The Hunted

by Reagan Woods

  Big hands curled around her upper arms and she knew he was going to try to force her behind him. Good luck there, buddy. She shrugged him off impatiently. He must have realized she was trying to show him something because he didn’t grab her again. Instead, he tried to stick his big bald head over her shoulder to see what she was doing. In the dark. Hell, maybe with those goggles he could see what she was up to.

  Her searching hand clasped over the package she sought. “We can blow our way out of here if we have to,” she whispered, holding up part of her block of C-4 in one hand while she unzipped an outer pocket for the remote/detonator set she kept stored separately.

  Silex made a grab for the explosive whispering furiously, “Where did you get - oomph?”

  Fran anticipated the move, jabbing her elbow back into his ribs. “Shh!” She chided, replacing her pack. “I’m going ease forward and assess the situation. Stay here.” She tried to keep the annoyance she felt at working with him in check. It wasn’t his fault he was used to being team leader and she was more comfortable operating solo.

  He hissed with displeasure but made no move to stop her.

  Size was to her advantage here. Slowly, she crept forward, her focus on the diffuse light ahead. The drain came to an abrupt cross pipe about three feet in diameter – significantly smaller than the concrete culvert they’d been in. Directly on the other side of the cross pipe from her was a metal-lined intake gutter.

  They had to be beneath the basement level of the parking garage – that was the only way to explain the lack of sound. The Texas camp had seemed to hum with people even when most of the Earthers were on a sleep/reconditioning shift.

  Inching across the space, she approached on the diagonal to get the widest possible view of the area outside the gutter. What she saw stole her breath, and suddenly the horrid stench made a macabre kind of sense.

  The LA Camp wasn’t surrounded by arable land like the Texas Camp. They couldn’t be self-sufficient without making a few strategic moves. Turning the five-floor, circular parking garage into a kind of stable or maybe slaughter house, given the number of animal skulls stacked around, was one way to make good use of what they had.

  In the limited light, Fran chanced a look down at herself. Yeah, it was as bad as she’d thought. She was covered in dried remnants of the slaughter house portion of the camp. Damned Silex. He must have known what they’d be crawling into. Good thing she wasn’t squeamish.

  Cautiously, she pressed closer to the intake, she didn’t see anything alive – at least, not at floor level. She needed to get out there and take a closer look. For all they knew, they were only moments ahead of potential capture. If she got out there and set the charge, they could ambush…

  “Don’t even think about it,” Silex rumbled.

  “One of us needs to look around,” she argued, only mildly surprised that he’d managed to wedge himself behind her without setting off her inner danger alarm. “It’s really dusty in there.” She scooted to the side to make room for him to look around. “Maybe they don’t come down here often. You know how stingy the Doranos are with protein for us.”

  “They’re good at restoring native populations quickly,” Silex offered absently.

  “And here I thought they were only good at destroying things,” Fran offered with a sugary-sweet smile.

  “I can’t fit through that intake,” he stated the obvious, ignoring her blatant sarcasm. “And I don’t want to send you in there alone.”

  Fran patted his cheek condescendingly, taking dark pleasure in wiping her grimy hand clean on his jaw. “And yet I’m going. Be a doll and pass my pack to me.” She wisely decided to keep the explosives and detonator on her person even as she handed off her backpack. She didn’t have enough up top to conceal the explosives, but her bra strap was a handy place to tuck the contraband. Now that she’d showed her hand, she didn’t want him confiscating her hoard.

  Between her blaster, the C-4 and the element of surprise, she ought to be able to take out a small cadre of Doranos. The Corian Warriors that were assigned as security to every camp might prove a bit harder to thwart, but she wasn’t overly worried with Silex to cover her back – even if he was stuck in the gutter. The thought made her snort as she couldn’t really think of a better spot for him.

