion he knelt, slung the soldier’s body over his shoulder, and stood back up. Blood pattered onto the floor, and Theroen glanced down at it, grimacing. Two stepped around him and opened the door, looking at the numbers above the elevators. None were moving.

  “Go for it,” she said, and Theroen carried the body quickly down the hall and into the men’s room. He was back in under a minute, and Two let the door close and latch. Both of them stepped away from the window and deeper into the stairwell.

  “Two hundred and forty nine to go, I guess,” Two said.

  “Midnight cannot come fast enough,” Theroen said. “Are you ready to move on?”

  “Guess so. It’s going to get a lot harder now.”

  “Yes.”

  Two took her satchel back and set it on the ground. Unlatched, it rolled out to be about three feet square and contained her sword and scabbard, a belt with a holster, a Beretta 92FS pistol, and four extra clips.

  “I’m putting this shit on now,” she said. “No reason to hide it anymore.”

  Theroen nodded. He took his satchel from his shoulder, rolled it out on the floor, and began to prepare for the final confrontation.

  * * *

  “Jesus, this place is huge,” Two said, and beside her Theroen gave a quiet laugh. They were standing at the edge of a vast gymnasium that seemed to take up most of the lowest floor. There was a full-sized basketball court in the center, surrounded by a running track. Along its edges pieces of exercise equipment were arranged. It looked to Two like any modern sports club, and she was glad it was empty.

  The stairwell had opened up onto a deserted hallway that they had followed to its only exit. The set of heavy wooden double doors had led to the gym. Two could see entrances to men’s and women’s locker rooms to her right, and to her left a door that was marked as leading to a pool and sauna.

  “The plans we were able to obtain were woefully inadequate,” Theroen commented, looking around.

  “Considering they didn’t mention that there was even one underground floor, let alone four of them, I’m gonna have to agree with you.”

  “We are not going to find Tori on this floor.”

  “Nah. But we had to start somewhere, right?”

  They had decided to work their way up from the bottom and thus had begun on the fourth sublevel. After all, they still needed to return to the warehouse on the ground floor and open the bay doors. Two glanced at her watch and confirmed the time. It was now almost seven o’clock in the evening. They had five hours.

  “We should return to the stairwell before anyone arrives,” Theroen said, and he turned to open the double doors behind them. Before he could, he stopped in his tracks and drew in a sharp breath of air. Two spun and peered through one of the small glass windows.

  “Oh, fuck me …” she began, and then Theroen grabbed her shoulder and pulled her toward the nearest door, which gave entry to the women’s locker room. At the far end of the hall, emerging from the elevators, they had seen no less than twenty Children soldiers headed for the gym.

  “We need to find a place to hide,” Theroen said as they ran, and Two made a noise of assent. A place to hide or another exit were the only options.

  At first glance, the women’s locker room seemed to provide little hope of either. There were three banks of lockers, none of which the vampires could possibly fit into. Two could see a corridor leading off to her right that held perhaps a dozen individual showers, and she supposed as a last-ditch effort she and Theroen could try hiding in those, but that seemed like a massive risk.

  “Storage closet at the far end,” Theroen said, pointing, and the two of them sprinted toward it. He threw open the door and Two stepped
in, immediately enveloped in a mélange of odors, from chemicals to the squalled, mildewed scent of a mop head long in need of changing. Theroen swung in behind her and hauled the door shut. Through the small crack at its base, they could hear the sounds of the female soldiers entering the locker room and getting changed.

  “This is so fucking stupid,” Two said, her voice barely more than the passing of breath over her lips, and Theroen nodded. What had they been thinking? They were trying to infiltrate what was essentially an active military base, with no training in such operations, during a time of day when nearly everyone within would be awake.

  The women in the locker room were not exchanging much conversation. There was some low murmuring here and there, difficult for Two to pick up even with her vampire ears. For the most part, the women seemed intent on getting into their workout clothes and getting back to the gym.

