by Kyle Noe
Quinn turned away from the others, lifted her visor, and popped one of the Black Sunshine pills into her mouth. She expected instant euphoria, but instead tasted only the capsule’s grains as it dissolved and tumbled down the back of her throat.
Cody was full of shit, she thought, climbing onto the back of a Thunderhead as it peeled off.
***
The Thunderheads rumbled up and over the dunes and into the outer fringes of the dust storm. The lights on the vehicles were out and the grit from the storm blocked most of the day’s remaining light, creating a kind of permanent twilight.
The Marines drove into the storm, Quinn hanging on for dear life as her Thunderhead bucked and heaved. She felt dizzy and wondered whether the drug was taking effect. She looked out into the dust and flinched when she spotted ghostly forms, vaguely humanoid, that seemed to be surfing on the sand. She blinked, and the forms morphed into long strands of light.
Quinn’s eyes jitterbugged. She looked down, and the sand itself began to shift and reorder itself into a writhing mass of snakes. Quinn flinched, blanketed by the snakes that slithered over everything until all that was visible was the reflection of her eyes, deep set and widening inside her helmet.
And then as quickly as they had appeared, the snakes were gone and a retina-searing light built, as if the Aurora Borealis had descended and enveloped her. Quinn’s mouth pulled back in a silent scream as a tsunami of light swept over her.
Teetering on unconsciousness, Quinn rapidly opened and closed her eyelids, realizing she was hammered on Black Sunshine. She closed her eyes again, cutting the visual distractions and the light, and her hallucinations ended, replaced with a feeling of…
Geezus, what was it? Awareness. She had never felt so aware of her surroundings in all of her life. She could hear every breath of her fellow Marines, every inhale and exhale and whispered word. She could discern distances even without the aid of her helmet, could detect which way the Thunderhead would maneuver before the driver did.
One eye opened, then another. Quinn reached down and stroked the barrel of her rifle, feeling the cold metal as she measured her breaths. Her nostrils curled up. They were close to their target. She could smell it.
Hayden whistled and the Thunderheads ground to a stop on a bluff that overlooked a wide valley. The storm still shrouded the land, but Quinn could see a warren of one- and two-story buildings down below, maybe a half mile away.
“We move out on foot,” Hayden said.
***
The Marines slogged through the dirt and dust on the other side of the bluff, hitting the edge of a ghost road. They moved across the middle of the road, the pavement broken with potholes the size of cars. There was no sign of life in any direction, the moonscape eerily silhouetted by the falling dust.
The road soon turned to dirt, the Marines maneuvering past the ruinous remains of a desert church, a plaque outside still holding letters that read “Jesus Is My Rock And That’s How I Roll.”
Quinn smiled at this, listening to the rhythms only she could hear in the howling wind. She turned and followed after the others, feeling the muscles tighten near the small of her back and the area where her calves met her hamstrings.
Black Sunshine coursed through her veins. She could feel it like the heated drip of an IV bag, worming through her neuromuscular system, supercharging everything. She was running without effort, overtaking the men, dropping down into a zone she’d never experienced before. She was supremely at ease and confident about whatever lay ahead. Her brain was on overdrive, as if it were rebooting itself after some unusually lengthy period of dormancy. She felt powerful and calm at the same time, and paused to look out over the battle.
And that’s when it happened.
One of the others, one of the rabble lumped in with Quinn and the Marines, tripped a wire. A ten-cent piece of metal wire hooked to a hidden flare streaked up into the sky and burst red, illuminating the village that lay at the other end of the broken road.
There was a moment of silence, and then the world seemed to disappear in a fireball of orange and red.
Chapter Twenty-Two: Incoming
Quinn sensed the incoming rockets before they hit, grabbing Milo and shoving him sideways as a blast tore through the road. The heat from the explosion rippled across her visor, and she watched as two other Marines were hit full force by the blast, vanishing in a spray of red. Hayden was visible in the distance, waving his arms, shouting for everyone to return fire.
