The pilot nodded with a thumbs up. “Gotcha.”
He didn’t see Prince’s condescending smirk as Prince closed the cockpit door. Didn’t see the poison behind his pursed lips. Tapping on this display, Prince opened the secure line to One Nation and typed: I’m patching you into our drone cameras. You’ll see everything. So will the world.
He blocked their responses, not wanting distractions.
From his backpack, he pulled out his entrusted drones and set them on the floor. Legs unfolded from their metal bodies. Prince switched on their cameras and patched them into One Nation’s feed. Now his former enemies were free to live-cast what they saw from multiple perspectives. From another compartment, he found a body camera and switched it on. Blue-toothed to his forearm display, it would also send video. He attached it to his chest, next to the heart-bound grenade.
Outside the window, Baltimore’s southwest end approached. Prince imagined Penny seeing this too, the cold wind on her skin, sharing the same rage he harbored toward Gray Altar—the the organization that betrayed him in the most immoral way imaginable. In this moment, Prince felt more of a kinship with the girl than with anyone else in his life. The girl who had killed his men and Janet. The girl that had killed him.
He whispered to himself, “Two by two by two.”
Minutes later, they were slowing to the center of the city. The protesting crowds had diminished in the late night hour, but people still lingered in tents and occupied encampments along the wide median and park areas. Makeshift vinyl awnings flapped and a tarp flew away as the gunship descended. Leaves and trash swirling.
“We’re home,” the pilot said.
Prince opened the cockpit door. The gunship hovered over the landing helipad, just as he had requested. “Two by two by two… no place like home,” Prince said and raised his machine pistol to the pilot’s head. The man never saw it coming. Prince fired a stream of bullets through his helmet, shattering it like a melon. The body slumped forward and hung in its harnesses. The ship banked, but Prince leapt out a second later, landing on the helipad to sprint away. His two drones followed. One Nation, a witness to the end.
Shivering, Penny detached herself from the gunship and landed on the roof. The building was smaller than she imagined. She had heard about this place from Sam, an art museum turned Gray Altar fortress. As her feet touched the landing pad, the ship faltered and turned almost lopsided and she saw Prince jumping out. Two drones flew over his head like watchful birds. He ran so fast she knew something was wrong.
“Oh shit…,” she said, eyes upward.
Above her, the gunship rolled and clipped its rotors on the side of the building. Shattered stone pelted the air like hail. Penny dove and scurried away as the huge machine slammed onto the roof and cracked almost in half. Fire burst from its black body. Heat washing over her. People screamed and ran in the streets.
Penny looked to Prince—still sprinting. At a doorway, soldiers ran outside and he shot both of them so fast that it didn’t look real.
“Oh my Gods…,” she muttered, powering up her arm. She charged after him, pushing away from the fire and carnage below. Police sirens screeched from every direction. Screaming compounded in the panic.
Prince was already inside.
At the doorway, Penny tried not to look down at the shot soldiers or the walls painted with their blood. Now it was obvious that the rage inside her hadn’t fully inoculated her against her irritable bowels. This stress bubbled and seized her. She tightened and halted, struggling to walk.
“C’mon. Not now. Not now. Not now.”
Penny knew it would pass. It had to.
Inside the stairwell, she heard yelling and more shots from Prince’s silenced pistol. “What the hell is he doing?” She wondered how he didn’t know she was there or if he was luring her inside. Either way, he will die.
Penny rushed down the stairs and hugged the wall, claw against the railing. At the closest door, she followed Prince’s trail. Wide stone archways opened to wider corridors. She had never been inside a place that was so foreboding. The weight of the building was as intimidating as the people that occupied it. She heard no alarm or alert, only the sputtering sound of Prince’s pistol. Her chest heaved, painful with silence. She turned a corner. Half a dozen soldiers looked as if sometwo tossed them in the air and let them land wherever. Arms and legs twisted awkwardly. One of them had their fractured head in the lap of another. Penny held the wrist of her metal arm like a rifle. Opened her claw and tried to keep from shaking. Clomping footsteps ran from behind her. She turned and crouched behind one of the bodies and saw two soldiers approaching her.
