She just stared at him and his face hardened. “Up on your feet now, Sergeant. That’s a direct order.”
Picking herself up, she staggered forward, Hayden shadowing her, clutching her forearm. “Now is not the time for weepy scenes, Quinn.”
“It’s all over,” she whispered.
“The hell it is,” he barked back. “We’re still alive aren’t we? It’s like we always say. Long as you’re still grooving, you got a chance.”
“To do what?”
“What is it that we do best?” Hayden asked.
“Cause mischief, Gunny.”
“Goddamn right. And as long as I got a breath in this body, we are going to bring hell down upon the aliens. We owe it to the fallen, to the ones that can no longer speak for themselves.”
Quinn nodded in agreement. The Syndicate was responsible for everything that had happened to her. Even if she no longer had the ability to change the past, she could impact the future. While she wasn’t sure if they were the ultimate enemy anymore, they had damn sure caused enough destruction and sorrow to deserve the ass kicking of a lifetime. Ass kicking, followed by painful death.
She could still strike a blow and make them pay for what they’d done.
At a look from Riot, she couldn’t help but wonder if something was up. Finally, Riot leaned in and whispered, “I don’t think all of us plan on sticking around very long.”
Quinn frowned. “You’d leave us? At a time like this?”
“It’s not that…”
“No, I get it,” Giovanni interjected. “We need to find out what happened, like me with Luke, I gotta know.”
Riot nodded. “That’s all it is. Then we regroup, get the band back together and bring the thunder.”
Quinn swallowed, trying to process that likely half of their group wanted to wander off in different directions, but still she nodded. “When the time’s right, say the word. I don’t like it, but… I get it.”
If there was a chance her Samantha was alive out there, she would want to go find her as well. And who knows, maybe Luke and the others would have a massive army waiting to help them deliver the final blow.
Not likely, but a girl can hope.
Glancing over to see they were done, Hayden gestured at Barrows. “We’re gonna need a place to lie low for a spell, boss.”
A quizzical look gripped Barrows’ face. “Hold up. You crash a space ship in my backyard, steal my weapon, and now you want me to hide your sorry asses from the scuds?”
Hayden nodded.
“What’s in it for me?”
Hayden strode forward and confronted Barrows. He was five inches taller and outweighed him by forty pounds. “I won’t beat your ass for pulling a gun on us to begin with, that’s what’s in it for you.”
Barrows registered this, swallowing hard. “Yeah. Okay. Sounds good to me.”
The woods soon gave way to a grassy knoll that rose up over Anacostia proper, providing a fog-shrouded view of the surroundings. Beyond a fringe of trees and bushes were a cluster of low-slung buildings and after that, ghostly stands of what had once been single-family homes and rowhouses connected by sections of blacktop. Most of the homes were charred shells and bore the telltale signs of having been stripped of usable materials at some point in the past. The ground was cratered all around, littered with chunks of brick and building materials, clothing and forgotten furniture. Abandoned cars lay in piles that were being used as dens by packs of emaciated, stray animals that trotted out to greet the strangers.
“This was a resistance stronghold a few years back,” Barrows said softly. “Some hardcore mofo’s used to kick it right here. They had the whole place cookin’, everywhere between V Street and Morris Road.”
“And now?” Quinn asked.
“Not so much.”
Barrows moved ahead and Quinn and the others paused, huddling.
“What’s the good word?” Milo asked.
Quinn looked to Hayden who gestured at Barrows. “I think we need to follow him.”
“And I’m thinking we need to have a serious sit down here,” Milo offered.
“I second that,” Giovanni said.
Quinn arched an eyebrow. “Give me one good reason why we should spend time talking.”
“Because we just crashed in a fucking time ship, Quinn, and we’ve got Renner over there with a goddamn metal hand and nobody’s told me why that is.”
