by D. J. Molles
“How close are we?” Getty asked.
“Five blocks,” Walter answered. They could see the red light blinking in the sky, even as dawn washed the darkness out of it. The spire of the network hub lifted blackly into the sky like a needle.
“Let’s get closer,” Getty advised. “Then wait for Bobbi.”
They agreed by saying nothing, and Walter took them out again.
A few times, a flight of gunships roared overhead. They didn’t take the time to look at markings—were they Fed or Chicom or Russian?—they just dove when they heard the rotors bearing down, and they squashed themselves into overhangs and rubble and gutters and underneath trucks that had been left in the road. Anything that would keep them from being seen.
The flights passed over.
Always, after about ten seconds, they would hear their guns open up. First the rumble-saw sound in bursts, and then the thunderous tremble of thirty explosive rounds striking within a fraction of a second of each other.
By fits and starts and fast-beating hearts, the three of them made it to within two blocks of the network hub. The sandstone buildings around them were in surprisingly pristine shape, as though the fighting hadn’t reached this area.
Still no civilians on the streets, and the smell of things burning still wafted from other areas less lucky.
From where they were, they could no longer see the spire of the network hub, but Walter knew that it was two blocks ahead. Two blocks west. Just a few more minutes of walking. Less, if they ran, which they probably would, and though he was tired, his legs were beginning to numb themselves to the task of it even as they ached and griped.
With the three of them huddled in the inset door of a garage, Getty keyed his comms. “Bobbi, how’s it lookin’?”
Bobbi’s response came through in Walter’s ear: “Making my way to the top of the building now. Haven’t seen anyone. Just trying to find a good view of the hub.”
Getty nodded. “Copy. Let us know.”
Walter peered out at the world around him.
He was suddenly struck by the strange duality of his environs, like two realities had suddenly meshed and he was seeing them both at once. Like having two pictures, one in front of each eye.
This was not his Town Center.
It hadn’t seemed like it, not from the point that he’d arrived, when it was still dark, and the gradual unveiling through the dawn’s light hadn’t changed that perspective. He knew consciously that it was the same place, that these were the same streets he’d walked, the same shops he’d gone in and out of to find this spare part of that tool. He knew it, and yet he didn’t know it. His heart didn’t know it, and it was because this place looked nothing at all like his Town Center.
His Town Center had never smelled so much like smoke. It had never been so devoid of workers. It had never been crumbling and on fire. Its sky had never been clotted with black smoke or crisscrossed with white contrails. It had never existed alongside the soundtrack of explosions and gunships and small arms fire.
This was not his Town Center.
And yet, suddenly, he was looking across this quiet corner of it, and his angle underneath the overhang blocked the smoke-muddied sky, and a gust of wind freshened the air, and none of the buildings in this area had been fought over, not bombed or pock-marked by bullets. This street was not strange. This street was a part of him. It was his home.
Had he ever cowered in this entryway?
No. He had walked through it and passed it a time or two. But he had never taken cover in it.
Had he ever been here with fear in his heart?
No. He had always been busy with the mundanity of his life.
Had he ever stood on this street with a gun in his hand, with comrades packed in close behind him, and knowing that this was the day they were going to die, but that they were going to go anyways, that they were going to make a helluva push, that they weren’t going to give up?
Of course not.
The alien and the familiar, suddenly becoming one.
It was a disorienting sensation.
It came and went like the first smell of fall.
He shook his head to clear it.
“You okay?” Getty asked.
“Yes.”
Getty had his pack of cigarettes out. He lit one. Extended the pack to Walter. Walter considered, then shook his head. He suddenly didn’t feel terribly great. The sun was coming in now, between the buildings. A great, big, clear yellow swatch of it. And it gave him a sense of foreboding where there should have been appreciation.
Didn’t things like this always happen on beautiful days?
Of course they did.
He couldn’t remember a dark and stormy day when bad things had happened.
They had always been on pleasant days, pleasant evenings, pleasant mornings like this.
Blue skies had the power to terrify him.
He inclined his ear to a low rumble. “You hear that?”
Getty squinted through smoke. “Hm?”
Walter leaned out of the overhang a little farther. It wasn’t the sound of gunships. He looked first right—west, towards their objective—and then left.
Then he jerked back, swearing at himself and wondering how dumb he was that he couldn’t place that sound, the sound he’d been hearing since he was a child. After seeing it, it became so monumentally obvious that he was shocked at himself.
He slapped the cigarette out of Getty’s hand. “Get down! Everyone down!”
The entrance to the shop was not only recessed, but sunken a few steps. Why it was built that way was a mystery to Walter in that moment, but it seemed like providence or luck, and he didn’t much care which one it was. The three of them squashed themselves down into their shallow concrete foxhole.
Above the rough worn top of the first step, Walter watched two guntrucks scream down the street, roar past about thirty yards, and then abruptly come to a halt.
Chapter 26
“Ah, shit,” Walter whispered.
Getty had seized his arm and was tugging it manically. “Did they see us?”
