She said nothing.
“Anyway, you can’t fall,” he said. “Look…”
He used the rope to tie them together by the waist.
“See? You won’t fall because I won’t fall.”
A hug of reassurance and she nodded.
Bravery’s not about being fearless, it’s about overcoming your fears, he recalled from his basic infantry training half a lifetime ago.
“Let’s go,” she whispered.
They slowly scaled the eight meters to the top of the bridge’s superstructure. The rusty trusses and dry conditions improved their grip and made climbing easier. They crawled on their bellies along the side-beam then took a right-angle turn left onto a beam spanning the road near the bridge’s apex.
“You’re doing great. Just hold on. You don’t need to do anything yet,” he said.
Squatting precariously on the cross-beam atop the bridge, he exhaled stale air against the flimsy mask. His watch told him three minutes until the next road-train would pass beneath. They’d need every second of it. The next two minutes he spent untying and re-tying knots in the rope. Specific knots that did specific things—first around the beam, then around Cora’s waist, then his own. Throughout, she moved stiffly and with caution. Her arms and legs were now wrapped tight as she lay hugging the cold steel cross-beam. But he had faith she’d do what she needed to when the time came.
Now for the hard part.
The headlights grew as the scheduled White Sands convoy sped along the highway, the sound of rumbling and high-pitched electric drives rising from the distance.
“Come on Cora, you need to get up and squat,” he said. “Look, just like I am. We need to be ready.”
Rae turned to see the lead Armored Personnel Carrier reach the bridge with a whoosh of displaced air as it passed beneath.
Any moment now…
12
He that fights and runs away, May turn and fight another day;
But he that is in battle slain, Will never rise to fight again.
Tacitus
R ae and Cora watched the armored escort rush under their perch on the iron bridge. Seconds later, tires screeched in protest as the lead APC’s headlights found the concrete debris Rae had left on the road. The near-kilometer-long convoy following the four APCs stopped in seconds and the three aerial drones swooped towards the debris on the highway. They hovered above the debris blocking the road, observing, awaiting commands. The APCs’ turrets came to life, sweeping the dark hinterland with their sensor arrays, their spotlights searching for the bandits that had dared block their path. One of the drones zipped vertically into the sky and buzzed around high overhead, another accelerated ahead to the south, the third hovered cautiously above the regrowth, then over the remains of the collapsed factory, advancing towards the burning van behind it.
“We need to move while there’s only one drone overhead,” he whispered urgently. “If our heat emissions are low enough, they won’t detect us on infrared. Hesitate and we’re dead. Jump with me.”
He held her gloved hand and they fell towards the trailer, sailing through the darkness. The hard jolt of the rope arrested his fall just inches short of the trailer’s roof. There beside him, hung Cora with the rope around her waist. He pulled the loose end of the knot to release himself. She copied him, landing cat-like on the balls of her feet.
“Get down,” he whispered, going prone, Cora doing the same.
He leopard-crawled to the back edge of the trailer. The roar of the van fire and the buzz of drones was punctuated by barked words from soldiers who’d left the lead escort to shift the debris blocking the road ahead. Rae poked his head down and examined the trailer’s sidewall. Lightweight and low cost. Nothing high-security about the dry-box trailer. Any bandits capable of taking out the Army APCs, a hundred troops, and three military drones, weren’t going to be thwarted by a dry-box trailer no matter how good its security. They were inside the security bubble now. They had to avoid detection for long enough to get into the trailer. He took off his backpack and withdrew the sturdy survival knife, clenching it in his teeth, before sliding feet-first over the side. Gravity pulled him down and he grasped the rim at the top and hung, first with two hands, then one, as he took the knife from his teeth and plunged it into the thin aluminum siding. He carefully sawed a line along the panel’s joint—easier to cut, easier to hide the cut. Every so often, when the burning in his muscles became too much, he’d swap arms and continue. There was no way of knowing what was inside—hopefully something that would allow them to get in. If not, he’d need to risk throwing stuff out to make room. With the rest of the convoy passing the jettisoned stuff, that’d be a last resort. Four minutes later, he sheathed the knife having cut the top and side of the panel down halfway. Still hanging from the roof’s rim, he shimmied along the siding to one side of the cut panel, then bent the panel down. Now they had a way in, the panel protruding at a thirty-degree angle with the opening at the top. He hauled himself back up.
