His stand is not here. It won't be Brezno, that much is clear now. It will be Istanbul.
I walk back the way I came. Lydia and Hatya stand aside, while Arnst lopes confidently behind. I feel the strength radiating off him; strongest beta male in the pack. He'll kill me as soon as I show a sign of weakness. Lucky for him there is none left.
We climb up, and Feargal blows the other elevator door, the one leading to Command. Everything here is an exact copy of Maine, as if they rolled these places off the same factory line. Built to the same specs. It's disappointing that Maine failed so spectacularly. I wonder what they did differently here.
Feargal sends more drones, scouring the elevator shaft with small explosive packs dropped in series from the craft's underbelly, like coins tossed down a well. Pop pop pop they drop, then pop pop pop they fire, perfectly timed to span the full height of the passage. The fire is minimal, the smoke rising stinks of sulfur, and the explosions not strong enough to blow this shaft's structural integrity. Just enough to trigger any waiting bombs recessed in the walls.
Arnst goes first again, Feargal follows, then me.
In Command I understand why this bunker didn't fail. We stalk through the corridors and see them everywhere, tucked away as if this space would somehow make them safer. I suppose it is an instinct, to stow your most sacred possessions in the basement.
Children.
The floor swims with them, of all ages, from newborn infants to early teens. Here they are, and this is what saved this place. The infrastructure may have been the same, but the rules were not. Letting the people locked inside have children kept hope alive in ways Mecklarin never could with his behavioral tricks.
I walk amongst them. Arnst steps on their bodies without care. Nobody tells him to stop. I lead them to the room that can resolve this issue in a second. Feargal blows the heavy blast door sealing it, Arnst rips the fragged metal from its frame, and I step through.
On the floor men and women lie in high uniform. Here's a general, by his stars. Here's a civilian leader wearing a US flag pin. Eight or nine of them sprawl around the room, and none of them shake or tremor, because they're already dead. There are bullet holes in their heads. Their blood staining the floor is still tacky.
I snort. The others don't get it; Feargal fears it's a trap, but I see what this is. The shark-eyed man came here and he did this, because he couldn't help them. Instead he stripped them. He took their best. If they had any helmets, he took those too. Any weaponry they'd saved for my arrival, he stole. He did what was necessary for his civilization to survive.
Yes.
Keeshom and Hatya have stayed behind. Lydia sees this, standing in the entrance, and starts to laugh. She's gone temporarily mad, perhaps.
"You're the Mayor!" she calls, pointing at the wall.
I look. On the map there's my trail across the Atlantic marked out, with my call sign written above it.
MAYOR
There's no other message from the shark-eyed man here, other than this room with its dead. It tells me what lengths my opponent is willing to go to. Would I have killed and sacrificed my own like this?
The shield still hums.
It is immense, mostly buried in the earth, syncing in to the hydrogen line Faraday-cage that encircles the bunker. Its face here fills the wall, replete with readouts, dials, displays, and control stations. One operative still slumps at his stool, head pressed against the screen, wedged into position by the angles of his body. Blood has run down his back like a red cape.
I swing my pack off my shoulders. Inside are some of the ANFO explosives taken from Drake's children, once stuffed into cuddly rabbits and elephants and unicorns. Perhaps there's some kind of poetic justice here, turning my enemies against each other. Taking their strengths and using it as my own.
I told Feargal at the start that we'd have to be ready to wipe a people out, including their children. Back then I meant Drake, but there is no difference to this. When this shield blows, these people will die, or be so close to death that it will make no difference. If they lie here forever, phasing in and out of the doorway to joining the ocean, it won't matter. What matters is they will never climb up into the light to face me. The line will lay them forever low.
"Do it," I tell Feargal.
He sets to work laying charges across the machine's front. When he's placed a handful of packs, he goes deeper. The machine has access hatches to allow for repairs to be conducted on the inside, and he crawls in through them. I hand him more explosives, carried here in our packs.
