Allie's War Season Four

by JC Andrijeski

  He reaches for her...reaches for her...

  He grabs her, as hard as he can, with both of his hands.

  She wears a filmy, filthy dress, covered in oil and blood. When he catches hold of her, it puffs up like smoke, and for an instant he thinks he’s killed her again. He grips her harder, putting his face into hers. He ignores the bruises all over her pale skin, the emaciated figure, the cuts, the gaunt cheekbones. He feels no flesh on her at all, only bone and teeth pushing out from under stretched skin. He holds onto her as if his life depends on it, knowing, somehow, suddenly, that it does...that all of their lives do...

  ALLIE! he screams into her face. ALLIE WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP!

  He stares down at her, still screaming as he looks at her pale face, her high cheekbones under those slanted, closed eyes.

  He screams at her, shakes her.

  For a long time, there is nothing. Nothing at all.

  He throws all of himself into her, into the screams, into her body and light.

  He does it over and over again, until he is exhausted, until there is nothing of him left.

  Then, there is something. He cannot say what.

  He sees the tear first.

  He sees it run down from under her lids, her long eyelashes black against her white skin. It moves slowly, even as he screams at her.

  ALLIE! ALLIE!

  Then, as his mind finally breaks apart, ungluing under the assault of the smoke-like shadows...

  Her eyes snap open.

  Brilliant green. Luminous.

  They stare up at him, glowing pools of light in all of that smoke and death, and Jon is half out of his mind with joy, afraid he is imagining it, that he’s not really seeing it––

  ––WHEN SOMEONE PUNCHED him in the face.

  Jon’s head snapped to the side. His eyes jerked open in shock.

  He stared up, panting, nausea still clinging to his head, stomach and neck, choking him, making his head hurt like the worst kind of migraine he could ever imagine. It hurts so much he can barely see, tears are streaming down his face, he feels sick...

  And now, on top of that debilitating sickness, his jaw hurt too, or maybe his cheek. He couldn’t make sense of where he was...but he recognized the light of the being who’d just hit him. Jon closed his eyes, groaning from the pain that exploded in his face, but more so from the sickening throb of his head.

  He was going to throw up.

  He was definitely going to throw up––

  Revik hit him again, harder, snapping Jon’s head and neck in the other direction.

  Jon held up a hand, a feeble attempt at defense, even as it sank in that this was real, that this was really happening. He was lying on the floor in a candle-lit room, his back pressed to white, shag carpet, and a tall, black-haired seer was sitting on his chest, his arm cocked to hit him a third time. Jon stared up at Revik’s angular face.

  “I’ll kill you!” Revik hissed, tears in his eyes. “I’ll fucking kill you!”

  Jon gasped, fighting for air. He couldn’t get any.

  “What are you doing here?” Revik said. “Why won’t you leave her alone?”

  The seer gripped Jon tighter, his fingers wrapped around his throat. Revik’s hands raised Jon up enough to thunk his head against the floor, forcing a moan from Jon’s lips.

  “Are you still working for him?” Revik growled. “Are you still their fucking lap dog, Jon?”

  He smacked his head against the floor again... harder.

  “Answer me!” he snarled. He shook him again, slanting out Jon’s vision when his head hit the floor a third time. Jon gasped, fighting to reach his hands towards his pounding skull. “...Answer me, goddamn it! Are you trying to kill her, Jon? Or is it just me you want dead? Is that what that fucker wants? To kill me off for good?”

  Jon could only lay there, his head exploding in throbs of pain, unable to come up with words, to think of anything.

  He still lay there, paralyzed, when the person on the bed above them began to cough.

  Revik froze.

  He hung there, panting, his whole body taut.

  He stared down at Jon, his clear eyes so wide, so filled with grief and disbelief and hope, warring with fear and uncertainty and doubt...

  Then she coughed again, louder that time, choking.

  Revik left Jon’s body so quickly that Jon could only groan.

