by Justin Bell
He skidded briefly and hung a left, curling around the back of a building and running onward, watching the Ironclad building in front of him, looming above the opening at the end of the alley, glaring at him with dozens of open glass eyes.
“Don’t even try it, kid!” an Ironclad operative shouted as he came around the opening ahead, joined by two others, blocking Brad’s path.
Brad slid to a halt, pulling the Ruger up into firing position as he did, squeezing off a series of gunshots toward the three operatives ahead of him.
“You don’t scare me!” he screamed as he fired, sending one of the gunmen scattering to his right. Brad set his feet and gave no inch, the small pistol snapping back in his tight grip. It roared in the narrow alley, roared like the weapon that cut down his parents, and as he fired at the men, he could see the face of Bruce Cavendish on each one of them.
“Don’t make us shoot you!” one of them shouted from behind the corner of the building up ahead. “We will gun you down!”
Brad held his spot, ejecting the spent magazine and slamming another one flush with the weapon handle. Maybe they would. Maybe they would gun him down in the dark, wet alley and maybe he’d fall to the ground, his blood running with the rainwater.
Just like his mother and father.
It would be nice to see them again. He missed them.
Footsteps thundered behind him, almost unheard against the barking of his Ruger .380 and he started to spin, but two of the gunmen were on top of him, leaping toward him. A hand lashed out and knocked the pistol from his grasp, while a body slammed him in the chest, and he felt himself going over backwards under the blunt force of two grown men tackling him.
“Winnie!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “Run! Run fast and far!” A hand crashed down against the side of his face, whipping his head around, lancing white streaks of light through the dark of his vision. The world around him swam and swirled, darkness crawling up to bring him down into it.
***
Winnie pressed her eyes tightly closed, willing her body to be just as tight against the brick wall. Shadows loomed tall and dark, cloaking the surrounding ground in a dim gray shade, a shade she hoped would conceal her presence. Tears stung her eyes and ran down her cheeks as she thought of her parents and brother, of not knowing what had happened to them in the parking garage. Hearing the massive, ground-shaking explosions of back-to-back grenades. Every time she closed her eyes, she swore she could see the broken and bloodied body of her younger brother Max, twisted and torn by fragmentation grenades, and she prayed it was her imagination, but she wasn’t sure.
It was the not knowing that was almost worse.
She’d heard Brad scream to her, to beg her to run, and she’d known that he’d been cornered and caught. She was quite possibly the only one left. The only one left to do what? It’s not like she was going to grab a weapon and single-handedly storm back into Ironclad and tear it down from the inside. Her best hope was to try to make her way back to Lakeview. Get out of this part of Chicago and make her way to familiar ground, try to salvage whatever small part was left of their mission.
What an ill-advised adventure. Was it Rebecca’s fault? Winnie didn’t want to blame anyone; it seemed like such a hopeless exercise, but she remembered her mother furiously resisting the plan, actively fighting against it, trying to convince all of them it was a fool’s errand. They’d ignored her. Even worse than that, they’d pressured her into agreeing with them and launched the operation, anyway.
Now their team was shattered. Broken. Ironclad stood tall, wide, and unblemished, but their team was in shambles. It had happened so, so quickly. Winnie regulated her breathing as she leaned against the wall, steadying the rapid slam of her heart, calming the racing, raw and torn frays of her nerves. She didn’t hear them. At least not close by. Brad had been a couple of blocks away, she was pretty sure, and if he’d succeeded in dragging Ironclad in his direction and away from her, she might just have a little wiggle room. Lifting her Beretta M9, she popped out the magazine which was nearly empty, and clicked home a full one, ensuring her at least fifteen rounds of fresh ammunition. The weight in her pockets told her she had a few other mags to spare as well, not that it mattered. If she ended up in a gunfight where she’d easily plow through forty-five bullets, she had likely already lost.
She pulled away from the wall and turned right, easing her way farther down the darkened alley, moving slow and quiet, the pistol held in two hands. Without trying, she wondered if the outcome would have been at all different if Tamar had stuck around, though she knew it wouldn’t have. He probably sensed the impending danger; he and The Orphans had been tangling with Ironclad a lot longer than they had, and he did the smart thing by making himself scarce. She had no room for blame when it came to Tamar, her only wish was that the entire group had come to their senses and left before things had gotten out of hand.
Was that what this was? Out of hand? Grenades had decimated the parking garage, hundreds of rounds of spent ammunition, several dozen loose shell casings. At least a half dozen Ironclad men dead, and most of her side captured or worse.
The only one left. Was that even possible?
“Down this way!” she heard the hushed whisper of the voice around the corner to her left and felt like crying again. They were close, and worse than being close, they were nearly right on top of her, sounding like they were in the next alley over. Running forward, she tried to move fast but quiet, a combination that was difficult if not impossible to achieve. Turning left she surged down a side street, a one-lane road lined by parked cars. She ran down the middle of the street, then hung a right, going back toward a connecting road. The Ironclad office building was to her left and behind her, a good block and a half away and she kept running, feet slapping pavement, breath screaming in her straining lungs, slick fingers desperately clinging to the gridwork metal handle of the pistol.