  Two wondered what they would do when all of the soldiers had left. As far as she had been able to see, there was but one exit from the room, and it would take them back into the cavernous gym, now populated by more than enough soldiers to ensure, even if Two and Theroen set to work with their weapons, that at least one would be able to sound the alarm.

  At last, when there had been no discernible sound from the locker rooms for almost five minutes, Theroen murmured, “I’m going to take a look,” and he opened the door a crack. After a moment more, he swung it wide and ventured out into the room.

  “It’s clear,” he said, and Two stepped out after him.

  “This is fucking bad,” she said. “We’re trapped.”

  “It does seem that way,” Theroen said, and Two couldn’t help but give an incredulous laugh at the unconcerned tone of his voice. Theroen glanced at her and shrugged.

  “We are at least equipped with swords and guns. That is something.”

  “Won’t be much if the whole of them come down on us in here,” Two said.

  “Perhaps not. I do wonder how long we could hold them off from within if we put our minds to it. Do you think they would set fire to their own gymnasium?”

  “Doubt it. They’d just wait us out.”

  “Agreed. So in theory, if we must, we could hold this position for some undetermined length of time, perhaps long enough for our cohorts—”

  Two interrupted him. “They won’t set the joint on fire, but I guarantee you they will grenade the shit out of that door.”

  Theroen made a sound of distaste. “I had not thought of that.”

  “We have to get out of here,” Two said. “I’m not sitting in a janitor’s closet for the next six hours.”

  She began to move around the locker room, looking for exits they might have missed in their first, frantic search. She noticed a few air vents poking out of the drop ceiling.

  “Nothing in the showers but four-inch drains,” Theroen said, returning from that corridor. Two frowned.

  “This is a dead end. Christ. You think we can get up in those vents?”

  “Even if we could, I think the idea that we could actually maneuver through them in any sort of effective way is a fallacy propagated by spy movies,” Theroen replied. “Particularly given that we have no map and no idea where we are going.”

  “Anyway, I think they might just collapse underneath us,” Two said.

  “That is also a distinct possibility.”

  “There’s no window in the door to the gym, so we can’t even look … I mean, I dunno, maybe they all went to the pool?”

  “There is no window, but we can attempt to crack it and see what is going on out there,” Theroen said. He began walking toward the door, and at that exact moment a woman – a girl, really, as she couldn’t have been older than fourteen – came into the locker room from the gym, muttering to herself.

  “… stupid iPod … leave it in there every—ohmigod!”

  She came to a halt, the door swinging shut behind her, staring at the two unwelcome visitors standing in her locker room, and for a moment Two seemed unable to move, unable to do anything but stare. This wasn’t a soldier. This was just some kid. Were the Children really taking advantage of people this young? No wonder they were able to produce such zealots.

  Theroen was the first to regain his composure. He held up his hand, staring the girl in the eyes, and made a kind of shushing noise. The girl’s eyes grew wide, and even from behind him Two could feel the force of Theroen’s personality rolling off of him. He was charming the girl, mesmerizing her, and it seemed to be working. She stood there, slack-jawed, staring as he advanced on her.

  Two had time to wonder if Theroen meant to kill this child or if he only planned on subduing her. She wasn’t sure it mattered; it would be only a matter of minutes, at most, before the girl was missed. Still, this would at least buy them a moment or two. It would—

  The girl’s lips were moving, and after a moment more her eyes began to sharpen. Two tilted her head, listening, and realized that the girl was reciting some sort of mnemonic device, a set of rhyming couplets, and the effort of it was bringing her out of her swoon.

  “… sister, hold her hand. Mister, my sister, she cannot stand. Mister, my sister, I cannot lie. Mister, my sister, I fear she’ll die …”

  Before Theroen could reach her, the girl came fully to her senses and, drawing in a great breath, she began to scream. Two watched as she whirled on her heel and threw herself at the door, crashing out through it and into the gym. Her screams became words, alerting everyone therein to the danger she had just successfully avoided.

  “Bats!” she cried. “Someone help me! There are bats in the locker room!”

  Theroen glanced back at Two with an expression of helpless despair, and she could do no more than look back at him and draw her sword.