  She slithered through the narrow intake only losing a little skin off her bubble butt. Getting to her hands and knees, she looked around as she motioned impatiently for Silex to hand her pack out. The large, circular room was divided in half by the huge ramp leading up. Someone had welded steel over the small wedges at the top of the walls that would have been open to the outside – and the amazing gardens that used to cover every inch of the finely-manicured mountain top.

  It was surreal looking at what had become of the once-famous art museum – or in this case, it’s ridiculously fancy parking garage. Chains covered in bloody rust hung from the high ceiling and dark stains spattered the room. A dried river of blood led her along the outer wall, behind stacks of the huge, plastic-like shipping containers the CGA used to transport alien tech to the surface.

  Peeking around the corner of a container, she made a grim discovery; the parking garage was also a mausoleum.

  Chapter 22

  “Siiii. You need to get out here. Right the fuck now.”

  Silex grabbed the two iron bars on his side of the intake drain and heaved the heavy piece of pitted iron away from the concrete. He’d never heard that note in her voice before and it motivated him as he shoved his pack through the enlarged hole and hauled himself, none too gently, out onto the slaughterhouse floor. Dread settled in the pit of his stomach as he slung his pack on and drew his sidearm.

  “I don’t think we have to worry about any Warriors coming for us.” She sounded weak. He followed the echoes of her voice and spotted her behind a veritable wall of shipping containers. She was panting, bent at the waist, hands on her knees. Her face was pale, a slick sheen of sweat shone on her forehead. Those dark, mysterious eyes had gone wide and blank.

  The ball of ice in his stomach grew bigger with every step he took toward her. Closing in, he hooked an arm around her as he took in the terrible sight. It was instinct that had him trying to push her behind him, to shield her from the bodies stacked in careless heaps like so much rubbish. Part of him knew it was too late to spare her, but the gory scene was too much to process.

  Francesca was the first to recover her wits. “Now we know why they were so eager to kill us. I’m sure your precious General Darvan doesn’t know anything about this. We have to keep moving,” she choked raggedly, pushing unsteadily away. She spun and took a few resolute steps toward the concrete ramp leading up. “We have to get out of here.”

  She was right. And yet…

  Silex, taking comfort in the weight of his sidearm in his hand, forced himself to look closer at the piles of Warriors. These were males he’d likely known and trained with. Their faces were masks of grimacing death. “These bodies are old. They’ve been here for a while. The dry environment has started to mummify some of them.” He took a calming breath and pulled on his training. Crossing the room, he wiped the dust from the face of one of the dormant holoscreens. It pulsed with light as it came out of hibernation mode.

  “Wait!” Francesca was suddenly at his side, her nails biting into his wrists as she tried to stop his movements. “If you wake up the tech, anyone monitoring energy usage will know this little secret has been discovered. Stop while you can. The bodies are old, just like you said. They aren’t going anywhere. Use your head.” He heard the worry in her voice, the fear that he would do something needlessly risky before they had a chance to find her sister. “You can follow-up on this...”

  Her logic was cold. But faultless. They weren’t – he wasn’t - positioned to investigate – or avenge - these deaths. In fact, they were in danger.

  They knew Neerum, the camp administrator, had security and that security was bound to be seeking the cause of the temporary shield outage.
Still, the need to pursue and exact revenge for the carnage of so many good Warriors was like a physical burn in his gut.

  Reluctantly, Silex turned away from the massacre. There was no way he would let this go unanswered.

  Francesca kept a hand on his low back as she ushered him away from the gory scene. “Do you hear that?” She asked, pausing just before they rounded the large supporting pillar that guarded the ascending ramp.

  The unmistakable shuffle of feet met his ears and he pulled her back so both their backs were pressed against the smooth concrete pillar, out of sight for anyone looking down on their position. He stretched around, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of whoever was up there and pulled back quickly as the sizzle of laser fire struck wide of his position. “I think they know we’re here.”