Lydia looks at the map of the Atlantic, whispering silently. Of course she has children back home. I hope she is thinking of them, as we do this work. These people would have wiped us out. They tried many times. We extended the hand of friendship to them, offered them a treaty and help in finding the cure, and this is how they repaid us.
Arnst entertains himself savaging the room. He kicks dead bodies when they lie in his way. He tears open drawers and tosses the contents into the air so they fall like white autumn leaves to the ground, where they sop up blood.
After he gets bored of that he ranges out into the corridor, where he starts shooting.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
He's a good dog, but the noise is distracting Feargal. I send a pulse that stills him, and the gunfire stops. Keeshom gives me a pathetically grateful look.
In half an hour Feargal emerges, sweating and burned in places and swathed with engine grease. The air puffing out with him smells of ozone.
"Done," he says. "There'll be nothing left."
Nothing left.
"Let's go," I say, and lead them out. Arnst picks up after us in the corridor. We reconnect with Hatya above ground. She sobs while Keeshom paces in tight, mad little circles on the flattened grass. Casualties of war. I silence them both with a pulse. I don't really need them now, though they may have their uses, so I'll keep them around. My doctor and my engineer, like we're an away team from the dark mirror episodes of Star Trek, where the captain leads his crew to bring devastation wherever he goes.
"Do it," I tell Feargal, and he taps a button on his tablet.
The physical blast doesn't reach us, but I feel the eruption on the line like an earthquake. The charge obliterates outward, blinding me to any sense, then sucks in with a gale-force violence that almost drags me down into the well. Only Arnst's hand on my chest keeps me in place.
Then it is over.
Arnst looks at me with a curious expression; part concern, part rising confidence. I show weakness that could damage our mission, and in that he sees his opportunity coming. There is no loyalty to me here, only to my strength. So I'll be stronger.
Below us, the full weight of the line soaks into the earth, no longer repelled by the shield. My sensation of it comes back gradually, like vision returning after a flash goes off in a dark room. The shield's tides that had lapped at my mind and skin for the last eight hours are gone, and all the people underground are trapped.
I don't say anything more. This is only the first, after all. There's Brezno, then the shark-eyed man in Istanbul and whatever surprises he has planned, and after that another seven bunkers. This is only the beginning.
Hatya has gone silent, numb from the size of the loss. Lydia guides her. Arnst grins and Feargal follows with a weary step. Keeshom stands there until Feargal takes him by the arm and leads him away.
We refuel. We get back in our vehicles.
I'm doing this for my children, I think, for Vie and Talia, but that thought rings utterly hollow. They would not want to know about this, so I decide not to think of them again. It will only pollute them further.
I put the Humvee in gear and we drive for Slovakia.
16. BREZNO
Brezno is far worse.
We drive for a day and a night, and at some point I sleep. Arnst sits at his wheel throughout in the Jeep behind us, a manic expression on his face. Revenge. For him it's misplaced, since he didn't
care about New LA. Rather he's just excited to cut down people because he can't cut me down. Just like he savaged me in Screen 2, because Drake gave him permission. I suppose he's an addict.
From France we pass into Switzerland, cutting through the high, remote passes of the Alps. There's snow here, and skiing pistes riveted with gondola wires like sagging power lines. Through the blip that is Liechtenstein we pour, into the long stretch of Austria. There are castles around every corner, and deep fable-filled forests, and old roads and old lakes and somewhere maybe I see Cinderella, and somewhere Snow White, peeking out from this ancient place.
I tell myself stories as I drive, to stay awake. I spin Disney tales so the hero must face a terrible choice. What if Simba could save his pride, but had to kill Nala to do so? What if Snow White could free her Kingdom, but had to kill the seven dwarves to get there?
It's funny, watching their faces crater in my head. The movies they never showed us as kids. Dumbo's mother dies, yes, and so does Bambi's, but not because Dumbo or Bambi killed them. That's the kind of movie my children are growing up in.