  He gasped, fighting to breathe, to turn his body, groaning again as soon as it reached his mind that the other’s weight had lifted off his. Jon reached for his own throat, his chest, paralyzed by the rush of air that filled his lungs once the pressure of the seer’s weight had vanished. Jon hadn’t even realized that he couldn’t breathe until then.

  For a long moment, silence.

  Then Jon heard Revik yell, calling to someone outside the room.

  Jon couldn’t make sense of what he said... or even what language it had been.

  He heard Revik speak again, lower that time, too low for Jon to make out words, a rolling murmur that began weaving a light-filled cocoon over the form on the bed. Jon felt sparks off that web of light, feelings too dense for words... but he couldn’t understand any of it. He couldn’t move, not even to lift his head. He couldn’t look at the bed. He couldn’t look at Revik... much less at her. He could only lay there, sick with that black smoke and the throbbing swaying visions that wanted to eat away his mind in slow, ripping tears.

  He is still there, some part of him. He is still in that horrible room at the base of the Himalayas.

  He is still burning on that altar, blackened and alone.

  6

  BREACH

  DANIELLA “DANTE” VASQUEZ coughed, fighting to clear her throat.

  Shivering, she tugged her hooded sweatshirt closer around her body, rubbing her face and eyes with a numb hand before she leaned back down to squint at the screen.

  Like everyone else in the damned hotel, she was fighting the edges of what they’d come to call ‘the crud,’ an amorphous multitude of sinus and lung problems from the few thousand miles of backed-up sewers seeping up through the basement, along with all of the mold that continued to creep inexorably up over every viable surface of the hotel in the aftermath of the tsunami.

  It didn’t help that the damned hotel was cold most of the time––paradoxically, in a way, since it had been unseasonably hot and humid outside.

  Somehow that humidity turned into cold air inside the glass and organics sealed walls of the hotel, especially now that they had to conserve every possible spark of power, and most of the windows didn’t allow in sunlight, due to the organic shields. The cold and damp seeped into Dante’s very bones, making it hard to think straight, so Dante had a tendency to move around a lot, to stay on her feet while she worked via the headset across their cobbled-together network of still-working machines.

  They had icers and worms scrubbing the mold off, pretty much every day, and pumping the sewage out of the basement whenever the fields crashed...which they did at every power fluctuation or electrical brown out, both of which happened all the time now. The head honcho icers in charge, including the big boss Sword from his bunker in San Francisco, gave everyone jobs. Everyone worked now, from the lowliest sad sack refugee and bottom feeder ‘Displacement’ recruit to the highest ranked of their hack-heads and sniffer dogs.

  Really, Dante counted herself lucky to have a useful skill, one that got her off the hook from most of that drudge work in the basement and lower floors. She took a turn at the lower-rung stuff, too, but nowhere near as often as others.

  Regardless, there were only so many pairs of free hands and only so many hours in the day, so neither problem seemed to get much better.

  If this damned rain would ever stop... Dante’s mind grumbled bitterly.

  But that wasn’t going to change anytime soon, either.

  Dante knew there was talk of evacuation to higher ground, but that was a risky proposition, too, given that the disease still rava
ged the human populations outside those quarantine walls.

  Here they had some protection from that mess still.

  Clearing her throat, Dante aimed her eyes at the flickering monitor, scanning the data dump with rapid shifts of her eyes. They had a kind of ‘all hands’ thing going on with the comps these days, too, especially when any real intel came in...mostly because they needed to glean as much as they could before they got hit with another brown out, or someone sniffed their cut.

  They’d lost over half the solar cells in the last big storm, and while the Vik-Man and Holo had teams up on the roof and the upper floors, working to repair those cells, the fact was, they’d lost actual storage capacity, mostly in damaged fields. Over half of them leaked now or lost their loads at every brown out. Until they managed to stabilize the current on a more permanent basis, the problem would remain, and right now, they just didn’t have the hardware. Holo, Deklan and Anale joked that the current config was starting to look like one of the jerry-rigged setups they used in refugee camps in Asia ‘back in the day,’ which they described as masking tape, bubble gum and a prayer...and where the lights conked every time a strong wind blew.