“Gonna take a look inside,” he whispered.
“Be careful,” said Cora tensely.
Not risking the glare of his M4’s tactical light, he hung his head down, into the opening he’d created and shone his watch-light into the trailer. What he saw shocked him.
“What the hell…”
Packed inside like sardines were people. With the watch-light, he explored the dark. Two rows of twenty trays, on each of which was a person, naked, on their backs, unconscious.
Asleep? Dead?
Most of them were men, but there were some women. All were from late teens to what he guessed was about forty. Between the trays, he could see that there was another layer of bodies below and, he surmised, one more below that given the height of the trailer. A hundred-and-twenty in this one alone. If all eighty trailers were like this, it amounted to thousands of people.
He hauled himself back up and said, “I’ll slide in first then I’ll help you down.”
She nodded.
He needed to warn her about what was inside. They could risk a surprised shriek. It could alert the troops, or maybe the human cargo.
“There are people in there… Asleep. Try to keep quiet.”
After dropping in his backpack, he waited a moment for a reaction from the guy whose feet it had landed on. Nothing. Rae lowered himself into the trailer and rolled the pack aside before helping Cora in, trying not to disturb or harm the human cargo in the tight confines. The dim watch-light was enough to reveal the inside to Cora, who gasped at what she saw. He pulled the bent panel back to vertical. The way he’d cut it along the seams meant it’d take close inspection to notice it. They lay there in the gloomy light each lying atop the soft motionless body of a naked stranger. He could hear Cora muttering something indistinct, clearly freaked out.
“My God,” she said. “Are they dead?”
He didn’t think so.
“Let me check.”
Removing his gloves and makeshift Mylar mask, he checked the twentysomething guy beneath him. His breathing was shallow, his pulse weak, but he was warm if pale-looking.
“They’re alive. Probably sedated.”
Cora exhaled, calming a little.
“You can take off your mask—we’ll just look like two more bodies. If we stay still, infrared won’t see us.”
“Who are all these people?” said Cora.
“My guess is they’re Serviles. Hold on, let me check,” he said, lifting the head of the unconscious woman beside him. There it was: the tattooed serial number on the back of the neck that all Serviles carried.
“Definitely Serviles.”
“And this convoy’s bound for a military base?” she said.
“Forward Operating Base at White Sands in the Border Zone.”
He did a quick calculation in his head. Nearly ten thousand Serviles on this road-train and another two more convoys to FOB White Sands tonight. And who knew how many more? That all these Serviles were of fighting age could only m
ean one thing—they were conscripts heading the border near El Paso-Juarez, capital city of the rebellion. From his experience, new conscripts came in a steady stream. This was different. This was an entire army. A mobilization. The ground was being laid for something big. Were they going to launch an offensive to take El Paso-Juarez from the Rebels? With the Democratic Alliance’s security guarantee, that’d mean all-out war. Or were the Regime arrogant enough to try to call their bluff?
The muffled sound of a foot patrol came from right outside.
Shit!
He grasped his M4 and lay facing the panel siding.
A radio crackled to life outside.
“We’ve cleared the road. Get your asses back here. We’re leaving!”
“Yessir.”
A minute later and the road-train started moving. Twenty-plus hours in the eerie darkness surrounded by cannon fodder and then into the Border Security Zone. They needed to get across to El Paso-Juarez, to Dr Muller and those he now regarded as friendlies. Doing it in the middle of a full-scale offensive would make it far riskier.
