by Kyle Andrews
“You can't kill me. I'm a professional.”
“Never stopped me before.”
“You've lost the element of surp—”
A shot rang out, cutting off the officer before he could finish his sentence. Rose heard a body slump onto the ground.
“Check it out. Freedom really does prevail,” said a familiar male voice that Rose couldn't quite place at first. “All clear.”
It was Paul. The man who had taught Rose how to drive and who had made a habit out of getting himself into and out of trouble almost as regularly as he moved in and out of her life.
Rose walked out from behind the water heater and saw Paul in the window, holding a rifle that he'd taken from the officer that she'd killed.
“I could have taken him out,” Rose said, moving toward the window.
“No doubt,” Paul agreed, taking in the sight of the four officers that Rose had shot. “And to think, you still can't parallel park.”
Rose went to one of the officers and knelt beside him. She grabbed his gun and set it beside her. She then unbuckled his belt.
“Should I leave you two alone?” Paul asked.
“Get in here. Take everything. Guns. Bullets. Smoke bombs. We won't get this opportunity again.”
Paul nodded and hopped down into the basement. When he was on his feet he went to Rose and lowered himself to her level. After checking out her injury, he looked her in the eyes and then pulled her into a hug. It was a familiar hug that she could have melted into, but she didn't allow herself to relax.
“I thought you were all dead,” he told her.
“Did you see the hospital?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
Paul let go of her and looked down. Though he usually tried to at least appear as care-free as anyone Rose had ever met, there was a darkness that would wash across his face every so often. It usually happened right before he would disappear for weeks and come back distant. That hint of darkness was nothing compared to what she saw now. Though he was trying to smile his way through it, Rose could almost see the horrors that he had witnessed replaying like old movies in his eyes.
She could still hear gunfire in the distance.
29
“We need to go! Move!” yelled a man as he waved people though a hallway in what was once part of the Garden.
The fires that had been started before were now extinguished, but explosions rocked the building. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing came crashing down around them.
In the distance, Justin could hear the sounds of machine guns firing and people screaming. In the chaos, every drill and protocol was forgotten. Overwhelmed by smoke, people were trying to escape through the front door and windows, only to be slaughtered in front of the building. How many? Justin couldn't even think about that number.
Since getting Ammo, Justin had joined a group of people who were looking to escape the building through one of the proper exits. It felt wrong to abandon their base, but it was their only option. Staying behind was suicide.
They fled through a door that led to a stairwell, and moved downward as quickly as they possibly could, toward an old parking garage that had been boarded up decades earlier. Several layers of parking were underground, where no bullets or bombs had yet reached. This was the safest exit available to them.
On the lowermost level of the parking garage, there was a rear exit from the Garden. Originally created as a last resort escape route, it had become the main entrance for some members who were approaching the building from the far side of town. With luck, HAND hadn't spotted this exit and the people could escape without ever being noticed. But Justin had a hard time believing in luck. It hadn't been working in their favor that day.
As he moved down the stairs, Justin kept his eyes down, making sure that he didn't trip as he ran. Above him, another explosion rocked the building.
Should he have left? Was there something that he could have done to help those who remained behind? Should he have gone searching through higher levels for Amanda, even after being told that hospital patients were being transported? He felt like he should have at least tried, but what was there for him to do?
In front of him, a father had a little boy in his arms. The boy was staring at Justin as they ran. He looked terrified, but he wasn't screaming or crying like most of the other children. This boy's stare was distant and emotionless.
Justin smiled at the boy, trying his best to look reassuring, but it didn't help. He tried to think of something to say, but what was there? He couldn't very well tell the child that everything was going to be okay as they both witnessed their entire way of life crumbling around them.
Down below, the door to the parking garage was pushed open and slammed against the wall as people rushed through it. As he moved closer and closer to that door, Justin kept repeating the same prayer over and over again, begging for protection. Begging for the lives of his people. Begging to get through this. It was all he could do, and he hated that feeling. He hated running away. He hated being helpless as tyrants slaughtered innocent people right over his head. So as he begged God for the lives of those around him, he also begged for the chance to take action. As he looked at that little boy in front of him, whose face lacked the youthful spirit that children usually had, Justin prayed for his opportunity to get revenge against the system that allowed this to happen. Whatever it took, he would make sure that those responsible payed a price for what they had done that day. They would not be allowed to look back on that attack as a victory.
The narrow stairwell opened up into a wide open area as Justin finally made his way through the door. People were running for their lives, trying to avoid bumping into each other as each of them raced past each other, hoping to be the next through the tunnel that would lead them away from the Garden one last time.
Those tunnels had always intrigued Justin. So much time had been spent carefully crafting ways into and out of the building. How many people had devoted years of their lives to designing and building those tunnels? How much effort was put into creating the perfect way to run and hide?