  “We are so screwed,” she said, and as she spoke the words, the door to the locker room burst open, and the first wave of Children soldiers began to rush in.

  Chapter 20

  Intruders

  It seemed to Vanessa that she had just lain down to sleep when someone, she thought it was Carrie, began shaking her awake. Grumbling profanities, she shoved the girl’s hands away and sat up in her bunk, raising an arm to shield her eyes from the burning glare of the desk lamp Carrie had lit. She had gone to sleep in nothing more than a pair of panties and knew this gesture was leaving her breasts exposed to anyone else who might be in the room, but she couldn’t be bothered to care.

  “Whazz…whuthafuck?” she asked, running a hand over her face. “Carrie, what time is it?”

  “It’s 11:30. Ness, you have to get up!”

  Her fellow soldier seemed all abuzz about something. Vanessa, who had slept barely four hours in the last thirty-six, envied her. She didn’t think she was currently capable of producing that sort of energy.

  “11:30 in the morning?” she asked.

  “No, at night. You’ve only been asleep a couple hours.”

  “Well Jesus fucking Christ,” Vanessa growled. “Did I not leave explicit instructions not to wake me up unless—”

  “They caught two bats in the girls’ locker room,” Carrie said.

  If Vanessa had thought herself incapable of Carrie’s level of excitement, the surge of adrenaline that went bursting through her body at the other woman’s words proved her wrong. She was out of the bed and moving toward her clothes, which lay stacked on a chair, even as she began asking questions.

  “Two of them? Are they alive? What are they doing here?!”

  “They’re alive. I don’t know, Ness, but they fought like hell. Wasn’t until the boys with the assault rifles showed up that they stood down. We lost six people.”

  “Fuck. Fucking bats. Who’s in charge right now?” Vanessa was pulling on her pants. She realized too late that she had them on backwards, made a sound of aggravation, and started over.

  “Colonel Miller,” Carrie said, and she held out Vanessa’s belt and holster as Vanessa began buttoning up her shirt. When she was done, she grabbed the items and fastened them at her waist. H
er gun was in her top drawer. She checked the chamber, pocketed an extra clip, and put the gun in its holster.

  “Miller. OK. And they’re still alive?”

  “Last I heard, yeah. He was going to speak with them personally.”

  “They in cellblock?”

  “Yeah, that’s where they took them. I don’t know what’s been going on since then. I had to wait until I could clock out to come tell you. Park’s still on shift for another couple hours.”

  All of the Children’s soldiers worked on constantly shifting, staggered schedules. This was true for the greenest private all the way up through the most seasoned captain, and even the three colonels themselves. Vanessa had just enjoyed the exquisite pleasure of working back-to-back eight-hour shifts. She had spent another three hours writing reports before taking a shower and collapsing into her bed.

  “Where’s Captain Perrault?” Vanessa asked, sitting on the lower bunk now, where Carrie usually slept, rapidly lacing up her boots.

  “We don’t know.”

  Vanessa stopped what she was doing and looked up at Carrie. “What the fuck does that mean? Who is ‘we’ and why don’t they know?!”

  “I guess ‘we’ is everyone I’ve talked to, and I have no idea, Ness. They had me doing repair work in the garage, fixing some trashed boards on the APC. She’s not in her room and she’s not answering calls.”

  “Jesus fucking … incompetent motherf—you know, if Charles was still alive, he’d—”

  “Be really pissed at the people in charge of watching her? I know, Ness. Colonel Miller threw them both into solitary and said maybe he’d let them out in a week.”

  “Good.”

  Vanessa finished lacing up her boots and stood up. She took a moment to try to smooth her clothes out, doing the best she could in the limited amount of time she was willing to allow herself. Then she hauled her long, black braids back into a ponytail and said to Carrie, “I’m going to the Command Center.”

  “I figured you’d want to be there,” Carrie said.

  “Well, I’d rather be down in cellblock interrogating the bats, but I think Colonel Miller would have me shot if I did that without permission.”