Fire

by Jim Heskett

  Yorick had shot him in the calf. Close enough. A jet of blood cascaded into the air and twisted around Diego's body as he fell. He rolled, leaving a red trail on the concrete.

  Rosia had now caught up, and she rushed toward Diego, face-down, trying to rise to his feet. Atop the bridge over the creek, he reached out for the railing for leverage.

  Diego was up on his knees by the time Rosia met him, and she swung the stock of her rifle at his face. It cracked him in the mouth, sending him back down to the ground. He still held tight to the metal railing, though.

  Yorick joined Rosia’s side a moment later. Diego looked up at him, mouth full of blood. “Hello, brother.”

  Yorick grabbed the idiota by the shoulder and lifted him to his feet. He shoved him against the railing over the water. “You know.”

  “Our father told me before I stabbed him in the throat. How long have you known? Did you know at the plantación?”

  Yorick shook his head. As he held Diego in place, Rosia dug through his pockets.

  “I’ve got the keycards,” she said as she hefted a collection of them. “We have what we need.”

  “That won’t matter,” Diego said. “They cycle the security on an hourly basis. You use the wrong card, and an alarm goes off. Security will swarm you in seconds.”

  Yorick now noticed an immense amount of commotion in the street. The outside world phased into his awareness. Soldados racing, directing cars to divert onto side streets. Far off, blaring alarms echoed between the buildings. Fifty or sixty kilometers away, maybe even all the way to the western side of the city.

  “There’s been a war coming,” Yorick said. “I think it’s here now.”

  “Too bad you won’t live to see it,” Diego said. Then, with a bloody smile, he added, “At least, not all of you.”

  Yorick got up in his face. “What does that mean?”

  “When was the last time you saw your friend Tenney?”

  Yorick’s heart sank. His lip trembled, and he had to force the words out. “What did you do to him?”

  “I gutted him like a fish and let him bleed out on the dirty floor of a soup kitchen. He’s probably in the dumpster behind the building now.”

  “No,” Yorick said.

  “Oh, yes. It’s only a matter of time before the rest of you pendejos get what’s coming, too.”

  Rage overtook Yorick. He felt it swirl up from his toes and make his upper torso vibrate. In one motion, he brought up his rifle and smacked the stock against Diego’s head, with all the force he could muster. Diego’s neck snapped to the side, and he banged against the railing. Eyes rolling back, his head lolled around on his neck.

  Rosia stepped back, out of the way. But she didn’t stop him or add any commentary.

  Yorick hit Diego again, and this time, he bent back over the railing and toppled into the water. Face down. The rushing creek whisked him away in an instant, traveling east, away from the mountains. Within two seconds, he was twenty meters away.

  Yorick lifted his rifle to shoot at the body, even though it wasn’t necessary at this point. In a few more seconds, the creek swallowed him.

  A bullet cracked the concrete below Yorick’s feet. He whipped back to find a group of soldados who had taken a break from the chaos to shoot at him and Rosia.

  She grabbed him by the arm and tugged him in the opposite direction, back toward the bike path. Yorick ran with her.

  “We need to get Hamon,” she shouted as the alarms around them grew louder and louder. “It’s starting.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Yorick, Rosia, and Hamon raced along Platte street. They had all ditched their rifles and instead would rely on the pistols they’d acquired from dead security guards at the brothel. With the chaos in the street, the only way to ensure soldados wouldn’t cut them down was not to brandish weapons while they ran.

  They had retrieved Hamon from the spot they’d left him at the playground. While he claimed to be perfectly healthy and ready to go, he still didn’t seem right. Getting knocked in the head inside the brothel had crossed his wires. Hamon’s eyes were blank. Maybe that was determination, or maybe that was blood sloshing around inside his skull, clogging his brain, and turning him into a zombie.

  Either way, Hamon sprinted with them, keeping up just fine. And they needed speed, too. Chaos ruled the streets. The First City had morphed from quiet tension to all-out war in only a few minutes.