Arm pointed at them, she fired her wrecking ball and yanked back, making it split into spinning quarters—two for each man. She turned away and still pointing her open claw, not wanting to see the wedges sever their heads. Their bodies dropped. Rifles clanged on the hard tile. Penny yanked her arm again and the wedges returned into a single ball, snapped snug into her claw’s palm. She reminded herself that these were the hateful and corrupt men that had just killed her own people. These were the thoughtless atoms making up a much larger organism that needed to die.
“Code black! Code black!” sometwo shouted over the intercom.
Prince’s laughter echoed from an empty gallery. More sputtering gunfire.
Penny sprinted toward it.
With his drones mapping every soldier within range, Prince barely had to aim. Head and heart shots for each man. One through the hand and into his face. Another blinded by his comrade’s guts. There was almost a boredom to it and now that he knew that he was cloned, that he wasn’t even supposed to be breathing or walking or firing a gun, he felt like it wasn’t even happening at all.
Both drones were busy deactivating every security camera, knocking them off the walls so quickly that Prince only saw the aftermath. He had snatched grenades off a few of the dead men and liberally pitched them around doorways, watching fragmented metal eviscerate soft tissue. He couldn’t give them time to knock out his drones or toss an EMP grenade at him. No doubt, One Nation and their audience were riveted. This is what he would be known for after his death—his actual and final death—and he wanted it not only to be a true spectacle, but to prove that he was a person after all.
He kept moving. Sweat beading. Cordite and pulverized marble in the air. He checked his bullet belt and worked the action of his machine pistol as he trotted from one cover to the next. Looking back, he knew Penny was close. The drones had mapped her too. What would she do, he thought. Did she want to die just as badly as me? Will I let her die?
“What are you fucking doing!?” Merrick yelled over the intercom. “Are you possessed? Stand down!”
More soldiers stacked up on either side of a thick stone doorway. Two of them were hurrying to set up a portable .50 caliber turret—one extending the tripod, the other loading and connecting the gun to its base. Without thinking, Prince holstered his pistol, unclipped two grenades, and rolled them through the thick doorway. The men yelled like children. Half a second of deranged screaming. Double explosions silenced those voices. Pulverized stone and muscle flying. The turret flipped into the air like a shattered baseball bat.
“Prince! Stand down!” Merrick yelled. “You’re giving us no choice!”
Wetness soaked the smoking passageway. Someone was moaning, but Prince could translate the gargled breathing as death approaching quickly.
Prince cackled. “Just like how you gave me a choice, right!?” He slid to the doorway and sprayed bullets around the corner. Men rolled out of the way.
“We can talk about that,” Merrick said. “Your father had just as much to do with it as me.”
When Prince looked back again, we saw Penny crouched behind a pillar. Good, he thought, keep coming, little assassin.
The drones focused on him. One Nation’s eyes, the world’s eyes, on him. “Come on out and we can chat about it,” Prince yelled as he taped the grenade over his heart.
Merrick waited a second. “Stand down and we will. Toss your pistol and everything else you’ve got.”
Prince unclipped another grenade from his hip and place it in the middle of the floor, standing up. A gift for his little assassin. Side-eyeing behind him, Penny was well hidden though he knew she was there. He stood and confidently strolled into another large corridor with his machine pistol pointed. Men hid behind pillars, but Prince’s drone revealed exactly where they were. “Now that doesn’t sound like me, does it, Merrick?”
Prince slid against the wall and pelted a column with bullets. The soldier behind it winced enough for Prince to graze his elbow, fracturing it and sending his forearm loose. The soldier’s rifle flipped out of his hands. One more bullet plunged into his shoulder and spun the man down where he groaned and rolled away. “Or are you mistaking me for the old Emmett Prince you cloned and woke up? The obedient one? The good son?”
“We had no choice!” the man over the intercom said. “It’s company protocol. We cannot lose someone like you.” He cleared his throat. “Someone as good as you.”
