A hand grabbed Rush by the arm. “Rush,” Avery said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” His head hurt less, and while his knuckles ached, he enjoyed the empowerment of success.
“Wow. Ten-years-younger Rush just slapped you on the ass for that one. Come on.”
Star handed him his visor, which he set on the crown of his head. The wall of darkness at the end of the tunnel swept away into bright sunlight.
“I’ve got your tank and respirator up there.” Avery paused as he cast his light over the still forms of six dead bodies surrounded by their also dead predator.
“Come on,” he said, pushing them into a quick run. “That was one of more, I’m sure. We need to get down there fast. Cliff dwellers must have found a way in. Dixon is going to stay up here and guard our group with the rifle.”
Rush was elated to be tagged back onto Avery’s dive team, in spite of the recent deaths.
Survivors filed out into the sun’s color. Dixon knelt at the exit and leveled the rifle square with Rush’s waist. Rush hitched his step, but Star and Avery grabbed him and pulled him on.
He’s aiming for another bobcat, Rush. Relax.
His nerves fired up and down. The suit didn’t help. Its mini-generator pumped veins of electricity across his chest and thumping heart.
Calm down. You’re acting like a first-year.
He leaned forward and ran, freeing himself from Star and Avery’s grip. The release of energy seemed to fuel more, and he broke out into the sunlight at a leap. A mound of sand gave under his landing, hot under his bare feet. Their exit was higher than the dunes to the northeast. Brigand country. Black sails bristling with wind circled and dove under far ledges. Searching for Danvar, but close enough for a well-aimed binocular glass to spot Rush and the survivors. To his left, the sand climbed a little higher up the mountain hills but ultimately gave way to its bare ground, scraggly trees, and distant rock peaks.
Avery picked up a thick role of the tarp Rush’d seen before. He fit his visor over his eyes and punched his dive button. “Someone holds this up here while we carry it down to the fort. I can charge it with my bolter and the surge will carry our direction all the way back up. I’ll picture stonesand above and down on my end, you’ll picture it on your side and the floor below.” He formed a square with his ringer, then stuffed the respirator in his mouth. “Instant tunnel,” he mumbled.
Star handed Rush his respirator and fit the dive tank into the harness on the back of his suit, tightening the straps as he flicked the air switch on the tank. Fresh air spurted into his mouth. Good. He flicked it back to manual to conserve the supply.
Viky held onto the bar in the center of the roll. Her arm muscles tensed as she snapped off some slack. Rush leaned down to take his corner. A ring large enough for his hand to fit through was secured on the edge. He fitted his visor and the bright world of tan sand bloomed into violet above and orange below.
Avery pointed out their splash zone, five feet ahead, and counted down from three. They dove and dipped into the sand together. The gentle embrace of smooth waves buffered their dolphin strokes. Three hundred fifty eight meters down, a rectangular block of red filled his vision. Blocks and quadrants of red into orange ran off on both sides of the main body, connected by angular tunnels and stairwells that descended three floors. As they approached the central door, Avery angled their ascent toward the roof.
“Take your hand out,” his voice vibrated into Rush’s ears. “And keep your—”
“I know. I know. I get how it works.”
“Okay. Let me know when you’re ready.” Avery took the bolter out of his pouch as they folded the end of the tarp to connect with the roof without their fingers getting pinched on the top side.
Rush imagined a square tunnel with stairs made of sand all the way up to Viky, focusing mainly on the right half from top to bottom. “Ready.”
The tarp jerked but didn’t zap his hand. His imagined body ran under the rapidly scaling ceiling, stone steps forming in time for each step. He pumped his arms up and down and huffed quick breaths. Sunlight eclipsed Viky’s form as she held the tarp over her head.
“Release,” Avery called.
Rush let go of the imagined body and blinked back into the sight from the bottom of the stairwell. Viky’s form appeared nearly black at the new distance, almost glowing on the edges from the sun’s rays. The stairwell held firm.
“Nice work, Poke.” Avery lifted his visor and spit out his regulator, letting the tube hang over his collar. He squatted in front of the door, brushing off an area under the handle. “There you are.”