  From far away, the gates at the north end of the sprawling Denver walled complex screeched open. Soldados rushed in that direction, some in tanks, some on foot. Isolated skirmishes broke out in the streets. Sun worshippers and Frenchies openly attacked any soldados they could find. White Flames, mostly ignoring the fighting, looted shops and mugged civilians in the streets. Maybe they were too busy to notice Yorick and Rosia, but best to keep their distance, anyway.

  Yorick had never seen so many pale-skinned people before at one time or place. They had come out of the woodwork, emerging from their holes. The revolutionary/dishwasher Alejandro had said they had numbers, but Yorick hadn’t believed him. But, he had to tip his hat to their battle strategy. If the enemy doesn’t know your strength, they can’t plan accordingly.

  Yorick kept his eyes on the capitol building, towering above the others. It grew larger as they raced toward it. The structure reminded him of the block quadrant at the plantación. A place full of so many options, too easy to get lost in. At no point in their lives would keeping their bearing be more critical than right now.

  “There’s a back entrance,” Hamon said. “Loading bays. Only the stars know how well it will be guarded now, but it’s usually only a handful.”

  When a tank blockade appeared ahead, Hamon pointed them down a side street. They diverted. A separate line of tanks rolled, big treaded wheels grinding down the street.

  Yorick couldn’t catch his breath. “This is loco. They’ll cut us down as soon as we get to the building.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hamon said. “I have a secret weapon. Help from the inside. You’ll see when we go around.”

  At the front of the capitol building, there were thirty soldados positioned there. Tanks blocking the streets on all sides. Inside the lobby, twenty more soldados were guarding the elevators and the stairwell. Hamon had been right. A frontal assault would be a death sentence.

  One of the soldados outside glared in Yorick’s direction, so they changed course and sprinted for the side of the building. Would he use his communicator to alert soldados at the back? No way to know.

  A few seconds later, they arrived at the back of the capitol building, breathless and exhausted. All three of them paused at the open expanse of concrete leading down to a set of below-ground loading bays sized for large trucks.

  A single door set off to the side of the bays. Unguarded. At least ten soldados were dead on the concrete, their eyes bulging out of their sockets as if poisoned with some horrible gas.

  “What’s this?” Yorick said.

  “I told you,” Hamon said. “Help from the inside. One of the king’s computer engineers is—or was—a regular customer of mine. He worked on the Operation Home project. Sorry, I couldn’t tell you about this before. I wasn’t sure if it would work.”

  Yorick thought back to Diego interrogating the engineers. He must have done so because some of them weren’t loyal to the king. Hamon had found a way to exploit a connection with one of them. Maybe that information would have been useful for Yorick and Rosia to know, but Hamon must have had a good reason to keep it to himself.

  “We have a path into the building?”

  “We do,” Hamon said.

  “This is awful,” Rosia said, her face a horror as she looked at the dead soldados. They were grotesque, expressions on their faces like they’d died in terror and agony.

  “This is war,” Hamon said, and the severity on his face frightened Yorick. He’d never seen his former guerrero leader with such fire in his eyes.

  Still, it didn’t matter. Th
ey had a way in, and they had to take it.

  Yorick drew his pistol and then turned to face Hamon and Rosia. “I should have known better than to doubt you. I love you both,” he said. Hamon nodded, and Rosia opened her mouth to say something, but her words were lost under the sound of an explosion. Across the street, a bomb or a missile or something took out a sizable chunk of a building almost as tall as the capitol. The metal and steel cried and wailed as chunks slid down the building like sliced meat falling to a plate.

  “Move!” Yorick said, and they raced toward the back entrance. Down the concrete, navigating the bodies, to the door. Yorick wished Tenney could have been here. After everything the former farm worker had been through, he’d deserved to see this final stage.

  He hadn’t deserved to die on the cold tile of a kitchen floor.

