Battle Cry (Freedom/Hate Series, Book 4)

by Kyle Andrews

  Let there be no misunderstanding, Dor didn't change her mind about the cause that she stood for or the goal that needed to be met. She didn't believe that their freedom could be won any other way than what they were doing.

  She didn't know what she thought anymore. There was truth and necessity. There was a clear and unmistakable side of good in this battle, so why did she feel the way she felt when she looked down at that dead body? Why did she feel her stomach turning when she should have spit in his face and danced on his grave?

  Lifting her eyes, Dor looked across the battle that was being fought around her and she no longer saw the beauty that she had once attributed to the war. It was ugly. It was horrifying. No matter how just the war might have been, hearing the screams in the crowd now made her sick.

  This was what the authorities had done to her people. They had forced them into this position, where men and women were fighting against people that they had grown up with and gone to school with. People that they might have called friends at one point in their lives, before the authorities decided that they were enemies.

  She watched the battle, taking cover behind cars and walls, snapping pictures when she could because the world needed to see this. History needed to remember that battlefield. And no matter who won or how it ended, they needed to know that this was not a victory. This was the most painful defeat that either side could suffer. This wasn't a battle against an outside force or invader. This was American against American. Brother against brother.

  This was what the authorities had done to them.

  37

  There were no words to describe how much Marti enjoyed looking out the window of one of the dark patient rooms and seeing the smoke rise around the HAND building several blocks away.

  Power in the hospital was minimal. The yellow glow of emergency lights filled the hallways as people scurried and panicked. It was music to Marti's ears.

  Behind her, there was a patient sleeping soundly in his bed. He was an office worker of some sort. He worked for the Governor and somehow managed to get caught up in the mess down at the stadium. Nobody was coming to wake him up, and the medication that he was on could keep him asleep through all sorts of warfare.

  Marti tried to imagine what it would be like to be knocked unconscious one day, and wake up in an entirely different world the next. If he woke up at all. There was a chance that Freedom would set the place on fire and none of them would be making it out alive.

  She only meant to take a quick look out the window in that room before returning to Geo's room and making sure that he was ready to travel. She might try to stall him, so he would be caught up in the violence, but she wasn't sure. She hadn't made up her mind just yet.

  The darkness wasn't confined to the hospital. As Marti looked out at the city, she could see that power had been cut to all of the buildings. The Governor had ordered the entire city to be shut down. Maybe he was hoping that turning off the electricity would keep the people from coming together, but just the opposite seemed to be true.

  Looking down, Marti could see citizens approaching the hospital with weapons ranging from guns and knives to shovels and chains. Though she could see no fire, thick black smoke was rising past the window.

  She turned away from the window and walked through the room, toward the door. On her way, she stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at the face of that young patient that was sleeping soundly. If she wanted to, she could have put him out of his misery right then and there, but she chose not to. If he woke up in a world that Freedom ruled, she wanted him to feel the shock of that realization and the fear that followed.

  As she made her way into the hallway, she could still hear the Governor yelling to his people, “Let's go!”

  “We have to clear the stairwell, sir. We can't risk taking you in there unless we're sure—” one of his Secret Service agents tried to tell him, but he couldn't finish his sentence before the Governor cut him off.

  “Stairs? What about the elevator?”

  “The elevator is offline, sir.”

  Marti couldn't suppress the smile that formed on her face. Fortunately, the medicine cart was close-by and she could turn her back to the men while looking as though she were doing her job.

  The thought did occur to her that she could approach those men and possibly kill one or two of them before being taken down. If she were lucky, she might even be able to kill the Governor himself. But the odds were against her. She would most likely be shot dead before she could get close enough to stick anyone with a needle. She needed to keep her cool and play the game until her next opportunity presented itself.

  The officials were mumbling amongst themselves. Aside from an outburst here and there from the Governor or one of the lower ranking officials who wanted to sound powerful around the various guards and HAND officers that surrounded them, Marti couldn't understand a word that they were saying. She decided to move on.

  When she walked into Geo's room, she found him pulling on a pair of jeans. She closed the door behind her and continued into the room. At first, Geo looked at her as though she had caught him in the middle of some terrible act. He scrambled to button his pants while Marti stared at him.

  “See anything interesting out there?” Geo asked.

  “City's on fire.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Geo walked to the window and looked out. He was on the wrong side of the hall if he wanted to see the HAND building, but there was undoubtedly enough chaos to go around.

  “My father is calling in helicopters to get us out of here,” Geo told Marti.

  “I heard. Lucky you.”

  Geo turned away from the window and faced Marti. He hesitated for a moment and then turned toward the window once again.

  “What?” Marti asked.

  Geo shook his head and said, “It's nothing.”

  “Okay,” Marti shrugged, and moved closer to him.

  As he looked out the window, Marti started to examine all of the bandages on his body, and put her hand to a scrape on the side of his neck. It wasn't a serious injury, but she inspected it anyway.

