Moaning in agony, Sofia returned to the cot. With her arms shivering under the stress, Maryanne knew that the child was going to be born any minute and that the Security forces would not be far behind, perhaps even present for the birth itself.
The echoing shot taken at the Sergeant and Goldman had initiated from a rifle directly above the heads of John and Roberts. Three distinct voices, apparently muffled under their gas masks, were calling out targeting positions for the sniper. Moving further into the old, fragile apartment building, John and his partner were silent and focused. The voices could be heard falling down the plaster and concrete littered stairwell leading up to them.
Turning off their microphones, the two-man assassin team toe-stepped their way up the stairwell, taking extra precaution not to disturb any of the debris that lay at their feet. The light of the Savior was beginning to seep into the room as they reached the top of the staircase. Hidden behind a cloth-covered banister that blocked their view from the team of deserters, the two men placed their eyes against the holes punched into the cloth’s side and peered through the tattered railing.
The feeling of pushing was so overwhelming that Sofia could not stand to wait any longer. Screaming in pain, blood and liquid poured forth from her birthing area.
“He’s almost here, Sofia. Keep pushing,” Maryanne encouraged her, holding out her towel wrapped arms between Sofia’s legs.
The warning cries of the streets outside were at a deafening volume as the transporters pulled up to the curb of their abode. Maryanne looked back over her shoulders, anticipating their presence. She knew they would be kicking in the door any minute.
The beams of light entering through the wounds of the building were falling upon the three-man sniper team. With the deserter’s backs facing them, John and Roberts could see, to their surprise, set between two soldiers dressed in their military battle dress, the sniper lying prone on the floor, fully clothed in Sweeper attire.
As Roberts turned to look at John, his boot knocked a piece of concrete over the edge of the stairs, alerting their foes. John lifted the barrel of his rifle over the railing. Pulling the trigger, he opened fire, blindly emptying his magazine into the direction of the enemy. Roberts, throwing a flash-bang grenade over the railing ducked his head down, yelling, “Grenade!”
As the blinding explosion rocked the walls, raining down chunks of plaster and concrete into the room, John let his rifle fall back, swinging across his shoulder upon its sling, while he retrieved the handgun holstered upon his hip. With Roberts in tow, the two men moved into the room, saturated with the hot bars of light filtering through the heavy clouds of dust kicked up by the skirmish. With several shots to the head and torso, the Sweeper agent fell to his death. The eyes and ears of the two remaining soldiers were in a state of neural confusion. John and Roberts blocked the Savior’s light from their faces as they stepped in front of them. The men appeared to be willingly kneeling down, giving themselves into their captor’s hands.
As the child’s head began to crown, Maryanne heard the thumping of fists on the door behind her, followed by the demand to immediately open it. Through the thin strips of light falling from the ceiling, the dust pulsated off the walls with each knock of the agent outside. Sofia, too overwhelmed by the pain to hear the commotion, continued to push, feeling the movement of the child as he prepared to make his entrance into the world.
With her baby’s head completely free and exposed, the Savior’s rise brought the needed heat and soft brightness to bear upon him. His shoulders were beginning to pass through her vaginal canal when the door burst open to the sounds of men yelling and boots pounding.
“Get on the floor, now,” The agents yelled with their guns drawn.
Ignoring their demands, Maryanne continued encouraging Sofia with the birth.
The two deserters did not plead for their lives. They did not even blink as they cast their eyes up to the Great Star above. At the moment that John and Roberts pulled their triggers, John was almost certain that he saw the men smile. As the bullets tore into their heads, their bodies folded in upon themselves to the floor like cloth, bleeding out their life’s worth. They had become like the city, empty shells, nothing more.
With her final push, Sofia heard the cry of her child for the first time. Seeing Maryanne at the end of the cot, her baby wrapped in the towel, she held her arms up to take hold of him.
Like bright vines of a forest of light, the Savior’s beams filled the room through the holes in the ceiling.
“Put the child down and get on the floor,” came the demand once again from behind Maryanne.
Maryanne could not obey his orders, and defying them, she began to present the newborn to his mother. As the bundled package was about to be delivered into Sofia’s hands, two electrified prongs veering towards Maryanne’s back followed by a puff of smoke from the barrel of the agent’s taser.
The barbed needles sailed through the air, whizzing through the shadows of the ceiling, inline with their target. Sofia could feel the warmth of the child through the thin cloth of the towel as he fell into her arms.
As the wired darts entered into the falling particles of light, they stopped mid-flight, tumbling to the floor. Maryanne turned around to look at the man that had just fired the weapon.
“This is not your child,” she said, falling to her knees and looking to the Savior above. “Please, don’t let them take him.”
Throwing down the taser, the commanding agent ordered his awaiting Security personnel to arrest the two women and to separate them from the child, taking extra care to be sure that they were not transported back to their headquarters together.
Sofia screamed out as the men began to approach them, “You’re not taking my baby!”
Closing in on Maryanne, the first agent entered into the light. Like a bubble bursting in the air, he exploded with a glorious mist of crimson spray of flesh and bone, painting the ceiling and walls, blowing holes through the cardboard, allowing more light to enter in.