“I don’t…” Walter wanted to raise his head to look, but he was terrified of being seen. “I don’t know.”
Crouched behind him, Getty and Rat saw nothing. Walter was their eyes now, and they weren’t going to move, weren’t going to try and scramble up for a better look themselves.
“What are they doing?” Getty said, voice barely more than a breath of air from his throat.
Walter strained. He eked upward. His muscles quaked and trembled. The tension sucked the energy out of him, cramped his calf, but he was almost too fear-dumb to care about it. He pushed himself up until his chin was nearly resting on the second step down.
He could just see over the first step.
Two guntrucks. Parked in the middle of the street.
A cacophony of doors opening and closing. New Breeds tumbled out of the guntrucks. Walter couldn’t understand them because they spoke in Russian, but their commands were not panicked or shouted. They were not harsh, nor angry. They were flat. Muted. Cold. Very business-like.
“I don’t think they saw us,” Walter whispered.
The soldiers pouring out of the trucks weren’t looking their way. All of their faces were shielded with battleshrouds. They scanned all about them, all of their heads always moving ceaselessly, but they didn’t fixate in Walter’s direction. They weren’t perceiving a threat there.
Still, none of them breathed.
Not for a moment or two.
And then, when they did, it was a cautious, shallow thing.
Like rabbits in the grass when coyotes are about.
Walter sank, melted into the stairs. His eyes jagged to Getty. The only movement he was really willing to make. “Tell Bobbi we’re on Market Street. Two blocks south of her. Three blocks west. Can she see the two guntrucks? Can she see the soldiers?”
Getty slowly reached up to the button affixed to the chest of his s
oftarmor and keyed the comms. He whispered: “Bobbi. You there?”
“Go with it,” she said after a pause. She sounded out of breath.
“Have you found a hide?”
“Not a good one.”
“Make do with whatever you got. We’re blocked in, hon. Need an assist.”
“Dammit. Okay. Where are you?”
“Two blocks south of you. Three blocks west. You see the two guntrucks?”
“Standby. I’m getting in position.” A pause on the open line. “There aren’t any anti-sniper cannons on those guntrucks, are there?”
Getty looked at Walter pointedly.
Walter stretched upward again. Surveyed the two guntrucks. Then relaxed. He touched off his own comms for the first time. “Bobbi, this is Walt. There are no cannons. Both have Lancers.” Walter peered closer, giving the soldiers a visual inspection for the first time. He could see two of the soldiers had the eyegear on them. He could see the four-barreled Lancers on the top of the guntrucks twitching back and forth on their electronic motors as the soldiers equipped with the targeting eyegear looked around. “Controllers are the soldiers on the curb, the guy furthest east, and furthest west of the guntrucks.”
Another long moment of silence.
“Okay. I can’t see you guys, but I see the trucks and the soldiers.” Her breathing seemed more level now, and on the air she took a deep breath and let it out. “Standby.”
The line with Bobbi went dead again.
Walter looked back at Getty. “What do we do now?”
The other man shook his head slowly. “We wait. Keep your head down. Let Bobbi be our eyes.”
Walter eased himself down. The cement steps were cool on his face. He pressed himself into them. Wondered vaguely and then poignantly if this would be his last sensation.
He didn’t think the softarmor would stop many of the bullets, if any at all. Certainly not the Lancer. The Lancer didn’t even have to hit you. If the projectile passed within a foot of you, the shockwave alone had a good chance of killing you.
The comm unit in Walter’s ear hissed quietly as the line was opened again.
Bobbi’s voice was quiet and calm now. “They’re moving into the building that they’re parked in front of. Breaching front entry…”
From across the street came a shuddering crash and then the sound of men shouting.
“They’re in,” Bobbi said. “Keep your heads down. The two Lancer boys are still on the street…stack’s moving in…rear guard is in…okay, Lancer boys are moving in. Get ready to move, you guys. Get ready…”
Walter tensed. Got his arms and feet underneath him.
“They’re in. Move. Move now.”
There was no choice but to trust in Bobbi.
The three of them sprang up at the same moment. Walter half expected to find the squad still standing there, and in the last moments of Walter’s short existence, he would see those Lancers coming to bear on him…
But the street was empty save for the two trucks.
Walter didn’t spend much time looking, and neither did the others.
They beat feet hard down the sidewalk, the triple rhythm of their feet—with the slightly off-kilter sound of Getty hitching along rapidly—echoing off the walls around them. And Walter didn’t look back at the guntrucks. He just kept listening to Bobbi.
“You guys are good,” she said. “You’re still clear. Keep moving. Take that corner on the right. Break the line of sight to the trucks.”
“How’s the hub?” Walter panted as they ran around the corner. He watched his shadow prance along in front of him as he went westward again. Dawn sunlight warmed the back of his neck.
“Standby,” Bobbi said. “Let me get a sight on it again. Okay. Still not a great vantage—I’m going to shift. But for right now, you look clear. The nearest unit I can see is two guntrucks sitting at an intersection about two blocks up and two blocks over from the hub.”