  “Do these hurt?” she asked him.

  Geo turned toward her and met her eyes. She could see him swallow hard before he answered her. When he did, his words were barely a whisper, “I'm fine.”

  There was something about the way he was looking at her that let Marti know that she had done her job well. He had the look of someone who wanted to kiss her.

  Rather than give him time to get around to it, Marti put her hand on Geo's cheek and leaned in, gently kissing him. After a moment, she pulled back and turned away.

  “I'm sorry. I didn't mean... That was inappropriate,” she said.

  In her head, she counted down the seconds until Geo turned her back around and planted another, much firmer kiss on her lips. When he did, she kissed him back, wrapping her arms around him and holding on as though he were the last life boat on a sinking ship.

  He was so predictable. So easily manipulated. That was what Marti loved the most about the elite class. They held all of the power as a group, but individually, they were schmucks.

  When their kiss ended, Geo looked down at her. She could barely see his face in the darkness of the room, with his back to the emergency light.

  She was waiting for him to declare his love for her and ask her to go with him when he left on the helicopter with histhe bullet struck the wall father. But Geo didn't say either of those things.

  Instead, he walked back to the window, looked out and asked her, “Do you think they'll win?”

  Marti didn't answer him. She couldn't see his eyes and she couldn't tell by the tone of his voice what he wanted to hear from her, so she chose to say nothing.

  Geo looked over his shoulder at her and asked, “Do you think they will take this building down? The HAND building? Do you think they could?”

  Marti looked down at the ground and shook her head as she said, “I don't know.”

  S
he walked to where he was standing and put a hand on his back. She looked out the window and said, “Either way, you need to get out of here. Put your shoes on.”

  Whether he was scared or angry, Marti couldn't tell. Geo kept his feelings well hidden. It was probably one of the things that they taught to all of the little privileged boys and girls when they went to school, so they couldn't be easily manipulated. With most of them, the training failed miserably. Marti could read them like books, but Geo was a little bit better at it. When he looked outside, she could see his mind working, but she couldn't tell what he was thinking.

  “As soon as we leave, you need to find a way out of here,” he told Marti.

  “I don't know that there is a way out. Not without going through them.”

  “Find one.”

  “Why?”

  “Because as soon as we're out of here, my father will show those people who controls this city. He will burn them all and make sure that nobody else ever considers something like this again.”

  Geo narrowed his eyes. In them, Marti could see a reflection of a fire burning down below, but his expression was completely blank. His voice was cold. He talked about the slaughter of those people as though it were the signing of a new law, or one of those pointless speeches that politicians loved to give. There wasn't a hint of emotion behind his words, and she wondered how anyone could be so indifferent toward other human beings. Innocent human beings.

  She didn't know what to say to Geo. She wasn't sure what the normal response would be from a proper citizen who was just told that they were going to be sacrificed for the greater good. 'Thank you for the warning' hardly seemed appropriate. It might have been an act of kindness from where he was standing, but it still made her wish that she had another syringe full of something lethal.

  Instead of saying anything at all, Marti wrapped her fingers around his, turned toward the window and said, “Get your shoes on.”

  Geo nodded just slightly and then turned away from her. He grabbed his shoes off of the bed and put them on while Marti looked out the window and listened to the growing roar of the crowd several floors below. She thought it strange how disconnected she felt from something that was happening in the same building. It was only a matter of time before her people reached the fifth floor. When that happened, what would she do? Join them? Keep up her act? Her ability to plan for anything had vanished. After years of covering her tracks and calculating every action she took, Marti was now completely lost and winging it.

  She had to admit, there was a certain thrill to the whole thing, but that would probably change once both sides started shooting at her.

  Turning away from the window, Marti opened her mouth and was about to make some stupid comment to Geo about how she wished they could have met before the night she died. She was hoping to play on the romance note a little bit harder than she had been, trying to appeal to a sense of guilt in Geo that she wasn't even sure existed, so that he would take her with him. Her current mission wasn't over. The hospital might fall, but as long as the authorities existed, she was not done fighting.

  Before she could get a word out of her mouth, there was a muffled BOOM from somewhere nearby. Marti and Geo both jumped when they heard it.

  “They're here,” he said to her.

  Marti grabbed Geo's hand and pulled him toward the door. As soon as they left his room, she could see HAND officers and the Governor's Secret Service team rushing toward the entrance to the stairwell. Smoke was pouring through the door. In the stairwell, shots were being fired.

  “We need to find another way out of here!” the Governor yelled. “We need to get to the roof!”

  Marti let go of Geo's hand and took a few steps forward, yelling, “Follow me!”

  She had no idea what the hell she was doing. If she left them there to rot, the Governor, Geo and all of the other political bastards on that floor could have been killed and done with. Instead, she seemed to be trying to get on their good side.

  The Governor and a couple of his men turned toward Marti, looking at her as though she had no right to be speaking. But Marti didn't let that stop her.

