The Mission_A New Earth Novella

by MJ McGriff

  There were a lot more of them this time, flooding out of every building, overwhelming us with firepower.

  “What now?” Nunez asked as we took cover behind a wall.

  I pointed to Nunez and Clarke. “You draw them toward the smoke. Use it as cover to pick them off.” We were closer to the main building now and the smoke farther up the walkway was getting thicker by the minute.

  I looked at VC. “You and I will take positions on the roof.” He looked up, shaking his head. I patted him on the shoulder. “You got this.”

  Nunez and Clarke helped us get to the roof of the building where we lay down flat so we wouldn’t be seen. Then they let off a few shots and headed toward the smoke. Just like I knew the attackers would, they followed and from where we were, we had the perfect view to take them out.

  “We only have a few shots before we have to haul ass,” I said to him, and he nodded.

  Then we let them have it. A few shots then we lay down so we couldn’t be seen. Together we took out ten of them in total before they realized where we were and we had to jump down. I sailed down to the ground, landing in a little roll. VC took a little longer to jump. The shot to his side sent him to the ground—hard. I shielded him as three of those blacked out men came around, shooting them dead one by one. I looked behind me, the air suddenly very quiet. Then Nunez and Clarke emerged from the smoke. I motioned them over to help with VC. He was going pale, blood gushing out of his side. His leg was twisted in a freakish and unnatural way.

  I kicked open the door in front of us, and we dragged him inside. “Nunez, you stay with him and shoot anybody who comes through that door,” I said to him. “We’ll be back for you both as soon as we can.”

  Nunez gulped and nodded.

  I signaled Clarke to follow me and save for a few stragglers we had to take down, we made it across the Quad safely. We were getting closer. I kept telling myself that I would find my father and he would be fine. I looked at Clarke and it looked like he was getting a little less nervous.

  That would all end.

  A voice came over the sector speaker system. More importantly was the voice. It was the same voice that threatened me the entire time I was at the commune. It was Verona.

  “Attention, Officer India Wilson. I have your precious president. If you want to see this bastard live another day, come to the brig and release Oliver Adams. You have fifteen minutes.”

  Chapter 12

  On the day I became the night shift leader my dad told me that the mark of a true leader was to make the tough call. The call that would feel wrong no matter how you sliced it. The call that could rip your heart apart but you would follow through anyway. That night I understood what he’d meant. I turned to Clarke, who had been staring at me, waiting for an answer to his question about what we were going to do.

  I wiped the tears from my eyes. “You need to go find my father.”

  “We can go together,” he said. “Then when we find him he’ll figure out what to do.”

  I shook my head. “There’s no time. I know the codes to unlock the cell.”

  “They will kill you as soon as you let him out.”

  “She will kill the president if I don’t.”

  Clarke ran his fingers through his dark hair and finally nodded. “Good luck,” he said and took off toward the gate. I headed to the main building. The flames were still going strong, wrapping around the metal frames. I came around the burning building and five soldiers were there, all pointing their guns at me.

  “Drop it,” one of them said, a woman by the sound of her voice.

  I slowly lowered my gun and put in on the floor. “I have the codes to the cells. I’m here to release Oliver.”

  Two of them broke their line and took me by each arm, leading me to the guard house. We walked right through the blasted security door and headed down the stairs. Verona and the president stood in the middle of the narrow corridor under one of the fluorescent lights. Her gun was at the back of his head as he kneeled on the cold, hard floor. His sleeping shirt was torn open, his hands tied behind his back. She looked up, not realizing who I was until I was only a few feet away from her. The president screamed through the tape over his mouth, and Verona’s black muddy face soured even more. My two escorts went back upstairs.

  “Hello, India.” She seethed.

  “I’m here to release Oliver.”

  She pulled another gun from her side holster and pointed it at me. The glass from the cell behind her shook and I saw Oliver’s face pressed against it.

  “Verona!” he cried. “Stop this.”

  “I should kill you where you stand,” she said.

  “Then Oliver will stay in that cell,” I countered. “I’m giving you what you want.”

  “You have no idea what I want.”

  I swallowed hard, keeping my hands where she could see them. “I know you really don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  She laughed an evil, bone-chilling laugh. “You’re so naive. No wonder Oliver took a liking to you.”

  I glanced over at him.

  “Don’t do what she says,” he said. “Get out of here. It’s not safe.”

  “Truth is, India,” she continued. “I want to kill all of them, the same way they killed my parents.”

  Oh no. We were in the same place where her parents died during their prison sentence. Everything about this was so bad.

  “Did Oliver tell you the story?” she asked but didn’t wait for me to answer. “Did he tell you how my parents were both locked up here for stealing food so I could eat? While you were here sitting pretty, your daddy wiping your ass in Sector A riches, we in Sector C were starving.”

  “I know. Oliver told me—”

  “Good. That means you understand my frustration, my anger, and my anxiousness to see all of you die. Only then can we have the society Oliver and I dreamed of. A world where no one starves and people aren’t treated like second-class citizens.” She kicked the president in his ribs, and he let out a muffled cry.

