by S J Taylor
“It doesn’t matter,” he said to me. “Love you always, is what I will do.”
Then the Enforcers opened fire, and Jadran was the first to fall.
“No!” I tried to shout. What came out instead was a mangled screech, the garbled shout of the creature I had become. I screamed and screamed and tried to claw my way to the Enforcers so that I could stop them.
It was too late. All of the Freemen lay dead around my feet. All of them, including Jadran.
As I stood frozen with disbelief, one of the Enforcers stepped up to me. Tall and lean, she reached up and undid the straps on her helmet.
When she took it off, she held it at her side, and I saw who it was.
Saskia. It was her pretty face, marred now by surgical scars and burn marks. Her once lustrous blonde hair was chopped short wherever it hadn’t been burned away from her scalp. Metal interface devices had been stitched into the side of her head, and one eye was the round red lens of a sensor.
She reached out to me with a gloved hand, to cup the side of my monstrous face. “Now we are the same,” she told me, her voice reverberating through an electronic filter. “We are both creatures made to serve the Restored Society.”
Then she leaned in, and kissed my puckered lips.
“I love you,” she said to me.
I jolted awake from the nightmare to find the barrel of a gun pressed against the side of my neck. In the light from maybe half a dozen handheld oil lamps, I saw men and women standing around me, holding handguns and long rifles, all pointed in my direction.
“Uh, uh,” the man holding the gun to the side of my throat warned me. “Don’t move too much. I might get nervous and squeeze the trigger. Real shame to kill you before we got to know each other.”
It was disorienting to go from the dream I’d just had of Saskia, to this scene here where I was being held at gunpoint. It didn’t seem real. It was like I woke up from one dream in the middle of another… until the gun lifted up against the underside of my chin, encouraging me to sit up.
Yup. This was real.
I almost sighed with relief when I heard Jadran speak. He was still in the room. Still with me.
“Lockett, this is not necessary. Era Rae is with me.”
“So I saw,” the man—Lockett—answered. “You two were very cozy on that table. Honestly, Jadran, I figured you for smarter than that.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” Jadran told him. I could just see him from the corner of my eye. He was being held at gunpoint as well.
So these were the Freemen. I saw ragged clothing and mismatched weapons and the gaunt look of soldiers who had been on the battlefield for too long. Every one of them regarded me like I was a trap ready to spring. Like I was dangerous. “Nice friends you have here, Jadran.”
“Hush now,” Lockett told me. “Jadran is a friend, sure. That doesn’t mean he can’t make a mistake or two. See, we know what you are, Miss Era Rae. We know where you come from, and we know what you can do. No way are we letting you just walk into our camp without taking precautions.”
He held out his free hand so I could see that he was holding a set of plastic binders. They were similar to what the Enforcers used to handcuff prisoners. “Stand up,” he said, “and put your hands behind your back.”
There wasn’t a lot of room to argue. So I did as I was told, and when I turned I was able to see Jadran better. His expression told me he was sorry, but more than that, he was silently begging me to go along with this. For now.
The calm that always came over me when I was about to fight had already started to surface, but at his look I pushed it back down, stifled it and kept control. It wasn’t easy. Jadran had told me that I was more than what the Restored Society had made me. If that was true, then I was in control of myself. I submitted to having my hands cinched tight behind my back, glaring at Jadran the whole time.
You better be right about this, I was telling him silently.
“Well,” Lockett commented, his voice a lot more relaxed than it had been just a moment ago, “that there’s a good first step, Miss Era. Jadran wants to vouch for you, and maybe that says something, but I’m going to let Commander Ross decide one way or the other. Everything I’ve heard so far, I doubt we can trust you.”
Jadran and I exchanged another look. Everything he’d been told so far, Lockett had said. They knew me, he said. There was only one person who could have told them anything about me.
Laria. She wasn’t here, I noticed. That whole story about going to check for supplies had been a ruse. She would have known where the Freemen camp was, too. She’d probably been there before with Jadran. I could just guess the sorts of things that she had told them about me. Her own special little version of the truth.
Anything to get me away from Jadran so she could have him all to herself.
I closed my eyes and figured I didn’t have anything to lose by trying. “Lockett, listen to me. I’m not the enemy. The Enforcers are on their way here, right now, with more manpower than they had the last time you faced them. It’s too much. You can’t stand against them.”
A man from the crowd stepped forward angrily. He was burly and tall and starting to go bald even though he kept his hair long enough to reach his shoulders. “I told you, Lockett. She’s trying to make us run. She’s trying to help the Enforcers by getting us out of the way.”
“Believe me,” I grumbled, “the Enforcers don’t need my help to get you out of their way.”
A collective grumbling went up from the group. Jadran’s expression sank.
“Uh,” I stuttered. “That didn’t come out like I meant it to.”
Lockett rubbed a hand over his square chin, looking thoughtfully at me. He was tough looking, like someone who was used to doing things by himself, or someone who had lived on the edge of society for years and managed to make a life of it. His black hair was shaved on the sides and grown in a strip an inch or so high from his forehead to the back of his neck. A design was tattooed on the right side of his face, mixing into the stubble of his beard. It was a hard face, and his pale green eyes were chips of stone.