Scoping the area ahead, Quinn could see the shadowy forms of the resistance fighters ducking behind buildings and running across rooftops. Gunfire rang out in sync with countless mortar rounds. It felt like they were surrounded by a full Earth Marine Division, but her heightened sense kicked in, and she could tell fog of war was deceiving her senses, kicking fear into high gear. From her spiked awareness, she could clearly perceive the resistance fighters firing from spread out positions to make it appear they were much larger in number.
With newfound confidence, Quinn heaved herself forward, and in seconds was leading a charge toward the village, taking incoming fire from the roofs of the nearest buildings. Sabots and old-fashioned bullets hissed and whined and kicked up the dirt between Quinn’s legs. She heard some of her fellow Devil-Dogs cry out in pain, evidently hit, but she didn’t stop. She couldn’t.
She danced between the rounds and plucked a ballistic grenade from her tac vest, throwing it toward the closest roof. The grenade spiraled through the air and landed. The concealed sniper spotted the grenade and ran, and Quinn shot him down.
The grenade fireballed, sending debris into the air. Quinn used the debris as cover, backpedaling across a berm and taking aim at the snipers on another roof. She brought the snipers down with a burst from her rifle, their tactical vests drenched in blood. Quinn waved the other Marines forward to follow her.
She zigzagged down a road that bisected the two sides of the village. Renner and Milo caught up and ran alongside her, Renner lobbing grenades from his launcher that set several of the one-story hovels afire.
Out of the fiery destruction of one building emerged a machine, what looked like a tank atop a set of girder-like legs. Quinn saw the human controller ensconced inside a reinforced compartment atop the drone, and realized it was a Resistance weapon of war.
The thing looked like it had been built from a patchwork of material pried from buildings and military machines, but the dual cannons on its turret, over which a set of white vampire fangs had been painted, were large and wide and terrifying to look at.
The battle drone rumbled forward. Its dual cannons rotated, spitting fire.
“TAKE COVER!” Quinn screamed.
The explosive rounds from the manned drone chewed up the ground and laid waste to the area around Quinn and Renner, who dove behind an earthen embankment. She heard the pneumatic hiss of the drone as it tramped forward, and she rolled over and fired at the machine, but her rounds bounced off the armored turret.
One of the other Marines ran off to her right. The drone turned and fired, and the Marine was vaporized.
“Fuck this!” Renner said, rising.
He fired a shot from his grenade launcher that burst in front of the drone, tearing through the ligatures that ran up one of the thing’s metal legs.
Impacted by the explosion, the human controller lost the ability to precisely pilot it. The drone churned wildly in every direction, opening fire at anything that moved.
“Now you've really pissed it off!” Quinn screamed.
Renner fired again and blew the top off the bullet-resistant compartment, killing the human controller. But the machine didn’t stop, rampaging across the battle zone as Quinn signaled for the others to open fire.
The Syndicate Marines rose and blasted the battle drone, eventually striking a fuel line as the construct went up in flames.
In seconds, the Marines were running past the drone that continued to flail, still on fire, eerily silhouetting the road ahead. Qui
nn dashed past, feeling the warmth from the battle drone as it caught fire in full and exploded.
Soon, the Marines were in the center of the village, picking their way past machines and the twisted wreckage from what looked like a Syndicate bombing run. Renner was out in front of everyone, dancing between the bullets.
Quinn watched as he fired his rifle with his left hand while tossing a grenade with his right. The explosion rocked a resistance hiding spot, and Renner turned back to the others and shouted. “The water’s fine!”
WHAM!
A bullet from a sniper blasted a hole in Renner’s stomach. He staggered and looked down at the hole as Quinn screamed for the others to fire.
The Marines emptied out their guns as Quinn raced down the street and dropped to the ground alongside Renner. His face was beginning to turn white and blood seeped from his nostrils.
“Is it bad?”
