by K.Z. Freeman
***
We didn’t have to wait long. Ty lead us to a crumbled, elongated building that he said had once been a school. It was getting dark when we came inside and I can tell all this poor excuse for architecture had not been one of the gems the Ancients left behind.
We find a few faint flames burning within the wide rooms as we ascend two flights of stairs and go to a vacant one. The floor is littered with pieces of wood. In the corner, someone had tried to place them together in a manner resembling a shack. A very poorly made and smelly shack.
Below the two-story window, a plane of about ten meters stretches out before going downhill. We stand up on the chaffed, marble edge of the window and a clear view of the bank below the hill opens to us, or at least the rubble surrounding it.
“When the nightshift starts,” Ty says, “a faint light will start to glow from the tunnel. There are only two guards outside at night. The other two, which usually patrol during the day, don’t do so during the night, so once I deal with the two outside, we’ll make a brake for the tunnel.”
“Sounds easy enough,” I nod.
“That’s because I haven’t told you the hard part yet,” he says. I can see him grin even in the dark. My trigger-finger itches.
“Figured as much.”
“There’s no way we can ambush them, somehow, somewhere, they’ve found night-vision visors, so sneaking up on them will be next to impossible. There’s also no way to get around them, they’ll hear us walking on the rubble before they even see us. The entrance to the tunnel has been cleared away so there’s rubble on all sides of it. It’s pilled around in a rift, you see, a corridor if you will, about ten meters wide to where the tunnel actually starts. They throw all the concrete they carry outside and onto these heaps so, like I said, they’ll hear us before they see us if we try to climb the things.”
“What makes you believe they’ve even reached the inner vault? I don’t want to do this to find they haven’t even found the entrance to it.”
“Oh they found the entrance all right,” says Ty. “They just haven’t got the means to open it because I stole it from them.”
He lifts the left side of his coat. Underneath are two large, thin and rectangular pieces of plastic with wires attached to the center.
“High-tech military explosive, pre-War stuff, this thing may not tear down a safe, but it will tear down any wall beside it. It directs the explosion, so if we place them on the wall, it’ll have a vertical spread. I have two of these, in case we have to tear down two walls to get inside the safe.”
I imagined things would lose their shape quite happily should the explosives be tied to flesh.
“Where’d you find these?” I ask, genuinely impressed.
“Stored in one of the warehouses,” Ty says. “All prepped for their breach when they should reach the vault. I bet they’re trying to dig through it now, it’s been taking them long enough for that to be the case.”
“So what’s the hard part?”
“We’re going to have to use their night-vision against them.”
“In what way?” I ask.
“Immediately after I saw you walk into that bar, I knew you’ll be perfect for what I was planning. I’m going use your frame to shield myself against them while you walk to where the guards are stationed.”
“A meat-shield? That’s what you need me for? What if they decide to fire on sight?”
“These men haven’t killed a person their entire lives. They rely on their guns to keep people away, not to kill them. Not a single one of them has ever fired a round.”
“And you’re basing this assumption on what, exactly?”
“It’s not an assumption. I’ve wasted more creditcards than I’d like to admit to get one of the guards drunk as hell. He told me this himself. It’s fact.”
“So how close do I need to be for you to take the shot?” I ask.
“Twenty paces should be ok, but ten would be perfect.”
“Not much of a marksman, are you?” I snort.
“We’ll see about that,” he laughs and I want to shoot him again.
***