“There! I see her!” the voice was behind her.
“Don’t move! We don’t want to kill you!” two more voices behind her. Three in total.
She kept running, veering right to hug the wall and put a parked car between her and her pursuers. She wound around a lamppost, and curled around a fire hydrant, picking up speed as she ran, letting her legs carry her along, trying desperately to ignore the burning in her lungs, the fistful of razors clenching her muscles.
Two shrill pops signaled a pair of gunshots. The first round punched through the rear window of one of the abandoned cars, smashing safety glass and setting a shrill car alarm off. A second round thunked into the wall several feet behind her.
She kept on running. Winnie had no idea where she was or where she was going, she was just running.
“You’re heading deeper into the city!” a voice screamed from behind her. “You don’t want to do that!”
She knew he was right, but she ran anyway, curling right and darting down a narrow access road as another handful of gunshots echoed in the pale, clear air. Footsteps scuffled all around her, to her right, in an alley to her left, on the road behind her, they were matching pace and converging on her, moving in closer, ever closer, and soon they’d be too close for her to lose.
They probably already were.
Up ahead she saw a blur of motion as one of them swung around the building, and without thinking, the Beretta M9 shot up and let loose, a swift group of three shots, driving the shadowed form swiftly backwards. A narrow side street opened up to her left and without even thinking she weaved then charged into the opening, running into the skinny passage, less a street and more an alley, cutting a path between two tall buildings.
She saw it almost as soon as she entered the passage and slowed for a moment, but knew it was already too late to turn around. A chain link fence blocked her path, climbing at least eight feet in the air, separating the alley into two distinct halves, the second half shrouded in a darkening shadow, like some forbidden place, so close, and yet so far out of reach. For a brief moment, Winnie loo
ked at the tall fence, her fingers twitching, considering whether she could climb it, but the smacking footfalls behind her told her it was too late for her to make that choice and as she spun, three Ironclad gunmen filled the space at the mouth of the alley, lifting automatic weapons and moving in toward her.
She stumbled backwards, her back slapping the chain link, and it bent slightly, but held tight, releasing her locked knees and sending her sliding down the fence, hitting the pavement below butt-first in a shallow puddle of old rain water.
Trash was scattered about the alley, empty bottles, a thirty-gallon trash can toppled over, some contents spilled out. It smelled horrific in the alley, a putrid, rotten stink, a physical manifestation of the current state of the world.
Winnie sat there against the fence and lowered her head, her breath coming in sharp, ragged gasps.
She’d been the only one left. And they’d gotten her.
***
The transformation had been swift, sudden, and brutal. One moment, the first floor of a multi-level parking garage, the next moment, the business end of a war zone. Massive chunks had been blasted away from the three main support columns there on the first floor, large portions of the rectangular poured cement posts torn asunder and tossed haphazardly along the floor. Bullets had knocked chunks out of the floor at pretty much every point, and the concrete barricades separating the down ramp and up ramp were chewed apart like cheese in a rat’s maze.
Thick layers of pungent smoke hung like fog inside the garage, pressed up against the ceiling and slowly drifting out through the narrow openings at each edge.
Karl Green strode into the bottom level, followed by three gunmen, while a fourth broke away and approached the first prone form lying on the floor. He crouched by the body, checking it, then looked up at Green.
“It’s the boy. The son. He’s breathing.”
Karl nodded while the same man separated and walked toward the others. Karl could see Phil lying against one of the support columns, barely holding himself up with one arm, his face streaked with blood. The gunmen bent down to check him out, but Phil lurched forward, slamming his head into the Ironclad soldier’s face.
“Get away!” Phil shouted, starting to scramble to his feet. “Max? My boy?” Two other soldiers moved in, one drilling him in the stomach, the second pounding him between his shoulders and knocking him back down to the pavement.
“Mr. Green?” a voice said and Karl turned to his right. Two men approached, Rhonda clutched between them. Her hair was matted to her head, her eyes vacant and dazed within her dirt streaked face, but she was very much alive.
“I’m so glad to see you’re still breathing,” Karl said to her as she was brought before him.
“Your mother and father will be, too.”
“Weren’t you just trying to kill us? I could have sworn that was live ammo you were hurling at us just a couple of minutes ago. And what do you know about my mother and father? What do they have to do with any of this?” Karl smirked. “Yeah, you know… I was probably a little overzealous there. But don’t worry, I just got off the radio with mom and dad, they put me in my place.”
“I still don’t understand,” Rhonda continued. “What do my parents have to do with this? Do they have Lydia? Do they have her?”
“You still don’t know what’s going on here, do you?” he asked. “Your parents are in Philadelphia. They’re preparing for Stage Three.”
Rhonda’s eyes widened and her face shifted slightly.
“I know, you didn’t want to believe it, did you? You didn’t want to think your parents were actually involved in this. I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you.”
“I still don’t get it,” she said quietly.