Now that Prince was through the doorway, Penny shimmied against the wall, making sure notwo saw her. She figured the man on the intercom was Prince’s boss or commander and he was the one that cloned him. Penny was about to step into the next corridor when she almost tripped over a grenade that was set in the middle of the doorway. It made her leap back. “Shit…”
And she covered her mouth and crouched.
The only person who could have put it there was Prince. It didn’t appear to be boobytrapped. It was just a live grenade, sitting in the middle of the damn doorway. A gift, maybe. An invitation. Of course he knows I’m here, she thought.
She picked up the grenade and clipped it to her belt. How weird it was to have an inert, yet deadly object touching her, slapping her hip as she jogged to catch up with her prey. Prince. Emmett Prince. The cackling devil burning down his own house.
Past more dead men and marble columns that looked like chewed corn cobs, she followed Prince into an open foyer where she ducked behind a lone statue and watched him work. The glass paneled ceiling had already shattered from flying bullets. Tiny shards snowed onto the floor. Now that Prince was in an open room with overlooking balconies, he had the freedom to sashay from cover to cover, popping muffled shots—three, five, eight at a time—at soon-to-be-dead men. He aimed and fired at enemy drones so quickly they barely had time to get off the ground. Prince ran and leapt onto the thick marble ledges of the higher floor to pick off soldiers hiding below, sidestepping pillars and double backing to trick them out of cover. How could such a crass and arrogant man move so elegantly as he murdered?
His drones scrambled high to the mangled glass ceiling, dodging bullets.
Prince panted and laughed and lobbed a grenade off the balcony as if plunking a penny in a well. “You’re making this too easy!”
Penny crouched and covered her ears as best she could, one with her claw, and waited for the explosion. The second floor shook as fire and rubble burst from underneath an overhang. It vibrated her bones. Made her jaw ache. Ears ringing, she opened her eyes. Tiny bits of rubble and dust coated everything.
“See!?” Prince laughed. “Too easy!”
“Stand down!” the man on the intercom screamed.
Penny stood and hunched and watched with one eye around a corner. She wondered if she should kill him right there while he was distracted, but, down below, a WarWalker stumbled over a pile of debris. It was much larger than the ones they had back at their own base. Prince peeped his head over the ledge and smiled. “Oh yeah?”
Mini guns spun for a few seconds before the WarWalker’s barrels fired. It chewed through the old stone ledge like a jackhammer. Prince ducked and crawled away from its line of fire, allowing his drones to give him a view of where the big machine lumbered.
“You’re gonna have to do a lot better than that, asshole,” Prince muttered, and tapped his forearm display. He was still linked to the network. Clustered pins appeared on the little screen. It wasn’t clear how big the explosion would be—that was impossible to calculate—but the armory was directly beneath the foyer and from what he could judge, the WarWalker was standing above it. On his display, every mag-vest that Gray Altar had confiscated from One Nation started to glow brighter. Prince stuck his head up to see Penny, but she wasn’t there. Then he looked to the ceiling and shouted, “How in the world are you forgetting how brilliant I am?”
The overcharging mag-vests vibrated what was left of the old building’s windows.
Screeching echoed over the intercom. “Wait! Don’t!” Merrick yelled.
“Fire in the…,” Prince yelled and ducked.
Multiple detonations compounded into one massive explosion. The building lifted and sagged. Prince thrust his back against the wall as all the air in his lungs escaped. Crushed stone and tile exploded on the first floor. Most of the lower floor collapsed. The rest of the ceiling crashed down as his drones zipped out of the way. Three pillars across from Prince crumbled into the new hole in the floor. One of them chopped the WarWalker in the side, crippling it as it stumbled and tipped into the newly-formed chasm.
Prince hunched and caught his breath.
“…hole,” he gasped and chuckled. Below them, every stockpiled weapon in the base had been destroyed by the exploding mag-vests. Millions of dollars of Gray Altar property. Glorious.
