by James Hunt
The barrel of the pistol was aimed just outside of Alex’s left ear now. Only centimeters stood between life and death. The ghost-white tips of Alex’s fingers pressed into the sentry’s arm were the only things that stood between Alex and finality. His strength was almost gone. Just a few more seconds. That was all he had left.
Finally, he felt the slip of his fingertips and watched the barrel swing right above his left eye. Time seemed to freeze in that moment, staring into the black hole that was the 9mm pistol aimed to kill him. A white flash followed by darkness, that’s all that waited for him now.
Just before the white flash of the barrel that ejected the bullet from the chamber, an earth-shattering blast rocked the very ground where Alex waited for his eternity. Both the bullet and the sentry were knocked off kilter, and Alex used the moment to knock the sentry off him. Both the gunshot and the explosion that had just saved his life left a high-pitched whine in his ears that froze him in pain.
Alex could feel the rawness in his throat as the soundless screams vibrated his neck but failed to penetrate the piercing whine still lingering in his ears as another blast, more powerful than the one before, caused the sentry housing building to transform into a pile of splinters. He instinctively reached for the rifle, and while the sentry behind was still bumbling from the blasts, Alex shoved the rifle’s barrel into the sentry’s eye and blasted a hole that soaked the two of them in blood.
Alex turned in half circles, his feet twisting underneath him as he looked for any of his people, anyone that might still be alive. The yellow smoke had been replaced by the white smoke of fires breaking out at the front gate and the sentry housing. Suddenly, he remembered the radio piece in his right ear, and he could hear the delicate cries of someone over the radio.
“Alex, it’s Iris!”
“Iris?” Alex coughed. “Where are you?”
“Still in the factory, in the back room. There’s a—”
But before Iris had time to explain, Alex watched the tracks of a tank crawl over the wreckage of what was left of the front gate. It crushed the two armored trucks, turning both of them into metal pancakes. Accompanied to the left and right of the tank were soldiers, dressed not in the black uniforms of the Coalition, but of the United States military.
Two of them ran over to Alex, their rifles pointed at him. “Drop the weapon! Put your hands in the air!”
Alex uncurled his fingers from the rifle, and it fell to the ground. The soldiers patted him down, confiscating the magazines, knives, and grenades on Alex’s person. Once the pat down was complete, they cuffed Alex’s hand.
“What are you doing?” Alex asked, starting to resist and straining against the two soldiers. Alex looked down at his chest, and the black sentry uniform stared back at him. “Wait! No! I’m not a sentry! Check the database! My name is Alex! Alex Grives!”
“Stop!”
The booming voice of authority caused both soldiers to come to an immediate halt and sent a chill up Alex’s spine. It was a voice accompanied by a stout figure with a few days’ stubble along his square jaw.
“You’re Alex Grives?” the man asked, with no additional inflection in his voice to tell Alex what type of news his name would bring.
“Yes,” Alex said.
The affirmation was a quick right hook to Alex’s cheek that knocked him out of the grips of the two soldiers restraining him. The residual pain left Alex rolling on his side, unable to push himself off the ground due to the handcuffs. The imprint of the man’s fist was firmly in place on Alex’s cheek.
“Uncuff him,” the man said.
“Sir?”
“Do it!”
The release of Alex’s hands brought little relief to the pain still reeling in his head. Alex pushed himself off the ground, wobbling on two legs.
“Do you know who I am?” the man asked.
Alex shook his head.
The air in Alex’s lungs left him as the quick blur of a fist landed in his stomach, knocking him backward. Alex gripped his stomach, his insides feeling like they had just been compressed into the same pancake-like flatness of the two sentry trucks.
The man fisted a cluster of Alex’s hair and lifted him off the ground. “Well, I know who you are.” A nasty left cross connected to the other side of Alex’s face, balancing out the marks, and the pain, imprinted on his cheeks. Through the firing spasms of pain, the man’s words jingled around Alex’s head. Alex padded his hands and knees in the dirt, trying to get his bearings.
“Emma Claire was my sister,” the man said.
A powerful right hook across Alex’s chin cracked his teeth together in a pop that sounded like shattered glass. He couldn’t focus. Everything was a blur. The earth underneath him seemed to move and shift like waves in the ocean. The only connection he was able to make wasn’t where he was, or the fact that he still had community members inside the factory and in the forest, but the smile of a woman he’d met not long ago.
But in the same confusion in which the woman’s smile had appeared, it morphed into distortion. It no longer held the natural beauty of purpose and strength, but the brutal finality of deceit and disgust, until it faded into the shadow of another figure. A faceless man walked toward him. An imminent feeling of calamity struck into the very soul of Alex’s being. Alex could hear the man’s voice proclaiming acts of treachery, tongue lashing Alex virulently. With every syllable uttered, the faceless man morphed into Todd. The past had caught up with Alex, and the archangel in front of him had arrived to ensure that Alex received what was coming to him.
“Wait!”
The voice came from the clearing smoke at the factory’s entrance, and the soldiers diverted their attention away from Alex’s painful skirmish.
“Please! He’s not a sentry.”
“Like hell he isn’t,” Emma’s brother replied.