Staring in disbelief, Sofia’s face was splattered with the ruby dots of the Savior’s wrath, while the crying bundle in her arms was a speckled display of the things to come.
Pushing his way out the door in order to flee from the macabre incident, a light ray fell on the commanding agent, and in an instant, he was gone, coating the doorway and stairwell outside with the remnants of his lost being. As the Savior’s particles filtered in through their newly found portals, the annihilation followed down the stairwell like a chain of timed death: one explosion followed another until the living were no more, and the dripping enclosure was all that remained of them.
Waiting beside their transporters, witnesses to the destruction from within, the remaining agents attempted to rush through the crowds, pushing the women to the ground in their desperate attempts to escape. But they were met with the same fate as their comrades. As the burning sphere of the sky arose above the rooftops, their bodily structures polluted the women around them.
Driving back to their mountainous compound, John thought deeply about his first run-in with a group of real deserters. Unlike the Simulator, these seemed to be true soldiers. They were trained in weapons usage and military linguistics, and they were not afraid to kill. But more importantly, there was a hole in the Sweeper community. One of their members was working against it. What was he hoping to accomplish, John wondered. What purpose was there in running?
The drive back to the base was without incident. They had not come across any more deserters, as was expected. Climbing up the steep incline, leading them to their lookout station, John watched the continuing battle of the valley out the back window of the vehicle. There were more men and women dying and fighting in that arena than all the people of Labor combined. Where could they all be coming from?
Careful to avoid slipping on the stairs, Sofia held a towel between her hand and the blood soaked rail. With a sheet wrapped over her and the child, catching the dripping flesh that fell in sticky chun
ks from the ceiling, she would have to wait until they were outside before throwing it off of them. With Maryanne and her child accompanying them, they exited the building, pausing for a moment at the edge of the convoy of empty transporters parked along the sidewalk.
The streets were awash in watery red fluids and pinkish-white flesh. The usual, stifling mass of women that commonly walked through them was nowhere to be found: the city was barren. Everyone was in hiding.
A transporter at the furthest visible end of the city rounded a corner. Its driver, seeing them standing in the street, began speeding in their direction, bearing down on the vehicle’s horn.
“What are we going to do, Mary?” Sofia cried, feeling her warm blood dripping down her legs, forming puddles around her feet.
Taking Sofia by the arm, she pulled her around the abandoned vehicles lining the street.
“Let’s go this way. Maybe we can lose them in the alleys.”
Entering between the buildings, Sofia doubled over again, feeling the contractions of birth once more.
“Maryanne,” she screamed.
Pulling her gown aside, Maryanne could see that in her haste, she had not cut the child’s cord, and Sofia was beginning to pass the second birth. Hearing the oncoming vehicle, Maryanne was panicked as to what to do. Sofia needed to be in a cleaner environment, and they needed something to cut the child loose that would not cause him to get an infection. She walked Sofia as delicately as she could around the corner, deeper into the filth of the alley, hoping that the Security agents had not seen them as they sneaked away.
With a rumbling stop, the transporter’s squeaking brakes brought it to a sudden end just outside their hiding place. There were no splashing explosions this time, no screaming, no opening of its metallic door accompanied by the stomping of boots. As she waited, rubbing Sofia’s back while rocking her own child to keep the silence, she heard a voice coming from inside their apartment building.
“Maryanne! Maryanne, where are you?”
It was Stephen yelling from their upstairs window! His voice brought an immediate sigh of relief. Whispering into Sofia’s ear, Maryanne said, “Wait here, I’m going to get help.”
Running out into the street, Sofia could hear her calling to her mate, “Stephen! I’m here, Stephen.”
She could hear them uniting just around the corner. Maryanne was in a terribly contradictory emotive state of happiness and fear. She was crying and babbling hysterically, while Stephen attempted to console her.
With her legs growing weaker, and the tightening contractions returning, Sofia searched for a clearing among the garbage that was piled up to her knees. Unable to find a suitably clean area, she held her child securely, sitting down in the place where she stood. Holding him up, she finally had a chance to look into his eyes. They were so blue and his cheeks so pink. His cry was sweet and tenderly soft. Under the blinding light of the Savior, she held the child close to her while the squeezing of her abdomen intensified. He was the offspring of her and John. Holding the child was like holding him. The world seemed to be falling apart around her, but nothing else mattered. What an adventure this has been, she thought.
Chapter Thirty-Four
As the years went by, John was beginning to sense that the battles with the deserters were slowly, but steadily, intensifying. Their ranks appeared to be better trained, more adept at survival, more organized and self-determined. Most of the Sweep members attributed it to an evolving state of awareness that was growing inside the bio-engineered men and women being sent into the Valley. The chief rumor floating around detailed a training facility, a secretive complex known as Planet Wasp Nest. Although that was the prevailing view on the matter in discreet conversation, it was not held in high regards within the circles of public discourse.
