Freedom Fighters

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  A few Insurrectos took shots at them. None of the shots came close. Duardo didn’t bother reacting. The only way anyone would to hit them would be if they pointed their gun in another direction. The wind was too strong. It made him put his pistol away and pull his knife from his belt. If the wind scattered rifle fire, then his pistol bullets would be even less effective.

  Ahead was a narrow concrete path between two of the admin buildings. The path led to the smelter that rose forty feet high behind the admin buildings. Duardo could barely see the alley. He had studied the layout last night through the night glasses and knew the general direction to head.

  Step by slow step, they made their way to the alley. A few Insurrectos tried to attack them and halt them. The line stopped while the two closest to the Insurrectos dealt with them. Twice, Duardo used his knife to fend off an assault, with Adjuno stepping around to help.

  The narrow alley between the prefabricated huts seemed to channel and concentrate the wind. The pressure came from behind, sending them stumbling forward as the wind pushed through the narrow aperture, whistling with a keening note that lodged in the brain. It was impossible to hear anything but the wind.

  When they emerged into the open area behind the admin buildings, Duardo raised his fist. Everyone came to a halt. Jasso and Emile quartered the area with their rifles, monitoring. Adjuno tapped Duardo’s shoulder and pointed. Duardo looked.

  The only road on the island wound past the compound, just on the other side of the fence, following the rail line. A spur from the rail line ran right up to the back of the smelter building. The road and rail line turned away from the compound and ran north to the bridge that gave access to the main island.

  A long line of Insurrectos were walking and side-stepping along the road. They were escaping.

  Duardo looked at Trajo, bumped his fist against the palm of his hand and let his fingers spread in the air. Trajo nodded, reached into his backpack and pulled out a flare. He lit it and pointed it toward the sky.

  The green flare shot up into the bruised gray sky and burst. The bright green sparkling light was dispersed by the wind. It had been spotted, though, for Duardo felt a low rumbling through his feet.

  The concrete spans of the bridge to the mainland lifted into the air in a cloud of debris and smoke that was whipped away. Two of the graceful spans collapsed inward and down, sending tons of tarmac, concrete and iron railings into the sea.

  The Insurrectos on the road halted, dismayed. Their last avenue of escape had been cut off.

  Duardo ignored them and instead bent and pushed forward, his head down. The entrance to the smelter, with its guard box and heavy iron doors, was within sight. To Duardo it appeared as a large, light gray mass among a lot more gray. His vision was shot, his eyes streaming. He pushed forward, Adjuno guiding him.

  Then Adjuno dug his fingers into Duardo’s shoulder and stepped up close to him. His gun arm pushed around Duardo and he fired. Duardo saw the flash from the muzzle. The shot was silent. He wiped his eyes and looked.

  There were seven Insurrectos standing in the entrance to the smelter, behind the guard box. They were firing yet nothing came close.

  Duardo was near enough to discount the wind. He took out three of them with quick shots. Everyone in the line behind him was firing, the wind masking their shots, and the Insurrectos dropped in front of the doorway.

  Two of them stepped over their comrades and surged forward, bringing their weapons to bear. The first one threw his gun up into the air, clutching at his chest as he spun as if an invisible hammer had slammed into his shoulder.

  Then Jasso stepped forward and took aim. The second was thrown backward off his feet.

  That ended the defense of the smelter.

  Duardo kept his knife and his Glock in his hands and pushed his way through the ten feet of churning air to the door. He worked with Adjuno to slide the door open, then moved inside and straightened up with a sigh of relief.

  He glanced around the dim interior as the rest gathered inside. There was no one else inside the building, although a lot of heavy, complicated equipment was bolted to the floors, reaching up to the roof. The roof was pierced by the smoke stack of the smelter itself. No wonder the Insurrectos had preferred to use the small trial smelter that had been built on the university grounds. It would take a team of engineers to get this thing up and running again.

  Behind Duardo, someone rolled the doors shut. The daylight chopped off.