  She looked the Governor right in the eye and she said, “There is an elevator on the other side of the hospital that is powered by the backup generator, for surgical emergencies. Even if they find the elevator, they can't use it during a power outage without special access, which I have. I can get you to the roof.”

  38

  Rose was ducking in that doorway as HAND officers fired at her, and she couldn't figure out how she was supposed to get out of there. There were a ton of officers, standing in a wide area, shooting at a smaller number of Freedom members who were stuck in one narrow hallway. It was a stupid situation, which Rose should have thought about a little bit more before she ran into, but she didn't have any choice but to deal with it now. The annoying part was that she had to deal with it while one of her arms was stuck in an annoying cast.

  Bullets were flying past her, hitting walls and destroying helpless boxes of latex gloves. Rose was standing there like an idiot while the people following her lead waited for her to get them out of that mess.

  In her defense, she hadn't planned on charging into battle with an entire strike team behind her. She ran in there alone, and if she had stayed alone, maybe she could have thought of an easy way of getting out of that mess. She could have gone back the way she came, but that wasn't an option when Freedom fighters were standing in all of the good, somewhat more bulletproof spots. No, now she had to think for the team. She couldn't be as reckless as she would have normally preferred to be.

  Next to the door that she was standing beside, Rose saw one of those boxes of latex gloves. She took note of this and then turned to see what other supplies she had available to her.

  “If you can't find a way to blow something up in a hospital, you're just not trying hard enough,” she said to herself.

  On the other side of the hall, near one of the other Freedom members, there was a janitor's cart. On the cart, Rose could see buckets, mops, brooms and a big garbage can. More importantly, she saw a number of bottles that contained cleaning liquids.

  During her early says of training with Mek, Rose had been forced to accept a truth that she hated. The fact was that no matter how well trained she was, or how angry she was, there was no way that she would ever be able to out-muscle a HAND officer who had spent a lifetime being trained and sculpted into a mass of muscle, at least a hundred and fifty pounds heavier than herself. If Rose were forced into a fair fight with one of them, she would be pounded into the floor.

  After much yelling and many attempts to punch Mek in the face, Rose learned that the key to her survival was to play into her other strengths. Ideally, she would never be in a fair fight with a HAND officer, because she intended to play dirty every time.

  That was when she learned how to blow things up.

  As Rose's mind began to travel down the path of which chemicals were flammable and which produced deadly gasses, her eyes drifted toward a door across the hall from her. On it, she saw a sign that brought a smile to her face: “Supply Room”.

  The door was closed, but Rose dove out of the safety of her empty room and toward that closet door, ready to push it open and get to work on her big plan. Her fellow Freedom soldiers were covering her, firing on the HAND officers down the hall, and Rose just had to hope that she wouldn't be killed by a bullet from either side as she made her way to that door and...

  It was locked. Rose smacked into it like a bird hitting a window.

  A bullet struck the wall next to her and a piece of the debris nearly took her eyes out. Rose crouched low, trying to make herself as small as possible, but she didn't have proper cover in that spot. It was only a matter of time before someone shot her dead, so she had to move quickly.

  She raised her gun and fired on the closet's lock, ripping it apart. She fired again and again, just to be sure that the job was done, and then she pushed the door open.

&
nbsp; Once inside, Rose noticed that the side of her head was stinging. She put a hand to the spot and found blood. Quickly feeling over the area, she tried to figure out whether or not there was a bullet in her brain. Those few seconds were terrifying to her, not because she wasn't prepared to die, but because she hadn't done enough in this battle to legitimize her death. She imagined Paul being told that she hadn't made it out of the hospital because she was shot while trying to hide in a closet, and the thought made her angry.

  She didn't find any holes in her skull. Though a more thorough examination might find one later, she wrote the injury off as a scratch, ignored the fact that a bullet had nearly blown her head off, and got to work in the supply closet.

  Standing back, the scanned the shelves in front of her, which were loaded with medical supplies and jugs of chemicals. Each time she saw a label, her mind went back to the chemistry lessons that Mek had forced her to sit through in the Underground. All of those things which bored her to tears at first, but slowly grabbed her attention.

  Rose could have melted a man's lungs with the contents of that closet, but not without the risk of melting friendly lungs in the process.

  She had to be smarter.

  Her best option turned out to be pretty basic. In the corner of the storage room, Rose found three oxygen tanks. She grabbed one of those tanks and brought it to the door.

  Locking eyes with one of her allies in the hallway, she asked him, “You think you can throw this thing?”

  He looked at the tank, and then back to Rose. Then he gave her a nod.

  “Good,” Rose replied. “Get ready.”

  As soon as she gave the order, her ally hurried across the hall and into the supply room with her.

  “You throw, I shoot,” she said, then she leaned toward the door and raised her voice for the benefit of the other Freedom members. “Everyone take cover, then charge like hell once this thing pops.”