Renner held up his prosthetic limb for all to see. Quinn took in the stares of the others. “Okay, fine,” she said. “You wanna know what happened, I’ll tell you what happened. We had a little incident up in the time ship.”
“Understatement of the millennium,” Milo answered, some heat in his voice. “How about you give us some real answers.”
“I don’t have any answers,” Quinn fired back. “All I know is that Renner and me woke up on a frozen Earth.”
Giovanni’s eyes went wide. “How the hell did it freeze?”
“The aliens took the sun away.”
Milo wasn’t buying it. He kicked at the ground and shook his head. “Listen, the Syndicate has some serious abilities, but there’s no way in hell they took the sun away.”
“It wasn’t the Syndicate. There’s something else out there, okay? We’ve heard it before and I saw it. Whether you want to call it a force or a power, all I know is me and Renner got trapped in a parallel world where this other power kicked the shit out of the Syndicate and stole the fucking sun.”
Everyone stared at each other in slack-jawed silence, trying to process this. Finally, Giovanni spoke up. “In mine, I mean, there were multiple versions, but at the end, I saw the Potentate.”
“And?” Quinn asked.
“He was in this command center with all these screens that showed various cities around the world that he was monitoring, but when we breached the room, ready to kill him, he simply asked if you were dead, and then said it wasn’t right, it wasn’t the time.”
“Because I was or wasn’t dead?”
Giovanni scrunched his nose, giving Quinn the answer she didn’t like. Her having died in any of these timelines or loops, or alternate universes, whatever they were, didn’t sit right.
“What the fuck does me being dead have to do with the right timing?” she asked.
“It wasn’t just you. You and Sam both had to be alive, it seemed to me.”
“Maybe you’re integral to this whole thing, somehow?” Cody said.
“I mean,” Giovanni interjected, “if you die, whatever’s happening gets reset.”
“Bullshit.” Quinn scoffed. “I might as well kill myself right now then and reset this whole thing, so that you all don’t have to live in this hell-hole.”
“Unless every alternative is worse,” Giovanni pointed out.
She glared at him, wanting to say that it was already hell, that Sam was gone, and that therefore it couldn’t be worse. But she knew that wasn’t true, not for them, anyway.
“Who’s up for voting for no more questions?” Renner asked, apparently seeing the look in her eyes.
Quinn held Milo’s look. “How ‘bout it? Anymore questions?”
“Just one,” a tremulous voice said. “Where the hell are we?”
All eyes swung sideways to see Cody. He was standing uneasily, his eyes glassy, his expression as blank as spilled milk.
17
Reunited
Quinn rushed toward Cody, who folded in her arms. He was cold and limp, his breathing ragged. Hugging him close, Quinn felt his back stiffen and then he eased back, able to stand on his own. She moved to embrace him again and he held up a hand to stop her advance. His head canted and for a moment it looked as if he was in a trance.
“What? What is it?” Quinn asked.
“They know we’re here,” Cody mumbled, his eyes flashing open. “We need to go. Now.”
Quinn spun and spotted a cluster of machines in the air. They appeared to be several miles away, but were moving over the terrain they’d just
traversed. Barrows was waving his hands, motioning for them to follow.
Quinn grabbed Cody’s hand. She had a million questions for him, but now was not the time. Instead, she led him and the others to the brow of a hill, which looked down over what had once been a busy highway. The highway had apparently been bombed at some point in the past. The spine of the structure was all that was left, providing a kind of partial cover for an immense series of tents and shacks, a shantytown, a favela that backed toward the edge of a lake, and stretched in every other direction as far as the eye could see.
“The scuds flooded the river and covered up what used to be Anacostia Park back in the day,” Barrows said, gesturing at the lake. “Now it’s just a place for refugees to coop and dealers to sling Sunshine. The ‘hood. The barrio. Locals call it ‘Dog Patch.’”
The word “Sunshine” arrested Quinn’s attention as Milo asked, “How come the Syndicate hasn’t destroyed it?”