  A few of the whiz-kids at Arc suggested working some kind of turbine thing, fueled by modified water scrubbers or something, but it would be another few weeks before they got that cranking out real power, assuming they could make it work at all. It still wouldn’t do much to store the charge, but, given the non-stop rains and the flooding, it would probably provide them with nearly steady power, if they set it up right.

  Sighing, Dante glanced at three of the other humans in the room, giving a tight smile to the cute one, a tall, black-haired guy with striking blue eyes that the seers still had a tendency to whisper about, at least in their more bored, gossipy moments. The rumor was, Cutie Blue Eyes used to do the pipe thrust tango with Allie Taylor, The Bridge.

  Clearly, that must have been before Allie Taylor married the Sword.

  Otherwise, Dante had a very strong suspicion that Sword-boy would have kicked baby-blue’s cute, jean-clad ass all the way up to his teeth by now.

  Next to her, Vikram chuckled.

  “You are not wrong,” he said, quirking an eyebrow. “I hear he still would like to.”

  She quirked an eyebrow back. “You guys are such old women.”

  “Yes, because teenaged humans are known for their discretion, good taste and kind appraisals of others,” he smiled.

  Dante grinned wider before she turned back towards the cluster of humans on the other side of the partition. She aimed her grin at blue-eyes, too, not wanting to make him paranoid. Truthfully, she mostly felt sorry for him and the others. Maybe because Dante got here earlier, or maybe because she was used to living a high-wire act even before the shit with C2-77, but mostly the other humans seemed to be struggling––with the no power, the crazy outside the city and the crazy inside the city and everything else––a lot.

  Well, more than Dante, anyway.

  Right now, blue eyes looked too tired to even acknowledge her smile, although he tried. Nodding to her, his lips twitched in a friendly way before he looked back at the monitor in front of him. Dante’s smile earned her a scowl from blondie big-boobs, though...what Dante dubbed blue-eyes’ skanky, always-pissed-off girlfriend.

  Their real names were Jaden and Tina, she knew. It was just more fun to call them the other things, and anyway...they weren’t seers, so for once, Dante could think whatever she wanted. She only had to worry about eavesdropping seers cracking up if they happened to hear her.

  Even as she thought it, Mika grinned at her, rolling her eyes.

  “Give it up,” she mouthed at Dante, motioning with her head towards Jaden.

  You can do better... Anale agreed drily, without looking up from her own monitor.

  Dante made an elaborate face, making it clear to both female seers that she had no intention of touching baby blue eyes. Anyway, the guy probably had serious diseases, considering where he’d been putting his dick for the past few years.

  Anale choked on a laugh at that, covering her mouth with one tattooed hand as she looked up from the screen for the first time all morning. Vikram chuckled, too, along with Raddi, who sat at the terminal on Anale’s other side, and of course Mika, who laughed aloud. Dante glanced again at Tina and Jaden, both of whom looked warier now.

  Sheesh, Dante thought in general at the seers. Obvious much?

  Vikram grinned, clicking at her.

  Dante gave up, grinning back. Shit, what else were they going to do in this submerged steel and glass ark but gossip? That and dick around with machines and try to salvage food from the flooded basement and fight information out of broken security systems and figure out ways to keep the water out...those five things seemed to be all they did anymore.

  Well, some of the seers were having sex, she was pretty sure.

  Some of the seers were having a lot of sex, from what she’d heard, maybe just to keep their minds off of everything else.

  She’d tried teasing out info on the Vik-man’s sex life during one of the longer blackout days, and he’d turned scarlet, so she knew he probably wasn’t getting any. He’d also informed her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t sleep with ‘children,’ and that she would do better to find a human partner of ‘appropriate age.’

