Battle Cry (Freedom/Hate Series, Book 4)

by Kyle Andrews

  Her new friend picked up the oxygen tank, testing its weight. Once he had a feel for it, he gave her a nod.

  “Go,” she ordered.

  He didn't miss a beat before rushing out of the supply room. Rose was close behind him, laying down cover. After taking three big steps, he flung the oxygen tank into the air, and dove into one of the nearby rooms.

  Rose reached the same doorway and waited as the tank hit the floor and rolled several feet, toward the admissions desk.

  HAND officers were firing at her. They knew what was coming, and shooting Rose was the only chance they had of stopping it.

  Despite her orders for them to seek cover, Rose's teammates kept firing on the HAND officers, keeping them from focusing their attack on her alone. This gave Rose the time she needed.

  The oxygen tank bumped into the admissions desk. Rose took aim. She fired.

  There was no ball of fire, just a loud BOOM, and the sudden release of immense pressure, ripping the admissions desk apart and sending HAND officers to the ground, scrambling to regain their line of defense, but it was too late.

  Rose and her team rushed down the hallway, firing with everything they had, overwhelming the HAND officers. Some of those officers were shot. Some of them aggravated injuries that they had sustained at the stadium and fell to the floor. Some of Rose's team also went down, but she couldn't take the time to properly react to that. She had to move, because her entire plan revolved around causing chaos and using that chaos as her cover.

  With fires burning in nearby areas of the hospital, smoke began to drift down all of the different hallways. Alarms were going off. The sprinkler system was triggered, causing more distraction and confusion.

  Another Freedom team was approaching from another hallway, shooting at the HAND officers as well. As both teams converged at what remained of the admitting desk, HAND officers were taken out of the fight, either by dying or surrendering. It was a small victory, but it wasn't enough.

  Pushing past them, Rose hurried to the stairwell door and flung it open. Once inside the stairwell, she quickly put her back to a wall and searched for any HAND officers who might be waiting. Mostly, she found hospital employees and low ranking government officials trying to avoid the fight by hiding in the worst spot that they could possibly find.

  Turning her attention to one of the younger nurses, Rose asked, “Where is the girl being held, and where are the VIP rooms?”

  The nurse started crying and shook her head as though she didn't know. Rose didn't buy it, and pointed her gun at the woman's head.

  She said, “You work in this place. You know where they are. Tell me.”

  “I can't,” the woman cried.

  “They'll kill her,” one of the doctors told Rose.

  It was true. All of those people knew that if they helped Freedom, and HAND still managed to win this day, they would be executed. They knew enough to fear the authorities. They knew exactly what kind of people they worked for, and yet none of them had ever refused to work for their masters.

  People like this were the reason why their world had been allowed to remain as messed up as it had for so long.

  “You people are disgusting,” Rose told that nurse. She turned to one of the Freedom members that had followed her, but whom she didn't know, and said, “Some of you hang back. Tie them up and make sure they don't cause any trouble.”

  “If they do?” the soldier asked her.

  “Shoot them. Stab them. Burn them. Whatever. If they're not with us, they're with them.”

  Once the order was given, Rose started to move up the stairs. She didn't know where she was going, but she was willing to check every single floor if she had to.

  Fortunately, before she could get very far, an orderly from the group of hospital workers spoke up and said, “VIP rooms are fifth floor.”

  Rose stopped walking and looked at him. She asked, “And the girl?”

  “I don't know anything about a girl,” the orderly replied. He seemed sincere enough.

  “Fourth floor. I don't know which room,” an older doctor offered, without looking up or making eye contact with Rose.

  She had to wonder whether these people were telling her these things because they believed in the cause, or if they were hedging their bets. At that moment, members of Freedom were fighting and being wounded. Those hospital employees could easily aid those people if they chose to. Instead, they were hiding from the fight.

  Whatever their motivation, it didn't matter to Rose at the end of the day whether these people were loyalists or rebels. When Freedom took the city, they could believe whatever they wanted to believe, just as long as Rose had that same right. That was what this fight was all about. Not just the right of the people to speak against the authorities, but the right of the people to speak against Freedom. The right of the people to be stupid was just as valid as their right to be smart, though it certainly didn't make Rose a big fan of those who chose to be stupid.

  Continuing up the stairs, Rose passed by the second and third floors without meeting any HAND officers. She and her team moved slowly and quietly, hoping to take their targets by surprise once they stormed the fourth and fifth floors.

  The silence of the stairwell worried Rose. While others might have found the quiet to be a pleasant respite from the ongoing battle, it had the opposite effect on her. To her, the quiet meant that she didn't know where the enemy was or what they were doing. It made her feel as though she were being watched and monitored—possibly lured toward an ambush. Perhaps the doctor in the stairwell was told to lead Freedom in one direction while the VIPs ran the other way.

  She never let her guard down. She never allowed a foot to fall any heavier than it had to, and when she heard whispers from the people following her, she quickly turned and signaled them to shut their damn mouths.

  When they reached the fourth floor, Rose pulled one of the soldiers that she knew from the Underground up to the front of the line. She told him to take half of the fighters to the fifth floor while she and the others took the fourth.