  Yorick couldn’t think about that now. His death had been avenged, no matter how unsatisfying and incomplete it had felt at the time to throw Diego into the creek.

  They paused in front of the building, and Rosia gave Yorick the keycards. There were six of them, each marked with different symbols. Circle, square, triangle, cross, star, three wavy lines.

  A single panel on the back of the door, with two lights, one red and one green.

  “Which one?” Hamon said.

  Yorick eyed him. “You don’t know?”

  “My engineer cleared a path but didn’t tell me about this. We have to choose.”

  Yorick had no idea which one to use. Diego had said the wrong one would sound an alarm. But, he could have lied about that. And, if an alarm did go off, would it matter?

  If it rerouted a security team to the back, then it definitely would matter.

  “What’s on the other side of this door?” Yorick asked Hamon.

  “Hopefully, more dead soldados,” Hamon said. “But that depends on if my engineer completed his second job or not.”

  Rosia pointed at the card with the three wavy lines. “Try that one. Maybe the lines are tire treads to represent the truck bay doors.”

  Yorick sighed, but he nodded. That was a better educated guess than anything he’d devised. He pressed the card against the panel. For a moment, the red light blinked.

  Then, the green light flicked on, and the door clicked.

  “Let’s go,” he said, holding his pistol up. He pulled the door back and aimed his weapon inside. They entered a dark room completely devoid of any humans. Any living humans, at least. A blanket of dead soldados littered the ground, apparently suffering the same fate as the ones outside. Eyes bulging, many of them with their hands around their own necks as they’d died. Yorick tried to keep his eyes up.

  The room was a large, open space to receive the trucks. There were boxes stacked on pallets. Small machines to move the pallets around. Not much else aside from a series of propaganda posters about King Nichol along one wall. They depicted a young, thin version of the king, mostly in battle. Smiling, victorious.

  There were elevators at the far side, but Yorick knew better than to head for those. If they were even working, the building’s security would certainly monitor them. They’d find a squadron of soldados waiting for them, on any floor they exited.

  A single door marked with an image of stairs was at the other corner. Hamon pointed, and they all ran toward it.

  “What’s on the other side?” Yorick said to Hamon.

  Hamon removed a keycard from his pocket. “Another present from my engineer. This is a private stairwell so we won’t be bothered. At least, not until we venture out into the main floors.”

  He flung back the door, and they entered the dark space. When the door shut behind them, everything turned eerily quiet.

  “The engineers work on the sixteenth floor,” Hamon said. “That’s where we’ll find the computer servers.”

  Without a word, Yorick hustled up the stairs, and his two companions followed. Boots stomping on each step. Every time they passed a landing, they could hear commotion through the doors leading into the capitol building’s floors but encountered no one in the stairwell.

  When they reached 16, Yorick paused. His head throbbed, his mouth had dried. He couldn’t draw a full breath. The aches and pains of the attack at the brothel had now caught up to him.

  Rosia and Hamon also paused to catch their breath. Hamon pointed at the door. “I haven’t seen the server area, but you’ll know it when you see it. Big machines stacked floor to ceiling, with hundreds of blinking lights.”

  Rosia frowned. “Why do you say that like you’re not coming with us?”

  Hamon looked further up the stairwell. “My destiny is somewhere else in this building. My inside contact gave me one last gift.”

  “What?” Yorick said. “We need you with us.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You do what you need to do. I have my own tasks I need to take care of. When I’m done, I’ll come back down. But, you don’t need me now.”

  “We do,” Rosia said.

  Hamon shook his head. “Look at all you accomplished without me.”

  Yorick stared, unsure what to say.

  Hamon drew his gun. He wrapped an arm around Yorick, and then Rosia. He pulled back and touched his forehead to each of theirs in turn. “I hope you fare well.”

  “Wait,” Yorick said, but it was too late. Hamon had already left, his boots stomping on the stairs as he thundered up to the next floor.

