by Oliver Higgs
Just like one giant rat …
I move quickly and quietly, grab the board without touching the wires. I approach the bed from behind, holding the partial trap so the nails are facing down. My muscles are so tense I can barely breathe. Echo’s pants are off. She has nothing on underneath. The curve of her bare thighs registers in some part of my mind. Behind me, Lectric lets out a whine. Ballard is undoing his own belt when he finally senses danger. He half-turns–
–as I slam the nails into the back of his neck.
Ballard’s back arches. His upper body goes rigid as a burst of electricity lances through him. He jerks sideways, rolling into the wall beside the bed. The board is ripped from my hands. It bounces off the mattress and clatters to the floor, nails bloody and smoking. I scramble for the leather holster. My hands are slow, clunky. Echo rolls off the bed. I’ve got the pistol. I fumble for the safety–is it off? Is it?
Ballard’s reaching into his jacket-
Oh God, a second gun! He’s pulling it free. He’s going to kill me. His eyes are wide. His mouth is moving in slow motion. My finger is squeezing the trigger. Again. Again. It’s an old-fashioned weapon, the kind that shoots bullets, but there’s barely any recoil.
Then it’s over.
There’s blood spattered across the wall behind him. His pants are wet. I’m watching his arm, still expecting him to pull out the weapon. My own hand is shaking.
“Is he dead?”
I have to ask three times before I realize I’m shouting. Why won’t Echo answer? Or did she answer already? Yes, of course he’s dead. I shot him in the face. Body armor didn’t help. I slap his jacket-flap aside, planning to take the second gun, but I can’t find it. Did it fall? No. Then it hits me: there is no second gun.
Is that possible? He was trying to draw it and shoot. But there’s nothing. What the hell was he reaching for? I saw his arm move. This is his fault. He shouldn’t even be here.
Echo’s hands are on my face. Trying to soothe me? I look at her. Shouldn’t she be mad? Wasn’t that her boyfriend? Absurdly, she’s still naked from the waist down. Lectric is barking madly, scurrying around us.
“Tristan,” she whispers. “Tristan.”
She tries to open my hand to take the gun but I won’t let it go, partly because I’ve just killed someone, but partly because I don’t fully trust it in anyone else’s hands. Her blue eyes fill the world. There are tears on her cheeks, but her face is serious, controlled, and then she says it:
“We have to kill the others too. It’s the only way.”
Chapter 4.
Her words don’t register for a moment. Kill the others?
Oh, right. Fin and Cabal. They’ll be back, and they aren’t going to take this lightly. Take this lightly? A tiny compartment of my brain wants to laugh hysterically. Yeah, they’ll shrug it off. It’ll be fine.
Echo is right, of course. She’s thinking while my own thoughts haven’t taken one step beyond the shooting. I try to kick-start my brain.
“You’re right. They’ll hear the shots. They’ll come run-”
“It wasn’t loud enough,” Echo interrupts.
Again, she’s right. The gun has a suppressor. Fin’s did too. After all, if Foundry’s scouts have to kill someone, they may want to do it without alerting half the countryside. Still, the others will be back as soon as they’ve dealt with the roamer. They’ve already been gone a little while.
“How are you here? I thought you were dead,” I say.
“Me? I thought you were–no. Listen. We’ll talk later. There’s no time now.”
“Right. We need to leave,” I say. This is my home but I can’t think about that now.
Echo shakes her head sadly.
“We can’t. Not yet. Cabal and Fin will be back soon. If we leave, they’ll come after us. They may come right away. They may wait for the army. Either way, they’ll hunt us down. And the fact is they’re better than us. They’ll kill us. Tristan. We can’t leave them alive.”
Her lip trembles, her voice threatens to break, but her eyes are deadly serious.
Aren’t they your friends? I want to ask, but now isn’t the time. I nod.
Echo looks at Ballard’s body. She closes her eyes and blocks something out, some memory perhaps, or a whole string of them. She takes a deep breath.