  As much as she would have liked to take the VIPs out herself, the girl was the mission. She needed to find Mandi and get her out of the building. Figuring out how to get a little girl past a storm of bullets was a problem that she would have to solve when the time came.

  Rose waited as the other team moved up the stairs, toward the fifth floor. Once they were at their floor, she pulled open the door for the fourth floor and rushed in. Her team poured through the door behind her, each prepared to open fire.

  At first, the place was quiet. Rose moved slowly through the fourth floor hallway, which was poorly lit. She saw shadows moving out of the corner of her eyes, but each time she turned to look, she found nothing.

  This wasn't right. She was prepared to be fired upon, but to move onto the fourth floor and be met by silence made her feel more vulnerable than she had down in the emergency room.

  Moving toward the fourth floor lobby, Rose found herself in a much more open area. The nurses station and waiting area were all exposed, with large windows giving Rose a view of the darkened city outside.

  “What is this?” someone whispered behind her.

  Rose raised her hand, telling whoever was talking to shut up. She then gestured for some of her men to move to one side of the lobby while she and the others moved the other way.

  She heard something move nearby. Maybe it was a piece of paper falling on the ground, or the sound of a shoe sliding on the floor as someone knelt down, but something had moved and Rose knew that the floor wasn't totally abandoned.

  Almost as soon as she heard that sound, a gunshot broke the silence and one of the windows shattered. Rose turned in time to see several HAND officers taking cover behind the desk at the nurses station and firing on her people.

  More people jumped out of various hiding spots around the area. Many of them were clothed only in hospital gowns and had no guns. Some held onto IV stands or other makeshift weapons as they approa
ched Rose and her team, but many came with nothing but their bare hands.

  Though she would have thought that it would be easy to take these officers down, just the opposite proved to be true. The armed officers behind the desk distracted Rose and her team. Obviously, they would take priority since they could do the most damage, but while she and her men avoided their bullets and tried to take them out, the unarmed officers attacked.

  The HAND officers without guns were quickly on top of Rose's team, fighting and punching. Even injured, most of them were more capable of holding their own in a hand-to-hand battle than many of Rose's team, who had no training to speak of. Using their guns became less of an option once HAND officers were mixed in with Freedom soldiers. Rose tried to take aim carefully, so she wouldn't hit one of her own people, but it was hopeless and time consuming. Before she could take a shot, a HAND officer was coming at her, swinging what looked like the leg of a wooden chair at her.

  For the first time since she broke her arm, Rose's cast proved to be more than just a nuisance to her. She managed to block the attack with her cast and kneed her attacker in the groin. Maybe he was on painkillers or maybe her aim had been off, but when she expected the officer to double over in pain, he simply swung the chair leg at her again and again. Rose blocked each attempted attack, but she was being pushed backward and she couldn't see where she was going. Eventually, her back was to the shattered window. She could feel the cool night air against her skin. If she kept moving back, she would fall out the window.

  She wanted to take a shot, but each time she raised her gun, her attacker would take a swing or throw a punch that Rose was forced to block.

  The officer came at her one more time with that chair leg and Rose had had enough. She blocked the attack with her cast and wrapped her arm around the officer's so that he couldn't raise the chair leg again.

  Raising her gun, Rose planned to shoot the officer in the gut, but he grabbed her wrist with his free hand and held the gun away from himself. Even medicated, he was stronger than she was. He had the benefit of HAND training and nutrition. Rose was well trained, but she wasn't muscular. She was certainly not as strong as a HAND officer who could probably bench press three times his own weight.

  He twisted her wrist and the gun dropped from her hand. As it hit the ground her heart skipped a beat. She wondered if this was how it would end for her. She thought about Paul and what he would say when he heard the news. He would undoubtedly call her stupid for rushing into battle with one arm in a cast. He would ask what she was thinking. He would say 'I told her so.'

  And that was why she couldn't allow herself to die like that. She refused to leave this world while giving Paul an opportunity to win the argument.

  Rose tightened her hold on the officer's arm, trying her best to bend it in a direction that it was not meant to bend. She couldn't snap the man's arm, but that didn't keep her from trying.

  At the same time, she spat in the officer's face and stomped on his bare foot as hard as she could. This loosened his grip on her arm just enough for her to knee him in the groin again. This time, he doubled over and she kneed him in the face.

  The officer stumbled back and Rose dropped to the ground. She grabbed her gun and fired at him. The shot landed in the center of his chest. She fired twice more, and the man fell to the ground, dead.

  One down. Only a couple dozen left to go.

  As Rose prepared to pick her next fight, she noticed a HAND officer making his way through the area, ducking away from bullets and not engaging any of the Freedom soldiers in battle unless they came at him first. He was looking at faces, not just of the Freedom members, but of the HAND officers.

  This officer couldn't avoid fighting for very long. Soon, one of Rose's men attacked the officer. The officer pulled his baton and fought back. His moves were smooth and graceful. He wasn't one of the injured. He was well trained and focused.