  Silex looked down to see Francesca calmly squatting on the ground and molding a small piece of her explosive into a ball. She stuck the cap into the ball and handed it to him. “Toss it up there and then, you know, duck.” Arms over her head, she mimed curling into a ball.

  He nodded and flung the small piece of plastic in the direction from which the laser shot had come. As he sank to his knees and plugged his ears, he felt the building vibrate with the blast.

  “Sorry,” Francesca yelled, hearing obviously affected, as he helped her to her feet. “I got a little trigger happy.” She waved at the smoke and concrete dust that clouded the air around her face.

  He put a finger over his mouth and pulled her behind him as he turned to do a low jog up the ramp. No one fired on them. There were three Doranos males, all wearing the dark gray garb of civilians but sporting Warrior grade weapons, bleeding and unconscious or dead behind another support pillar at the top of the ramp.

  There was a scuff and the hiss of laser fire when he bent to check for identification. He looked up to find Francesca coolly covering him as he searched the bodies, scanning them for hidden markers with his wrist bracer. She took out two while he tried in vain to identify the males before him. Realizing he wasn’t going to find definitive answers to his questions here, they stood and circled around to scan for further threats.

  She signaled at another pillar across the way and he nodded. There was absolutely nothing on this level. The floor was stained black with time and the lights flickered ominously. The concrete walls were fluted in vertical bands from floor to ceiling with metal fire shutters riveted closed. He suspected they were close to ground-level and the shutters were a way of containing the cattle they drove through here down the ramp into the slaughter area.

  Silex couldn’t help thinking about the last moments of his brother Warrior’s that lay dead below. Had they been herded through here like animals?

  Behind the pillar, he caught sight of the tell-tale long white hair and fired. He and Francesca met over the body to confirm the kill. There didn’t seem to be anyone else on this level.

  “We need to keep moving,” he voiced.

  Francesca pointed to a nearby doorway. “That should be the stairwell to the surface. I doubt the elevator still works – or that we’d want to use it.”

  “I don’t like the idea of a stairwell.”

  “Too closed in,” she agreed. “But our choices are limited. We can go up, clear another level and see what we see, I guess,” she whispered with a shrug.

  They jogged into position and prepared to go through the whole exercise again. Francesca pulled another cap/detonator combo from her pack and molded another bomb.

  “How much of that stuff do you have?” Silex wanted to know.

  “Mind your own business,” Francesca responded, handing him the explosive.

  Biting back a rude retort, Silex waved his helmet around the support beam at the foot of the ramp to the third floor of the structure. As expected, the first hiss of laser fire went wide.

  Thinking of the relative positions of the Doranos on this floor, Silex tossed the bomb into a more centrally-located area and hunkered down next to Francesca for the blast.

  “These guys are really, really bad at this,” Francesca observed when she realized they’d taken out all six of the males on the third floor with the well-placed explosion. “What kind of strategy was this supposed to be?”

  Chapter 23

  Silex scratched the back of his neck as he looked around the third floor of the repurposed parking structure and tried to make sense of what was happening. Francesca was correct. Sneaking into this camp and taking out these males had been easy. Too easy given the firepower and strategy from mere days before.

  This floor shared the same basic layout as the previous two. The concrete walls on this floor were only solid to his waist here. There were tall, thin, panels – probably blacked out windows - worked into the concrete every few feet around the perimeter indicating they were well above ground now.

  The floor was the same dirty concrete but showed additional evidence of having been used to stable animals. He wasn’t surprised to see petrified dung in the moldy hay underfoot. None of the hay or excrement was fresh and something about that caused a fission of unease to tingle up his spine.

  Putting that aside, he focused on taking in the details of their attackers. The six Doranos that had ‘defended’ this floor still lay where they’d fallen. It went against his training to leave their bodies without attempting to ascertain their identities – and making sure they were dead, so once he and Francesca cleared the floor, they returned to take a closer look at the bodies.

