“Hand grenade,” Cole said, barely pushing out the words in his stunned surprise. Both he and Natasha were staring, dumbfounded at the destruction before them. Their ears rang slightly, but through the ringing, they could hear Steve’s voice from behind one of the nearest tents. It sounded muffled at first but then they could make it out.
“RUN!!”
There was gunfire in the distance, and Natasha pulled on his hand as she began sprinting towards the area where the fence had been destroyed by the falling tower. He felt his legs catch up, and before long, he was running with Natasha, hoping beyond hope that there were no guards with machine guns waiting for them at the fence line.
The two siblings had to slow down to climb through the wreckage of the tower, making certain not to drag a nail or sharp shard of metal across their legs from the broken fence, which had collapsed under the weight of the fallen tower. Cole arrived first, and he pulled Natasha over a particularly tricky section of debris. As she gained her footing, he looked up to assess the situation. He saw Steve standing between the two escaping Warwickians and a large unit of MNG troops, responding to the commotion, were gathering together not far from the collapsed tower. The soldiers, shocked and surprised by the sudden attack, were just beginning to check their weapons, and now they stood and gaped in foggy disbelief. Someone in charge started shouting orders, and the soldiers were in that moment—the milliseconds it takes to make a decision as to whether they should chase, or fire at the escapees.
****
It was the soldier on the far left who saw him first. A prisoner was standing defiantly between them and the destroyed tower with a hand grenade held up in his clenched fist. The pin had already been yanked away, and dangled pointedly from his lips.
One of the soldiers shouted, “Halt!”
Just as he did, Steve spit out the pin and ground it into the ground with the heel of his boot. He turned, locked eyes with Cole, and smiled. He made a motion with the hand that was not holding the grenade. “Run, Kolya! Run!”
Kolya Bazhanov stood and watched his high school friend grinning back at him. He watched as one soldier lost his cool and began firing, the bullets ripping into Sergei’s body. “Run!” Sergei yelled as the first shots hit him.
Cole ran.
****
Cole felt Natasha grabbing him by his elbow and pulling him, and he started to run again, but even as he ran, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the drama taking place behind him.
Steve, mortally wounded, dropped to his knees, and the group of Missouri National Guardsmen had started to move forward when the young man used the last of his dying strength to toss the hand grenade into the midst of them. The explosion that followed was terrifying in its intensity.
Now, Cole and Natasha were sprinting without hesitation, and they each unconsciously flinched as the deafening explosion echoed behind them. Their freedom had been bought with a price, and they did not intend to squander the benefit.
“Oh, my…” Natasha said as she ran.
Cole, for maybe the first time in his life, was speechless.
****
The sounds of battle intensified as Peter, Ace, and Elsie, along with the restaurant owner named Nick, and his son Charlie, low crawled deeper into the service areas of the besieged establishment.
“Follow me!” Nick shouted as he crawled. “Stay low and stick together!”
“Where exactly are we going?” Peter shouted back as bits of plaster and brick and other debris filled the air and dropped down on their heads. “The catacombs, you said?”
Nick reached a back wall and pulled himself up to his knees. The sounds of battle seemed closer now. The building shook with every impact, and the ground rumbled as Nick began struggling with a long, stainless steel shelving unit. The shelf was seven feet high and ten feet long. It was heavy, and made heavier because it was laden with canned goods and other barter-able materials. Nick, without assistance, was only barely able to move it, so he waved for Peter and Ace to come help him, and they crawled forward and began tugging on the shelf until it moved.
“This place used to be a brewery!” Nick shouted over the din of warfare and brutality going on around them.
“I know!” Peter yelled, trying to make himself heard over the constant shelling.
Nick and Peter gave the shelf one last shove, and then Nick pushed his way behind it. Reaching behind a wooden wall panel, he released a lever. The panel slid out of the way, and Peter saw that behind it was an antique door. Nick pulled the door open until there were maybe eight to ten inches of clearance, and then he jammed his ample frame through the gap, waving for Peter and the others to follow.
As everyone pushed in through the crack in the door, Nick squeezed back past them, and pulled the wooden door closed, leaving the group in darkness.
“There are huge, arched cellars under this place,” Nick said, as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a Zippo lighter. He lit the lighter and held it up in front of his face. “We’d planned on making them into a restaurant called The Catacombs, but that was before the bombs dropped. They’ve been unused, except for storage, since the 60’s!”
He pushed his way back past the group again so that he could lead the way into the catacombs. “Follow me, and hold on close to the person in front of you! We’ve got about twenty steps, then a landing that doubles back, and then about twenty more steps to the door.”
Nick moved slowly towards the first step, hunched over with the Zippo in front of him so he could see. He found the stairs, and began to descend, with the rest of the group close behind him.
“So… what about the rest of your staff?” Peter asked.
“Most of ‘em took off when the shooting started,” Nick shrugged. “They were loyal, but only to a point.”
Nick reached the landing and turned to the left, searching with his foot for the next step down. “A few of ‘em got it when that mortar took out the area where you people were sitting. I didn’t see any more around, and none of ‘em know about this place… only me.”