His thoughts were shattered by a shuffling, then groaning noise beside him. Cora. He shone the light on her distorted face, which seemed to be fighting itself. Her body tensed and jerked in fits.
“Cora! What’s the matter?”
He held her, tried to restrain her seizure.
“What’s happening to you?”
No response.
He checked her pulse—off the scale. Her eyelids were open, her eyeballs flickering in the roof of their sockets. Then her face went blank, she stopped twitching and her body went limp.
13
Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.
William Shakespeare
C ora’s pulse was fast, her breathing deep but steady. He tried to rouse her, but she didn’t wake. In his experience, she was a fragile sleeper, but this was no ordinary sleep. Pulling open her eyelids revealed her eyes in rapid-eye movement. Really rapid. REM occurred in a dream-state. She was asleep—but in sleep of a strange kind. And the way she’d twitched and convulsed her way into slumber was anything but normal.
“Cora, can you hear me?” he said into her ear.
No response.
He kissed her forehead, then laid back half-on, half-off the sedated Servile, putting much of his substantial mass on the gap between trays. The poor guy might be a Servile, but he didn’t deserve to be suffocated.
His attention returned to Cora. He wasn’t panicking—she was still breathing, her heart still beating—but what had happened was something that needed both fixing and explaining. He tried shaking her, pinching, flicking her, and talking loudly into her ear—nothing worked. There were hours still to go, but this couldn’t go on indefinitely. At some point they’d need to get out and go on foot. Preferably as close to El Paso-Juarez as possible, which meant as close to FOB Whites Sands as possible.
With his ideas for waking her exhausted, he lay back, quietly contemplating, only road noise and the respiration of the human cargo filling the blackness. The disconcerting surroundings led him once again to past horrors. He’d felt better on the run from Chicago, his mind occupied by the present. Now he feared the nightmares sleep brought. The faces of the dead taking their revenge.
Every so often, he tried to wake Cora, tried to talk her from unconsciousness, but to no avail. When he’d pushed aside his current worries, guilt from his atrocities flooded in to fill their place. His rationalizing then converted guilt to anger. He logically knew the Regime’s manipulation was to blame, yet lingering self-accusations resurfaced. Reliving the days as a child growing up in New Zealand brought the relief of distraction. A slow, simple way of life in a small farming community. Innocent, happy days. The smell of his mother’s apple and feijoa crumble as she used the surfeit of fruit from the trees in their backyard overlooking the creek. The chill of water fresh from the mountains in the stream near the bottom of their paddock as he splashed around as an eight-year-old with Eddie, the little boy from next door. Long summer days playing in the sand and boogie boarding in the surf he could still hear in the distance at night from his open bedroom window. Drying off by the wood fire after getting drenched playing rugby or soccer outside. Sitting cross-legged, looking up to at his mom’s kind eyes as she brought him a hot drinking chocolate. He wiped a tear from his cheek. It had been a long time since he’d felt this way, a long time since remembering any of this.
What did they do to me?
Took away part of your humanity, came the answer.
If he ever managed to escape, he had a lot of explaining to do to his parents, living back home in the same little town. No calls, no visits, nothing in the way of contact. Maybe they’d tried and had their calls blocked by the Regime. Who knew? Hell, he’d barely even thought about them in years. Until recently. Until Dr Muller had freed his mind. The mindchip must’ve somehow suppressed feelings of kinship. It was the only explanation he could conjure. Eventually, fatigue and the steady vibration of the trailer rocked him to sleep. Fitful naps, interspersed by drowsy checks on Cora, filled the time.
