by Sean Grigsby
An attack ship, blacker than pitch and big as a whale, hovered through the newly made hole in the ceiling, casting bright green light onto the cells. Dolfuse had seen the aircraft before, seen the enormous cannons mounted on its sides. Sweet Kiss. The prototype Wickey had shown her the day she went to look at the drones. It was out for a trial run, and she and the shippees were its first test.
It fired, giving no warning. A few shippees were quick enough to shoot their laser rifles, but most caught a laser or were blown apart before they’d rubbed the sleep from their eyes.
Dolfuse crawled. It was all she could do as light and blood rained all around her. Screams and the thwump, thwump, thwump of each cannon or laser only spurned her to move faster before the entire floor crumbled below her.
She made it to her cell, staying on her stomach. Rebecca lay on the floor, pinning a pillow around the back of her head. A cannon flashed behind them, briefly revealing a tear-soaked face, a child’s face, terrified beyond belief. Dolfuse knew just how she felt.
“Follow me,” Dolfuse said.
Rebecca shook her head. “I don’t wanna die!”
“You don’t have to.” Dolfuse grabbed her arm. “But we do have to get out of here.”
Rebecca released the pillow and latched onto the back of Dolfuse’s uniform. The senator grabbed the shippee’s rifle and crawled from the cell. They’d stay low. Senator or not, she wore the same white as every other shippee, and Sweet Kiss wouldn’t give her time to explain the situation.
The attack ship maneuvered in a circle, picking off assailing shippees with smaller guns, and decimating entire cells with its cannons. Dolfuse made it to the stairs and had to crawl over more than a few dead shippees before she and Rebecca reached the top. When Dolfuse looked back, Sweet Kiss fired a cannon and blew apart the stairs behind them. That’s when Dolfuse and the shippee ran.
“Where are we going?” Rebecca asked.
“To end this.”
Chapter 46
Sarah didn’t know welding huge pieces of Oubliette glass and metal could be so fun. One of the OC women had offered to teach her how to do it if Sarah agreed to finish the job. Sarah didn’t wield the laser perfectly, but she got used to the task easily enough.
“Am I doing this right?” she asked the OC member, who hadn’t offered her name.
“Yep. Try to stay a little tighter, but that’s it.”
Sarah smiled behind the golden sparks issuing from her laser cutter. The other woman walked off and Sarah thanked her without looking up from her work. She really wanted to show Dipity and Hurley Girly what she’d learned, but Lena had sent them off to refill more canisters with energy from the Core. They’d been gone a while, and nobody said anything more about where Farica and her dwellers might be hiding.
Ava was too busy with the sensor to bother with anything else, and Lena seemed to have the weight of the city on her shoulders. Sarah guessed it made sense to feel that way. It was Lena’s plan, and if something went wrong, everyone would blame her.
The lights went out.
Dwellers screamed and something clanged against the floor amidst shuffling boots. Sarah quit welding so she wouldn’t mistakenly burn the wrong thing.
“Everyone calm down,” Lena shouted. “We’re still breathing, so that means we still have the Veil. Is everyone OK?”
Rory cried from where Sarah had last seen her, on a couch with Shamika, where they’d both fallen asleep.
“I’m just fine, Horror,” Shamika said. “What the hell did you do?”
Lena didn’t answer, and Sarah wondered how much restraint it took.
“Pao,” Lena said, and lit a laser cutter to illuminate her face. “Come with me to the roof.”
Sarah lit her own cutter and moved past crouching dwellers and overturned shelves until she reached Lena. They eased their way to the roof and came out to a blackened city. No lights whatsoever shone from any building, including Grindy’s warehouse. Even the street looked darker, devoid of its glow.
“What happened?” Sarah looked all around.
“More than likely? Dipity and Hurley Girly took more power than they should have. But they’ve already been gone longer than I thought they’d be. So it was them, or…”
“Or what?”
