Blood Zero Sky

by Gates, J.

  We start shooting.

  Maybe six guys in the hallway die before anyone can even return fire. Those who do resist look for us desperately, their flashlight beams raking the dark, their guns firing blindly, but the shots ricochet uselessly off the door frame behind which we hide, and in a few moments, most of our assailants are cut down.

  Some of the survivors drop to the ground and try crawling away. Others dash for cover, diving into one of the many doorways off the main hall.

  “Watch our back,” Ethan says. “I think there’s another entrance to this room.”

  Sure enough, just as I turn I see a door behind us opening up. Tracer rounds rake the wall off to my left, and I take cover behind a desk, firing as I go. I must’ve hit somebody, because the machine-gun fire ceases for a minute and I hear soft, guttural muttering from across the room. Peeking over the desk, I see one squad member stooping, attending to his companion. Still, he’s too well concealed behind the doorway for me to have a clear shot. I look around the room for the advantage, and spy an alcove inset in the wall to my left. Concealed by several filing cabinets, I crawl over and stop, leaning against the wall. I poke my head over the cabinets, half expecting to have it blown off. From my new position, I see my enemy clearly. He fires a few useless shots at the desk I was crouched behind a moment ago, then turns back to his friend.

  I smile cruelly and level my ceramic, feeling the tension of the trigger against my finger. But I hesitate. I drop to my knees again. Don’t know how many shots are left. Better change the clip. I rise again, looking over the filing cabinets at my unsuspecting adversary and open fire. Of the five shots I unleash, at least one finds him, for he falls back, dead.

  My heartbeat pounds in my ears.

  “May,” hisses Ethan from across the room.

  “Here,” I say.

  “You alright?”

  “Fine.”

  “Then come here.”

  Ethan is leaning just slightly out of the doorway, angling for a better view of the main hall. “Look,” he says, trading places with me. I lean out into the wide passage, and stop breathing. Something’s coming. My first thoughts are absurd: that it’s a huge, many-legged monster stalking us, or that the entire hallway has come to life and is boiling with movement, folding in on itself, collapsing toward us. Of course these ideas are foolish. It’s just difficult to differentiate shapes with the night-vision glasses on. What looks like one massive form approaching must be a mass of men—easily a hundred—and from what I can see, they seem to be concealed behind giant shields.

  “Riot gear,” says Ethan into my ear.

  As the men draw rapidly closer, small groups of them break off, firing into side corridors and storming the rooms adjoining the main passage. I suddenly feel ill. There are too many of them. No way we can hold them off.

  “What do you think?” Ethan whispers. “Can we take them, or should we call for help?”

  I’m so incredulous at the question, I almost yell my response. “Call for help!”

  Ethan laughs, and for a moment I’m gripped with the fear that he’s actually gone mad. He checks his clip, fills it, replaces it, and surprises me by leveling it not at the mass of rapidly approaching squadmen, but in the opposite direction, at the huge, steel door through which we entered the prison.

  One, two, three—he squeezes off the shots with an interval of perhaps one second between them, and with the strike of each bullet, the steel door belches forth a knell like a great church bell.

  Next, Ethan is pulling me back from the doorway. Seeing the muzzle flare from his shots, the squadmen direct fire at us, and in a moment’s time, the doorjamb we were leaning against is reduced to a jagged, crumbling ruin. The air hangs thick with cement dust. We pull back deeper into the room and Ethan yanks me behind the desk again for cover.

  “Watch that door,” he says to me, nodding toward the back entrance by the file cabinets where I had dispatched the two squadmen only a minute before. The fire outside intensifies, blended with the terrifying footfalls of countless heavy-booted feet. Still, no reinforcements seem to be coming.

  “Dammit,” Ethan says. “Come on, guys. . . . ”

  The footsteps grow nearer. Suddenly, I’m falling back against the wall, my arm stinging. Shots blink like Christmas lights from the doorway I was supposed to be watching, and the top of desk we’re hiding behind splinters before my eyes. Ethan wheels toward our attackers, rattling off six shots in quick succession, and just like that, the doorway empties.