Into the high, clear valleys and lakes of Slovakia I play folk music CDs on maximum volume, picked up from dusty gift shops along the way. There's one with beer steins on the front cover and a man playing bagpipes. I laugh every time I see that, because bagpipes are Scottish! It takes so little to cheer me now.
Feargal sits and drives while I laugh to myself. Occasionally we swap and he sends one of his drone patrols out, but they find nothing. I could tell him that, but he's a stickler for security. Kind of like Julio. When I think that it sets me off laughing again. Oh, how Julio must have seen me. Jumped-up hipster idiot, painting shit on buildings and calling it hope. I totally get him, now. If I wasn't me, I think, I would have been him.
On the outside, slowly stewing in my own juices. I could have been him, I could have been Don, I could've been dead already.
It's funny. We ascend through more fairy-tale castles on roads Anna cleared painstakingly a year back. Cars shunted to the side by her construction equipment, rocking a JCB like I once did on the trek to California.
Brezno is a small town, population 21,000. Like Gap. There are mountain ranges, which seems a prerequisite for bunkers these days, and a river called the Hron. The town has a nice central square; probably they had a stellar Christmas market here. As we circle up narrow, switchbacking roads toward the bunker, I recite information to Feargal from tourist guides I picked up along the way.
"Their hockey club was very strong, in the 1st Senior League." I leave a gap for Feargal to show his appreciation, but he is not forthcoming. I flick through the pages looking for something better. "Brezno's most famous son was Slovakia's first astronaut, Ivan Bella. Cosmonaut, actually. He did experiments on quails in space! That's quite a claim to fame."
He wants to tell me to shut up, I know. That's why I push.
"There's nothing in here about the bunker though." I riffle to the index but indeed, there is no mention of it.
We come upon the bunker a few hours after dawn, and it's not like any of the others we've seen before. This one is not a hole dug directly down into the ground, but a large metal doorway built into a face of rock. Those doors would take some opening, but then Feargal always knew what we were coming up against, and he's got the requisite explosives.
Except we won't need them.
The doors stand open, leading into a well-lit cement gullet that stretches in and down. But that is not the most extraordinary thing either. The most extraordinary thing is the people.
They are everywhere; lying in the gullet like bits of undigested food, clogging round the doors, mounding and writhing. In the clearing before the door, where now the stump of an autocannon bristles raggedly, they lie in their hundreds.
Like in Gap, they're alive and phasing under the line. Some of them shudder. Some of them crawl. Some of them even see us.
Arnst calls something terrible over the radio and roars ahead, ramming his Jeep onto this low ocean of bodies like a little kid running through piles of autumn leaves.
Crunch, splat, splurge. Bodies burst and stop wriggling under his truck's big wheels. He does donuts as we pull up. In a few moments the clearing is a churned wound of mud and blood, which even tweaks my stomach a little. Perhaps I haven't seen anything quite as bad as this. Of course I've done worse to the ocean, but these are not the ocean.
These are people.
God knows why they left the shelter of their shield. I suppose they knew they had no other choice. They were afraid. They ran for the hills. Maybe they thought they could get on their knees and beg, and I would take pity.
Feargal pulls up our Humvee and sits at the wheel, knuckles white on the wheel. Clearly furious. "He's enjoying it."
I nod along. Arnst hops out and starts stomping on skulls. He breaks wrists and ribcages with his boot heels. He's having a hell of a time out there. He starts singing what I think is a Bavarian beer hall song, bawling lustily while he stomps and savages. It would be cartoonish if it wasn't real. He's cracked worse than me.
"You should stop him," Feargal says. "This is not right."
I look at him. Maybe this is about a kind of revenge, because hearing him say that makes me feel good. Perhaps I really am that petty. In Screen 2 when Arnst was hurting me, and Drake was hurting me, Feargal didn't even look my way. That was a hard choice, and it hurt me more than I can say. But then I'm weak too. We're all weak. They're all going to die anyway.