Barrows swung a look in his direction. “Cause it ain’t worth wasting a bomb.”
Barrows did a double-take upon seeing Cody. Then he gestured to Quinn and the others. “We gonna need to do something about that,” he said, pointing to their armor. I don’t care who you are. You walk around Dog Patch in that shit, you’re gonna get dimed.”
Barrows turned and starting hunting through the piles of clothing, much of it soiled or sodden or slathered in grime. He began tossing clothes to everyone.
In minutes, everyone was concealed in ragged, blood-stained clothing. Then Barrows jogged forward and began tearing sections of cloth from a set of bed sheets that were tangled around an overturned bus. He moved back and handed a strip of the fabric to everyone.
“Best cover up your faces from here on out,” he said. “The scuds are like God. They got eyes and ears everywhere.”
Quinn and the others looked like a delegation of Third World freedom fighters as they angled down a hillside, faces concealed, moving in a ragged line under what had once been the Anacostia Freeway.
They crossed between a section of derelict apartment buildings, the walls tagged with graffiti. Below this, lodged in one of the building’s walls, was what appeared to be the remains of a small alien drone. The exterior was rusted and spray-painted in yellow with a strange symbol, what looked like the letter z turned on its side with a dagger through the middle of it. Quinn had seen the symbol before, back up on the hill, tagged on a number of cars and deserted houses.
“What’s that?” Quinn asked, gesturing at the symbol.
“That ain’t none of your concern,” Barrows replied, not breaking stride.
Soon, the group could see the barrio on the other side of the structure, where thousands of people were milling around. Smoke from hundreds of open fires mixed with fog, dropping visibility to a hundred feet.
The air was putrid, filled with the competing odors of torched garbage and grilled meat. Quinn watched a Syndicate patrol slice past on something she hadn’t seen before, what appeared to be a tandem motorcycle wedged between a circular piece of metal lined with rotor-blades that were spinning furiously, keeping the contraption aloft.
There were three such machines visible in the distance and they were close enough for Quinn to see that they held two scud soldiers, a trooper up front who appeared to be navigating, and a second figure behind him who was draped over a surveillance device and what looked like a snub-nosed Parallax rifle.
“Hoversurfs,” Barrows said, angling his chin in the direction of the bikes. “Scuds use ‘em all over the place now to keep watch on people.”
Quinn and the others shielded their faces, blending in with the crowd to avoid attention. They moved toward a crude fence that wreathed the barrio, and a main gate that was manned by two bulky men garbed in old school flack-jackets who were holding mini-sledge hammers. The guards held up their hands and Quinn watched Barrows trudge forward.
Barrows forced a smile and mouthed words to the guards that Quinn couldn’t discern. The conversation grew heated, Barrows gesturing wildly. Then he lowered his rucksack and the guards fished inside, plucking out several pieces of jewelry that they stuffed into their pockets. And then a final indignity as one of the guards pointed to Barrows’s pork pie hat. Barrows reluctantly handed it over, then waved a hand to Quinn and the others, motioning for them to advance.
Quinn padded forward, keeping her head low. She walked alongside Barrows who grumbled. “You better be grateful. I just paid the cover for you and your people … and I lost my favorite hat.”
“We’ll get you another hat,” Quinn replied.
“You guys are killing me. Taking money out of my pocket, food out of my kids’ mouths.”
“You’ve got kids?”
“No, but if I did, they’d be starving,” Barrows said.
Barrows quickened his pace, waving to passersby of all ages and ethnicities. Quinn reckoned from the greetings that he was well-known in the refugee camp, although she noted just as many icy looks cast in Barrows’s direction along with a few expletives hurled his way. The group trekked between clots of tents and large structures built from scrap. They slogged by women with garishly painted faces, groups of children singing nursery rhymes, people hawking food, and men clutching Bibles, shrieking about the end times which, from all appearances, had already come.
“How often do the scuds come?” Quinn asked Barrows.
