by Kyle Andrews
She watched Mandi sleep and put a hand on the girl's head as she softly said, “I'm going to get old and fat because of you.”
Some time later, Rose realized that the shooting was beginning to slow down. What had once been a brutal back and forth that sounded like hard rain on a tin roof was now an occasional pop-pop. The fighting was beginning to come to an end, at least for as far as she could hear. She didn't know which side was winning, but there would be no more hiding.
Rose picked Mandi up off of the ground. The girl moaned softly, smacked her lips a couple of times and fell asleep once again. The girl slept through an entire siege. For some reason, that thought amused Rose as she carried Mandi out of the room and back to the nearest stairwell.
When she stepped into the stairwell, Rose stopped and listened. She didn't hear guns firing anymore, but that didn't mean that it was safe to go down. Who would she find when she went downstairs?
She peered over the side of the banister, looking down the stairs, for as far as she could see in the darkness. On several levels below her, Rose saw bodies. She even saw one dead body being dragged out of view, which she found a little creepy.
What she didn't see were living people—at least not right away. She could hear footsteps below, and the sounds of quiet conversation. She could hear someone breathing heavily just a level or two below her, and the sound of that breathing was echoing through the stairwell.
Then the breathing stopped. Rose didn't know whether the person had died or had just quieted their breathing, but the sound was gone.
Staying there all night was not a viable option. Going back the way she came wouldn't serve any purpose at all if the wrong side had won. Rose wanted desperately to keep the girl in her arms safe, but she didn't know what that meant in that moment.
Footsteps started to echo through the stairwell. Someone was hurrying up the stairs, getting closer and closer to Rose by the second. Rose shifted Mandi into her cast-covered arm and held onto her tightly as she gripped a gun with her one free hand.
The footsteps grew louder as the person grew nearer. Eventually, Rose could hear that person breathing and what sounded like a backpack bouncing off of their body with each step they took.
Rose turned toward the stairs that led downward and waited for that person to round the corner. She was ready to shoot the person dead if she needed to, but she also had to prepare herself for the possibility that the person was an ally, so she couldn't shoot as soon as she saw them. She kept her finger off the trigger, just in case.
Closer and closer the footsteps came, and Rose began to realize that if this other person fired at her, Mandi would probably take the bullet instead of her. In the last seconds before that person came around the corner and saw Rose, she realized that she couldn't stand her ground and fight off an enemy. Instead, she turned her back to the stairs and covered Mandi as best she could with her own body. She turned her head, watching and waiting to see whether she would live or die.
At last that person came around the corner.
It was a boy, who couldn't have been more than seventeen years old, with dust and soot all over his face. Blood dripped down the side of his head. He had a bag slung over one shoulder.
The boy was skinny. He didn't look like a HAND soldier to Rose, and she was even more certain that he wasn't with HAND when he saw her and stopped in his tracks, eyes wide as he tried to figure out whether he was going to live or die.
“Good guy or bad guy?” she asked him.
“Good guy,” he mumbled. “You?”
Rose stood up and shrugged. She said, “I suppose the answer to that question would depend on which side of the fight you're on. It was a stupid question.”
She started to walk down the stairs and asked the boy, “Did we win?”
He smiled and replied, “We won.”
Rose gave him an approving nod and kept on walking.
As she left the boy behind, he said to her, “There are doctors on the first floor, treating people who are injured.”
“HAND doctors?” she asked.
“Yeah. Some.”
“I'll pass. Thanks.”
҂
“Hey. I need you to stay awake,” Dor said to the woman as forcefully as she could.
She looked back to the leg and tried her best to focus. Remembering what she had read, Dor looked around the area for some way of elevating the wound, but she couldn't find anything. There were no convenient chunks of cement or overstuffed backpacks nearby.
The only thing that Dor could see that she might be able to use was something that she really didn't want to use. Her eyes locked onto the body of a young man lying nearby. Though his chest was a bloody mess, the man's face looked oddly calm and peaceful.
Wishing that she had some other option, but without enough time to even look for a better option, Dor hurried to the dead man and pulled him closer to the injured woman. She turned the dead man on his side.
“You might not want to look,” Dor told the woman.
As soon as she said it, the woman looked at what Dor was doing and gasped.
Dor put the woman's injured leg on the man, keeping the wound elevated. She put more pressure on the wound and tried to think of what to do next.
She thought that she might be able to use a tourniquet to cut off blood flow to the leg, thus stopping the bleeding. However, she didn't know how bad the wound actually was, and she didn't want to risk the woman losing her leg if it wasn't necessary.
There were fires burning all around the area. Dor looked at them and she knew what she was going to have to do. Her life had suddenly become a series of decisions that she didn't want to make. She wished that there were someone else who could take over for her, but there was nobody available—and even if there were other people, how many of them would have read books on first aid, just for the sake of knowing?
Taking off her belt, Dor folded it into several layers and said to the woman, “You're going to need to bite down on this.”