The blurred savior that rescued Alex from another vicious beating came into focus, and Alex felt the calm waves of relief as Harper came into view.
“I don’t know what happened in Wyoming. But I know that whatever he did, he must have had good reason to do it,” Harper said.
“No,” Alex answered.
Both Harper and Emma’s brother looked at Alex, who had managed to push himself off the ground. He spat a dribble of blood and saliva and could already feel the sides of his face swelling up.
“I remember your sister’s face,” Alex said. “The hate. The anger. She wanted to kill me.”
Emma’s brother’s hand twitched over the pistol at his waist, a glimmer of Alex’s blood shining on his thick knuckles of granite. That pair of eyes looking over every different way that he could make Alex hurt.
“And that’s what you’re here to do now, isn’t it?” Alex asked.
“Wait! Stop!” Harper yelled, rushing to Alex’s side, before the soldiers blocked him. Instead of looking at Emma’s brother, Harper looked at Alex when he spoke, trying to let his words revive whatever life Alex had left. “Don’t let him kill you.”
For whatever reason, those words permeated through all the pain, the anguish, and guilt that had plagued Alex’s mind since he’d left for Wyoming. As much as he wanted it to end, Alex still had one mission left.
“I can help you get them back,” Alex said.
“And why should I trust anything that comes out of your mouth?” Emma’s brother asked.
“You don’t have to,” Alex answered, thinking back to the bag on his bed. “I have one of the Coalition’s computers.”
Chapter 4
The fishing villages along the Louisiana coast were locked down. Every fisherman with a boat was landlocked, and all of their vessels commandeered by the Coalition. The salt-crusted faces trudged sullenly around their shacks, glaring at the self-appointed sentries who held them captive.
An elderly man, far beyond the age of usefulness, wobbled in the muddy dirt as a unit of sentries led by Dean Grout almost trampled him on their way to the control station where the gates to the community
were still being assembled.
“How many?” Dean asked.
“The report said it was the Atlantic fleet, Chief. It didn’t provide any other details besides that,” the Class 2 sentry answered.
The fact that there wasn’t a Naval presence in the Gulf was what made the coast so appealing in the first place, but now that they had caught the attention of the Navy’s entire Atlantic fleet, their strategic situation was about to change.
“They won’t be able to flank us from the north, so I want every available sentry stationed along the coastal perimeter. And make sure you radio every other community on the coast to disperse their sentries within the community’s population. The Navy won’t risk using their bombs if they know we’re right next to civilians. Make them come to us.”
“Yes, sir!”
A rare ocean breeze cooled the sweat collecting on Dean’s face as he tried to adjust his uniform to allow some of the sweltering heat to escape. He didn’t like the swamps and bayous. He wanted to get back to Topeka as quickly as possible, but until the Navy left or pushed them out, he was stuck here.
Dean found himself glancing out into the water’s horizon, waiting to see the iron ships make landfall, but each time there was nothing but the bayou’s calm waters. Still, beyond what he couldn’t see was a threat that could kill him. His way of life would grow extinct, and he would be either forced into the ground or into a cell. At that moment, he wasn’t sure which he’d prefer.
Strength had always come easily for Dean. Ever since grade school, he’d been the biggest kid in his class. And whenever he wanted something, all he had to do was take it. The only repercussions back then were a trip to the principal’s office or a stay in time-out.
But as he grew older, the consequences for his behavior morphed from time-out to juvy bars, and it was then he realized that even with all of his strength, he couldn’t bend steel. No matter how hard he punched, he couldn’t escape the concrete walls that enclosed him. His strength was a tool that, when wielded, only landed him in confinement.
All those years skipping class, homework, and tests had left him with no high school diploma, no job, and no life. Before the Coalition and before Gordon, he did nothing but enforcer jobs that paid next to shit. But when the soil crisis hit, it was like the second coming of the Dark Age. A time where brute force was the only authority recognized, and whoever could hit the hardest won. And there wasn’t anyone who hit harder than Dean Grout.
If the Soil Coalition lost this fight to the United States, then all of that would be over. The level of involvement he’d had with the Coalition over the past three years would have him tried, and convicted, of whatever crimes-against-humanity bullshit the courts could throw at him.
“Chief!”
Dean turned around from the coast and was met with a panicked look from his Class 2. “What is it?”
“One of the scouts on patrol radioed a confirmation of a unit of soldiers making landfall a mile west of here.”
“How many?”
“The transmission cut out before we could get an answer.”
“I want every gun, missile, bomb, and truck stationed to the west. Anyone else still out on patrol, tell them to get their asses back here before I run out and kill them myself!”
“Yes, sir.”
One hundred sentries had gathered at their makeshift wall to the west, shielded behind armor-plated trucks. Eyes searched the dense bayou in organized patterns of fear and adrenaline. Dean marched along the back row, watching his men, watching beyond the wall, and feeling the waves of the ocean to his left bringing a sense of overwhelming finality. The slow moving of thick muscle and steel, wielded by equally dense minds, only added to the calamity held in their incompetent hands.
