by Chris Lowry
"You have a Doctor?" the man sat up, eyes flashing in interest.
"Not a you kind of doctor, Sawbones. He's a Pede."
"A pediatrician? We could use his help here-,"
"A PH.D," Annie said. "Engineer."
The man slumped back into his seat.
"Oh. That doesn't help me at all," he said.
Lt glanced around at the rudimentary environment.
Secondhand wood salvaged from scrap, slapped together in a rough effort to keep out the elements.
Sheets as curtains, and even though he couldn't see to the room beyond, he bet everything in there was scrounged too.
"See this," he tapped his chest with his knuckle. "Our Doc got this up and going. First tech we've seen in almost four years."
Lt waved his hand at the room.
"I'd think a little before I said he couldn't help."
The Doctor rubbed his nose with his long thin fingers and sighed.
"I apologize," he said. "I get snappy when I lose a patient."
He glanced back at the curtain and glared.
"Well shit, why didn't you say so," said Lt. "I get pissed when I lose a man. No blame here."
"How can I help?" the man in the gown sat up straighter.
Annie moved to one side of him.
"We're here to help you," she said.
The Doctor looked from her to Lt and back again.
"Help me how?"
"Sawbones," said Lt. "You ever thought you had a chance to save the world?"
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Lutz, Waldo, Steph and Crockett sprinted across the compound toward the guarded warehouse doors.
They stopped at a corner wall. Lutz peered around the edge.
“Two on the door. How many inside?”
he whispered.
“We’ve been in the cell with you Lutz. We don’t know how many.”
“Shit,” Lutz grunted. “And civilians inside?”
Waldo nodded.
“A couple of hundred of them,” said Steph. “There’s no way we get out of this without some of them getting bloody.”
“I don’t want to kill any of them,” said Lutz.
“It would be worth it if we could get Doc,” said Waldo.
“I don’t know,” said Steph. “I don’t think so. Lt wants us to save humans, save the civilians. The people inside the walls aren’t fighting us. They’re helping us.”
“It doesn’t seem right that they might die just because some bad guy took over the compound.”
Lutz peered around the edge again.
“Alright,” he said. “I get it. We’re bullet proof. They’re not.”
“And they might drag Doc out again and kill him to make us stop. Then what?”
“We go back to fighting without these,” said Lutz.
“I don’t think Lt will like that,” said Crockett.
“Lt’s not here,” Lutz hissed. “I am. And I’m trying to think.”
“We could run,” said Steph.
“Run where?”
“Away. We could try to get away and get weapons. Or more time to come up with a better plan.”
“Or we could just go in,” said Lutz. “Stop the guards and hope no one gets hurt.”
“That’s a lot of risk on a little hope,” said Steph.
“They could kill him anyway,” Lutz shrugged.
But he didn’t say it with any emotion, a last gasp at wondering.
“All right,” he said and looked at the fence at the rear of the property.
“We make a run for it. Hide in the woods. Come up with a plan.”
The quartet of Suits jogged toward the fence.
Behind them, they could hear the camp explode in shouts and screams as their escape was discovered.
They didn’t let it stop them.
Crockett leaped first, the biomechanical enhancements made the fifteen foot bound seem like stepping up on a step.
Steph went next, and Waldo landed next to her.
Lutz hesitated.
“We should do something,” he said.
“We are doing something,” Waldo told him. “We fall back. Regroup.”
Lutz shook his head.
“I don’t like running from a fight.”
“We aren’t running,” said Steph. “We’re planning the next move.”
“Come on,” Crockett called. “They’re going to catch us.”
“So what?” said Lutz. “Then we fight.”
“And civilians die,” Steph lifted her face plate so she could see his eyes. “Doc might die.”
Lutz shook his head and crouched. He didn’t seem convinced, but he wasn’t going to fight alone.
He leaped over the fence in a mighty bound.
Steph turned her head to watch him. A bullet smashed through her open faceplate and ripped her head backwards.
Blood sprayed in an arc, landing on the earth just as Lutz hit the ground.
More bullets ripped through the fence, chipped at the trees and pinged off their Suits as a dozen of Russel’s soldiers pelted around the building and rained fire into them.