“I need you to move his body. We don’t want them to see it through the window,” she says. Ballard’s body possesses hidden weight. I drag him heavily off the bed, across the room and through a doorway, leaving him out of sight. Volume Seven is still on the floor. I stuff it into my pack and strap the pack back on, fumbling for a moment because I can’t stop shaking. When I’m done, Echo is crouched by the window with my crossbow, peering out.
The sight of the weapon gives me pause. I’ve been living alone in a lawless wasteland for three years. It’s not easy for me to trust someone with a weapon, even if that someone is Annabel Lee, the girl who waits in the desert. She’s found the bolts with the supply pack and is figuring out how to load them.
“We’d better trade. I’ve never used one of these,” she says.
We trade weapons. My crossbow’s familiar grip gives me comfort. Echo presses a button on the side of the gun.
“This is a machine-pistol, you know. Fully automatic. You had it in semi.”
“Oh.”
I don’t know much about guns. Echo has apparently learned some things in her travels. I’m still not thinking clearly. The past few minutes are stuck in a loop in my head, subjected to ceaseless analysis for internal absorption. The brain is reprogramming itself, trying to make things right with the world.
Echo says we should ambush them as they walk through the door. They won’t be expecting it. She keeps watch through a corner of the window while I kneel ten feet from the door. Now and then there’s a sound outside. Lectric shifts nervously nearby. I forgot he was even here. I have to keep telling myself not to pull the trigger until I see them. And don’t miss. Aim, shoot, don’t miss. Forget about Ballard’s face, the way his left eye came out of the socket as the bullet passed through.
“I see them. They’re coming. They’re together,” Echo whispers. A long minute passes. She backs slowly away from the window, settling down on my right. From this position I still have enough room to shoot, and Echo is virtually guaranteed to hit, especially with an automatic weapon. The odds are stacked in our favor, yet we’re nervous as hell. What if they sense something’s wrong? I can’t hold my hands steady.
Why is this happening to me?
Stop thinking. Aim, shoot. Don’t run. Kill. Conan would do it without a second thought. I just want to be elsewhere. Lectric decides to hide beneath the desk. It was like something from a comic book, Ballard’s eye popping out.
Cabal’s girlish laughter interrupts my thoughts. Something flutters in the cauldron of my guts. Echo gives me a terrified glance. Fin and Cabal are talking as they approach. Some joke has been made–their last. The door opens and Fin is a few steps ahead, a smile departing, a trace of humor fading from his face. He has a split second to register surprise as my bolt penetrates his chest. A burst of gunfire peppers the doorway, making little puffs of smoke as debris shoots out of the wall around it. A red flower blooms in Fin’s neck even as he’s knocked off his feet by the sheer force of the bolt. Cabal is already diving out of sight behind him.
Echo runs forward, shooting. I load another bolt. She takes a step outside, firing, but gasps and reverses directions in a hurry. A shotgun blast eats a chunk out of the doorway, almost taking her head off. Splinters are lodged in her hair. She screams a curse, blue eyes shut tight.
I flatten myself against the wall on the left side of the door, glimpsing Cabal behind a boulder outside. Fin is convulsing on the ground, holding his neck, one boot-heel rhythmically scraping the doorway. Echo slinks to the window on her right, near the bed. Outside, Cabal is moving, scrambling. Echo’s machine-pistol sends a quick burst through the window.
“Got him!” sh
e exults, but when I leave the wall she waves me back. “Stay inside. I don’t know if it went through.”
If what went through? I wonder before remembering Cabal is wearing some kind of armored jacket. Echo peers out and flinches back as a shotgun bites the window-frame. Fin’s twitches slow like the hands of a dying clock. He reminds me of a fish flopping on dry land. The death rattle comes.
Cabal screams at us, says he’s going to kill us. This is hard to ignore because it’s a real possibility. I ponder the likelihood of dying here. Am I ready for it? No. But I have to be, just in case. It feels important.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“Behind that wall,” Echo says. She’s biting her lip, thinking, worrying–how can we get him? He has better cover now, a crumbling three-foot wall fifteen feet from the building. I peer out through the door. He pops up briefly for a look but I don’t have a shot. Maybe Echo can keep him pinned while I go out back and circle around.