After an hour of squatting, waiting for the soldiers to show up, the minds of Dean and his men had finally matched the inactivity of their own bodies. Dean leaned to the left, triggering a wave of cracks along his back.
“Sir, they could have moved farther west. We did occupy more villages in that direction.”
“Have the communities there sent us any word?” Dean asked.
“No, sir.”
It could have just been a simple recon mission, setting the Navy’s men up for a bigger play, but the fact that his men were killed before they had a chance to report how many soldiers they’d come across caused the smallest of wheels to turn in Dean’s mind.
“Do a final check with the communities to the west. If they’re still clear within the next hour, then go ahead and––”
The explosion sent both molten pieces of metal and human limbs into the air around them, cutting a hole in the flesh-infused steel wall.
Dean wobbled on all fours, his palms sinking into the thick mud squishing between his fingers. The gunshots echoing at the front line only added to Dean’s concussed state of mind as he managed to get his feet under him.
“Chief!” the Class 2 said. “What do we do?”
“Fire back!”
Dean charged to the front line and positioned himself in the thick of the fight. Sentries fired blindly into the swamp, propelled by fear and their own sheer will to stay alive no matter what the cost. While the others wasted bullets, Dean took his time, looking for any sign of where the blast may have come from, but saw nothing.
“Hold your fire!” Dean said.
Dean’s orders were echoed down the line, and the sporadic thumping of gunshots slowly petered out. Smoke from the lingering fires drifted in and out of Dean’s view as the gunshots were replaced by the moaning cries of the injured sentries from the previous blast. Their pained voices pleading for a divinity to come and save them, which Dean knew would never come.
Then, between two puffs of smoke, Dean could make out the whites of eyes, buried deep under the thick cover of swamp.
“To the right!” Dean shouted.
Thousands of rounds of ammunition were exchanged as Dean and his sentries entrenched themselves, and the United States soldiers continued their push forward. The smell of lead and copper blended with the humid stench of the swamp.
While the majority of Dean’s focus was on the advancing soldiers in front of him, he couldn’t help but let his eyes wander to the peripheral, where his wounded sentries were being carried away. Streaks of blood smeared into the mud, only adding to the dark textures of the earth. Sentries clutched their wounds, trying to hold whatever organs and fluids escaped. One of the bodies he saw was blown in half, completely lifeless, and he ceased his firing when he saw two other sentries picking up the pieces of their fallen comrade.
“Hey!” Dean said. “He’s already dead, so unless you want to join him, I suggest you drop the body, grab your gun, and fight, goddammit!”
The sentries complied, and Dean aimed the crosshairs of his scope over as many enemy limbs as he could find, squeezing the trigger with a negligent purpose until one of the shells that ejected burnt the exposed flesh on his forearm.
Each violent pull propelled a two-inch piece of hot lead at 1700 miles per hour. Dean could feel every ounce of force in those shots, and a fulfilling pleasure when the deadly projectile disabled and maimed its victim. The successive click of the firing pin signaled for a replacement magazine, but before Dean could reload, he heard the strained, throaty scream, “RPG!”
Dean flattened himself on the ground as the explosion disfigured the resolve of what was left of the sentry’s line in the sand. A blast of flesh-melting heat washed over Dean’s back as he buried himself deeper into the mud to avoid the scorching. Once the ground had ceased its quaking, he wiped the muck from his eyes. The mangled flesh and twisted metal had doubled. Whoever wasn’t already dead in the mud was retreating back to the villages behind them.
Clumps of mud fell from the front of Dean’s uniform and splashed back into the earth as he joined the unauthorized retreat. The roaring stampede of boots against the Louisiana mud was only matched by the sporadic gunfire growing louder behind them. Dean bulldozed his way past anyone s
lower than him until his fingers reached the door handle for one of the vehicles parked by one of the small huts of tin and twigs. Dean cranked the engine to life and locked the truck’s doors just as another one of his men came rushing toward him. The sentry pounded on the window, streaking the glass with mud and blood.
“Hey! Let me in! Let me in!”
The shouts were muffled through the truck’s thick glass, and Dean could see the first wave of United States soldiers entering the village’s muddy streets.
“You hold this village, sentry!” Dean yelled.
But the sentry’s only response was another flurry of smacks against the windshield and a stream of insubordinate curses that fell on deaf ears. Dean shifted the truck into reverse then sharply turned a one-eighty, which sent up a fishtail of mud behind him.
The sentries Dean passed were caught up in an animalistic panic that had reduced their minds to savagery. Sentries threw bodies of women and children in front of them as human shields, each piece of fleshy Kevlar screaming and crying to be let go, and anyone who tried to save them was met with a 5.56-caliber bullet to the head. But even with the atrocities occurring around him, all Dean could concentrate on was the story he was going to tell Gordon when he made it back to Topeka.
***
Three-dimensional DNA models rotated on computer screens as Sydney continued his reconstruction of Todd’s work. He’d completely submerged himself in the research, losing himself in the intricate data that Todd’s mind created with nothing more than a few pieces of equipment in a hole in the ground. But instead of a scientist, working on the latest research from one of the brightest minds of the century, he felt more akin to a burglar, rummaging through the drawers of a home he had no business being in.