“Hate to break it to you, Renner, but most of your stomach is gone,” she whispered.
“Don’t beat around the bush, Quinn. Is it bad or what?” he replied, wheezing, a smirk still on his lips.
Quinn reached in her pocket, pulled out the Lazarus syringe and broke its clear housing on the hard ground. She plunged the syringe into Renner’s neck, and almost instantly the color began returning to his face. Quinn’s eyes were wide as she watched the ragged flesh around Renner’s wound close up in seconds. The blood was still there but the flesh was intact, and already Renner was feeling the spot with his hand and grinning.
“You just cannot keep a good fucking man down,” he said.
Renner rose and shot down the sniper who’d nearly ended his life. Quinn grabbed him and pulled him to the right, the other Marines following into the shell of a large building beside a trench. Inside, the Marines hit the ground and rolled over, out of breath and running dangerously low on ammunition.
The wounded were tended to as the Marines glanced through holes in the building. Quinn scanned the schematic on her HUD as General Aames and Cody relayed information to Hayden.
“How far?” someone asked.
“Down the road and to the right is a stone structure,” Milo said.
Quinn could see it on her HUD, along with the thermal images of dozens, if not hundreds, of resistance fighters scurrying to take up positions.
“Getting hairy out there, sir,” Hayden said. “We’ve got seven fallen and beaucoup walking wounded.”
“Mother says you’ve got three minutes before your position is overrun,” came the general’s response.
Looks were shared and ammunition divvied up, and then Hayden rose and signaled for the Marines to charge.
They burst out of the building and were met by a flurry of rocket and small arms fire. The building to their right imploded as shells and high-energy rounds ripped into the ground. Quinn watched a round cave in the face of an unlucky Marine just next to her, carrying a Hafnium ground-to-ground missile launcher.
Quinn hoisted the launcher from the fallen Marine’s clenched hands, then wheeled and fired at a pocket of resistance troops who were taking cover inside what looked like an old, metal warehouse. The structure vanished in a greasy, orange fireball, the resistance fighters staggering out into the street, on fire, only to be cut down by the Marines.
Hayden screamed and the Marines followed him, racing down through the village as shells and sabots snapped and popped off stone walls, the dust from the storm mixing with smoke to create a whirlwind that was almost impossible to see through.
Quinn and her comrades ran a gauntlet of ragged incoming fire, covering their heads as rounds from unseen snipers burst all around them. They could see the target coming up fast, a squat, stone building protected by a machine gun nest and a half dozen resistance fighters. The machine gun was positioned on a tracked turret-drone and opened fire as soon as the Marines appeared.
One Marine was winged in the leg and another’s head was taken off, but the others dove behind a junked car. Quinn looked over at Milo and pointed across the street. “I run, you shoot,” she said.
“You won’t make it,” Milo said.
“Then I’ll run, you shoot,” Quinn said.
Milo tensed up. He froze. Quinn got it. She did. Shooting humans, albeit, to stay alive, wasn’t something she wanted to do anymore than him. But they had no choice. Not if she wanted to see her daughter again. Cooperate and live and keep other cooperative humans alive. It’s how the Syndicate operated. But Milo wasn’t having it.
“Can’t do it,” he said. “They’re innocent.”
“It’s our best chance,” Quinn said.
“But they’re fighting for us,” Milo argued.
“Is it better to fight for a lost cause, or try something else until you find a method that works?” Quinn asked. “We have to stay alive and find a way to fight back that makes a difference. What they’re doing is suicide and besides, they’re the enemy.”
Milo lifted his rifle, but hesitated. “What the fuck are we doing? Are we really doing this?”
“We’ll get our shot at revenge,” Quinn said.
“Will we?”
Quinn ignored his question and wormed behind the car as bullets thudded into it. She could feel the muscles throbbing in her legs as she dropped her rifle and pulled out a sidearm, a large-barreled pistol that had been loaded with what Cody said were white phosphorous incendiary rounds.