The woman looked at Dor with confusion in her eyes and asked, “Why? What are you doing?”
“I have to stop the bleeding or you'll die. Will you trust me?”
The woman's eyes gave Dor a firm no, but she nodded and said, “I don't have a lot of options.”
“Me neither,” Dor quipped.
She put the belt in the woman's mouth and then stood up, looking around the area for a piece of metal that she could use to cauterize the wound. Eventually, she settled on a knife, which she found on the ground, next to another fallen Freedom soldier.
As she took the knife, Dor felt strangely ashamed. Not just for taking something that wasn't hers, but because she had been picking through corpses as though they were her own personal market. It seemed like a stupid thing for her to feel, given the circumstances, but she couldn't help it.
Knife in hand, Dor ran to one of the nearby fires and held the blade to the flame. She waited until the blade was glowing red before she pulled it out again. Then she ran to the wounded woman and tried to ready herself as much as she tried to ready the woman. Then she put the knife to the wound. Rather than keep the knife in place until the woman's flesh cooked, Dor applied and relieved pressure several times.
The woman tried not to scream as she bit down on the belt. Dor was impressed by the woman's ability to remain as still as she did, because Dor knew without a doubt that if their roles were reversed, she would be twisting and turning and trying to escape in any way possible.
Eventually, the bleeding stopped—at least, as far as Dor could see. Dor breathed a sigh of relief and slumped back onto the ground, pulling herself together. The woman wasn't quite as relieved. She was still groaning in pain, even as she pulled the belt out of her mouth and said, “Thanks.”
Dor smiled a tired smile at the woman and replied, “Any time.”
҂
Collin stepped closer to where Aaron and Simon were working. He wanted to see the news feed that they were looking at, but by the time he
got there, the video had been replaced by a text field, where Simon was entering commands. Though Collin had become quite skilled at typing up articles, he had never seen anyone type as quickly as Simon.
As Collin stood by Aaron's side, Aaron didn't look in his direction. They both watched Simon work.
“You've been through the library, right?” Aaron asked Collin.
“Yeah.”
“Just the books?”
“The books. The history. It's a lot to get through.”
Collin wasn't sure why Aaron was talking about the library at a time like this. He thought that maybe Aaron needed to get his mind off of what was happening outside, so he went along with their conversation. At least it gave him something to do.
“I have some old magazines from before all of this happened. They had interviews with Norman Teller, the guy who created the library. He was... extreme. Some said he was crazy.”
“Was he?”
“He was opposed to the government buying out QxCorp and those other tech companies. He said that it would destroy the free market, and when scientists were forced to work for the government, they would lose the incentive for innovation that the free market created,” Aaron explained, still watching Simon work on the computer.
“He was right, wasn't he? All of the geniuses either moved out of the country to continue their work, or they just did what they had to in order to eat, same as the factory workers,” Collin said.
“Which is why technology hit a brick wall. Innovation is the child of freedom. You take pride in your paper, which makes you a better reporter than any of the journalists on TV. You are constantly trying to think of new ways to reach the people. You're forced to think outside the box.”
“Then again, I don't experiment on kids,” Collin shrugged, making a reference to Norman Teller's long-rumored methods. He looked away from the computer, focusing on Aaron instead, and asked, “Why are we talking about this now?”
“Doctor Teller provided the last great morsel of innovation to reach the common people. But he didn't just upload random files from the internet. He didn't just backup the history, art and literature. He included everything that he could think of. Everything that he had access to.”
“I'm ready,” Simon reported, and the work he was doing on his computer was replaced with live video.
҂
The woman was saved. She would need medical attention as soon as possible, but for the moment, she would live. The problem was that when Dor looked around that area, she saw more and more people who were injured or dying. Men were screaming in ways that sent chills through Dor's spine.
Where were the medics? They were supposed to be there, but they weren't. Even if they were there, Dor wasn't sure how they would ever manage to pick up the pieces of this mess and pull their city back together.
She couldn't sit there while people suffered around her. She needed to do more and help more people, so Dor pulled herself up off of the ground and slung her camera over her shoulder as she looked for the next injured person that needed her.
When she looked back, in the direction that led away from the HAND building, Dor saw something that she should have expected, yet somehow she hadn't. Though the battle had been won and the city was now in the hands of Freedom, there remained one reminder of the authorities and their vicious nature.
She watched as one of the lights that circled the sky above the city broke its patrolling pattern and began to fly lower and lower, toward the HAND building.
For so long, the drones had flown overhead. Dor had grown so accustomed to seeing them that she never thought twice about them anymore, but as she watched that drone flying toward her, and she saw all of the free people in its path, Dor knew that the authorities weren't going to let them have this victory. She knew that they would rather see every man, woman and child in that city die a horrible death than allow them to remain free.
Dor watched that drone coming closer and closer, and she could feel her end drawing near.