  “I said watch that door!” Ethan shouts. And his gun barks again, this time casting lead toward the main door leading to the passageway, which is now crowded with bodies and bristling with gun barrels.

  Bullets swarm around us like hornets. I shoot, reload; Ethan shoots, reloads. Below the din, I become aware of a low sound, like the beating of a great drum. It comes only every few moments, but when it does it seems to rattle the very foundation of the prison, the two-foot-thick block walls around us, and the desk against which we lean. My eyes squint at my doorway; now it’s a rectangle of black, but from behind the tangled limbs of fallen men lying across its threshold, I see furtive movements and tremble with anticipation, knowing that any instant now more men will appear there, gunning for my life.

  “You okay?” hisses Ethan. “You get hit?”

  “I think it was just a splinter of the desk. I’m okay.”

  “Keep it that way.”

  At that moment, another deep crash rattles the structure around us, and I allow my eyes to dart over to Ethan’s doorway, behind which the passageway has suddenly been flooded with the light of day. I see a few black-uniformed squadmen dashing away, and the sparks of tracer bullets following them, stinging them with death. A moment later, one of the black squad vehicles rolls past, moving fast with guns blazing from each open window and I understand: the rebels have used the vehicle to batter down the steel door and breach the perimeter of the prison. Reinforcements have arrived. Another vehicle rumbles past, close behind the first.

  “Come on,” says Ethan, leading me toward the wide passage, “but keep watching that door; cover our backs.”

  “KAPPA!” he says when we reach the ruined, crumbling doorway, and the lights above blaze to life again. Ethan removes his glasses and so do I, blinking in the newly rekindled light. He pulls what looks like a scarf, striped with red and white, from some unseen pocket and waves it over his head as he runs down the passage with me in tow. “It’s us!” he yells.

  As we run, I keep one eye trained over my shoulder, watching our backs just as Ethan ordered, and I see another of our vehicles stopped at the entrance to the prison, just past the twisted, fallen hulk of the steel door. It’s positioned across the entrance like a blockade, and I see several rebels standing close to it, using it for cover as they fire with massive, roaring machine guns over its hood and out across the grassy courtyard we traversed on our way in.

  I glance ahead again just in time to avoid running into Ethan, who’s already stopped next to one of the vehicles.

  “Christ, you took long enough to signal us,” says Grace, sliding out of the driver’s seat with a big, smoking assault rifle hanging from her fist. Behind her, more rebels pile out of the personnel carrier. “We thought for sure you were dead.”

  “Not yet,” says Ethan. Leaning into the backseat, he pulls out two white machine guns, slings one over his shoulder by its strap and hands the other to me. I’m shocked at how light it is. “Here,” Ethan says as he passes me a bag, which I hang over my shoulder. “Extra clips. This is how you drop a clip out to reload; this is how you clear the chamber if it jams. Got it?”

  “We gotta go,” says Grace, out of breath and frowning. “It’s pretty hot outside. We could only take out one of the guard towers, so they’re taking a lot of fire from the other one. We don’t have much time.”

&nb
sp; “Put this on first,” Ethan says, handing me a garment rather like the jerseys I remember wearing in school gym class. It has no armholes, only a neck hole and a bib-like swatch of cloth hanging down over the chest and the back. It’s covered with stars and stripes, the old American flag. Ethan puts one on, too; I realize it’s the object he had waved over his head a moment before, the one I had taken for a scarf. Grace, glaring at us impatiently, already wears one, too.

  This, I realize, will allow us to tell our comrades from our enemies.

  “Come on,” says Ethan.

  We step over many bodies; dozens of squadmen were mowed down by gunfire when the vehicles came in, and scores of others died under the crushing wheels. The other guards have scattered, fallen back into the hallways and side rooms. These hiding, sneaking, probably terrified squadmen, I realize, could be very dangerous. At any moment, from any conceivable hiding place, we could face enemy fire. And we do.