  Yorick and Rosia looked at each other, then at the number 16 on the door. A strange quiet filled the darkness of the stairwell.

  He held out his hand, pinky finger up. “Always.”

  “Always,” Rosia said.

  Then, they opened the door.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Yorick opened the door. Pistol up, he and Rosia dashed down a bright hallway and found a single door at the end. A placard of a computer and the royal seal carved into it. There were no security cameras in the hall, soft carpet underfoot. No noise drifting out from the room. Up this high, they were shielded from the noise of the chaos on the streets below.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  Rosia blew out a breath and held up her pistol. Yorick cycled through the cards, checking the symbols on each.

  “Square,” Rosia said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t. It’s a feeling. Try the one with the square.”

  “If you say so,” he said as he pressed the card against the panel next to the door. After a brief pause, the LED above blinked green.

  In a flash, Yorick entered the room. Like they’d been trained, he took the right half of the room while she checked the left. Eyes trailing his pistol around the room, he absorbed all the details. Three people visible. Two soldados, and one person who looked like a scientist or computer engineer. None of them in body armor.

  At first, no one saw him or Rosia. They had a second or two to get their bearings and learn the space.

  No doubt this was the server room. The initial office space was approximately six meters by six, with a small cluster of desks and vid screens. Beyond that, in an adjoining room, there were rows and rows of machines with blinking lights that ran almost to the ceiling. At least six of these rows in the larger back room.

  The engineer saw them first. He'd been facing the other direction, and he whipped around, his eyes landing on a pistol sitting on a nearby desk. He reached for it, and Rosia shot him once in the chest. The blast lit up the room and rocked Yorick’s ears, standing only a meter away from her pistol.

  The engineer stumbled and fell to his knees. Now, the soldados noticed, scrambling to take up a defensive position. They had been back by the front of the server area, and they raised their rifles.

  Two more joined them, emerging from the server room. Four hostiles.

  Yorick and Rosia both ducked down and crawled toward the nearest desk. Yorick didn't know if its heavy wood would provide much cover from rifle bullets, but it was better been standing and waiting to be shot. Four or five meters of space between them and the h
ostiles.

  Yorick met Rosia’s eyes. He held up two fingers and then spread them apart. Old battle tactics learned as young teenagers in a place they’d been doomed to spend their lives as slaves. He was telling her that they would sneak around opposite sides of the desk to divide the attention of the soldados. Done fast, it would disorient them.

  He leaned around the corner of the desk and spotted a soldado’s exposed thighs. His cover didn’t protect him from this angle. Sloppy. Maybe they were too busy thinking of the skirmishes in the streets to fully enter the battle mindset. Probably, they had not expected the server room to come under siege in a battle.

  Yorick supposed it made sense this room wouldn’t be heavily guarded. Particularly if the king wanted to control who knew about the things they were doing in here. Diego interrogating the computer engineers suggested as much.

  Taking out these hostiles as quickly as possible became the most critical task. Every second mattered now.

  Yorick shot the exposed soldado in the thigh, then he leaned out a little further shot him again in the stomach. Rosia also took out one of them on the other side. He backed up into a wall, dropping his rifle as he tried to stem the bleeding from the hole in his chest. He failed, and slid down the wall, leaving a trail of blood behind.

  Two remaining.

  As the echo of the bullets faded, one clear sound arose. The shuffling of boots on the floor. The two remaining soldados were advancing across the tiled floor.

  Yorick gave Rosia another look. She nodded.

  "Now," Yorick said as he popped up. He had only a fraction of a second to locate his target. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Rosia do the same. They each emptied their magazines, taking down both of the remaining soldados.

  Only then did Yorick realize how dangerous a gun battle could be in this room. Not only because they might’ve been shot, but what if they'd hit one of the servers? They probably could not insert the chip and spread the virus if the pinche thing wasn't working.