Rush took his visor off and spit his regulator out. “What?”
Avery pushed the end of the bolter flush against the door. Click. Something inside the door unlatched. He rose to the keypad over the handle and entered a nine-digit combination. A small bar turned green and he pulled the thick door open.
Inside was a short hallway before a glass door, and a lobby with an adjacent desk set against the right wall. White planks of light spread out on the ceiling lit up the room. Avery took the handle and opened the interior door.
“Avery, Rush,” Dixon called over their radio. “They’re coming up the tunnel. Are you in yet?” A gunshot cracked above the stairwell.
“Yeah, send them down,” Avery said.
A polished black texture made up the walls and desk, which had a clear shield from counter to ceiling, save for a small horizontal-box opening in a direct path from the door. A hallway stretched left around a bend and disappeared. Another to their right went on at least a hundred meters, ending in closed double doors. They walked left around the desk.
There were two more entry points, one at a northwestern slant and the other between the rear of the desk and the right corner of the room. Both were closed double-door entries. An emblem on the wall between entries read AIR NATIONAL GUARD along a white scroll. Above it were three mountain peaks and a blue sky marked in darker blue by the paths of three fighter jets. At the top, COLORADO was written in red, with a five-pointed star inside the bold C. Beside it was a two-thirds size replica-shaped emblem. The body in shades of gray split in three from top left to bottom right. 140th WING was printed in the white scroll along the bottom.
Six flags stood on silver poles in front of the emblems, with the one on the far left the red, white, and blue that he recognized as representing U.S.A. The first he’d seen in person, and in its natural habitat. It was undisturbed by the chaos swirling four hundred meters above. Its calm presence commanded his respect. It bore significance built by generations of heroes protecting citizens and a country that he felt a part of, yet somewhat also as an intruder into a deceased relative’s abandoned home.
Inside the shielded desk were mounted dark screens on a secondary counter, facing away from the entrance, to a pair of unused chairs on wheels. On the bottom right corner of the screens’ black frames were small orange circles of light. Black cords ran into holes behind them and down into a wall of closed cabinets.
Another gunshot erupted outside. Another. And another, almost too quickly to get a proper aim. “What’s the status up there?” Rush asked.
More quick shots went off.
Star made it inside first, backpack over her shoulders, followed closely behind by some teenagers Rush hadn’t met, and who barely waited for her to open the interior door before they pushed inside. The one she’d called Will tried to shield her, but the crowd forced them in until they fanned out into the lobby. Star wrapped her arm around Rush and leaned up to kiss him.
Ten seconds had passed since the last shot. “They’ve fallen back,” Viky said over Avery’s radio. “I have a pistol, so I’m staying up here.”
At the end of the crowd’s surge inside, the door shut on the exterior. Click-thunk.
One of the dark screens lit up and The Gov’s face appeared close up. His dark brows bent down over blue eyes. Rush waited for them to glow as though they were a coiled and hissing viper.
&
nbsp; “Welcome to Fort Pope, everyone. I’m afraid only two of you will be leaving alive.”
SCAVENGER: Blue Dawn
Chapter 10
“What’d he just say?” one of the teenagers asked.
“We’re gonna die!”
“Not two of us.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Many forced their way through the crowd back to the entrance. The first one hit the door and groaned out in pain when five more crushed him into it. “Stop! It’s locked.”
The Gov’s laugh boomed through speakers on the counter. “I’m afraid that’s not the way out at the moment young lad. Your way out will be to commandeer the regulators, air tanks and visors off of the two divers among you.”
“Commandeer?” one of the group asked.
“It means take them and put ‘em on your faces!” The Gov mocked.
Blue smoke crept out of vents in the ceiling.
Rush turned to Avery, his pale stare not providing an answer.
“Rush.” Star tugged on the front of his suit. “We can’t let them die.”
“I know. I just…” He took his visor off, separated the goggles inside to protect his eyes, and handed her the visor.