  Duardo turned back to the door. “Emile. Jasso. You’re on the doors.” He had to lift his voice above the noise and fury of the wind, which despite the thick concrete walls of the building, still roared. “As our guys get here, let them in. Shoot anyone else that approaches.” He glanced around at the rest of them. “Everyone find somewhere comfortable and camp. We’ll be here for a while.”

  “Who blew the bridge?” Garrett demanded. “It looks like every free Loyalist is out there fighting, except you seven.”

  “You’re right,” Duardo agreed. “Everyone fit enough to stand up straight is out there. It’s your men who blew the bridge.”

  “Who is leading them?” Garrett demanded, his eyes narrowing as he thought it through. It was a good question, a question a good leader would want answered.

  “My brother,” Duardo told him. “You know him as Nemesis.”

  “Nemesis!” Carmen repeated, surprised.

  “Are you related to everyone in Vistaria?” Garrett asked, sounding peeved.

  Duardo grinned. “If you take the family trees of Vistarians far enough back, then yes, we’re all related.” He fished his cellphone out of his thigh pocket and dumped his back pack. “I have calls to make, if there’s still a cell network operating.”

  He turned away as everyone spread out, looking for the least uncomfortable spot they could find among the concrete and steel.

  It would be a long twelve hours.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The eye of the hurricane passed directly overhead. Around ten pm the wind, which had howled like a monster for hours, ceased. It dropped away to nothing within a minute or two. The silence throbbed.

  Carmen lifted her head from Garrett’s shoulder and looked up at the roof. There was nothing to see. Not in here, anyway. Every available inch of concrete had been taken by Loyalist soldiers, who had filtered into the building in ones and twos not long after she had followed the colonel into the building.

  Minnie’s husband. Carmen had to remind herself of that constantly, for Duardo was a stiffly upright machine soldier who didn’t miss a single thing. He led his team with fierce efficiency.

  He’d rescued her and Garrett, too. Although they had broken out by themselves, Carmen hadn’t allowed for the strength of the wind. She would never tell anyone, even Garrett, that she suspected they wouldn’t have made it across the compound alive. Either the Insurrectos or the wind would have defeated them.

  Forty minutes after Garrett had found the little tucked-away space behind the gantry that supported a catwalk and pulled Carmen down next to him, one of Duardo’s team had taken Garrett to the door to identify the rest of their unit, who had climbed up from the beach where they organized their demolition of the bridge.

  “The Lieutenant wants you to vouch for them, as they’re your people,” the soldier explained to Garrett.

  “Lieutenant?” Garrett questioned, for there had not been a lieutenant in the team that had found them in the building.

  “Lieutenant Castellano, sir. He came in with them.”

  That would be Nemesis, then, Carmen realized with a start. Nemesis was regular Army, too. So, his real name was Castellano.

  Garrett returned five minutes later, settled next to her and drew her up against him, carefully avoiding jolting her arm and shoulder. “They’re all fine. Short on sleep like all of us, but I don’t think anyone will sleep until this storm is done.”

  Night had turned the inside of the shed into a dark, warm and stuffy cave, filled with still and silent men
. Carmen couldn’t sleep, because the sheets of tin on the roof rattled and stirred, thudding in the wind. She was confident that not even a hurricane could bring down the concrete walls, for they were over a foot thick. The roof was another matter.

  Yet she had drifted into a doze anyway, only to be startled awake by the absence of wind.

  She sat and looked at the roof once more. No banging. No shifting. No threatening to peel away and leave them all exposed.

  “It’s over?” Garrett asked doubtfully. His voice was loud but flattened, as if she had cotton wool in her ears.

  Carmen shook her head. “It’s the eye. We’re right in the middle of it.”

  Others were stirring in the shed and the few who had flashlights or a cellphone with a charge had turned them on.

  Carmen struggled to get to her feet. “It’s the eye,” she repeated. “Hell’s bells!”