"Not the right kind of genocide?" I ask calmly. "You'd prefer your mass slaughter a little more bloodless, perhaps?"
His lip twitches. He wants to cave in my head, and I don't blame him. Maybe I want him to.
"Send a drone in," I say. "He'll tire himself out."
He doesn't.
The whole time he stomps on heads. As Feargal sends his drones in, blowing a few traps with their probing blasts, Arnst keeps dancing until he is sweltering in sweat. When we finally stand in front of the shield mechanism, deep in the belly of the mountain, then he stops. There are no dead bodies here waiting for us. They must have accepted their fate with greater equanimity than Gap, and the shark-eyed man didn't need to kill them. He just let them open the door and crawl into freedom on the line.
"Beg," I imagine him saying. "It won't save you, but it's all you can do."
Or maybe they just grew tired of waiting for death to come. Better to bring it on yourself.
"You should try this, Amo," Arnst says.
He is sopping with blood, like he's taken a bath in the stuff. It must be sloshing around in his boots. I smile at him, then I hit him between the eyes with the haft of my gun. He goes right down, plonk, like a stone. He's like a little kid who had too much ice cream, and now he needs a timeout.
Feargal watches me with something beyond disgust. "Now? Why now?"
I shrug.
"You just brought him to torture us. That's the only reason." He looks so sick. "Who are you?"
I look at him. "What I need to be. Pain is weakness leaving the body, Feargal. Haven't you heard that? These people are becoming strong."
He shudders and shakes his head. I'm sure he has hopes of returning from this voyage into hell as a human being, but I have no such delusions. We're damned for this, so may as well be doubly damned. But I'll admit, it is better with Arnst quiet.
While Feargal goes to his work, I kneel by a child, maybe eleven years old. Probably conceived in the first year after the Seal came down. Her eyes flicker a panicked gray then green then gray, like a traffic light gone out of control. I stroke her soft red hair, tucking a strand behind her ear. Is she in pain? It's hard to say. I wonder how long she'll survive like this, locked into the line. If her current state is anything like the ocean, then it could be for years. I hope it doesn't hurt. I don't want that for anyone. If this is about revenge, then it's not against these people individually.
Still it is cruel to leave them. Maybe we'll come back when we have more time and kill
them all properly. It's the least I can do. Though that is a lot of stops, and I rather doubt that I'll have the appetite for it, when the whole trek is complete. After I finish up in Kamchatka, twelve bunkers down the line, thirty thousand dead or thereabouts, will I really want to retrace my steps and finish coloring within the lines?
"Done," Feargal says.
We head out and he blows the shield. The pulse washes through me like before, and wakes Arnst. We had to drag him out; the big bastard is heavy. He rubs the crust of blood on his face and grins up at me.
"You see? It feels good."
I have to laugh at that. Victory. Yes.
We leave the people of Brezno as they are, caught in their fits like mosquitoes in the amber of the line. Even when I'm ten thousand miles away they'll still be here, phasing between life and death. What a life. They survived the apocalypse and more than twelve years in a cooped up can underground, but they couldn't survive me.
We go south.
From Brezno it is another thousand miles to Istanbul; down through Hungary, Serbia, south-east across Bulgaria and then into Turkey.
It gets warm again as we go. Hungary looks ancient and flea-bitten through the window. I dream of hands reaching up through the asphalt to pull me down. Serbia is a world of ugly little villages scoured by dry sandy winds. Bulgaria is a long nightmare of demons cracking open my head and sucking out the contents with a straw.
I'm sick.
I feel Istanbul coming. There are things on the line ahead that I don't understand, filling it up with a kind of rippling static. I can't get any kind of read on what they are, but neither can I stop. I caution Feargal, and he twitches in the seat beside me. I tell the others via radio, but no response comes back except a giddy cheer from Arnst.
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