  “This is not the way, Verona,” Oliver pleaded. “We cannot resort to the same violence that our forefathers did. There’s enough room for all of us to coexist.”

  “If they wanted to coexist with us they wouldn’t have sent a third of their army to the cavern to slaughter us.” She kneeled down by the president’s ear. “Too bad for you that we were already gone by then. You underestimated us, Mr. President. What we lack in numbers we make up in passion.”

  She stood up, tossing her hair back. “Enough of that. Give me the code.”

  I took a step, getting ready to tell her I would enter it myself, but she hit the president over the head and jammed the barrel back into his head. “You move again, he dies.”

  I recited the twelve-digit alphanumeric code, and she remembered it all, her gun on me the entire time she punched it in. The glass door slid open and she met Oliver with the barrel of her second gun. “Walk over to her.”

  Oliver looked at her, sympathy and pity in his eyes.

  “Move!” she yelled. “Now!”

  He shuffled over to me, clutching his injury.

  I went to help him, but he shooed me away.

  “Verona, please. This was not how I wanted—”

  “Of course it wasn’t and it wouldn’t have you not listened to me. I told you they would try to slaughter us the minute we gave them an inch.”

  “Because you put a gun to her head!” Oliver shot back.

  “And I would’ve finished the job had you not jumped in the way,” Verona said.

  “I couldn’t let you kill her.”

  “Why not? You think she’s different? You think she understands us? She doesn’t. She’s a privileged little Fourth Gen who doesn’t know her ass from her elbow.”

  “But I do understand,” I interjected. “I pleaded with my father and even the president to hear you guys out. I was the one who shot that tree branch so the fighting would stop.”

  “Am I supposed to be grateful to you? Well
, I’m not. There’s only one way to get through to your people.”

  Verona looked down at the president and pulled the trigger, his head exploding all over the floor.

  Chapter 13

  Verona stepped over the president’s dead body, her boots surrounded by brains and blood.

  I just spoke with him.

  The leader of our sectors, the one charged with bringing together a peaceful collective of colonies was lying in a pool of blood a few feet in front of me. She undid all of it.

  What will become of us? Will we become a race of savage people who won’t stop killing each other off until no one is left?

  No. We won’t. Not as long as I’m still alive.

  Verona wants to fight for change. I’ll fight for the right to live in a place where no one gets bombed, or shot, or starves. Oliver was right. This was not the way.

  The barrel of Verona’s gun in my face brought me back to reality. Oliver was so close to me, his breath hot against the skin of my neck.

  “Put the gun down!” he said through his teeth.

  “I’m done listening to you, Oliver,” she said. “I’m only letting you live because I promised your people I would free you. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have come.”

  “A lot of those people are dead because of you,” I said, staring at her, not at the gun in my face.

  “And you’re going to join them,” she said.

  I didn’t get another word in. Oliver rushed her, and I ducked when the gun went off. They both fell backward, landing in the blood, tousling around until the gun when off again. Oliver screamed and rolled off of her, holding his arm. She jumped up and pointed the gun back at me.

  She pulled the trigger.

  I held my breath.

  It clicked.

  No more ammo.

  Verona tossed the gun aside and charged at me. I held my arms to stop her from knocking me down. She grabbed them and threw me up against the glass of the cell next to me. Pain shot down my spine, but I ignored it. I had to. Her hands were around my throat. I didn’t let her squeeze. I kicked her hard in the shin, and she let go, staggering backward. It was my turn to grab her by the neck and push her hard into the glass next to her. It felt good to squeeze her flesh in between my fingers.

  Too good.

  Was I becoming a killer like her?

  I spent too much time thinking. My grip on her relaxed enough for her to knee me in the groin. I stumbled backward a few steps, and she yanked me up by my braids. Her fist landed hard on my face. The bones in my nose cracked, warm blood flowing out of my nostrils as I tried to find my focus. I swung, trying to hit her, but missed. Another punch to my face knocked me down, the cold floor oddly refreshing. It was so much easier to lie there.

  “You’re pathetic,” she spat, kicking me in the stomach.

  Maybe I was. All I could do was curl up in a ball, pain soaring through every part of me.

  “It’s high time a woman like me took charge of this place,” she continued, standing over me. “It’s spineless and greedy people like you who turned Old Earth to shit.”

  No, it was cold-hearted people like you who ruined it all. I couldn’t speak and swallow the blood in my mouth at the same time. Who was I kidding anyway? I wasn’t a fighter. Hand to hand combat was not my thing. I was a shooter. That’s what I was good at.

  The gun.

  She tucked her second weapon in her back waistband. If only I could get to it. That meant getting off that comfortable floor and even getting hit a few more times to even try to get to it.

  She’s so much stronger than me.

  Those eyes. Those cold dead eyes of those colonists that lay dead in the paths I walked every day. The main building I’d spent most of my young adult life was reduced to molten metal frames.

  Verona destroyed my home while I lobbied to save hers. I couldn’t let her win. I couldn’t let her destroy me.

