by D M Robbins
“It’s my honor, sir, like carrying the flag. For all of us. We’ve been waiting for something big like this.”
The other three guys who look like me nod.
Milleron says, “Boys, you make me proud.”
In our room we pack in silence. It grows eerily quiet as we wait. Off in the distance the toxic barrage of shells begins falling. They’re getting closer and the toxins seep into the cave’s air.
We hear Milleron over the speakers: “Masks on. Red Team get to the labyrinth. The field to the hillside is half a mile long. Bomb teams launch. Open that hillside up. Help our fighters. We will be exposed.
Shovel team up front. Other teams get to the hyperjeeps.” The base begins firing back from multiple locations spread over a mile to distract and confuse Kimbel’s army as to our location.
A dozen of us get to the end of the cave’s intricate network through tunnels of packed dirt.
“Volunteers!” Milleron extends his arm and points. “Forward.”
The bombs begin striking the hillside. We give them half the distance then exit first, protected by dense forest. The day is sunny with a lone cloud floating overhead.
It’s warm as the bombs’ smoke rises. We jog double time as shells fall around us exploding clumps of earth. The diggers make it to the hillside and begin feverishly digging like possessed men. Sharpshooters give cover from behind us. I see no opening yet. We are exposed in the field now outside the canopy of trees and brush. Kimbel’s mass weaponry are just south of our position. We are attempting to sneak around while they bomb the far edges of the Revo base.
One of the diggers falls on the right and the other three dig harder. My legs pump and I speed up ahead of everyone picking up the shovel and cause. Hancock is wounded by mortar fire. Bill stops to pick him up then keeps running for us with Hancock on his shoulder.
“Dig faster!” Milleron implores, yelling at us as they approach. “Open that up, boys. That’s an order!”
I dig faster, my shovel blurring. After four feet of dirt we break through into the tunnel, stumbling in.
“Go! Go! Go!” Milleron shouts five feet away from the tunnel opening, willing the remaining group to enter safely.
Tanz makes it then stoops over, out of breath. Bill makes it, placing Hancock down.
Hancock, who must be sixty, leans against the wall, wincing. “I’ll be all right. Just my leg.”
Belinda the nurse tends to him, injecting and patching him up.
Milleron crouches, patting him on the shoulder. “It’s not your time yet, old man.”
TUNNELS
A few feet in I trip over something as toxic bombs scorch the field like napalm. There’s a corpse lying on each side of the entrance. Tanz walks over and crouches.
“Starved to death yet perfectly preserved. No wind in here and protected from the elements.”
“Except for the ice age and hunger part,” I say.
Milleron orders to, “Keep shovels at the ready.”
We attach them to packs.
“Collapse the opening,” he says, and Bill wedges a small stick of dynamite into the top.
We turn our backs, cover our ears, hear the pop and falling soil. Headlamps are turned on as we venture inward.
“Fifty thousand years, what an incredible find!” Milleron says, hitting the hard-packed wall. The slap echoes down the tunnel. A faint buzzing stirs as we move through the earth like worms through soil.
After a few hundred yards we turn into a wider space with tunnels connected on both ends.
“This must’ve been the main living area, where they slept,” Hancock says. His eyes light up seeing depictions on the wall. He hobbles over to study them shining his lamp. I learn from Bill that Hancock is an ex-high school history teacher.
We follow along with him from earlier depictions of hunting with spears, bears, fire, then dancing celebrating a hunt. We follow his light to the last segment. An entity stares out with four eyes: two side to side, two up and down with an elongated forehead and scar that runs its length.
Hancock says, “He must’ve been their god and sits atop what appears to be a tornado.” He shines his light at the ceiling and other walls. “My goodness, this is an archeological dream.”
Tanz says nothing, looking away.
We keep walking and the buzzing sound grows. Down another tunnel we come upon cliffs and a stream flowing over into a dark, endless hole. Wanting to try the fresh water, I touch the stream and it burns me. Recoiling in pain, the skin on my finger sizzles.