Walter didn’t respond. Didn’t need to. They all knew. All three of them knew.
They would have seconds to open the live-feed. And then it would be the fight of their lives. And they would likely lose. That was just how the math worked out. You couldn’t be mad at the math. The math was simply the math.
Getty cleared a corner slowly, looked both ways down the street. Walter and Rat stacked up behind him. To the south, a building had nearly been brought down to its last standing brick. Oddly, the buildings on either side looked relatively unscarred.
They cut around the corner, headed across the street at a diagonal, heading to the north sector of the block. Walter kept looking this way and that, kept sweeping his rifle, but his body was not conditioned for war. His arms ached. His back ached. They threatened to rebel against him. Mutiny. Pure mutiny. He resented it.
Should have trained, was the new mantra that his panic-brain had seized on. Should have trained, should have trained, should have trained.
They stopped at the next corner.
The hub was the next block down.
Walter peered around the corner, and he could see it. The fencing around it. The clearing where they’d installed it. A few squat maintenance buildings set around it. One of those. One of those would be the place they needed to get into.
Walter hit the corner of the building, and Getty and Rat followed.
Before them, the network hub took up the sky.
Was it worth it?
Well, it was too far past now to not be worth it.
Walter plunged ahead.
Chapter 27
Gunfire chattered fiercely in the distance. It was like standing outside of a stadium and hearing the roar of the crowds, but still being removed from it, a strange sense of under-worldliness, like you were skimming below the surface of reality, unnoticed and unnoticeable.
Brownstone walls streaked passed. Here, not quite so peaceful and untouched as the blocks previous.
Here a car stood, still smoking, crumpled into the side of one of the apartment buildings. The windows were white like privacy glass, shattered into opaqueness by a flurry of bullets, but somehow still standing there, delicately, in their frames. Red painted the interior of the car. It leaked out of the front door and onto the pale sidewalk.
Walter worked around it, didn’t look inside.
They skirted a smoke-blacked cluster of debris that still stank of off-spent munitions. It was an acrid, nose-curling stench. An angry smell. He could see blood in the rubble. He could see a hand, and that stopped his breath. Because it was a small hand. Very small.
He stumbled to a halt. His lungs wanted the air, but they were stuck for a moment, stuck in exhale. It was strange how he’d not wanted to look in the car, but this small, pale thing sticking out of the rubble, it had snatched his eyes almost hypnotically.
“Walt,” Getty said from behind him.
From worlds away.
The ringing in his ears had returned.
Maybe it had never gone away.
Walter stared. Finally inhaled.
The arm belonged to a kid, of course. Maybe five. Maybe four. It was hard for him to tell. He’d never had kids of his own, so he’d never developed that ability to tell a kid’s age that a parent somehow magically possesses, and seems a mystery to the childless. And…it was just a hand.
The rest would be buried in that rubble.
He went to it.
He wanted it to reach for him.
He wanted the voice of the boy or girl that was buried there to cry out for help, to still be alive. He bent down and he grabbed it, and Getty and Rat were saying something behind him and they sounded either angry with him, or scared for him, maybe both, but he wasn’t really listening to anything they had to say.
When he touched it, it was cold and stiff.
Like a mannequin.
He jerked back.
“Walter, Jesus Christ, man!” Getty limped up next to him, and he grabbed Walter by the shoulders, but not unkindly, almost gently, almost like you would turn
a mourner away from the grave of the recently deceased.
Walter realized that he wasn’t hypnotized. He wasn’t drawn in against his will, wasn’t locked onto staring at this thing by some power that was beyond him.
I want to see it.
And so he did. He looked at it.
What he felt…
What did he feel?
Nothing that would well up violently or suddenly and force emotions to be wrung out of him like dirty water from a used washrag. Nothing like that.
No, it was worse than that.
It was something down deep.
Something cataclysmic, but so far down inside of him that all he could do was sense the distant disturbance that it caused. He only knew that he needed to look at that hand. He needed to accept it. He needed to let that inside of him.
Look at it. Remember it. Mark it.
“Hey!” Getty smacked his shoulder, this time roughly.
Walter took another moment to look at the child’s hand in the rubble. He blinked a few times, almost like mentally swallowing it, like he was making sure that it was all the way down, that it wouldn’t ever be forgotten. And then he looked up.
“Sorry,” he said, and he didn’t wait.
He looked behind them, ahead of them. Saw the coast was still clear.
He started running again.
Ten yards beyond the pile of rubble with the child buried in it, the street intersected with another. Beyond that intersection, the road ended, and the network hub sat. It was completely encircled by an eight-foot fence with barbed wire on the top. There was a vehicle-entry gate directly in front of them. The road that they were running on turned into the drive that led through the gate.
It was an electronic gate. A small box stood to the right of the entry, requiring key-card access.
None of them would have it.
“How’s the skies?” Getty asked over the comms.
It took Bobbi a few seconds to respond.
“Clear over top of you,” she said. “There’s a whole shit storm going on southwest of you, though.”
Walter tracked his eyes over the gate, looking for a weak point. “How do we get in?”