His son cleared his throat. “Me and Charlie,” Nick corrected himself.
When the whole group had arrived at the bottom of the stairs, they could see by the illumination from Nick’s Zippo that there was a heavy iron door, rusted but very solid, leading into the catacombs. To Peter, the door looked like a movie prop, or the gateway into an ancient dungeon.
Nick produced a heavy, iron skeleton key on a leather strap, and opened the door with a solid push.
“Built in the middle 1800’s, the catacombs served as everything from wine cellar and beer-aging vault, to a hospital during the Civil War, to a speakeasy and casino during Prohibition.” Nick talked like a tour guide, chatty to take their minds off the rage of bullets that seemed to be pouring into the building over their heads. Once everyone was in the cellar, Nick pushed the solid door closed, and lowered a steel piece of I-Beam into a cradle that received the heavy bar and locked it into place. The barricade served as ‘insurance,’ Nick said, in case anyone ever managed to find a way to unlock the door.
The subterranean room they were in was cold and dusty, and there were antique wooden shelves laden with goods stretching from floor to ceiling. The shelves curved along their tops, matching the arched ceiling, and the whole of it gave Peter the mental image of a wine cellar in France, maybe back during the Hundred Years War.
The feeling of stepping back in time was shattered, though, when Nick walked over and pulled a tarp off what turned out to be a stainless steel box. Nick flicked a switch, and the box hummed to life with a mechanical whirr, which increased in speed and intensity, until the room filled with the sound.
“What are you doing?” Elsie asked.
Nick ignored her question. He only held up a finger and smiled. He continued his movements, and from under another shelf, he pulled out a device that looked like a World War 2 era battlefield phone. He plugged a cord into the humming stainless steel box, and then he cranked a lever on the phon
e.
Charlie, for his part, walked around the cellar and lit lanterns. Elsie turned and watched him as he did so. Ace helped the boy reach one lantern that was a little bit out of his reach. The orange-yellow glow lit up the room and gave it a warmth that matched its antiquity.
Ace, Peter, and Elsie watched Nick go through the strange series of motions, and then they glared at one another with a look of intense curiosity. Young Charlie watched the three visitors with unrestrained amusement and just smiled a knowing smile.
A minute or two passed, and the only sound was the whirr of the stainless steel box, and the breathing of the five inhabitants of the basement. Before long, though, Nick spoke into the phone.
“Clive? This is Nick over in Mount Joy. We’ve had a breech. The MNG have surrounded the place! Heck, they’ve probably taken the whole town. If you’re coming to save the day, now would be a really good time!”
****
As Cole and Natasha sprinted through the snow, the frozen ground and the darkness made their running treacherous.
Still, they ran, darting through the forest and through clearings without any real thought as to what direction they ought to run. Their goal was just to get away. Away meant ‘away from the Carbondale camp.’ Away was an idea to them, just as escaping from any imprisonment is always an idea. Their escape was no different from that of a man, not long ago, who’d left his Brooklyn apartment to seek freedom from the stranglehold of the city. Or, that of a woman and her son who’d trekked out of the city just to get away from the mayhem.
They ran to save their lives.
Natasha breathed deeply as she ran, and for a moment, she even forgot that Cole was with her. His own strenuous gasping, coming from behind her and to her right, faded for a moment as memories flooded over her. In her mind, she was back with Lang—who was really Vasily—and he was also the man she’d loved, and she was sprinting across the open clearing of Highway 17; sprinting for her life and to escape a world of lies. Tears welled up in her eyes now, and her thoughts tumbled together, and she thought of the other family members and friends that she’d lost. She thought of Sergei, giving his life for her. She thought of Peter and Elsie, and she hoped that maybe they were still alive. Where could they be? Somewhere out there in the darkness. She looked out into the rolling hills in front of her and the tree line to the right and ran toward that nothingness.
She ran as if she were running from her bitterest recollections, and running towards all the things she’d loved and lost. That thought brought her mind back around to Cole, the only family she had left. She turned to look at her brother, and that was when both of them stumbled through a particularly deep drift, tripping over something buried under it. Together, they tumbled headlong into the snow, crumbling like Olympic decathletes who’d failed only steps from the finish line.
Lying on their backs and looking up into the darkness, their chests heaved in unison as their eyes flashed around the night sky in a jumbled mishmash of terror, sadness, elation, and hope. They each greedily, and wordlessly, took in the cold, night air—the air of life—and neither of them was prepared when a dozen armed men were suddenly all around them with guns pointed into their surprised faces.
CHAPTER 46
Jay Watkins, former Sergeant in the Missouri National Guard, and now a Staff Sergeant in the Free Missouri Army, squatted down next to a large tree, leaning his back against it as he inhaled deeply from his cigarette. In the distance, there was sporadic gunfire coming from the direction of Carbondale.
“You two may have made it out of there just in time,” Watkins said.
“Time?” Cole mumbled, shuffling his boots in the snow. The rest of his sentence was a mumble.
“What was that?”