Lena stopped talking. It gave Sarah the chance to hear the distant sound of a yelling crowd. It grew in volume by the second, but she could see nothing. Then, from a building a few blocks up, the unmistakable glow of orange cyclone wheels rounded the corner. A fathomless, dark mass followed behind it.
“Oh shit,” Lena said.
“Is that what I think it is?” Sarah asked. Of course it was what she thought it was, it was plain as night. Sarah just wished she was dreaming and that Lena would slap her back into a safer reality. No such luck.
“I knew we should have found them sooner,” Lena sighed.
“What are we going to do?”
“The only thing we can do. Fight blind.”
Chapter 47
“Stop here,” Rebecca said. She pushed Dolfuse behind a corner as shipper guards rushed by.
Dolfuse tried to steady her breath so the guards wouldn’t hear, but it didn’t matter. The sounds of death covered their steps, and the guards were too focused on finally getting to shoot something.
“How much farther?” Dolfuse asked after the guards had gone.
“We’re almost to the manna room. Come on.”
Since escaping the holding cells minutes before, they’d run until they heard someone coming, and hid until the danger passed. Once the young girl had calmed down, Dolfuse realized that Rebecca knew the ins and outs of the port, having marched down every corridor for the last year. And she knew where to hide if any guards – or invading soldiers – approached. She stopped again just beside a hallway when Dolfuse heard a familiar voice.
“Focus everyone on that attack ship,” Beckles told a group of guards, who quickly hurried to join the battle.
Dolfuse dared a peek around the corner and spotted Beckles entering the manna room in a night robe.
How classy.
“Let’s go.” Dolfuse crept toward the manna room.
“No,” Rebecca said. “If we go the other way, we can take the main stairs and get out of here.”
“This is the best shot we have of not getting blown to hell – if we capture the warden,” she held up the rifle, “then they’ll be more apt to keep their fingers off the trigger. Now let’s go get that bitch.”
Beckles was standing halfway across the top railing when Dolfuse entered the manna room. The blades in the vats of goo spun like manic propellers below.
Whipping around, Beckles drew a handgun from her robe and fired. Rebecca pulled Dolfuse out of the way, but not before the shot ripped through the senator’s hand, sending the rifle from Dolfuse’s grip and into one of the giant manna vats. The shippee dragged Dolfuse across to the opposite railing, dodging another of the warden’s shots, and coming to a rest at a large air conditioning unit.
“She shot me!” Dolfuse stared at the burned hole in her hand. No blood – the laser had seared the blood vessels. Pain, though, plenty of that radiated from the wound.
“Shippee!” Beckles yelled. Her steps clanged closer. “You should have stayed and fought like you promised me.”
Rebecca tightened her lips and hung her head.
Beckles stepped closer. “This is all your fault, Senator Dolfuse.”
“Senator?” Rebecca whispered.
Dolfuse would have retorted, but it was trouble enough gritting her teeth against the pain in her hand.
Leaning close to Dolfuse’s ear, Rebecca whispered. “When I tell you, run and catch her from behind.”
“What?”
“I’m going to distract her.”
“No, wait.” Dolfuse tried to grab her, but Rebecca bolted toward the other side.
“Now!” Rebecca yelled.
Dolfuse swallowed and clambered behind the air unit.
Keep
ing low, Rebecca zigzagged every few steps. Beckles took the bait and fired, but the shots whizzed over the shippee’s head, or into the railing at her feet.
It was now or never. Dolfuse rounded the railing, keeping her injured hand tucked to her chest. The night robe flapped behind Beckles as she stomped after Rebecca with an itchy trigger finger.
Dolfuse charged when Beckles aimed another shot at the fleeing shippee. But the warden heard her coming and turned the gun around. Dolfuse had already leapt, knocking her head into Beckles’ gun hand and wrapping her arms around her waist.
The two women landed on their backs and the gun slid across the railing. Dolfuse went for it, but Beckles pulled her back by the ankle. Pain ripped across Dolfuse’s scalp when the warden took a tight grip on her hair, yanking back and slamming her head into the grated floor. Dolfuse squeezed her eyes shut, as if it would protect her. The metal greeted her nose and forehead with bludgeons and cuts – again and again and again.