Quinn juked sideways and ran across the street, drawing fire as she lurched inside a misshapen twist of buildings. Keeping low, she rolled under a window and peeked out. The drone was rotating toward her, so she raised her pistol and fired a round that set the machine gun nest on fire.
The resistance fighters went up in flames, allowing Hayden, Milo and the others to advance. Quinn joined them, kicking through the window and running down the street, guided by the schematic in her HUD.
She entered the stone building and fired another shot from her pistol, catching a female resistance fighter in the chest. The blast tossed her back against a wall. Quinn watched, her throat tightening as the woman screamed, trying to stifle the flames that soon consumed her. The woman’s body jerked and twitched and then fell silent as Quinn stood there, overpowered by the assault, sensing that the effects of the Black Sunshine were beginning to ebb.
Looking back up, she navigated down a staircase, the other Marines behind her. She met a landing and took a right. At the end of a corridor was a door made of faceless metal with no handles.
Quinn shot at the door, smashing it open as the resistance fighters hiding behind startled and shouted in anger and shock. The other Marines dropped and fired around Quinn as if she were a jutting rock in a lake, leveling the resistance fighters who ticked and clicked and crumpled to the ground in a bloody heap.
The room on the other side of the door was no larger than a convenience store. A bank of computers lined one wall, shelves laden with food and munitions against another. And in the middle of the space was a vault, a square of steel ribbed by titanium rods centered with an elaborate time-lock. Quinn knew at first glance that was the object they’d come for.
Hayden and the others moved to it, shooting off the time-lock and opening the vault to reveal a translucent holder the size of a cell phone. Inside the holder was an electronic device that buzzed and glowed with a strange, yellow light.
“We got what we came for, boys and girls, we have secured the grail,” Hayden said, radioing in to General Aames and Cody, who congratulated the team.
Quinn could hear Cody instructing the team on where the extraction was to occur as she squatted on the other side of the room. Her eyes were fixed on something none of the other Marines had noted before.
It was a small, silver object the shape and size of a water bottle, and it lay near the outstretched fingers of a dead resistance fighter. There was an open rucksack near the dead fighter, and Quinn surmised that the man had been trying to stash the silver object away when he was killed.
Quinn slipped in close and peered down. She c
ocked her head, intrigued by the silver object, horse-shaped, but with a human pulling back a bow and arrow. It was a centaur, like the Sagittarius symbol.
She grabbed the object, analyzing the strange markings on its side. Whether it was the aftereffects of the drug or intuition, she had the strong sensation that she should not share her find with the other Marines. She placed it inside a pouch that dangled on the back of her armor.
Hayden whistled for the Marines to retreat, and everyone filtered through a rear door. They were met by the B-team, the other prisoners and aliens, including Larry, whose battle armor was blackened.
“You encounter any resistance?” Hayden asked.
Larry nodded and held up his hands, which were slicked red with human blood.
“We need dustoff asap,” Hayden said.
Quinn watched one of the aliens tap its battle helmet, raising the mother ship.
She looked up, and soon the sky was filled with several gliders that dropped down through the dust like spiders on a string.
Quinn waited next to Larry, who was clucking his mouth and making guttural sounds. Larry’s eyes rotated over to her, and Quinn caught a look.
“You found what you came for?” he asked.
Quinn nodded.
“But you also found something else, didn’t you?”
She shook her head, and Larry’s mouth parted in what she assumed was a smirk.
The gliders landed and the bay doors descended. Quinn and the other Marines filtered into the assault craft and were quickly whisked up into the air.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Underground Vegas
Giovanni had no idea how long they had been driving or how long he had been asleep. Images assaulted his mind, thoughts of red-clad Syndicate soldiers, of fellow Marines falling dead all around him, and of his hopeless struggle. He wished they were just dreams, but he knew better.
Raising his head off of Luke’s shoulder, he quickly wiped saliva from the corner of his mouth and looked around, groggily.