  Garrett read her mind. He jumped to his feet, bringing her with him. “Colonel!” he shouted. “We need to brace ourselves.”

  Carmen stepped out around the steel superstructure they had been resting behind, searching for Duardo in the darkness. “Colonel!” she yelled. It sounded loud in the still silence.

  From somewhere closer to the doors, Duardo spoke, snapping out the order. “Everyone up against the south walls. Brace the doors! Move it!”

  Everyone in the shed scrambled, tripping over each other, grunting and protesting in the dark. Garrett caught her free arm and pushed her forward. “Come on.”

  His grip on her arm stopped Carmen from stumbling over other soldiers’ feet and legs as they moved across the open area of the shed to the walls on either side of the big doors. Everyone pushed closer to the walls. They were two or three deep in places, although they obediently squashed themselves up against the walls.

  A dozen men were standing by the iron doors, their backs against them.

  Silence fell over the shed.

  “How long?” Garrett asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she confessed.

  “You’re sure about this?”

  She bit her lip.

  “Sure about what?” someone asked in the dark.

  “Tidal wave,” Garrett said shortly.

  “Oh Jesus, Mary, Joseph…” someone muttered.

  There was more muttering as the word passed.

  “Silence!” Duardo roared.

  Immediately, the shed fell still. Then they heard it.

  To Carmen, it sounded like morning traffic she used to listen to through the closed windows of her apartment in Boston. A low murmur, made up of thousands of vehicles moving all at once.

  The sound grew louder. It became a roar and now she could hear that it was water. Roiling, rushing water.

  She turned her head against Garrett’s shoulder, glad that the dark hid her face and the fear that must surely be showing on it right now.

  The wave hit the walls and she could feel the impact through the ground, which trembled. The shed doors, held down by dozens of men, groaned and shuddered. Water squirted in underneath them. It gushed through the gap between them, a raging wall of it, reaching up to their shoulders.

  Garrett held her against him, his arm like an iron band around her shoulders. She didn’t mind the pain it caused.

  Seawater lapped around her ankles and the brine smell was sharp.

  After what could have been only a minute or two, but felt like hours, the water belching through the doors with fire hydrant pressure diminished down to a trickle, then halted altogether.

  The sound of dripping and running water was loud.

  People stirred, making the water ripple as their feet shifted. Someone laughed and shouted “Yee-ha!”

  Everyone spoke at once, in tight, high voices, celebrating.

  “Get the door open!” someone called. “With caution!”

  The steel doors rattled as they slid back. Cool, fresh air brushed her face. It told her how stuffy it had grown in here. She struggled to her feet. “I have to go outside,” she told Garrett. “I’ve got to walk around.”

  “Let the Army go first.”

  They made themselves wait until most of the big shed was empty, then sloshed through the water toward the doors. Already, the level of the water was lowering as it found holes and cracks and channels to pour into.

  The general and the colonel were both standing in the doorway, looking out. As Carmen reached them, the colonel nodded. “Okay, it’s clear.” He stepped out himself and the general followed, moving with an odd, stiff gait.

  Carmen and Garrett stepped out behind them and breathed in deeply.

  The air was still. She looked up into the sky. Overhead, the stars twinkled like any ordinary night, but all around them, on every horizon, were banks of cloud that glowed with ghostly light.

  The water was everywhere. It was barely higher than her boot soles, yet it covered everything.

  Garrett stepped up beside her and stretched his back, his hands on his hips. “My head is throbbing.”

  “It’s the air pressure in the eye of the storm,” Carmen told him. “That’s why our voices sound muffled.” She looked around.

  “No bodies,” Garrett said. “There were plenty of them lying on the ground when we stepped in here. Now, they’re all gone.”

  “The wave took them,” Carmen said. Pity for them touched her. She reminded herself sharply of the cruelties and horror the Insurrectos had delivered upon innocent Vistarians since the revolution had begun…and for months before that, too.