  She wasn't sure why this officer stood out above all of the others, but Rose kept track of him, even as she engaged in another fight of her own. In between punches and kicks, and shooting back at the officers who were shooting at her, Rose watched this other officer fighting her people.

  After some time, the man warmed up to the idea of fighting against the Freedom soldiers. He began to fight with more purpose, rather than swatting away annoyances who had gotten in his way. He pulled his gun and fired on one of Rose's men, and Rose was done observing this son of a bitch. She took aim and was about to take him out when she saw something new in his eye.

  The officer looked down the hall and noticed something that interested him. Rose couldn't see what he was looking at, but the officer seemed to lose interest in the fight around him. He tried to move toward the hallway, but one of Rose's team lunged toward him and the two began to fight.

  The man fighting with the officer was Troy Ryland. He was a large and muscular man, trained by Mek and capable of holding his own in hand-to-hand combat.

  Rose ran deeper into the fight, hoping to get closer to that officer as she fought off others that stood between them. She shot two down before being tackled by a third. As she hit the ground, she knocked her head against the floor. It hurt and it made the world fuzzy around her, but Rose had to fight to keep herself in the game.

  She looked up as that officer was about to punch her in the face and she blocked the punch with her bad arm. She tried to kick the officer off of her, but she didn't have the leverage to make it work.

  Kicking and squirming, she tried to get free. She managed to land a couple of solid hits to the officer, including one to his ribs which made the officer recoil in pain. Rose realized that even though he was in uniform, this officer was a patient in the hospital, and he had a very sensitive injury that she could exploit.

  She punched him in the ribs again and the officer winced in pain. He made a move to grab her neck, but she jabbed his wound once more. When he flinched, she grabbed his arms. She managed to shift beneath him and was finally able to throw him off. Once she was free, Rose grabbed a knife from her belt and jammed it into the officer's chest.

  Grabbing her gun from the ground, Rose pulled herself to her feet and looked around the area for that other HAND officer. Troy was on the ground, injured but not dead. Rose didn't see the HAND officer at first, but found him as she looked down the hallway. He was rushing away from the fight, toward something that must have seemed more important to him. What could that be?

  The only answer that Rose could come to was Mandi Hollinger. If she were being held on the fourth floor and this officer had been sent to find her, Rose needed to get to the girl first.

  39

  Dor was pinned against a wall, not far from the statue of Lady Justice that had been torn down. She had tried her best to move toward the building and get inside, but the fighting around her worked against that goal.

  In order to avoid being hit by fire bombs, knives, shovels and all sorts of other—sometimes very creative—weapons, Dor had to move around the people who were wielding them. Most wouldn't try to hurt her deliberately, but she couldn't expect them to stop their fighting against the authorities in order to let her pass, no matter how many times she tried to tell them that she was with the Secret Citizen.

  On top of avoiding the people from her own side, Dor also had to avoid the HAND officers who were fighting to protect their own building from invasion. These officers didn't care who they struck down with their bullets. They fired fully automatic rifles into the crowd, sometimes taking down citizens by the handful. Dor even saw them take down a few of their own people, when it served whatever their HAND bosses would consider the greater good.

  This wasn't exactly what she had imagined when she decided to rush toward the battle. She imagined a riot, like the one that she had seen years earlier, on the night when she first met Collin, Tracy and Mek. She thought that there might be some more order to the chaos this time, since most of the citizens were fighting on the same side, but this fight wasn't like that riot. The riot w
as a burst of violence before the city went back to sleep. The battle that she was witnessing now was the end. It was either the downfall of HAND in their city, or it was the end of the Freedom movement. There was no in-between, because everyone was out that night. Even citizens who hadn't been previously allied with Freedom were standing against the authorities.

  If the authorities won, citizens would die by the hundreds, or possibly even thousands. There wouldn't be enough graves to bury them all in. Even if the authorities won, what would be left for them to rule?

  For that reason, there was no holding back on the side of the authorities. There was no smiling for the crowd. There was no act of civility as they went after the citizens. The authorities had nothing to lose in that city, and Dor couldn't understand why they hadn't bombed the whole thing into dust already.

  As that thought occurred to her, she looked toward the sky. She thought about how the Garden had been taken out by one drone before its members were slaughtered by the HAND officers. She watched the drones flying overhead now, wondering how much time her city had left.

  She turned her eyes back to the fight and asked herself if it was worth it. If all of those people, good and bad alike, were to die on that night and none of them ever knew one single day of true freedom, would it have been worth storming into battle? Would it have been better to keep fighting in the shadows until freedom was the only choice left?

  Eventually, she decided that fighting for freedom was always worth it. These people were already free and even if they did die, they would die for their own beliefs and their own free will, not at the whim of their overseers.

  When she wrote about this night—if she ever had the chance to write about this night—Dor would tell the world that the battle was won the second that it started. The violence was the aftermath of the true battle that had been simmering in that city for almost three quarters of a century.

  In the windows of the HAND building, she could see flashes of light. Guns were being fired. Windows were shattering two and three levels up, and glass was raining down upon the crowd that was fighting down below.