“Bring her,” he said finally. “Grab their weapons on the way out, too. Commander Ross wants to see her, so he gets to see her. After that, well…”
He finished the thought with a shrug that I definitely did not like.
I gathered that this Commander Ross was the leader of the Freemen. I didn’t know if I’d be able to talk sense into him or not once we finally got to their camp, but I decided to try once more with Lockett now as we started down the stairs. “Listen to me. You need to warn your camp to move out. Go somewhere the Enforcers won’t find you. Live to fight another day! They’re coming for you now and I’m telling you, there’s no way you can stand up to them.”
Lockett laughed. Not the response I was hoping for.
“Don’t worry, Miss Era.” We were at the bottom of the steps now, in the area under the building that led out onto the street, and he motioned for two of his men with their lanterns to move out ahead of the rest of us. “The Enforcers are a force to be reckoned with, sure as you say, but they aren’t here for us. The Freemen aren’t their target.”
“Not here for… what do you mean?” I demanded. A quick glance over at Jadran showed he was just as lost by that comment as I was. “Of course they’re here to attack you. What else would they be after out here in this Godforsaken city?”
“Shh,” was his answer.
“Don’t shush me. Tell me what you mean,” I pressed. “If you know something—”
“Shh!”
I nearly snapped at him again, the blood rising in my cheeks, pounding along the line of the cut on my face with every heartbeat. If Jadran hadn’t stepped up beside me and clamped a hand over my mouth, Lockett would’ve gotten an earful.
“Shh,” Jadran repeated to me.
I nearly bit his hand. How dare he shush me too, when all I was trying to do… was…
Then I heard it. Shuffli
ng, scraping noises, and the heavy breathing of some huge animal.
My eyes went wide. There was a Child of the Event out there.
A second growling came from over to our right.
Not just one.
“Untie me,” I said after shaking Jadran’s hand away. “Untie me, right now.”
“Don’t you worry your pretty little head,” Lockett told me in a voice that wasn’t the least bit concerned by what was out there. “We’ve fought these creatures before. We know what we’re doing.”
“Jadran, you get these restraints off me.” I heard my voice cracking, and I didn’t care. I remembered our encounter from earlier today under the lights of the tunnel. Here, in the dark, it seemed like suicide to do anything but run away. No way was I going to die with my hands cinched behind my back. “Cut me loose, Jadran!”
Lockett was still ignoring me. He gave orders to the men and women with him like he really had been through this before and really did know what he was doing. Which just proved to me that he was insane.
“Omar, Carline, set up the flares there, there, and there. Tony, Johannson, crossfire from those steps and that car over there. The rest of us face them head on. Here we go, people.”
In seconds there were three blazing balls of white light firing up into the air from deployment tubes set up around the front of the JEA Tower. They blazed up into the air and then hovered at a height of ten feet, illuminating everything around us clearly.
I really wish they hadn’t.
Not one. Not two. I counted three Children of the Event crawling toward us on hands and feet and appendages that were all coily and bendy like snakes. Their faces were all different, all warped, all lumpy and twisted like they’d grown from the inside out. They all stopped when the flares popped up, and then all of them at the same time roared at the little humans standing in front of them in the lights, exposing pointy teeth and jagged fangs and tongues that dripped silvery saliva.
“Stay away from the venom,” Lockett reminded everyone. “And don’t stop shooting until they stop moving!”
Gunfire blasted through the night. I saw frag bullets tear through the bulbous flesh of the children, blood spraying from the impact. There were lasers overlapping in a crossfire pattern. The enraged monsters howled again, and advanced.
Hellfire, I thought to myself. If there are more of them out there, all this noise is going to draw them right to us.
“Jadran—”
I started to demand again that he un-cuff me, but instead he pushed me over to the side of the wide front opening and kissed my forehead. “Stay here. Stay down. I’ll be back for you, when the fight is over.”
Then he ran off, grabbing up my pulse rifle from where the Freemen had stacked our supplies before he went out to join the fight.
“Jadran… Jadran!”
I was going to kill him. If he survived this, I was going to kill him with my own bare hands.
I peeked around the corner of the doorway and saw gunfire and monsters and Jadran, taking up a defensive position behind a low, crumbling wall near the street. One of the Children lurched forward even as a chunk of its shoulder was blasted away by the coordinated attack Lockett had laid out. The monster landed right in front of where Lockett was standing, roaring out of a split mouth and baring teeth as long as my forearm. Three Freemen concentrated their laser fire at the creature’s head.
The thing reared back as the side of its face was just obliterated.
Then it swung out with a bisected, thorned arm, and slapped Lockett sideways. His body sailed through the air, limp and spinning. I didn’t see where he landed. I didn’t see him get back up, either.
Screw this.
I was not going to die here. I ran to the closest of the oddly shaped vehicles down here in this space under the JEA Tower. It had been set on fire at some point in the past, leaving an ashy silhouette around it in the concrete. That suited me fine, because its metal skeleton was jagged and sharp. Just what I needed.