Hours passed, and daylight started to seep through the thin slits in the cut panel. Still Cora slept. Unless that changed, their chances of escaping in hostile territory were slim. All road-trains aimed to go from origin to destination non-stop. From his time in the military, interdiction attempts by bandits were common but rarely succeeded. The attackers generally fell in the first few minutes—mostly from the sonic cannons, which felled people like skittles and neutralized them inside vehicles. He had seen bandit trucks knocked on their sides by sonic cannons. Failing that they’d use one of the escort’s anti-tank missiles. Then there were the military drones. Unlike the Police models, these ones used thrust-vectored jet engines and could decimate attackers. None of this stopped the people of the Badlands from trying. The so-called bandits were mostly just desperate, hungry people. Not a fair fight. They were rarely well-armed—mostly small arms, unless a foreign backer had smuggled in more potent weaponry. That happened from time-to-time. Mostly it was the Democratic Alliance. Sometimes the Russians or Chinese. Foreign powers kept their meddling low-level, just enough to stop the Regime from pacifying the Badlands. Push it too far and the Regime would unleash another wave of sleepers or Special Forces on their enemy’s cities. Rae knew. He’d been one of them.
As the day wore on and the convoy progressed south, he felt the trailer warming up. Sunlight streamed into the panel cuts, providing a gloomy half-light. He wolfed down some food and water from the backpack, trying not to overdo it. Still no change with Cora. He was responsible for her, yet impotent to help. She’d been there for him more times than he could count and now she needed him he was out of answers.
But then things changed. It was 4:20pm, eighteen hours into the journey when Cora woke up.
A soft groan alerted him.
“Where am I?” she said weakly.
“What happened? Are you ok? How do you feel?” he said anxiously.
With concern on his face, he reached over and held her, kissing her cheek, before checking her pulse—back to normal. Her eyes looked fine, if a little drowsy. Her temperature was back to normal. It was as though nothing had happened. But something had—he just didn’t know what. She had no history of such episodes. It made no sense.
“I’m fine, Cal,” she said, observing her surroundings. “Oh, this place… I remember—we’re inside the trailer.”
“I was worried about you,” he said. “What the hell happened? You were fitting, then I couldn’t wake you.”
“I don’t know, Cal… I don’t remember anything.”
He said nothing.
“Look, I’m fine now. Ok?” she said with a hint of impatience.
He forced a smile and kissed her again, relieved but still baffled.
“Come on, take some food and water and try to move about a little,” he said. “We need to go soon. Time to get out of this damned box.”
She nodded
and took the water he offered.
A short time later, the trailer decelerated to a walking pace. The time, and the golden light streaming through the cuts in the panel, told him it was dusk. The slow-down told him they were approaching the Border Zone.
“What’s happening?” asked Cora. “I’m hot—can I take off this jacket and hat?”
She still seemed dazed, yet distant. More like the Cora under Ruby’s surveillance than the real Cora he’d enjoyed the company of while making their escape.
“I’m sorry, I know it’s hot—I’m sweating my ass off too, but we need to keep our winter gear on and put on our Mylar masks. We’re nearing the security gate. Once inside, the entire convoy will go through the scanners. They have infrared scanners there too, so the less heat signature we have the less we’ll show up against the Serviles in here. And I need you to lay flat on top of the guy you’re on. Stay completely still and the scanner shouldn’t differentiate you from him. I’ll do the same. We’re near the front of the convoy, so we’ll be on the go-slow while it goes through the scanner. It’s about a kilometer long. After the gate is our escape window.”
She nodded.
“Where are we headed to after we jump out?”
“Worry about that later. First, we find cover. Fast. Before the drones or escort or border guards find us.”
“But what is our plan to get to our destination in El Paso-Juarez?”
He ignored her question. Her body language was all wrong, but he didn’t have time to deal with it. He reached over and squeezed her hand.
“Come on, let’s get in position,” he said. “Lay with your arms and legs exactly on top of the Servile beneath you. And whatever you do, stay still.”
“Ok,” she said absently, following his instructions.
They stopped moving. Distant voices drifted across what he knew was an arid terrain of brush and scrub. The guards would be meeting a soldier from the lead APC, taking a report.
Blocked highway outside of Chicago, burning van but no bandits—must’ve aborted whatever plan they’d had. Everything to plan since, he guessed.
The Free Citizen Page 13