Tanz squats and analyses it. “It is the toxin,” he says, loudly, his words echoing down the chamber.
Milleron looks on. “We aren’t far from the water plant. So, it may just be leaking.”
The hole is twenty feet wide and the waterfall is eating a hole into Earth’s core as water drops into never-ending blackness. We all look down.
“Hee hee hee… Hee hee hee.” Startled, we hear this high-pitched call and increased buzzing. “Hee hee hee… Hee hee hee.”
“What is that awful sound?” I say, covering my ears. Then hundreds of creatures fly into the open from another tunnel.
“What are those, things?” Bill asks.
We start running back to the main room.
“They look like… fanged… flying… ferrets! Yuck!” Belinda shouts covering her head.
One swoops over my head and chomps down. I duck. The fangs are twice the size of their heads. A few in the rear are chomped on and knocked into the black, toxic hole. We never hear them hit bottom. “Ahhhhhhhh…” We only hear their voices grow distant.
Milleron commands, “Shoot to kill! Shoot to kill!”
The gunners duck and take position.
“Hee hee hee … Hee hee hee.” They swoop again, chomping with eight-inch incisors. Then, as the bullets fly, the ferrets drop.
Tanz tests one that falls near his feet. “It’s as if they live off the toxin as one would food. Clearly they have survived perfectly in here, evolving and mutating without predators.”
I ask, staring over the falls again, “Wouldn’t this toxin eventually carve its way into Earth’s core?”
Tanz nods. I shift to speak telepathically, covering my forehead with my hand as if scratching it. He does the same, but only after I clear my throat he catches on.
“Didn’t you say the spirit of Narican’s world was cloaked? Couldn’t something similar happen here?”
“Indeed, it could,” he says, rubbing his head, looking over the edge.
Deep in thought we make it to the last tunnel, which dead-ends.
“This is it, folks!” Milleron shouts. “Shovel Unit. Dig.”
I unclip my shovel and start digging.
“Sir! Sir!” we hear from the rear and stop shoveling. There’s a door that looks like mud yet opens into a low-lit room. The room is cold and filled with sealed metal crates.
“Those crates are filled with the toxin,” Tanz says.
Flies buzz and shoot green goo that burns a hole in the guy who found the room. He gets angry then enraged, swinging at the air, then he pushes Hancock into the wall next to him. The kid’s eyes turn red.
Milleron strolls over, punching the angry man hard in the face, knocking him out. Jumping on top of him, Milleron grabs serum from his jacket and injects the guy’s arm. After a minute the kid comes to, rubbing his face.
“Whoa, what happened?” the kid asks.
Belinda helps him to his feet. “It’s okay sweetie, you were injured,” is all she says.
We back out and spray small canisters of serum into the room. The flies fall to the floor and die. Smoke rises from their quickly decomposing bodies.
We step back in looking closer at the crates.
“Tanz!” I shout. “There’s strange writing on this one.”
He hurries over and studies it. He leans in, rubbing dust from the crate surface, then his face goes pale.
“Tanz… Tanz… are you all right?” I shake him.
“This language,” h
e says, staggering to his feet, “has not been used in a thousand years.” His words slow. He switches to telepathy, no longer hiding the flashes. “It was used only by a small group of tribesmen in a remote region of Rybag, Narican’s third moon, just outside the universal expansion.”
“That’s where Jintara’s from.”
A silence fills the room and the cold of it grips me tighter. The men and women stare at us.
Milleron walks up to us and says, “Come, gentlemen, we have a job to do.”
Tanz says to me, “We don’t have enough serum to destroy the toxin and stop the process. We must leave it.” He opens the equation and drops in a few more ingredients that sparkle blue, float, and fade. “90% complete.”
He checks the records again. “Nothing,” he says.
Back to telepathy and covering our heads. “What we know is whoever did this knew how to elude the universe’s memory.”
“Where the universe expands, does it remember?”
“Fine question.”
In the tunnel we walk to the dirt exit and hear the toxic waterfall echoing.