Waldo and Crockett grabbed Steph by the arms and dragged her limp body through the woods.
Lutz used his armor covered back to block her until they went deeper into the trees.
Then he bent over, lifted her up and tried to ignore her shattered face and leaking blood as they ran away.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Russel rounded the corner and sprinted toward the twelve foot hurricane fence.
He gripped the metal in his thick fingers and glared at the trees hiding the four Gen One Suits that escaped.
“I got one,” said one of his men.
“But they got away,” Russel spat. “We don’t get the Suit if they get away.”
“Should we kill their Doc?” another asked.
“We’re going to need him,” Russel seethed.
He whipped around on the others.
“Go!” he screamed “Get after them.”
An armored figure bounded across the compound from the direction of the road.
“Dad!” Jake screamed.
Russel glanced up in alarm.
“He’s coming,” Jake slid up the faceplate on his Suit.
“Did he get loose?”
“Wrong he. The Lt is back.”
Russel snorted.
“We can handle him.”
Jake shook his helmeted head.
“He killed Barnet. He’s got his men and is bringing them here.”
Russel stared at him, confusion knitting his eyebrows.
“We need to get out of here,” he said. “There are two of them. He set Babe free.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
“I,” Jake stammered. “I couldn’t.”
Russel studied what he could see of his son’s face, a young man he barely knew and wondered why he was so spooked.
The Gen One’s were tough, but they still had the Doc and a threat to him ensured their compliance.
Except it didn’t, he thought.
The rest of the Suits ran away, leaving the man who reactivated their armor behind.
Maybe they knew something he didn’t.
“Grab their blaster’s Jake,” he said. “We can at least take that much from them.”
Jake spun on his heel and raced away to his father’s command tent where the weapons were stored.
“What about them?” the man who shot Steph mumbled as he pointed at the forest.
“You got one,” said Russel. “Let them deal with their dead. In the meantime, grab their Doc. We can take him from them too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Lt stood in the prow of the hovercraft and stared at the column of men trailing behind.
There were hundreds of them, but he had no illusion that they were his army.
They were bandits, collaborators and he would figure out what to do with them once he got his squad back together.
It ha
d been a real struggle not to waylay the bunch and seed the earth with their corpses, in hopes that a new batch of better men would grow, but it didn’t work like that.
Annie had talked him out of it.
Somehow, Warbucks convinced him that the numbers would help, and he knew she was right.
Besides, if he killed all the bad guys in the camp, it might dissuade the Sawbones from switching sides.
The man sat in the back of the hovercraft, wind whipping through his hair and seemed to enjoy it.
Babe sat across from him, his face hidden behind his helmet.
He saw Lt staring and tilted his head.
Lt opened up his mask.
“You ready to get in the game?”
Babe worked his shoulders. He was stiff, kinked and sore from the damage they tried to inflict on him, but even as he rotated his arm, he could tell it felt better than it did ten minutes ago.
The nano at work, and working overtime to knit the muscles, heal the cartilage, to rebuild him at the cellular level.
“May have to bunt a few times till I work out the knots, Lt.”
“You get on base, Babe and I’ll knock you home.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Warbucks snapped.
She gripped the wheel with white knuckles, eyebrows furrowed as she watched the road unfold in front of her.
“Baseball, Warbucks,” said Lt. “America’s game.”
“We’re using baseball as a metaphor for battle,” Babe called out to her.
“I know,” she snapped again.
Lt put a hand on her shoulder.
“Breathe,” he said.
The sensitive pads of his gloved fingers picked up the tension in her shoulders. Even if he couldn’t see the read out on the screen inside his mask, he could see how tight she was wound.
“What is it?” he said.
“We’re too big of a target in this,” she said.
“Let them find us,” he sounded eager.
“We’re about to get the whole lot of us back together. We could do with some alien ass busting.”
“What if they kill Doc?” Babe shouted.
Lt considered this for a moment.
“We’re going to have to move like greased lightning, Babe. One blaster ain’t gonna do two of us any good, so you get to him, johnny on the spot.”