҂
Rose continued down the stairs, passing by other Freedom soldiers as she went. The bodies of the fallen from both sides were being cleared out of the stairwell as she walked through it. Blood was smeared on the floors and walls. Fires were being extinguished.
When she reached the first floor and walked out of the stairwell and into a hallway that was lined with offices, Rose saw HAND officers being marched out the now-cleared entrance to the hospital at gunpoint. The entrance didn't have any doors left hanging. All that remained were broken walls and shattered glass.
Rose walked through that entrance and into the night air. Outside, the area around the hospital was less chaotic than she would have imagined. There were too many bodies on the ground for her liking, and even more injured being cared for by employees of the hospital, as well as Freedom medics who were just arriving on the scene.
She carried Mandi out of that hospital, toward a van that was being driven by one of her friends from the Garden. They needed to let people know that Mandi was safe. More importantly, they needed to get her back to her own base and her own people. The girl would need to see familiar faces when she woke up.
Walking toward that van, Rose took a deep breath. The air smelled of death and smoke, but it was cool and felt nice against her skin.
She never would have imagined that she would have been caring for a kid during the last moments of that fight, rather than rushing into danger without a moment of thought or hesitation. Going in, she wasn't even sure that she would be alive to see the end of that fight, and she would have been okay with dying for her cause. But now the world in front of her had changed. She wanted to live. She wanted see what the future looked like.
With that thought running through her mind and with her brain trying to make sense of it, Rose turned her eyes toward the night sky. She expected to see clouds or stars, but instead, she saw a single drone in the the distance. It was flying low, making its way toward the hospital. It flew silently.
Rose stopped walking when she saw that drone coming toward her. She knew that there would be no time for her to run away or escape. When that drone fired upon the hospital and the people surrounding it, nothing would be left standing.
There would be no future. After a lifetime spent getting to this moment, and a night spent trying to pry that little girl out of HAND's grasp, it came down to this. Nobody to shoot or punch. No face to spit into. Nothing to confront except utter helplessness.
Rose looked at Mandi's face, still peacefully oblivious to anything that was happening around her. The only thing that Rose could think to do for that girl now was hold her even more tightly and hum an ancient lullaby.
҂
Collin studied the video on his screen. It didn't take him long to realize that he wasn't looking at footage from any news feeds. No hand-held or van-mounted cameras could have provided the view that he was seeing. He was seeing several feeds of aerial footage, circling the city.
“Now,” Aaron ordered Simon. He then resumed his conversation with Collin, “QxCorp was a government contractor, before they were taken over. The best minds in the country were responsible for developing the firmware that commands the drones. The same drones they use today.”
“Oh my God,” Collin said under his breath as he realized what this meant.
“Teller gave us the key to the back door.”
On Simon's monitor, several of the drone feeds broke out of their circling pattern and started to move downward, between buildings and down the streets. Collin could see the HAND building getting closer and closer. He could see the hospital where Mandi Hollinger had been taken.
“Weapons are charged,” Simon reported. “I'm inputting access codes now...”
Collin watched as the drones acquired targets and prepared to fire. More drones broke their normal patrol pattern and started to move through the city, choosing targets.
How many people could be killed by those drones? Though he probably shouldn't have been surprised
, Collin couldn't believe that the authorities would randomly kill thousands of people.
҂
This was it? Dor looked from the battlefield around her, with its smoke and rubble, and bodies lying all over the ground, back to the drone that was silently drawing nearer and nearer.
What were the authorities planning to do? The only thing left to destroy was... everything. Every building, every person, every hint of what had happened on that night. If even a suggestion of that battle remained for other to see, it would be impossible to stop the idea from spreading.
It wasn't fair. They won. This city was theirs. They had earned it. They had a right to it!
The notion of that drone coming closer and closer made Dor mad, but what that drone meant terrified her. Freedom was dead.
Tears formed in Dor's eyes. She took a step back, wanting to run, but she was frozen by fear. A memory flashed through her mind, from when she was a child, falling helplessly for what felt like an eternity, and crashing into ice-cold water. It was the weakest that she'd ever been in her life, until now.
She watched the drone coming closer. She trembled and cried. Then she noticed something strange.
The drone's smooth, gentle glide through the air suddenly became a wobble. Then the wobble became a sharp dive. Then the drone turned upward and shot into the sky.
Seconds later, it exploded.
As debris fell from he sky, Dor shielded her face, but she couldn't take her eyes off of the puff of smoke that now hung in the sky where the drone had once been.
҂
“The pigeons have been caged,” Simon told Aaron, with a sigh of relief. “Well, most of them. Frank blew his up.”
“Sorry!” someone—presumably Frank—called from across the room.
On the monitor, Collin watched as the drones pulled up and returned to the sky.
This was the moment when he realized how big the change to his world actually was. He had been detached from it all night. He had been shielded from the situation on the ground. He had no idea which way the winds were blowing or how many people were dying. To him, it was still a vague notion until he saw Aaron and Simon take control of the drones.