  He’d said it kindly, but the sheer embarrassment on the seer’s face made her grin.

  Just how much of a snowflake did he think she was?

  If she hadn’t liked him so much, she might have taken it as a challenge. As it was, she assured him she would attempt to control herself, which made all of them bust up...not just the Vik-man himself, but Deklan, who happened to be eavesdropping but pretending he wasn’t, and Anale and Mika, who’d both been eavesdropping openly.

  The very next night, while they’d been passing around a bottle in the upper floors, Deklan offered her some, joking that he’d only give her a drink if she would promise to ‘control herself’ around Vikram. That was another thing Dante learned––seers loved giving one another shit, even in the middle of an apocalypse.

  They all seemed to have taken to her, too, treating her more like ‘one of them’ than they did most of the other humans, presumably because she spoke comp-nerd better than the rest.

  She’d even started getting the hang of hacks for organics. The translation program she’d built with Vikram between non-binary and binary helped a lot...and she’d gotten good at feeling out gaps, as Garensche put it, that giant seer in San Francisco who still called now and then to help them out with the machines. Garensche was the real organics guru, Vik said. Of course, they gave him shit about that, too, teasing him about his ‘machine girlfriends’ and making what Dante suspected were even cruder jokes in their own language.

  As a result of all this...and, well, the fact that she hung with the icers more just because they seemed less depressed than the vast majority of the humans she saw here, even cute, blue-eyed Jaden...Dante already knew a fair few of their little soap operas.

  She was learning more and more of their swear words, too.

  One thing was for sure, the Bridge had some hot men hanging around. Jaden was famous, too, so not just a pretty face. Not famous like the Sword famous, but Dante recognized his name from music feeds, as the lead singer of that San Francisco indie group, Eye of Morris. Jaden himself had been a minor heartthrob before...

  ...well, before all of this started.

  Of course, since they mostly only showed avatars on the feeds, not real faces, Dante didn’t know what Jaden looked like before.

  Luckily, in addition to being a hot crooner type, Jaden was decent with comps, too. They’d pulled him just a few days ago, mostly to help with minor coding. Blondie big boobs appeared to be pretty much useless with tech, but she came up here every day with him. Her sole purpose for making the trip seemed to be to keep an eye on Jaden, and make sure no one so much as breathed on him without getting a death stare from her.

  Next t
o her, she heard Vikram snort an involuntary laugh.

  He glanced up at her, a glint in his violet eyes. “The gods will smite you,” he told her. “...Watch what you think, for they hear all.”

  “You,” she said, pointing at him. “Aren’t you the one hitting those security bots?”

  Vikram only smiled innocently, giving her a wink. “I have only concern for your soul, my beautiful cousin,” he told her. “I am willing to be late on my work, to prevent you from temptation and decadence.”

  Dante rolled her eyes, realizing only after she’d done it that she’d probably picked up that particular mannerism from her new seer pals, too.

  “Yeah, right,” she snorted. “My soul.”

  Vikram grinned again, right before he turned back to the old-fashioned monitor. At no point during their exchange did he remove the ridiculously large, noise-muffling headphones he wore, which made him look like he had two enormous bread rolls taped to his ears.

  Vikram grinned at her again.

  “Quit that!” she barked in their usual ritual, motioning sharply to his monitor. “Back to work! I can’t keep carrying you, my cold-blooded friend.”

  He waved her off dismissively, but that was part of their ritual, too.

  Dante raised her fingers to her own headset. In the background, she kept screens shifting, slower than before the tsunami, but still multi-tasking.

  Leaning closer to the console despite his feet resting on the desk, Vikram turned up the music on his monitor, which happened to be the 1812 Overture, another private joke of theirs. They’d gotten in the habit of playing that particular piece of music whenever hurricane-force winds started buffeting the windows of the hotel, vibrating the organic panes, like now. At the very least, it distracted them from what was probably going on in the basement, with the pumps and fields and the seers manning them.