“They could hurt civilians.”
Lt shook his helmet and glared at the men lined up the road behind them.
“I ain’t too happy about that. These folks were hiding out here and we fell in their laps. But it’s total war now Babe. Can’t no one stand on the sidelines and wonder what’s gonna happen. Nope. Now it’s time to pick sides, fly your flags and if you ain’t with us, you’re against us.”
Lt couldn’t tell the man’s reaction behind his mask, but the look on Sawbones face let him know the man was considering his words.
He glanced over at Warbucks behind the yoke. She was considering them too.
“You could go in first,” she said. “In the Suit. Sneak in and warn them so they can get out of the way.”
“Or,” Lt grinned. “Cause a distraction.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Turned out, a distraction wasn’t necessary.
Lt leaped over the side of the hovercraft and disappeared into the trees.
Thirty minutes later, he met them at the gate and watched Annie maneuver the hovercraft to the ground with only two bumps and a slight skid.
Babe stared at the empty enclosure where he and the others had been housed as prisoners.
It was empty.
“Where are they?” he asked Lt.
“Gone,” he popped open the faceplate and stared as Babe did the same.
“Did they kill them?” Babe looked around at the silent compound.
The door to the warehouse swung on its hinge, a slow arc in the slight wind.
Lt shrugged.
“Don’t know,” he grunted. “They’re all gone.”
He led Babe toward the warehouse turned encampment.
“Stay with him,” Lt told Warbucks.
The two Suits marched across the compound. Babe kept looking at his former prison cell.
“The gate is busted open,” he said. “That’s a good sign, right?”
“Could be,” said Lt. “But honestly Babe, I just don’t know.”
They reached the interior of the encampment.
It was empty.
The makeshift shelters and tents built into the fifteen foot corridor that circled the building and turned it into a shanty town were still there.
The smoky fires were all burned out, the only light from the solar powered LED’s discovered by Doc, bouncing off the soot streaked walls.
“Gone,” Babe said.
Lt led them to the hole in the wall next to the door to the lab where they discovered the Gen One technology and resurrected the Suits.
“Gone,” Lt sighed.
The lab had been burned.
“Anyone in there?” Babe meant Doc or any of the other squad.
They circled the lab and felt relieved it was empty.
“We got aliens to fight,” said Lt as they exited the building. “And this shit keeps happening.”
“It’s human nature, Lt.”
“I know you’re right, Babe, but I don’t have to fucking like it. Seems like we should all be working together to make everything better, and some numb nut asshole comes along and fucks shit up for everybody. We should be spending our time figuring out how to get a secret weapon on Mars, and this shit is causing us some serious grief.”
“Then we find them,” said Babe. “And we cause some serious grief of our own.”
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
"Survival is complicated," said Annie. "Up there, it's easy because you're constantly on watch. You have to be vigilant, because machines break down. Equipment goes bad down here, you can just throw it away."
She pointed toward the sky.
"Up there though. Something breaks, and you could be sucked into space for the worst three seconds of the rest of your life."
"I get you Warbucks. You're saying you had it rough, and I ain't doubting it. But no one up there has died from the flu, have they?"
She crinkled her eyes and glared at him before shaking her head.
"Yeah, you got meds. You got docs and all kinds of tech that we just ain't got down here anymore. We're looking for it, and we're finding it, but it is a slow row to hoe."
"Who you calling a ho?" she smirked.
"I should have said slow ho."
She reached up and traced a finger down his faceplate. Lt couldn't tell if it was meant for him, or her own reflection in the mirrored surface.
"Most people think the stars disappear in daylight," she told him. "But they are there. You just can't see them in the sun."
"This your nice way of calling me sunshine?"
"Just be careful," she said.
"Careful is my middle name."
"I thought it started with an H," said Annie as she stepped back.
It freed him up to go, but he held on for just a moment, like taking a mental picture of her standing with Doc, and the rest of the survivors from the two merged groups.
He didn't want to leave them alone, but there was still work to be done. Two jobs to do.
Find his squad and destroy the Licks.
"You ready Babe?"
"As I'll ever be, Lt."