  There are maybe fifteen of us, running at a shuffling jog down the dim hallways, firing at anything that moves. The rest, I imagine, are still fighting at the entrance or going door-to-door in the main passage, just as the squadmen had been doing a few moments before, killing any lingering enemies so they can’t strike us from behind.

  Soon, the narrow hall widens and the ceiling soars; we’ve reached the cellblock. All around us, the yells and curses of the prisoners rise in a strident cacophony. Though I had expected we would find the greatest resistance here, I am relieved to see there are no squadmen at all. Evidently, they had all been ordered to defend the main entrance. A few yards away, I notice Ethan standing very still in front of one of the cells. In his hand, he holds a red paper tag.

  Looking out across the cellblock, I can see that perhaps half of the cells here bear the same mark. I approach one of them and pull it down from the bars.

  Notice of Termination, it says.

  Ethan’s voice cuts the through the prisoners’ shouting.

  “May, Grace—to me.”

  We rush to him.

  “Clair is being held in a lower level. You two will come with me. Blake?”

  A young driver with an acne-scarred face, one of Grace’s soldiers, steps up to Ethan and salutes.

  “You know which prisoners to rescue. Get them loaded onto the trucks. We’ll meet back at the entrance. If we’re not there in ten minutes, leave us. ”

  Ethan nods to Grace and me, and we fall in behind him. I ignore the suspicious glances Grace gives me as we cross the cellblock and descend down a stairwell on the far side. The further down we go, the hotter it gets, as if the staircase might deposit us in the middle of hell’s foyer. In fact, we reach the bottom of the stairs, pass down a long hallway, and then arrive in a long, low-ceilinged room at the far end of which a gaping furnace burns.

  There is one door on our left and another on our right.

  Here, Ethan pauses and speaks into an IC. “Come in, R. Which way to Clair from here?. . . . got it.”

  I tug on Ethan’s sleeve. “Who’s ‘R’?” I whisper, but he ignores the question.

  “Clair is behind this door,” he says. “I want the two of you to wait here and secure our escape.”

  Grace starts to protest, but Ethan’s already disappearing through the doorway. Left alone with me, she glowers. The good thing about me is that I can take a hint. I wander away from her, toward the swirling flames of the furnace.

  “What is this place?” I wonder aloud.

  “How the hell should I know?” Grace grunts.

  I lean closer to the flames. This furnace is much deeper than a regular fireplace or kiln, and the enclosure seems to be made of some sort of special, heat-resistant ceramic. Stranger yet are the logs, or rather the log, that burns in the space. It’s very long, almost as large as a person. In fact—of course it’s my imagination—but it’s almost as if I can make out a human form hidden among the ravenous flames. There are the legs, the arms, the torso, the head.

  Suddenly, I’m sick. My head spins. Sweat drenches me. I dash for the door—not the one Ethan disappeared into, the other one—poke my head through and puke until there’s nothing left of my stomach but a single, throbbing cramp. Only then do I raise my eyes to take in the room I’ve discovered. What I see turns my stomach all over again.

  Bodies. Thousands of them, stacked against the wall like firewood. The room must be as large as a football field, and it is completely filled with tangled arms and gaping mouths, staring eyes and twisted legs. They all wear orange prisoner jump suits. They all bear red tags tied around their ankles. I can read the words on the tag closest to me: Notice of Termination.

  “Problem and solution,” I whisper, suddenly feeling utterly numb.

  Everything the Protectorate says about the Company is true.

  A second later, Grace appears in the doorway next to me. “My God,” she murmurs.

  Suddenly, Ethan appears. His hand is strong on my shoulder.

  Grace has tears in her eyes. Clair is there, too, leaning heavily against Ethan. Even in the shadows, I can see both her eyes are blackened. Her nose is broken. Blood is crusted at the corners of her mouth. Ethan stares past me, into the carnage of the room beyond, the thousands of dead, twisted bodies, the Company’s efficiency turned deadly.

  “This is it,” he says quietly. “It’s beginning.”