Wasp Nest was not, according to the questionable information disseminated among the rank and file and those agents less privileged in regards to security clearance and classified information, a planet as such. It was believed rather, to be a hub of moon-sized asteroids where there supposedly existed the mass production of genetically altered peoples created with the sole purpose of dying in the Valley of Blood.
The passing of time had brought John into contact with several well-placed individuals with a more intimate knowledge of the deeper aspects of the governing agencies. Through one of his sources he learned of the intricate details and behind-the-scenes functions of the military’s more secretive entities.
The Security on Raw, as John came to find out, was its own entity, left out of the loop as to what the military was engaging in. Although the top brass used them to bring certain men and women in for questioning, what was done with the prisoners afterwards was strictly a military operation.
When John first came to the understanding of the heinousness that was the underbelly of his training, he all the more resented his former “instructors”. Although he wished that he had applied more pain to Crawford before shooting him from such a non-intimate distance, Michaels, he believed, received his due reward… for the most part, anyway.
The following years in his initial function as a Sweep operator began with a state of mind full of contradictory emotion. But with the passing of time, John eventually, with the exception of a few transient moments, blocked out all the heartbreaking thoughts of Sofia and the wonderful days they had spent together.
He began by turning his sadness into hatred, his love into hatred. Everything he ever cared about was ripped away from him and annihilated. He alone was left to wallow in his guilt. With all of his emotions exchanged for the heart-searing anger that pulsated within him, John found acceptance and comfort in the open arms of the Sweeper Society and their murderous ways.
Burning under the stress from the thick, black smoke that blew across the city ruins, John’s eyes were moist with tears as his helmet’s face protector did little to filter out the polluted air. As part of a larger Sweeper force than he was used to, he and his crew kept their heads low, crouching beside the crumbling walls and waiting for their next order.
During the late morning, pre-op briefing, Sweep Command had informed all active units that a monumental breach had occurred in the Valley of Blood. In the ensuing battle, cloaked under the darkness of the early dawn, a rebel faction had staged an uprising.
Entire formations of deserters had simultaneously fled the Valley for the first time in the history of the war, commandeering hundreds of vehicles and fleeing to different parts of the planet with an innumerable cache of weapons and ammunition. The organization with which they were operating seemed far too complex, to John’s mind, to be carried out by mere grunts thrown into a foreign war. It had to have been facilitated by someone with insider knowledge of how the Valley operated and what its surroundings held in regards to resources and vantage points.
Much to John’s chagrin, the briefing had brought more terrible news other than the uprising itself: the order to forego the use of poison gas, a primary tool in the Sweeper arsenal. The reason for its discontinuation was, to John, a blur at best, but it ran along the lines of “safeguarding against friendly casualties”. In order to lighten their loads, several operators, seeing their filtering masks as an added burden to their already heavy load, chose to leave them behind, contrary to John’s stance in the matter.
Splitting up and heading out into numerous parties, the Sweeper’s numbers were thin and diluted down as they pursued the deserters far from the Valley and into the ruinous, ancient environments. Outnumbered and out-gunned, their training had not prepared them for the full-scale warfare they were getting themselves into.
Sweep-Team Alpha had begun their retreat from the buildings just ahead of John’s position. From his cover behind the concrete structure he could hear the rhythmic bouncing of the gear against their bodies. Moving to the open, rubble-strewn streets in a parade of clinking metal, John used their sounds, coupled with the tempo of the crunching rocks and debris under their boots, to judge their distance and gauge their motives.<
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Within a few seconds time, the Command Center’s radioman came over the earpiece confirming his suspicion: John and his men needed to lay down covering fire for the fleeting team. Lifting their rifles over the wall on his command, he ordered his men to place suppression fire towards the enemy’s lines.
There was an initial pause, a moment of confused silence as his team was unable to locate any targets that were in need of their suppressive service. But a crack from a deserter’s rifle changed everything. And within a fraction of a second the world around them exploded into a hail of small arms fire.
Before they could even squeeze off a handful of rounds, all the men under John’s command fell to the ground as a chain of explosions sent the bodies of Alpha Team’s members tearing into meaty particles. The entire crew was wiped out in a single volley.
Lifting his reflective visor, the smell of destruction, like burning rubber, hung heavily in his nostrils. The stuffiness of the helmet’s shield was too suffocating to keep it hanging over his face. Pulling out a map from his hip pocket, John traced the assumed position of the enemy’s X-Y coordinates.
“Requesting to gas ahead of position: maploc three-one-echo! How do you copy, Command?” he spoke into his microphone.
The only answer was static.
“Request repeat: gas ahead of position maploc: three-one-echo!” Do you copy, Command?”
After a few seconds of radio silence, John looked up the line at the battle-hardened faces that existed through the open facial coverings of his team members. Shaking their heads and cursing the Command, they silenced themselves as a voice aired through their ears, “We copy loud and clear.”
There was another static-filled moment of silence, followed by, “That’s a negative. Do not smoke them out. Repeat. Do not smoke them out. How do you copy? Over.”
The Lover's Parable Through A Seven World Journey Page 29