When Beckles stopped to catch her breath, Dolfuse rolled over and kicked both feet into the warden’s chest. The blow sent Beckles onto her back, but instead of pouncing on her, Dolfuse used the break to get to her feet. It gave Beckles enough time to do the same.
The warden swung a left hook, a surprise even in the heat of the fight. Dolfuse cowered back, barely dodging the punch. Beckles grinned. Sweat covered her face, and one of her eyelids twitched. With her big arms, Beckles grabbed Dolfuse into a bear hug, and suddenly the senator could no longer breathe.
“I’m going to crush you till your eyes pop out.” Beckles grit her teeth. Her arms tensed – as if they could have tightened any more. “And I’m going to watch it happen slowly.”
Dolfuse’s daddy always used to say she should never resort to using her fists when she could use her head instead. And so she did. A quick bend backward and Dolfuse used the momentum to slam her head into Beckles’ nose, sending more pain through her own damaged face. The warden let go of her and staggered back, clutching the gushing wound. Beckles moved so fast, so preoccupied with her bleeding nose, she didn’t see the railing behind her.
Hitting the metal, Beckles flipped over the side, screaming only once before sinking into a manna vat. When Dolfuse looked over the railing, the concoction had turned a bright shade of red. Dolfuse turned away, nearly vomiting.
“You OK, Linda?” Rebecca trotted over. “Did you let the warden escape?”
Dolfuse shook her head and thumbed behind her, toward the vats. “She thought she was God. I guess now she’s the body and blood of Christ.”
“Oh, gross.” Rebecca stuck her tongue out, grimacing and showing her age. “What a way to go.”
A hundred boots beat against the metal railing. Dolfuse didn’t have to look up to know which side was coming toward them. Who else could it have been?
The senator got to her knees and raised both arms into the air, nodding for Rebecca to do the same. The UCNA soldiers met them with laser rifles aimed at their heads.
One with more bars on his shoulder than the others stepped forward. “Face down on the ground.”
“Don’t shoot.” Dolfuse obeyed the soldier’s command, placing her face against the railing, sucking in air from the stinging cuts across her skin. “I’m a continental senator.”
They’d given Dolfuse a sandwich, just a slice of bologna between two pieces of bread, but it might as well have been a twelve course meal at a reservation-only establishment. She never again wanted to eat that terrible manna, let alone look at it. It all probably tasted like blood and guts now anyway.
She waited in Beckles’ office alone, with soldiers guarding the door outside. They’d sworn she wasn’t a prisoner, but she couldn’t leave and they had to guard her. What else would they have called it, then?
The soldiers hadn’t told her where they’d taken Rebecca. Although Dolfuse let them know repeatedly the girl had been the only reason she was still alive, and should be rewarded for it, the soldiers had simply nodded and carried the shippee off. Fear had coated Rebecca’s face when they separated them, but Dolfuse assured her everything would be alright, and that she would keep her promise to protect her.
Finishing her sandwich and craving something to drink, Dolfuse leaned back in her chair and felt the dog tags around her neck shift. She lifted them out of her shirt and stared at her own name pressed into the metal.
Bobby would get a laugh out of this. The rest hadn’t been so funny.
Dolfuse used to wonder how people who’d gone through something traumatic would be able to make it to another day without losing their minds. But she thought she might have figured it out, as she sat there, rubbing her dog tags between her fingers. It all felt like a dream, happening so fast, she couldn’t replay it all through her head – the parts she didn’t mind going over again, anyway. That’s how victims moved on, they treated the experience as a dream. Dreams could be forgotten, for the most part, and the comfort came from knowing they weren’t real.
She ripped the dog tags from her neck and looked at them one last time. A light shone on Beckles’ magnetic frame that held so many of the same tiny dog tags, representing so many shippees who’d suffered more than she had. Those women couldn’t wake up like she could. They were lost to the nightmare. And those left behind on Earth got to be the ones to forget.