Milleron shouts, “Once we dig through, know your partner, form regimen lines, then double time it to the water plant. It will be two blocks from here, but two blocks above ground. Knowing Kimbel, he’ll have the entire city waiting for us.”
We prepare at the tunnel exit and hold off finishing the dig until we’re all ready to go.
“One last thing,” Milleron says. “Don’t forget, we are the enemy…”
“Only the enemy of bullshit, sir.” Bill says.
We dig for a short while then break through the hard-packed soil ending up in the crawl space of an abandoned building. Pushing up rotted wood planks that snap with ease. Piling through, we help each other out into a dusty room. There’s an art easel and wood table pushed against the wall. We walk out through the white front door as if we’d just been to an art show and stopped by for a visit.
Exposed on the street we quickly form lines.
“One block straight. One block left,” Milleron commands.
BATTLE FOR THE CAPITAL
Jogging past televisions with war and reality shows, the monitors switch to us and the camera zooms in on Tanz and me.
The newscaster shouts, “The murderers have escaped. There!” He points into the camera. “They’re approaching the intersection of Main and South and with these cretins!” The camera zooms back out.
Milleron, up front, says to Bill next to him, “Well, that didn’t last long…”
People begin filing out of buildings. They come out of stores with anger in their eyes.
“They think we killed him,” I say to Tanz, disturbed by how many are filing into the street. These people look the same as the folks that came into the grocery store. Just regular folks.
We pass a cheese shop that sits across the street. The proprietor, a middle-aged man with brown hair and a short brown beard, turns his window sign to CLOSED. He walks out, wiping his hands on his white apron while carrying a large cheese knife.
The mob forms on the road slowly. Milleron mutters in disbelief, “There are so many.”
“You estimated the entire city, sir. You were not wrong,” Tanz states, jogging alongside me just behind Milleron and Bill. Hancock and Belinda are behind us then Revo fighters and sharpshooters carrying all sorts of weaponry.
“I’d prefer to be wrong, Mr. Tanz.”
Dark forces pop out of sewer grates and swoop down from windows hovering above the growing mob. They encircle them with a dark cloud further twisting their thoughts and emotions: hatred swells in their eyes.
We make it to the intersection. “Turn here!” Milleron says.
Eight guys from Green Team meet up with us. The noise and clamor from the mob grow. Police sirens blare from a few blocks over. Sulfur is in the air.
Milleron shouts, “Nice to see you safe, gentlemen!”
Bull, the dark skinned, thick Green Team leader, agrees, “Good to be seen, Commander. First friendly faces we’ve seen all morning.”
“And most likely your last,” Tanz says. Everyone stares at him.
Bull nods in our direction. “Fun guy.”
“I intended no humor. Simply stating a calculated fact.”
“And an obvious one, Tanz. Thanks,” I say as we continue hoofing it.
Coming around the bend there’s another mob forming. It merges with the one behind us. There are hundreds on the street now and they all want our blood. No due process. No innocent before proven guilty. In front of a shop window the women in fur coats see us and glare, pulling sharp keys out of their pockets.
Monitors flash the newscaster. “They killed our leader!” he shouts into the camera. The volume increases as his words echo off buildings.
Half a block down we see the white, unmarked building that stores the pumps. The exterior has one bolted metal door on the side. There is no lobby entrance. We arrive but there’s no access point.
The mob descends from up the block and fills out the street, half encircling us in a crescent shape. They’re armed with sticks, rakes, tire irons: a single moving mass of vengeful seething hatred. White faces with a few scattered brown and black ones.
Standing in front of the white stucco building Revo fighters spread out to take positions shooting serum and rubber bullets into the crowd. Sharpshooters also take up positions on stoops and on top of cars.
“Take position men.” Bull’s team also spreads out to hold the perimeter.