“Time is the father of truth,” Cole replied. He glanced up at the soldier, pulled off his glasses, and cleaned them on the filthy sleeve of his coat. He placed the glasses back on his face and snorted in disgust.
“That was Rabelais,” Cole said, matter-of-factly.
“Well, ain’t that a load of crap!” Watkins said. “And that was Jay Watkins, Staff Sergeant!”
“Time will tell,” Cole replied. “That’s all I can come up with right now. I suppose I could snort again if you’d like.” He straightened his back and looked at Jay Watkins.
Watkins laughed. The laugh was slow at first, but it grew in an increasing way, until the only way to describe the sound would be guffaws. Jay Watkins had large heaps of laughter pouring out him, coming from deep in his gut, and his whole body shook.
Cole laughed too, until he looked over at Natasha, and her face—frozen in anger, or maybe it was pain—put an end to the mirth.
Watkins took the last draw from his cigarette and threw the butt down into the snow. “As I was saying, it looks like you two made it out just in time. A dozen more made it out after you, but they got cut down by automatic fire in the clearing. You two beat the rush by a minute or two.”
“How do you know all this?” Natasha asked. Her hands were shaking, and her jaw was fixed and set.
“Our guys have been watching the prison for a week. We were in the final planning stages of an assault on the camp when you two blew the fence.”
“It wasn’t us,” Natasha said, looking down at her feet, before looking back up at Watkins. “It was a friend of ours.”
“He was a hero then.”
“He was.”
Watkins looked at the young lady and saw in her eyes that she really meant it. He was touched by such an old-fashioned notion. He could see these two were not ordinary.
“Where are you two from?” Watkins asked.
“I don’t suppose it matters anymore,” Natasha said, “it only matters where we’re going, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose.”
“We need to catch up with some friends who are headed to Amish country.”
Watkins lit another cigarette, took a long drag from it, then blew the smoke upwards into the chilly night air. “Well, our attack is, at the very least, delayed now because of your escape.” He jerked his head in the direction of Carbondale. “They know we’re here. We might be stuck out here for another week.”
Cole reached his hand out to Watkins who just stared at him blankly, not knowing what Cole wanted.
“Gimme a smoke, Joe.”
“It’s Jay, friend.”
“It was a joke, Jay, geez! I’m Cole, and grumpy here is Natasha, so enough of the meet-n-greet and give me a smoke.”
Watkins laughed again and popped a cigarette out of the pack, reaching it over to Cole. “Help yourself, Cole. I like you,” he said, laughing heartily.
“Do you like Shakespeare?”
“He’s alright, I suppose.”
“Then I suppose we might get along.”
“What if I had said ‘no’?”
“I’d have left you here talking to her,” Cole said, cutting his eyes towards Natasha.
Jay Watkins caught his breath. She was beautiful, he thought. He was about to say something corny like, “Well, that wouldn’t be so bad,” but he didn’t get the chance. A quick glance at Natasha showed him the impatience of a sister who’d been listening to her brother charm others with kooky bravado, along with her amazement that, even here, in the midst of catastrophe, he was still doing it.
“No,” she said. “We’re not getting along here, because we’re not staying, Cole. We’ve got to try to catch Peter and Elsie.” She looked out into the darkness. “If they’re still alive.”
They heard a quick blast of staccato gunfire from automatic weapons in the distance, probably coming from the prison camp. Natasha wondered if people were being executed because of the prison break, but there was no way for her to know. Maybe Mikail was taking over the camp. She did not speak the words, however. She didn’t say a word about the camp.
In retrospect, long after this cold, dark night, sometime in the distant future, she would regret not telling someone about Mike’s plan to take over the camp. She’d re
gret that she was never properly debriefed by the FMA. Those were sketchy times, and a lot of things were not as they should have been.
She tugged at Cole’s sleeve.
“Whatever you say, Sis,” Cole said. He lit his cigarette and puffed on it happily; the low, red glow of the cherry illuminating his now much slimmer face in the darkness. The glow of the cigarette caught in his glasses and flickered, and he turned to stare out into the darkness, and took the smoke into his lungs.
Cole turned back to look at the people around him, and he saw that his sister was still shaky from the escape—anxious to hit the road. He wasn’t so anxious. He felt that it was good to be alive.
A soldier walked up to Watkins and nodded a greeting to Cole and Natasha, who nodded back at him in return. The two soldiers stepped a few paces into the forest to talk, and when they finished, the underling soldier hustled back off into the darkness.
“It looks like you two may be in luck,” Watkins said.
“How’s that?” Natasha asked.
“We’ve been called off of this duty for the moment. It seems there’s a full-fledged assault going on in the Mount Joy area. We’ve got wagons and horses, but it’ll still take us a day and a half to get there. The MNG is trying to push us out of our territory.”
“Or draw you away from here,” Cole said. Natasha looked at him, as if to see if he knew anything. He didn’t.
Watkins pulled the last cigarette out of the pack, balled up the empty wrapper, and stuck it into his pocket. He pulled a new pack out of his coat, opened it with practiced precision, and then offered another cigarette to Cole.
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