A couple survivors hacked and bent over, squeezing their throats. “Burns,” one of them mumbled. Two more, four, seven, all coughing and struggling to stand as their faces turned red and they looked up at Rush and Avery, who were backing toward the flag wall.
Those nearest the desk turned as one from their falling friends to their only option. Many ran without a second thought. Rush unclipped his tank, handed it and the regulator to Star, and shoved her toward the door in the northeast corner. Multiple bodies landed on his back and took him down. His chin hit the floor and his suit powered up. Survivors flooded past him toward Avery and Star. She jerked on the handle, rattling the locked door.
Avery retrieved his bolter and pressed the middle button, but three guys had already leapt at his head. He collapsed under their weight. He tucked the bolter and rolled onto his side.
Star slammed the pommel of Rush's dive knife into the glass, shattering it and rubbing the knife handle up and down to clear the debris. One of the survivors yanked her by the collar. She screamed. Rush pushed up. A heel stomped on his back and bent him to the floor. More climbed over him. His face burned on the carpet. Someone stepped on his cast. He shouted and looked up, but the culprit had already made it to Avery. Noxious, bitter fumes tickled down his throat. He gasped and held his breath as a wall of people separated him from an unseen Avery and Star, forming two piles on top of them. Fists reached back before punching or stuffing their hands into the center to get a hold of something to give them life.
A bright blue beam cut from right to left, severing limbs, torsos, and bursting heads. The spray covered Rush’s goggles. He ran the sleeve of his good arm over them, producing only a smeared vision of the pile to his right that was sinking. Pained cries mixed with berserk shouting. The beam disappeared, but Rush traced its end to the bolter rolling down the legs of someone who’d been sliced in half.
“Rush! Agh!”
Star’s cry stole his attention and when he looked back down for the bolter it was gone. He fell to his knees and forced both hands into the congestion of squirming and lifeless limbs, now warm with fresh blood, soaking his fingers and bubbling into his cast. His left hand took an upward kick to the wrist, forcing him to grit his teeth as he pulled it back and dug deeper with his right.
The short stick rubbed under his fingers. He clasped them over its center and pulled it out, the ends blue and ready.
A thick-bodied man barrel-rolled out of Star’s pile with a regulator tube protruding from his crossed arms and a mouthpiece dangling.
Rush thumbed the bolter into a staff. Gas fumes burned his nostrils, but he dared not sniff. No time for playing nice. She’ll die if you don’t stop them.
Rush unleashed his staff’s ends into every vital organ in his path, puncturing a throat, crushing a temple, shooting through a chest, and then spinning around to impale the man holding his wife’s air. He yanked the staff out. Blackened blood ran in a glob off the end. Rush fired quick bursts into every head that looked his way, sorry to do it, but without a choice.
Star’s face appeared as the pile rose and turned on him. Blood smeared over every inch of her skin and gushed from her nose and a gash in her lower lip.
If he could fire through the door and let them escape into the next...blue smoke had filled most of the air in there as well. He pressed the staff against his armpit, reached down, lifted the barrel-roller off his chest, and unleashed the bolt on everyone who came at him. He released the charge and finished the ones coming from his left. Star crawled over dead bodies and those cowering away from Rush’s bolt. His lungs burned for air. He dropped the staff and fumbled to get the regulator’s mouthpiece.
Blade strokes in Avery’s pile scraped bone and plunged into wet sacks of blood. Avery growled through one more and then heaved a muffled sigh, one contained by a sealed regulator.
The tickle in Rush’s throat leapt for him to cough and let it out. But he held it down. As he lifted the regulator toward Star, her hands clasping it and bringing it to her mouth, the blue smoke swirled around them.
He was going to die.
Worse, if she sucked on the air, some gas would have snuck inside the hose, and she’d poison herself.
He waved her off. The smoke dissipated around his hand. How was he going…? Fisher. He remembered the smiling form of his son disintegrating with the wind over the court house. How different was gas than sand under the power of the dive suit?
He had to at least try.