“Echo-”
A metal cylinder bounces through the door, red light blinking. Gluefire.
I’m running at Echo. A shotgun blast comes through the open door in my wake. I tackle Echo low so that we roll beneath the window as a second shot passes overhead. We hit the side of the mattress. I reach over and flip it on top of us, angled to shield us from the place we just left. The gluefire detonates, washing the room in a sticky mass of burning tar. Everything is instantly on fire. It’s Cabal’s best chance to finish us.
I push the burning mattress up and shove it against the open window, grab Echo’s wrist and pull her toward the back hallway, avoiding the molten tar. A shotgun blast hits the mattress. Cabal’s probably a foot outside the building now, taking advantage of the distraction, knowing he’s got the advantage. As soon as that mattress tips, he’ll have us. As it does, Echo sends a scattered burst at the window. It gives him pause–there’s no shotgun poking in, but another gluefire grenade bounces into the room just as we reach the hallway.
Something’s missing.
“Lectric!” I shout. I’m terrified that he’s already dead. But somehow he comes scrambling after us, unharmed, and I remember him cowering beneath the desk.
“Good boy.”
We pass the ladder leading up to my room and head down the hall to the place where the floor collapsed. The second grenade goes off behind us. Cabal’s probably running to cover the rear exit. Yet there’s something he doesn’t know.
I pause at the edge of the sewer.
“Reach into my pack. Get the flashlight.”
She finds it. We descend. The beam bobs as we jog through the wet, cramped, rat-infested sewers, heavy breath echoing in the darkness. Monsters, here we come. The air is thick with moisture and rancid odors. I pull Echo left at the first intersection, leading her through a maze of tunnels. I can’t say how far we go. Half a mile maybe, mostly west. Then we hit a dead-end with a ladder leading up to a half-covered hole.
I’ve been here before. In my paranoia and boredom of days past, I’ve explored these sewers for miles around, noting possible escape routes should I meet with another Complete Disaster. Which is pretty much what this is.
Three years in the Library–gone. But now isn’t the time for self-pity. I need to avoid thinking and feeling and remembering. I climb up, carrying Lectric under one arm. Echo follows. We’re in the middle of a broken street, hemmed in by the rubble of collapsed buildings. Cabal is nowhere in sight.
Echo curses. Her eyes grow wild. She starts rambling suddenly about how we should have finished him and he’s going to come after us, and he may get help from Foundry because we killed two of their people. Cabal terrifies her. I think that was true even before today.
“Annabel!” I exclaim, seizing her by her upper arms.
The name jolts her. She flinches as if she’s been hit.
“Annabel Lee,” I say more quietly. She looks up at me as though I’ve said something terrible, and maybe I have. The name is a light piercing the darkness where she hides the things that hurt her. It’s a boulder that starts an avalanche. Tears come, and they don’t stop. She stands there shaking, crying, neither moving away nor drawing closer. Lectric senses her distress and stands on two legs, whining.
“Oh God,” she whispers, and cries more, her muscles rigid with feelings I don’t fully understand. I don’t know whether to hug her or let her go. I mean, I’ve just lost my home, but the change is bigger for her. She did just help kill what appeared to be her boyfriend. I’m not sure if she did it for me or herself or both, and I can’t say why she did it at all. I have no idea what’s happened to her in the past three years, let alone the past hour. Whatever it was, it’s over now, and a new path has been chosen. Some changes take a lot of tears.
Slowly, her head tilts forward until it touches my chest, but still I don’t actually hug her. I’m afraid to move. She sobs in relative silence until the sobbing becomes breathing and dissolves further into almost complete stillness. Finally she lifts her head, wipes her cheeks, and licks her lips.
“We can’t stay here. Fin’s a better tracker than Cabal, but the army will be here tomorrow, and he’ll have help. We need to go, or we need to hide,” Echo says.
“How many are coming?”
“It’s an army, Tristan. The Black Baron wants Cove.”
“The Black Baron?”
“Tristan! We can’t waste any time here.”