“They leave us be mostly,” Barrows answered. “Every once in a while they’ll send their familiars down, humans that work for ‘em. They fly by on their hoversurfs, dick around for a bit, and shake some people down, but pretty much they keep to themselves.”
“I meant where are they physically,” she said.
Barrows stopped and stared at the sky. As if on cue, a stiff breeze blew, flapping a nearby tent. Pushing some of the fog away for an instant. That’s when Quinn saw it.
The Syndicate fortress. A structure that seemed as large as ten city blocks. Defying gravity, suspended in the air off in the distance. Hovering over what was left of Washington, D.C.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
Down below the fortress, somehow beamed into the air, were holographic images of a gruesome visage.
A man she’d encountered before.
A man whose face appeared to have been partially burned off.
18
William Rane
The man formerly known as William Rane was strapped to a translucent chair in a medical bay inside the Syndicate’s floating fortress. His eyes studied the silver objects on the instrument tray while watching a series of alien medics pore over his body, inspecting this, prodding that, removing samples of tissue or fluids when necessary.
Once a month he would come here for a form of neural engineering that allowed for the repair of the central nervous system. Rane had been severely injured in battle and the conditioning was designed to both extend and improve the quality of his life. He had things to live for now. He was an important man after all, the Viceroy, the Potentate’s hand-picked overseer. The de-facto ruler of Earth.
An alien medic swabbed Rane’s arm, preparing to take a blood sample. He closed his eyes, wincing, remembering that terrible day on the bridge six years earlier.
The sound he heard that day, the one where he nearly exited this world, was the same one babies hear when they’re brought into it: screams of agony. Rane hadn’t actually crossed over of course, he hadn’t died, but he felt as if he had. After confronting the female Marine named Quinn on the godforsaken bridge in Wyoming, he’d lost the fight and half of his face. A serendipitous plunge through a hole in the bridge was the only thing that had saved his life.
The frigid water had snuffed out the flames ravaging his face, restarted his heart, and given him the energy to ride the rapids downstream to safety. Even though he struggled to focus purely on what lay ahead, there wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t remember what had transpired.
He remembered the excruciating pain of the burning, the funk of charred fle
sh, and the days of woe that came after it. The ones where he, blinded by rage, stalked the wilderness like some Old Testament prophet for an indeterminate period of time. Then, after finding a way to harness the pain and anger, he returned to his small congregation of scavengers and began leading them against the resistance and the Syndicate (both of whom he blamed for his hardship). He was an equal opportunity killer and as his small army grew, he drew the attention of the Potentate who marveled at the ability of the former judge to orchestrate the obliteration of one of his elite sweeping teams on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado.
The Potentate had tracked Rane and personally picked the small team that ambushed him on a highway in northern New Mexico. After his entire team was killed, Rane was captured and brought before the Potentate on the command ship and forced to kneel before him.
Rane would endure one final harrowing as his mind was plumbed and then reformatted by one of the Syndicate’s top depatterning physicians. Rane soon became the Potentate’s top lieutenant (replacing the late General Aames), and eventually was given a new title. Rane had asked to simply be called the “Judge,” but the Potentate thought something slightly more exotic would be appropriate, and so he was given the title “Viceroy” and placed in charge of all alien ground operations.
Some of the Syndicate upper echelon, including the mysterious woman named Marin, had suggested that Rane change his appearance, that he undergo surgery to conceal the horrific scarring on his face and make his appearance more palatable. The Potentate disagreed, reminding everyone how easy it was to manipulate the human psyche. Since Rane would be ruling over those on the ground, better that they learn to fear him. Accordingly, his appearance remained unchanged and an elaborate backstory was concocted to take advantage of Rane’s visage, a legend revolving around a campaign he waged as a guerrilla fighter for the resistance and the Syndicate bases he’d helped destroy out west, the very same ones that had actually been atomized by the daughter of Quinn.
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