The four of us stand in front trying to figure a way in. No windows. Tanz grabs a dark haze ball near his head and holds it on the lock. The gunners and trained fighters battle, struggling to keep the crowd back. The haze ball squirms, attempting to escape. Tanz squeezes harder and uses his eyes, commanding it to melt the lock as a rocket hits above us from a hoverplane exploding the door and wall leaving us standing in a cloud of white dust and rubble. A gaping entrance stands in front, exposing the massive pump station and pipes.
“Unconventional,” Tanz says, flinging the dazed haze to bounce off what’s left of the building. Tanz shakes his hands and arms.
Just inside sits the spray station that pumps into the water main.
“Hurry, Bill, set explosives!” Milleron shouts, pointing to the location where a section of piping comes together from the direction of the toxin.
“Yes, sir!” he says as we all duck inside. He unpacks explosives but too many bullets scream past as we take cover behind the rubble.
The military hoverplanes unleash their payload, wrecking the building but not affecting the pipes.
Bill shouts over, “They can’t unload missiles, only bullets, or we’d all be dead!”
“Why?” I ask.
He nods up to the pipes and I understand.
Rocks fly from the mob and ding the metal pipes like an orchestra. Bill cannot set explosives. Too many bullets and rocks flying in. We look to Milleron for answers.
The crowd presses our fighters closer as it grows thicker with faces hostile as one’s worst enemy, when within we must all want the same things.
“They won’t let us!” Bill shouts to Milleron a few feet away, who’s assessing the situation.
Deep in thought, he responds clearly, “We did not anticipate such hostile resistance.”
On the left perimeter Hancock goes down in a barrage of military bullets. Bill shouts over, “Hancock, no!”
The fighters try to get to Hancock, but the mob swallows him whole. He’s not seen again. Bill lunges forward.
Milleron stops him. “No, he’s gone.”
A haze cluster encircles two of our fighters. One goes insane, holding his head and running into the street then hit by a fast-moving military vehicle. Another one climbs a building and jumps off. I lose sight of him as he’s swallowed by the mob on the far side. Bull fights hand to hand.
Belinda tries inoculating who she can, but she can’t inoculate from bullets or a rock to the head. She gets hit with a rock herself and
our guys back her out. The mob gets hold of another two and beats them with sticks and rocks. Bull pries them out. The fighting continues while our line is breaking.
“Kimbel stripped the public of guns a few years back. Hence the rocks and sticks. Secure masks!” Milleron commands.
The cheese shop owner shouts, “They’re trying to kill us by poisoning our water supply!”
Bill stands next to me scanning the growing surge. Buildings are on fire in all directions. Time is running out.
“Why won’t they let us shut it off?” I say.
“Their minds are frozen in fear, distrust,” Tanz says in his low measured voice.
“They’ve been taught the spray protects them from outsiders, man,” Bill says with his rolling Midwest accent. “Don’t you get it? We’re the outsiders!”
I shout to them, “There’s a drug in there. We’re trying to help you!” But they can’t hear above the raucous din. They wouldn’t believe me anyway after the lies Kimbel has spread.
More rocks and bullets whiz at us. “They won’t believe us…” I say.
Milleron turns to me with his rugged face. “Would you?”
Crouching beneath the massive structure, Tanz looks at the chaos and crumbling buildings. He speaks again with a low measured voice. “We are losing. The city is on fire. We must abandon the pump station while we can and get to the statehouse.”
Once more we look at the massive pumps with twelve-inch reinforced steel and spray canister with rivets the size of my hand. We start to run. Milleron signals the group to pull out. Our gunners blaze the last rubber bullets into the crowd, slowing them. Bull and Belinda are running, too. Milleron slows down to take her hand.
Half sprinting again, Milleron speaks into his watch. “Purple and Black Teams continue with your perimeter speed assault. Dismay and confuse. Disrupt. Spread them out, and for God’s sake stay safe.” He looks around the city, his city, and stops running.
We all stop to gather around him. We have a few seconds’ lead. He broadcasts over his watch to the field teams, “Men and women, we do this for country, for family, for our children, the future. Justice matters that much. There are hard decisions to make. Right and wrong should not be one of them. I know this is scary. But we must win.”