“Okay, okay, just let me think. Foundry is to the south, right? Cove is west. Why are they even passing through these ruins?”
“West of Foundry is a barren desert. They’re following New Sea north to stay close to water, but Cove is almost straight west from here, so here is where they’ll turn.”
“And if we go north?”
Echo closes her eyes and pinches the place between them, shaking her head. She doesn’t want to think or talk any more. She wants to be somewhere else, or someone else. Then she heaves a deep breath and looks at me.
“Unless you know somewhere to hide for a few days, north is our only option,” she says. “Cabal will know that too. He’ll come after us. But what else can we do? The army will head west. They’re not going to delay for a few–a few dead scouts. We weren’t even officially part of the army, more of a mercenary group. But Studebaker–that’s who Ballard reports to–Studebaker will see this as an attack on Foundry, and officers have a duty to protect their troops. He’ll give Cabal whatever he needs to catch us.”
So we run or we hide. There are places to hide. Plenty of little cubbies and niches in the sprawling ruins. But how long will we have to stay in one? We’ll need water for at least a few days, and with so many soldiers spreading through the ruins, we’ll have no chance to gather more if the army lingers. Even if they move out immediately, there’s a fair chance we’ll be found, especially if they have some variation of those spider-like recon bots Cove uses.
If we’re not found, I could eventually return home–but how long until the army comes back from Cove, or Cove’s army comes for Foundry, or Cabal returns to check the Library? Will I ever feel safe again? No. I want to go back but I can’t. Even with no one around, the Library will never be the same. I don’t want to admit it, but deep down I already know that part of my life is over.
“We’ll go north,” I say. Echo’s face says many things. Her voice says nothing. We set out circling west-northwest, giving the Library a wide berth. Lectric trots along behind us. I’ve never been very far north, but I know what lies that way as surely as Echo does. From New Sea to the Rockies, maybe even beyond: the z-line. Toyota never did tell me how he made it through. I pray we won’t need to–but where else will we go?
It’s not a question for the present. Our world has narrowed to the next moment, the next mile. We watch the east for signs of Cabal and hold our weapons ready, stumbling over the fallen homes and scattered bones of the resting dead.
Chapter 5.
We don’t dare stop at night. It’s an easy decision to make and a hard one to carry out. The logic is s
imple: we need to get as much of a head-start as possible before Cabal comes after us. The reality is more complex: as soon as we circle the Library and head north along Big Road, I want nothing more than to lie down in a dark corner and forget my entire existence.
Life was never easy in the ruins, or even in Farmington, but I never personally had to kill anyone. Now I’ve killed two people. I can’t focus on anything else. Their lives ended because of me. Shouldn’t I feel bad? All I feel is a numb. I stumble over cracks as we walk. Echo’s eyes are glazed. We’re both exhausted.
When I try to think of something else, Cabal is the only thing that comes to mind. He’ll likely wait for the army before coming after us. When we don’t emerge from the Library, he’ll assume we died in the fire. He’ll have to wait for it to burn down before he can search the ashes. It’ll take time to realize we took to the sewers, and there’s simply no way for him to track us down there.
When he can’t find us and we don’t attack, he’ll know we’re either running or hiding. In both cases, he’ll be better off waiting for the army. Then he can get better supplies and maybe a horse, and the army can search for us in the ruins. After I mention my conclusion to Echo, trudging along the road near sundown, she looks at me like I just told her the most obvious thing in the world.
“Of course he’ll wait. The army can’t be more than a day away,” she says.
“Maybe they’ll just write us off. I mean, maybe the army will want everyone they can for the march west, and they won’t want to waste any supplies or manpower on us.”
“No. I told you, Studebaker can’t just let it go, and neither can Cabal. Cabal’s not exactly loyal to Foundry. He was loyal to Ballard. They grew up in the same town. Not that Cabal liked him. He respected Ballard, I think, but he was jealous too. Ballard was smarter, a better leader, but Cabal is cruel in a clever kind of way. I think if Ballard had to die, Cabal would’ve wanted to be the one to kill him.”