He cupped his hand over his eyes, pointed at Star, then tapped his visor. She nodded, lips pressed together in pain he knew she struggled with. He had to hurry.
He took the visor off her head, revealing her tightly closed eyes, and slid the visor over his eyes, the probes in place over his temples. The sync turned the room into angles of red with two bodies in neon green. The remaining were faint traces of green inside husks of orange. Clouding these colors was a billowing tide of purple haze flowing down from the ceiling.
Rush took Star in his arms and moved her down the hall behind him. The poisonous gas had spread throughout there as well. His head swooned from lack of oxygen. He didn’t have time to keep looking. Star wasn’t trained for holding her breath like he was.
He fell into a corner between the wall and a display of plaques and military insignia. His imagined body stood and he left his real body to hold his wife. How was he going to collect and remove every particle of poison, let alone quickly? The gas continued pouring from the vents. Even if he—Star began coughing—even if he pushed the smoke away from them in a hammer wave, it would keep coming from behind, the tide sucking in gas before it shot it out. It wouldn’t be clean enough to breathe.
Thinking about water brought to mind a tan paper journal he’d scavenged, Poseidon’s Domain, which had described a man in a terrible storm that abated as the center rolled over him.
His real body picked Star up and brought her to stand with him in the center of the hall, providing enough space to form a tunnel of wind as his imagined body blew straight up at the ceiling. After the initial gust, he lassoed his finger over his head. The cloud condensing near the ceiling swirled in a circle with an eye void of purple poison directly over them. A tunnel spun around them, sending the purple specks up into the cloud.
Star continued to shake against his real body’s chest. The torrent of his artificial hurricane drowned out the sound of her cough. Just a little longer.
Faint specks of purple drifted down in the air from the ceiling. His imagined body swatted them away and they rejoined the storm.
After a detailed look around him and Star, and seeing no poison, he inhaled.
In rushed cool, fresh air. Out coughed a sharp, raspy exhale. Star patted his back. He took one more deep breath, exhaled, and nodded.
“You can breathe now,” he shouted into her ear.
He felt her chest inhale against his. She did not choke.
A crawlway of clearer purple formed under the rising cloud of gas, progressing past his waist, chest, and then over his head until the cloud kept all the gas on both sides of the hall and in the lobby.
Rush walked Star back to the desk where Avery sat against the eastern wall and watched them approach.
“I said two,” came The Gov’s voice from the desk. A chorus of boos sounded from the speakers. “But it seems my guests are taken with your performance.” The unseen crowd cheered like a brigand camp electing for a midnight dive. “So I suppose I’ll extend my mercy to the three of you, and maybe you can teach me how you did that some day.”
“It’s really quite precious, isn’t it?” The Gov talked to his crowd as though they were observing a child’s smile into his mother’s eye.
Rush hated that man. Most, if not all, of the dead boys and girls lying around him had once smiled up into their mother’s eyes. More so than the dead ones buried under Springston’s wall, these had looked him in the eye and he’d still cut them down. All were grown up Fishers.
The realization filled his chest with heavy dread.
Fans whined inside the ceiling vents, sucking the purple cloud past their slats. Rush's wrist throbbed and his throat itched toward another coughing fit.
After the fans calmed into silence, short bursts of mist rained onto Rush’s skin and soothed the itch left by the gas. He took off his visor.
The smell of exposed, fried organs and flesh made him shorten his breaths. Star grimaced as well.
“Oh, come on,” The Gov said. “Do you think this world would let us do what we need to get back on top without shedding a little blood? I knew Avery was a gifted diver, and I probably wouldn’t have made it into Fort Pope’s interface without his ideas, but now that he has turned things on for me there, it is time to move forward to the next stage in our plan.”
The camera on The Gov scaled back and the background moved. Orbs of light hung in the air. Another reflection glinted on the glass. Faint faces across a crowded room watched from inside. “Sorry folks, what I’m about to say has to stay between me and them. Thank you all for coming, and your patronage, but the party’s over. McKinney will show you out.”
Scavenger: Evolution: (Sand Divers, Book One) Page 11