In his current situation, Justin couldn't very well be angry over the years spent building tunnels, rather than fighting the war that needed to be fought. As it turned out, they did end up needing as many escape routes as they could get.
But would it have been that way if a stand had been taken sooner? Could their enemy have been defeated more easily when they were in their infancy, still maneuvering themselves into a position of absolute power through political strategy and media wordplay? Or was it already too late by the time anyone noticed what was happening?
When he reached the tunnel entrance, Justin didn't race through. He allowed others to go first, while Ammo sat by his side, panting. Justin might not have been able to save all of the people who had already died, but he could be sure to allow the survivors to go before him in the tunnel. To make sure that if the tunnel collapsed or HAND followed them through, he would be the one to take that hit before anyone else.
It wasn't rational. He wasn't saving lives by waiting to go through the tunnel. He knew that, but he wanted to feel as though he were taking a stand and protecting his people, even if it was only symbolic.
As the last of the people in his group made their way through the tunnel, Justin followed them. As he went, he listened for any sound from behind that might signal trouble. He turned around every so often to ensure that they weren't being followed by HAND officers. But all he saw when he looked was the faint light of the parking garage growing smaller and dimmer with distance, until eventually there was no hint of that light at all.
The tunnel was poorly lit. Nobody was talking, so the only sounds were footsteps and heavy breathing, echoing off of the walls and making it sound as though they had triple the amount of people with them than they actually did.
There was no telling how many people had survived. Those numbers would be tallied at some later point, by some other person.
To Justin, it didn't matter. All that mattered were those who didn't survive. Who had struggled for freedom their whole lives and would never see the light at the end of the tunnel.
A light did appear at the end of the more literal tunnel, which merged with a runoff pipe, leading to a ditch not too far from the river. When it rained heavily, the ditch and the river became one, but it was more or less dry as the survivors of the Garden moved toward the mouth of the tunnel.
Justin couldn't actually see that first person leave the tunnel, but as he got closer and closer to the light, he felt a weight lift from his shoulders. They'd made it.
One pop destroyed that hope. People near the mouth of the tunnel began to scream. The crowd pushed against each other as they tried to move back the way they had come.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Then there were no individual gunshots. Just the thunderous roar of multiple shots being fired, mixed with screams and cries.
Justin took a step backward, wanting to clear the way for those other people and to help those who were in danger near the front, but he couldn't do both. The only way for him to help any of them was to turn and run. So, he did. With his back to the carnage, he ran as fast as he possibly could. But where would they run? Where could they go? Was there any hope for survival? Their chances were fading by the second.
The race through the tunnel and back to the parking garage was a blur. Ammo led the way back to the stairwell and Justin held the door for people, screaming “Go!” as they passed.
At any moment, HAND officers could come marching through the tunnel or down the stairs and those members of Freedom had no way of stopping them. For all of the years that had been spent digging tunnels beneath the streets, there were no stockpiles of weapons. No bombs, just in case they were needed.
Justin was beginning to hate those cowards who came before him. Those who had given up their weapons in the first place, and those who hadn't found some way to obtain new weapons in the years since. Their tunnels had only served to lead people to the slaughter, completely helpless.
The number of people who came back through the tunnel was significantly less than those who had entered it. HAND officers were undoubtedly on their way, slowed only by the bodies that they would have to climb over in order to get to the parking garage. Justin wasn't going to wait for them. He entered the stairwell and ran as fast as he could up the stairs.
Had he been able to find a scrap of wood or a metal bar, he would have tried to secure the door as he entered, but there was no way for him to do that and it would have been foolish to stand around looking.
With Ammo racing past him to each landing and then stopping to make sure that Justin was following, they made their way to ground level and re-entered the mess that had once been the center of Garden activity. Now the lobby was barely recognizable. The ceiling had caved in in a number of spots. Fires had burned through walls, but were now mostly under control. Those who remained behind had managed to slow the damage that was being done, but the day was not yet over. It was only a matter of time.
“This way!” someone yelled, leading the way toward the tunnels that Justin had been using to enter and exit the Garden for years.
The path had been blocked earlier. Had the situation changed?
When Justin reached the main entrance, he saw debris piled high in front of it. People were digging, trying to clear the way, but it would be quite some time before they would clear an opening big enough for everyone to fit through.
But something had changed. Moving closer, Justin could see through a small gap in the rubble. He could tell that the door which led to the tunnels had been opened. There were people on the other side, working to clear the way from within the tunnels. If they were still out there, maybe there was hope. Maybe HAND hadn't found those tunnels yet.
“Justin!”
He turned, looking for whoever it was that had called his name. Aaron was rushing toward him. He was a mess, covered in dirt and ash, with a large bloody cut across the right side of his face.