  “I think this one is alive,” she whispered, turning one of the mortally wounded males on his back to examine him. “But I don’t think he will be for long. He’s bleeding pretty badly.”

  “It appears the blast wave threw him clear but there was no place soft to land,” Silex observed, taking in the compound fractures in the male’s arms and legs.

  “So, do you want to end him or should I?” Francesca’s face was void of emotion as she scanned the area for incoming threats. At least she wasn’t squeamish.

  “Leave him,” Silex decided. “If he’s alive and someone comes up behind us, they’re more likely to alert us to their presence if they’re trying to help him.”

  “Okay.” Francesca nodded. “Are we going up or out? There are two more floors to clear in this building if we’re going up. Although…I’m honestly confused as to why there hasn’t been more activity. No one has come to investigate the blasts – from above or below. And it’s so quiet. It’s almost like no one else is even here.”

  Her comment triggered something in the back of Silex’s mind. He took another pass around the perimeter room. The security measures were decidedly lacking. “I think they’re operating blind in here. Few of the surveillance devices appear to be in place and those that are don’t seem to be in working order.”

  “They didn’t want the Warriors to know what they were walking into,” Francesca speculated. “So they put up sub-par security.”

  Silex collected a darkened observation orb from its spot half way up one of the pillars and stowed it in his pack. Perhaps he could reengineer it into something useful.

  He didn’t like the direction Francesca was headed with her speculations, but neither could he discount her theory. “That would indicate the slaughter we saw down there was premeditated.”

  “If it was a slaughter, it was definitely premeditated,” Francesca murmured, waving him over to where she stood. “Keep watch for me, will you?”

  Without waiting for his reply, she pulled herself up onto the concrete that encircled the room. Quietly, she began chipping away at the blackout paint on the windows with her fingernails. “Give me a knife.”

  Silex kept his eyes trained on the ramp leading up to the next floor but passed her a blade. If trouble were coming, recent history suggested that would be the direction from which it sprung. Something else occurred and he turned back to her. “Wait. How do you know how many floors are in this building?”

  She glanced at him over her shoulder. “This isn’t my first time here.” A rare
smile transformed her serious face into a breathtaking beauty. Just as quickly, she sobered. “When I was a kid this campus was a museum. After that, it became the magistrate’s palace. My parents worked here as groundskeepers. It’s ironic that your people chose this site for their jail.”

  “It’s not a jail,” Silex grumbled, ignoring the fact that it probably was just that to the Earthers trapped inside. He continued to scan for threats. “What did you mean: ‘If it was a slaughter’?”

  “I didn’t see any wounds on the corp- er – on the Warriors,” she admitted. “There was just a whole lot of dried blood. Maybe it was a plague or something?”

  “We’re immune to your Earth diseases,” he argued.

  “Maybe it wasn’t an Earth disease,” she shot back.

  He didn’t know what to say to that, so he silently ruminated on her words.

  “Finally.”

  He turned to see her press her face to the glass.

  She sucked in an audible breath. “Shit. There is literally no one out there; no guards, no aliens, no people. There’s just nothing.”

  “What?” That didn’t sound right.

  “Look for yourself.” He helped her down and stretched up to look through the small peep hole she’d scratched. It was nighttime and the sky beyond the electrical field was pitch black. The dome overhead gave everything outside a blue wash. The stone and pavement courtyard sat empty below. Tall piles of detritus huddled against the base of the buildings as the relentless wind swirled stray leaves across the open space. Along one side of the courtyard, a raised stone flowerbed was overgrown and untended.

  “There must be some mistake,” he commented, jumping down next to Francesca. “Where is everyone? I have a hard time believing those twelve Doranos were the only people living here.”

  “I have a hard time believing those twelve idiots could kill that many Warriors,” she stated. “That half-assed defensive formation they had didn’t exactly speak of military precision. We need to clear the remaining two floors here and start searching the other buildings. There has to be an explanation for all this.”