Prince saw Penny maneuver around the balcony, away from the crumbling arches. Her slender body carved through smoke and ash.
Prince unclipped the body camera from his chest and held it over the ledge to film the carnage below. Panning left to right, he captured the room from end to charred end. “You getting that at home, people?”
Penny’s ears rang as dust turned the air to chalk. She was lucky to be behind one of the second story ledges, protected from flying rubble and fire. To the right, the balcony had collapsed along with the double-pillared archways and Greek statues. Bits of ruined molding continued to fall into the new hole. Gray soot and darker ash piled inside it. A tang of iron in the air as if the people who had once been there were now part of the atmosphere—smashed to mere molecules. There was no more gunfire or screaming. The WarWalker clicked and whined for a few seconds before it died.
“You son of a bitch!” the man on the intercom yelled.
Prince said nothing. Penny could hear him reloading. She could see the top of his head every few seconds. One of his drones had been disabled in the blast. He rushed over to it and tinkered with its propellers before giving up. What was his goal, she wondered. Kill the man on the intercom? Kill himself?
Prince stood and ran and slapped his shoulder against the far doorway. And, without hesitation, he looked back—right at her. He stared for a few seconds as if enjoying being watched before continuing onward through the door.
Penny’s stomach churned and knotted. They had locked eyes, if only for a second. If Prince knew she was there, he didn’t care.
Straining, Penny grit her teeth. When she focused and relaxed, the pain passed. If she could convince herself this was temporary, then it wouldn’t overwhelm her and she wouldn’t have to duck behind an embankment and squat.
“You’re a dead man!” the man on the intercom screamed.
Prince’s echoing laughter enticed her forward. She hunched and scurried. Past lifeless men not much older than her. Below, people were hollering names and picking through the smoldering pit. Flashlights beamed in the thick dust. She wiggled her fingertip inside her ear and worked her jaw, the ringing slowly subsiding.
“Anybody alive in there?” sometwo yelled from inside the gaping hole.
Penny followed Prince down a hallway and staircase. At one point, he was surprised by a few soldiers, but he managed to double back and bottleneck them, getting only a dozen feet away from Penny as she flattened herself against a wall. It would be so easy to pull the pin off her grenade and roll it up to his feet. Was that satisfying enough,
she wondered, or did she want him to know it was her killing him?
The men fired frantically at Prince.
“Traitor!”
“Coward! Stand down!”
Bullets snapped by her, cracking the stone walls. Prince fired back, patient, the chime of his casings on the tile like tiny bells. When the soldiers lobbed their own grenades at him, his remaining drone immediately caught them and tossed them back.
“Really guys?” he yelled.
The grenades detonated, rippling a wave through Penny’s stomach. More crushed rock pelted her leg, cutting her. Penny prayed that last drone wouldn’t get shot down. Without it, Prince’s advantage would disappear.
Once the hallway was clear, she tailed him through carpeted rooms with lower ceilings. Office doors hung open in the dim light as they left the heaviness of the old museum. Penny held out her claw, open, swinging it slowly left and right.
Prince kicked in door after door, aiming his pistol, but not having to fire. The drone led him like a watchdog. Propellers inches away from the florescent lights.
The man on the intercom’s voice wavered. “You’ll never make it to me. You know that. Prince!”
Calm and expressionless, Prince continued in silence. Penny made sure not to get within his view again. She took as much care in her hushed breathings as her muffled steps. They walked up another staircase where exit signs glowed and the air wasn’t tainted with smoke. Prince let his drone map the area as he tapped on his forearm and waited. When it was clear, he moved even slower until he came to an office door and opened it, pistol leveled at the darkness.
Prince guessed that his attack was such a surprise that Merrick and the other Gray Altar operatives forgot to guard or clear out his room. Or maybe they were overconfident, assuming they would stop him before he reached the fort’s administrative and communications departments. Either way, they had fucked up.
Nothing was disturbed. The girl’s belongings were still piled and sorted in the corner. His nightstand and footlocker were untouched.
Two Girls Book 2: One Nation Page 19