  “How long will this calm last?” Garrett asked, eyeing the cloud bank to the south-west. That was the oncoming second half of the storm.

  Already, the tiniest of breezes brushed Carmen’s hair into her eyes. She pushed the tendrils away. The wind was coming from the opposite direction from before. “It’s nearly here already,” she said, looking to the south-west, too. “The eye is tiny and the pressure is high. This is a bad storm.” She glanced toward the smelter shed. The soldiers had thrown the doors fully open and many of them were walking about the flat ground in front of the shed, stretching and chatting. Their talking sounded subdued, although that could be the air pressure and her battered hearing.

  “I guess we should head back inside,” she said with a sigh and turned toward the shed reluctantly.

  Garrett caught her hand. “No, stay a minute,” he told her.

  Carmen glanced at his hand, then at the soldiers standing nearby. She looked up at Garrett questioningly.

  “There isn’t going to be a better time,” Garrett said, which told her he had understood her concern about eavesdroppers. Then he switched to English. “We’re always going to be surrounded by someone,” he added. “After this storm is over and after we get off this island and onto the main one, we’ll be living cheek by jowl with the rest of the unit. That’s situation normal. After the war…” He blew out his breath. “I don’t want to wait until after the war, Carmen. Wars change things. They change lives. I’ve seen too much of it and I know that if I don’t speak now, we could regret it.”

  Carmen turned back to face him, her heart racing.

  He held her hand between his and the pressure of his fingers on hers was hard. He wasn’t as calm as he appeared. Only, he was so good at keeping the neutral mask in place that nothing showed.

  His gaze roamed over her face.

  The hard lump in her chest hurt. “Just say it,” she told him. “Put me out of my misery.”

  His eyes widened. “What do you think this is?” he asked.

  “I don’t know!” she snapped back. “You’re bored, maybe. That all this is too complicated for you. That you’re going to live up to your unavailable status and kick me to the curb. I don’t know. You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

  The corner of his mouth lifted. “It’s good to know I can scare you that way, Escobedo.”

  “Sadist.”

  “No, just all too human.” He touched her cheek. “Telling me you loved me…it caught me by surprise.”


  Carmen dropped her gaze. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”

  “I guessed,” he said softly. “You don’t talk about your life much, but there’s a reason you’re still single despite being the most eligible woman in Vistaria. I think I’ve figured out most of that reason. I don’t think growing up being the most watched daughter in the nation helped much. Harvard must have been a relief. You would have been anonymous there.”

  “Not so much,” Carmen said dryly. “They have the Internet in Boston, too.”

  Garrett’s mouth quirked up in another lopsided smile. “You got to be yourself, really yourself—temper, smart mouth and all—when you walked into my camp. That’s the Carmen I love, not the one on the Internet.”

  She caught her breath. Even her pulse seemed to pause. She stared at him, willing him to repeat what he had just said. She wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined it.

  “Yes, I mean it,” Garrett said softly. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking while the wind was too loud to hear anyone speak. It left me alone with my thoughts and made me think. So I’ve been thinking, possibly for the first time in ten years.” He raised her hand up, making her look at it and the grip his fingers had on her. “I don’t know where we’ll end up, Carmen, but wherever that is, I want you with me.”

  “Live the life of a guerilla?” she asked. “Find a war and sign up?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Fighting wars, no matter how unfair they are, has lost its appeal for me. If it ever had any appeal. I can’t remember why I started doctoring in war zones. I’m sure one day I’ll figure it out, but only when there’s some distance between us and this one.”

  “There are plenty of patients out there who aren’t war casualties,” Carmen told him. “Some of them are the neediest people on the planet.” She took a breath. “There’ll be thousands of them here in Vistaria once this war is over.”

  Garrett nodded. “I like your thinking,” he said. “Only, I don’t want to lock us into any decisions. Nothing, for now. Not until the war is over and we know what it looks like on the other side. Can you live with that, Carmen?”