Turning, I set my hands against the frame, and began slicing through the plastic binders around my wrists. It would’ve been easier if I could see what I was doing. A couple of times I missed and cut into my own skin, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t dare. Outside I could still hear the monsters, and the shouts of the Freemen, and the blasts of gunfire.
I wasn’t going to wait for the only sound to be the Children coming to get me.
The bonds finally snapped in two and I was free again. The cuts on my wrists weren’t bad. Just a little blood. I could deal with bleeding.
Bleeding meant I was alive.
Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to go outside.
One of the Children was already dead. Its hulking body lay in a broken heap on the ground over where Jadran and two Freemen had barricaded themselves. That left two of the things, both of them bloody and torn up and… angry. They kept advancing, even as lasers and shell projectiles tore into them. Blood sprayed. Bellowing growls split the air.
Two Freemen were on the ground, unmoving.
But another of the Children fell dead as I watched. That left one.
It was bigger than the others. Its purplish skin was stretched so tight that I expected it to split open and spill out the creature’s insides. Six multiple-jointed limbs kept it crawling forward while four strong arms smashed at Freemen scrambling around under it, shooting again and again.
Jadran came out from his cover to put three carefully placed shots across the monster’s face, taking out an eye, enraging the thing further. He dodged to his left to avoid one of the arms and turned to fire again.
One of the thing’s legs caught Jadran across the back, knocking him sprawling.
“No!” I heard myself shouting. I picked up the first weapon I came to from one of the dead Freemen and ran to Jadran, firing without looking, hitting the beast but not doing any real harm. Its clawed fist was coming down at Jadran. It was going to crush him. He was going to die.
It was my nightmare, all over again.
In the middle of everything, I lost myself.
The calm that I knew so well wrapped itself around me, folding me into its steely grip. The world slowed down until I could see everything around me. I knew the dangers. I knew the risks.
I didn’t care.
There was only the calm, and the need to fight.
I got myself in place over Jadran and braced my feet and rammed my rifle down at the creature’s hand, firing as I did, drilling into one thick finger and making the thing draw its arm back. That was just pain, though. That wasn’t enough to stop this thing.
Death would stop it.
The weapon in my hand was a low gain ballistic laser. I knew everything about this weapon. Deep in my calm like this I could picture every bit and piece of it in my mind, in vivid detail. It would never do more than just hurt this monster screeching in anger above us. If I wanted it dead, I needed to do something else.
Twisting the reload cylinder the wrong way and adjusting the gain allowed me to jam the trigger back in full auto mode. It didn’t fire. The energy buildup was trapped inside the chamber now.
I held the rifle by its middle and reared back with it like it was a spear. Then I waited, my mind working the angles and the timing with clockwork precision.
When the beast screamed at me again, I threw my makeshift javelin down its throat.
The creature gagged and swallowed.
Then it stared at me, like it knew what I had just done.
“Die,” I hissed at it.
Just before its insides exploded.
I saw the bright light flash against the underside of its thin flesh. Blood burst out through its nostrils and from the corners of its eyes. It spasmed, its six legs curling up underneath it, and then it let out a low moan as it toppled to the ground.
It died at my feet.
The calm slipped away from me in waves, leaving me cold and sick. I swallowed back what tried to retch up in my throat, and knelt down over Jadran. He was on
his back now, staring up at me, a little smile on his pretty face. Nice to know he wasn’t badly hurt.
“That,” he said, “was amazing.”
“Somebody had to save your life,” I told him. Then I slapped him, not gently, across his chest. “Don’t you ever leave me tied up in a crumbling building while you go off to fight monsters. Understand me?”
He took ahold of the back of my neck and pulled me to him so that he could kiss me. “I understand you, Era Rae.”
Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I heard a lot of meaning in those few words.
The Freemen gathered around us, weapons trained out at the night. “We need to go,” one of the women told us. “You two can pick this up some other time.”
“Where’s Lockett?” Jadran asked her, moving me off him to sit up.
“We don’t know,” the woman told him. “If he’s still alive he’ll find us later. We have to go.”
I noticed how Jadran winced as he stood up. He was hurt worse than he wanted to let on. His shirt was ripped across his back, but I didn’t see any blood.
“What’s the rush?” I asked. “You killed these things. You don’t have time to look for your leader? Or take care of your dead?”
The woman stared at me like I’d just asked the stupidest question in the world. She had a web of scars on one cheek. It made me wonder how she got them. “We don’t have time,” she said, slowly, “because all that noise is going to draw attention. If we don’t get out of here—”
Sputtering growls filled the night around us. At the edges of the light from the flares, things moved.
Big things. Mutated things.
Children of the Event.
Chapter 4 - Hard Places
All of us lifted our weapons up. Except me. All I had was my machete.
“Back in the building,” Jadran suggested. “Cover, is what we need. We can’t hold up against that many, Carline.”
The woman with the scars nodded her head. “Yeah. I think you’re right. Everyone, fall back. Get back in the building. We’ll find a choke point and pick them off from there.”