“This whole thing,” Green explained. “The coordination between Ironclad? Between the militias? The government agencies? It was all coordinated by Gerard and Jodi Krueller. Your parents.”
“Don’t lie to me about them,” Rhonda snarled and started to lunge forward, but the grip of the Ironclad cronies was too strong.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“But… but why?” Rhonda asked, finally giving up the struggle. “Why... all of this? What is this supposed to accomplish?”
“Does it matter?” Karl asked. “Will it change anything to know why it happened? Will it somehow undo the millions of dead? The catastrophic state our nation is now in?”
Rhonda lowered her head, shaking it slowly back and forth. She was silent for a moment, then looked back up at him.
“What about Lydia? What are they doing with my daughter?”
“That I couldn’t tell you,” Karl replied. “She’s with them, that much I know. Why?” He shrugged.
“So… what now?” Rhonda asked. “Do you kill us all? I thought you had orders against that?”
Karl Green crossed his arms over his chest and looked at her. “This could go both ways, actually,” he said. “Yes, I have my orders. My orders were very specific. I’m to bring you alive. In what condition that is, well…that may be up to my discretion.”
“I won’t go without a fight,” Rhonda hissed.
“And see, there’s the conundrum. They have their preference… but this is reality. And I suspect if we told them you went down in a blaze of glory, they’d understand.”
“So, what? You’ll just line us up and gun us down like dogs?” Rhonda asked. “Women? Children? Is that what kind of organization Ironclad is?”
Green’s face hardened, his smirk narrowing to a thin, flat line. “Ironclad is what this country made us, Ms. Fraser. For my entire life I’ve served the United States of America. My blood, my sweat, my tears. Not just mine but so many others, and all we see are corporations controlling congress, governments who can’t get out of their own way, and a citizenship so dependent on being connected that they’ve forgotten how to appreciate life. America has grown into a farce, Ms. Fraser, a bloated shell of what it used to be, and if Ironclad has to tighten their fist to pound that shell back into its previous state, then by God that’s what we’ll do.”
“So that’s the grand plan? The endgame?” Rhonda’s voice firmed as her anger grew. “Blow everything up so you can start over? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”
Green’s hand moved fast, a black-gloved streak, the rear of the pistol slamming into Rhonda’s left cheek. Her head snapped back as she grunted, blood spraying from pursed lips. She tried to pitch forward, but the two men behind her held tight, keeping her upright, her limbs limp and boneless.
“So I guess that’s how it is,” Green said quietly. “You wouldn’t give up. You wouldn’t come quietly, and we had to put you all down like the dogs you are. My orders can only go so far and we’ve just about reached the end of my rope.” He lifted his hand, the pistol clenched tightly between gloved fingers, then pressed the barrel to the matted tuft of Rhonda’s damp hair.
Chapter 10
In all of her fifteen years of life on the planet, Winnie had never had the occasion to see her life flash before her eyes. She wondered, as she sat in the debris strewn alley, Ironclad gunmen approaching her with weapons raised, if her life did flash before her eyes, would it be a short highlight reel, a swift scattering of images from fifteen years, or would it simply mean that each event of her short existence would be shown in deeper, richer detail? Each segment of the chain link fence pressed against her curved spine and she felt every single link, every bunch of metal twisted around metal, every diamond shape, imprinting itself upon her back like a brand.
If Ironclad had taken Brad, and it sounded like they had, everything was resting with her now, the secrets Fields had uncovered, the impending threat of the Consolidated and Ironclad relationship… her family’s mere existence. All of it rested upon her and only her. Yet, there she sat, butt on cement and back pressed into the curving fence behind her, staring into the four wide eyes of M4 Carbine assault rifles, each barrel directed straight at her, each one representing a tiny opening into the next life
.
If the weapons were any sign, all that was in the next life was a deep and deafening darkness… a lack of light as pure as the barrels of their weapons.
“You think Green wants her alive?” one man asked, glancing toward the other three.
“This family’s been nothing but trouble,” growled another one. “Weren’t they the ones who drove us out of Lakeview? My buddy Orville got killed back there.”
“So what are you saying? We should just gun her down in this filthy alley? She’s like fifteen years old.”
“In a world like this, what does age even mean? She’s old enough to hold a weapon. She’s a threat. Threats get eliminated.” The gunman snarled underneath a scraggly, dark beard.
“She’s a kid!”
“Spoken like someone who’s squad never got hit by a twelve-year-old suicide bomber. Where did you serve anyway?”
“Shut up, both of you!” barked a third. “We grab her and take her to Green. He told us to grab them, not kill them. Let him decide what to do. I don’t want her death on my conscience.”
“All right, girlie, get up,” snarled the guy with the dark beard. “Your little game is over.”
Winnie hesitated just a moment, her eyes darting from one to the other, landing on each weapon, trying to gauge her next move. There was no next move. This was becoming painfully obvious the longer she sat here, and the quicker she realized that, the better things would be. Best to just stand up, go with them, and hope that maybe Karl Green would be kinder to her than the dude with the dark beard.