  —Chapter Ø16—

  Back at the camp, I wander among the blanketed, sleeping forms. The smell of so many bodies pressed in together no longer bothers me. The fear that my fellow unprofitables once elicited in me has vanished, replaced by camaraderie, even love. The camp is already beginning to feel more like home than any home I’ve ever had. Still, I am far from content.

  Images keep splashing through my mind of the squadmen we killed during the prison raid—and, worse, of the countless dead bodies stacked in that horrible underground room. But what I’m about to do now is more frightening than those memories could ever be: I’m going to go and talk to Clair.

  After taking three circuits around the massive room, at last I get up the courage to find Ada. She sits in a metal folding chair outside the makeshift hospital—in this camp, it’s an old ticket office. She hums a happy tune to herself, staring down at her hands as she busily knits an orange scarf. She must be the only person in camp who sleeps as little as I do.

  “Well, hello there, May,” she greets me with a friendly smile. “Here to visit one of our patients?”

  I nod. There were several people injured in the raid. At least four of us were killed. But the only one I’m here to see is Clair.

  “Go on in,” Ada says. “Just go quietly. Some of them are sleeping.” And she goes back to her knitting.

  The medical room is lit by candles. There are four shapes at the far end of the room, lying on several stacked sheets and covered by threadbare sheets. All of the sheets rise and fall in the easy rhythm of sleep except for one, whose owner seems to be panting because of pain or a nightmare, I can’t tell which.

  Clair, however, is awake. She sits cross-legged atop her blankets, playing solitaire with a deck of ragged playing cards. Her eyes flick up to me as I enter, then back to the game.

  “Hey,” I whisper. “How you feeling?”

  “How does it look like I’m feeling?” she asks, slapping a card down in front of her. It looks like she got hit by a transport truck, but that’s no reason for her to give me attitude. Not after I just risked my life to rescue her.

  “Why do you hate me so much?” I ask.

  She chuckles, still intent on her game. “Why do you think everything is about you, Blackie? I just spent two weeks in that God-awful Company dungeon, being tortured and choking on the smoke of burning human flesh night and day, and all you can think of is yourself?”

  The intensity of her attack confuses me, then makes me angry.

>   “All I’m saying is that I risked my life to try to help you, and obviously you still despise me. I’d like to know why.”

  “I don’t despise you, May,” she says, looking up at me at last. “I just don’t trust you.”

  The idea that she still thinks I might be a traitor after everything I’ve gone through makes me bristle.

  “I cut out my cross, Clair. I gave up my life. I fought and bled for you.” I gesture to my shoulder, freshly bandaged and still stinging from the shrapnel Ada dug out of it hours before. “So why can’t you trust me? Why?”

  She gazes up at me now, the hardness in her eyes replaced with something like wonder. “You really don’t know me, do you?” she asks, shaking her head in disgust.

  Of course I don’t know her, I want to shout. She hasn’t given me the chance; we hardly met before she decided that I was the enemy. But before I can answer, the door behind me swings open. The next thing I know, Ethan is at my side. Instantly, Clair’s countenance brightens.

  “Well, how are the two loveliest soldiers in the revolution doing tonight?”

  The compliment makes me wrinkle my nose in mock repulsion, but Clair smiles. And, as I watch, Ethan falls to his knees before her, and Clair presses her lips to his. Twin revelations wash over me in that moment, the second more nauseating than the first. One: I have feelings for Clair. And two: I’m already too late. She’s in love with Ethan.

  “I’m going to get some sleep,” I mutter, and turn on my heel.

  Their “goodnights” are lost in the clatter of my footfalls as I hurry out of the room, out the door, across the sleeping camp, angrily wiping tears from my cheeks as I go. It’s fine that Clair hates me, I think to myself. I hate her, too. And Ethan. And myself. And this whole pathetic, miserable revolution. I think back to my lonely apartment, my job, my life, my Company. But I hate those things even more. There is nowhere and nothing for me. My heart feels like a volcano, ready to explode.

  I had foolishly convinced myself that once I escaped from the Company’s repression, the love I’d been needing for so long would magically materialize. But no. There is no home for me. No love. There is only the fight.