  Her ankle was right in front of my face as she called me every foul name in the book. I did the first thing I could think of. I lifted my head and sank my teeth into her dirty flesh.

  “You bitch!” she cried, trying to yank her leg away.

  My hand grabbed her other foot and yanked it forward. I let go of her completely as she fell backward, landing hard on her back. I crawled on top of her, a hatred burning in my gut that almost scared me. She started clawing at me, and I grabbed her face. She bit my fingers, and I let go, punching her in the face with my other hand.

  It didn’t feel hard enough.

  I screamed and punched her again. My knuckles cracked her face for the third time and she let up. I got to my feet and kicked her in the stomach like she did to me.

  I lost count of how many times I hit her. I finally stopped, my throat hoarse from yelling. She was coughing up blood, holding her stomach with bruised fingers. She was on her side, and I saw the gun handle. I quickly reached down and grabbed it. I stood over her, aiming right at her head.

  “India, don’t!” I didn’t even look at Oliver. I was too focused on her, thinking about all the ways she’d ruined life on New Earth for everyone.

  “You kill her like this you’ll be no better than she is,” Oliver said, his voice smooth and steady despite his injury.

  Verona looked up at me and smiled with red stained teeth. “You don’t have the balls to kill me,” she said. “I’ll have fun coming back here to kill you and the rest of your greedy ass tribe.”

  She’s not going to stop if I let her live. How much of a hypocrite am I? I’d told my father that killing people was not the answer. Yet here I was with a gun in my hand, ready to pull the trigger. Was that how the man in the forest felt when he fired the first shot? They didn’t teach me this in training. As an officer, I wasn’t prepared to make this type of decision.

  I was the leader here. I had to make the tough call, the one that others wouldn’t have the balls to make.

  Keeping the gun steady on her, I yanked her up to her feet by her hair. I spun her and her smiling face around and dug the barrel of the gun into the back of her neck. “Walk!” I yelled. I escorted her past Oliver, who sat up against the wall, holding his bleeding arm, to the cell he’d sat in all that time.

  “Go all the way to the wall and don’t even think about turning around,” I said.

  She didn’t move, starting to laugh as if this was some type of game. In the half a minute it took me to move the gun away from her neck to a few inches away from her ear, I fired a shot into the wall. She ducked down, covering her ears.

  “Move!” I ordered again, pointing my weapon back at her.

  She walked to the wall, and I kept my gun steady on her as I punched in the key code to close the cell with my free hand.

  When the cell door slammed shut she ran to the glass. “You idiot!” she yelled. “You’re both going to die!”

  “Shut up!” I banged on the glass, making her flinch.

  “If I don’t come up those stairs my men will shoot you on sight. Neither one of you is making it out of here alive.”

  Chapter 14

  I helped Oliver to his feet and away from Verona laughing hysterically in her cell. It was unnerving, but I couldn’t let that get to me. This fight wasn’t over. She had a gang of people up there with no desire to see me breathing. My only saving grace was Oliver, who would bleed out if he didn’t get medical attention.

  “You have to go up there and talk those people down,” I said to him, and he nodded.

  “My thoughts exactly. I can get them to leave this place without harming anyone else.”

  I let go of him, and he leaned back on the wall behind him. “You can’t leave!”

  He cocked his head to the side. “Did you think this would end any other way?”

  I wanted to pull my braids out. “They killed dozens of innocent people! They bombed our home.”

  “It’s unfortunate. But we will not subject ourselves to a jurisdiction that would’ve done the same to us had we not attacked first.”

  I took a few
steps back from him. “You planned this, didn’t you?”

  He shook his head. “No! I would never resort to this type of violence. Yet here we are. For better or worse, you nor anyone else here are in a position to make any of us stay and face your punishment.”

  I ran my fingers through my braids, pacing in front of him, trying to find the words to describe what I was feeling. Disbelief. Betrayal. Embarrassment. Anger. The only word that tumbled out of my mouth was, “Bullshit!”

  “I don’t want to see anyone else die here. I will get my people to go home and leave you in peace.”

  “For how long? Who’s to say that you won’t come back here to get her and finish the job?”

  He looked down at her cell and then back at me. “Give me the code. I’ll have my armed men take her with us.”

  I pointed the gun at him. I didn’t care how many times he’d saved my life, I was not letting that animal out of her cage. “Over my dead body.”

  “That may well be the case if we don’t give my people up there something in return for leaving.”

  How did this happen? How did I go from being the bigger person to being the biggest fool all at the same time?

  “I know this isn’t the ideal situation—”

  “You people will stop at nothing to screw us! I advocated for you—to my father and even to the man that mad woman of yours killed! I made the case that you were peaceful people who deserved a chance to be heard.”

  Oliver looked at his feet and then up at me. “In a perfect world that would be more than I could ever ask for. I asked for the chance to settle this amicably. My people were shot to death. I saved your life. I ended up in a cell. I saved your life again and here you are pointing a gun at me.”