Dolfuse cast the dog tags into the air. The magnet picked them up and sucked them into the countless horde. Just another addition.
The doors opened and Vice President Martin strolled in with a concerned face and open arms. “Linda, you poor dear!”
Dolfuse accepted her embrace, thankful to have any sort of contact besides a gun to the face.
“I rushed here as soon as they told me.” Martin rubbed at tears that she obviously hadn’t shed.
“They wouldn’t let me leave.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. With this whole mess, we couldn’t let anyone go until we knew who was who, and where to put them back.”
Dolfuse returned to the chair. “There was a girl with me. She helped me escape.”
“Oh?”
“I promised her that she wouldn’t be shipped.”
Martin puffed her cheeks. “Oh. Linda, I… You shouldn’t go around making promises like that.”
“I’m a politician. It’s what we’re best at. But I intend to honor it.”
“That can’t happen.” Martin shook her head.
“Why in hell not?” Dolfuse sat up. “I’m a continental senator, you’re the vice president. I’m not saying we can help all of these shippees, but this one, Rebecca’s her name, she helped me when I was stuck in this torture chamber, and I demand that kindness be repaid.”
“It’s not like a crime that can be pardoned.” Martin laughed a little under her breath. “Her mother made a choice to ship her. If we let this girl go, we’d be interfering with her mother’s legal rights.”
“What about the girl’s rights?” A bad taste coated Dolfuse’s tongue. She hated Martin with every molecule; she just didn’t know it so completely until that moment.
Martin sat on the edge of Beckles’ desk. “What rights? Goodness, Linda. What did they do to you in here? You sound like an anti-shipper.”
“I’m seeing things for how they really are.”
“Who would take care of her? You?”
“If there was no one else,” Dolfuse nodded. “If it meant she wouldn’t be forgotten.”
Martin laughed again, harder this time. She flapped a hand in the air as if dispelling a foul smell. “Anyway, she won’t be getting shipped. None of them will.”
Dolfuse wrinkled her brow. “What do you mean?”
“There will be no more shipments to Oubliette.” Martin smiled proudly. “As of 0800 hours, Executive Order KMA-4 went into effect. You know, we initially thought of cutting off the manna supply and waiting for the inevitable. But the freeze and the EA weren’t going to let up, so we had to take a more aggressive approach.”
Dolfuse leapt to her feet. “What are yo
u talking about? And there’s a baby on Oubliette.”
“Yes, I know.”
“We have to bring her back.”
“That video from the drone.” Martin whistled. “I have to tell you, Linda, that’s what did it for President Griffin. I was afraid she wasn’t a hundred percent behind the plan, but when she saw all those ruffians killing each other, she couldn’t sign the order quick enough.”
“What did Griffin sign? What is KMA-4?” Dolfuse said through clenched teeth, trying to refrain from strangling the vice president.
Martin hopped off the desk. “Come with me, Linda, and I’ll show you.”
Trudging once again through the unbearably porcelain halls of the shipping port, Dolfuse wondered if she’d ever leave, or if she’d died and gone to White Hell. “What are you going to do with the shippees?”
“Military is going to pick and choose from them. Give some a second chance.” Martin tucked her hands into her pants pockets.
“And the rest?”
Martin quickened her pace and Dolfuse saw that they neared the control room. She thought of Spangler. He wouldn’t be in there like he’d always been before. Dolfuse tried to brace herself for the blow, remembering he was gone, but it still pierced her to see that her best friend’s chair stood empty, that only soldiers stuffed the room.
It only got worse when she saw what waited on the other side of the glass in the launch room. Plumes of frozen air rolled off its sharp black wings, prepping it for space travel. Soldiers hustled at each side, ensuring the laser cannons’ power cells were topped off. Sweet Kiss, the airship that had killed most of the shippees in the holding cells, was ready to wipe out Oubliette.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Dolfuse pressed her head against the glass, feeling the coolness against her flushed skin.