As soon as Aaron was close enough to speak to Justin without anyone else hearing, he asked, “Did you run into any HAND officers?”
“In the tunnels,” Justin nodded.
“You personally?”
“Not directly. Why?”
“You need to get out of here. We have to make sure that you aren't spotted.”
“There are more important—”
“No, there aren't,” Aaron said, cutting him off while taking his arm and leading him toward the entrance, which people were still trying to clear. “When a big enough hole is opened, I need you to get out of here. Take the sewers as far as they'll get you. Stay hidden until after dark, and then try to get back to your home if you can. But whatever happens, you can't be seen. Nobody can know you were here.”
“I don't understand.”
“Justin... We need to have a longer talk about this, but I've been looking to get a man on the inside for a while now. Someone who works for them, but reports to us.”
Justin was completely thrown off by everything that was happening. In the midst of the Garden's destruction, Aaron was talking to him about things that made no sense. His confusion must have been obvious, because Aaron told him, “They've been raising you to join HAND since you were a kid.”
“They raise a lot of us. I could just as easily be assigned to the police, or shipped off with the military.”
Aaron shook his head and said, “You're smart. You're capable. They'll see the same things in you that I saw, especially after what happened at school. Which is why I know you're going to be assigned to HAND. ”
“I'm not working for them.”
“You have to. If we want any hope of taking these people down, we need to get smart about it. We can't keep doing things the way we have been. We need access to the inside, and you can do that.”
In a flash, everything that had happened in the previous month replayed in Justin's head. Uly. Libby. The riot. The deaths in the Garden. It was too much. He couldn't go back to his old life as though it hadn't happened. He certainly couldn't pretend to be okay with it.
Justin shook his head and said, “I can't live with those people and pretend that I don't want to kill them.”
“You have to.”
“Find someone else.”
“I could,” Aaron agreed, “but do you want me to find someone else? Really? Someone else to find the weakness in the system and expose it? Someone else to look them in the eye when all is said and done, and let them know that we played them? Do you want someone else getting your revenge for you? Justin, we could have known about this! We could have gotten out of here.”
Justin didn't respond. He wanted to take down the authorities more than anything in the world, but he wanted to do it with his bare hands. He wanted to strangle them to death, not feed information back to Freedom in the hopes of someday taking down the bad guys. He was pissed off and he wanted them to know it.
Aaron looked Justin squarely in the eye. After hesitating to find the words, he said, “Libby liked to joke about the refrigerators full of her blood, but the truth is, most of those samples that we took were destroyed during testing. And after we knew what that blood contained, I wanted to save it. I wanted to give it back to the people. I tried. I put her blood in the most secure room we had. I sent a runner with two samples, to store in different bases.”
Aaron looked around at the building that was coming down around them, and in a soft, hollow voice, he continued, “His body washed up by the river three days later. Libby's blood was destroyed, Justin. All of it. We lost everything. I lost everything.”
The words struck Justin like a slap to the face. Everything that Libby lived for since discovering the truth was in her blood. Everything that she thought she could contribute to the cause was stored in her DNA. Knowing that Freedom had it safely stored away was the only reason why she ever would have allowed herself to be killed in exchange for Collin Powers' life—And Justin had no doubt that she knew ex
actly what was going to happen to her that night. She'd been feeling guilty for a month before she died, because she was saved and Powers wasn't. She died because she didn't feel like she deserved to live. It was a useless death.
Uly died because of what was in his blood and Freedom's cause had been given a new life because of the hope that Libby's blood gave them. The hope to reclaim what had been taken from them. And now Justin was being told that it was all for nothing. It was gone. Everything that they were was gone.
Justin could choose to get even more angry. He could scream at Aaron, but that would get him nowhere.
He could attack every HAND officer that he saw on the street, which would probably get him killed within a day. Or he could choose to destroy their entire world and everything that they had spent decades to build. He could take them down and make them pay for what they had done. He could reach a day when they would look him in the eye and know that he was the one who took away all of their power and made them answer to the people.
The anger was surging through Justin's veins, but he remained calm as he looked Aaron in the eyes and said, “I'll do whatever it takes.”
30
“Reports are pouring into the newsroom from concerned citizens who are witnessing today's dramatic events, which began less than thirty minutes ago when a HAND drone apparently launched an attack on a Hate stronghold, in what was thought to be an abandoned part of the city,” a news anchor said into the camera as she sat behind her desk. Her facial expressions were carefully calculated and appeared almost robotic to Collin as he stood in front of a TV screen, watching the report.
He couldn't remember whether or not he'd taken a breath since he first heard of the attack. He assumed that he was breathing, but everything around him seemed unreal somehow. It was like watching a bad movie on the TV, except that this was really happening. People were being slaughtered on live television and the anchor behind the desk couldn't even muster up a genuine facial expression.