by Ben Oliver
“Well, keep your observations to yourself,” the oldest of the three says, spitting into the dusty street. “That kind of talk starts to sound a lot like treason.”
Mohawk holds both hands up. “You guys need to calm down. I’m just saying that we must have been close to Tier Two, that’s all.”
“But we’re Tier Three, so shut up about it,” the woman says.
“Fine, fine, I’ll shut—”
The man’s head snaps back, his Mohawk whipping to one side, as a USW round hits him above the left eye.
I look around, trying to figure out what’s just happened, and I spot Pander—she dashed over, snatched up the female soldier’s gun, and fired before any of us or them had a chance to react. Now she’s aiming it at the second, older man.
“Hold on a second,” the man commands.
“Fuck you!” Pander screams as she shoots him. Then she swivels the gun and kills the woman before she can react.
The whole slaughter takes less than five seconds. In this moment, I don’t know what to feel. Pander is thirteen years old, and here she is, so failed by the system and by the world that she is able to murder three people without thinking twice.
“That was … that was …” Malachai tries, but he too is lost for words.
“Let’s go,” Pander says, throwing the fallen soldiers’ guns at each of us before taking the Lens from the older soldier’s eye and activating the enormous tank.
* * *
We drive until we’re close enough to see the park. There are maybe a thousand people crowded around a stage, where Galen Rye stands, his hands held aloft. Behind him, projected into the sky, is a fifty-foot holographic re-creation of Galen, ensuring that everyone gets a clear view of the man who killed millions of innocent people. He steps forward, and the crowd falls silent. When he speaks, his voice echoes through the silent city.
“In times of extreme jeopardy, extreme action is required,” he intones, his voice amplified via the almost invisible patch-microphone stuck to his jawline. “Think not of what has been forced upon you as a sin; think instead that it is a necessity. You may be haunted for the rest of your days on this earth, but that is the price we all must pay so that our children and our children’s children may live a good life, a life that they deserve.”
The crowd cheers, a roar so animalistic that I’m surprised to look into the horde and see human faces. I see soldiers as young as fifteen and as old as fifty as they cheer and yell and hug one another.
Galen leans forward until his lips are almost pressed against the microphone. He speaks again: “What we have sacrificed, what we have given—so that the world can thrive—may be looked upon by the historians and the scholars of the future as a heinous act of self-preservation, and they will be right, my friends. Let’s not pretend that we are morally pure, but without our sacrifices, our bravery, our ability to look history in the eye and say, We had to do what we had to do, there would be no future in which to scorn us!”
Standing behind Galen in a straight line are eight other Alts, all of them with the same glowing eyes as the soldiers atop the Black Road Vertical. What is that? I wonder. A new Alt enhancement? There’s no time to consider it further, as the roar of the horde rises up to meet us. The crowd adores this man.
“What have they done?” Malachai whispers.
“The heartbreak is over, my friends, the culling of the world is finished, and we are the survivors; we are part of the two percent, the lucky few. Phase One is complete,” Galen Rye yells, and as the crowd roars their appreciation, he holds his hands up to silence them. “Strike that,” he says. “Phase One is almost complete.”
He gestures offstage, and my heart skips a beat as Wren is marched to stand beside Galen. Walking alongside her is a soldier with a Deleter, the crescent-moon-shaped piece of technology that they use to execute inmates. The weapon is glowing with the power it possesses to break matter down into subatomic particles, Deleting whatever it comes into contact with. Keeping Wren in check with such an extreme weapon seems unnecessary—she looks so lost and confused that I’m not sure she knows what’s going on. The only positive thing is that she is no longer a Smiler.
We were right, I think. There is a cure.
“Nine surviving escapees from the Loop,” Galen continues, his voice echoing around the now-silent park, “plotting against us. Plotting to end the mission that we pledged to complete. And were they wrong to conspire? Ladies and gentlemen, no, they were not. You and I—had we been in their shoes—would have done the same thing. This is what we must remember if we are to keep our humanity: We act on our instinct to survive, and therefore we are all right and we are all wrong, we are all sinners and we are all virtuous; it all depends on what side of the line you stand. But this is the new world, and these people committed treason against us. Remind yourselves, my friends, that—had we not decided to take action—this overpopulated, overpolluted, overworked planet would have been drained of all resources, all habitable Regions, within ten years. We must set a precedent, and we must not falter. The nine must turn themselves in, and if they are truly righteous, they will. If they do not, this girl, the one who set them free, will die. This is a message, a benchmark, a line in the sand. We must be as one if we are to succeed.”
There is a murmur among the crowd now, and for a second I dare to hope that they might push back against the Overseer’s declaration, that he might have gone too far and a mutiny might follow, but the murmurs subside as he holds his hands up for silence once again.
“The nine escapees have twelve more minutes to turn themselves in.”
My eyes move from the executioner gripping his Deleter to Wren, whose tired eyes scan the crowd, still unaware of what’s going on or where she is. The crowd is not angry, they’re not baying for blood; they are calm and resolute.
“What’s the plan?” Kina asks.
“There’s hundreds of them,” Malachai says, the rage in his voice bubbling through.
“We have a tank,” I point out, “and not much time. I say we get close and kill Galen. Whatever happens after that happens.”
Malachai nods slowly. “Well, fuck it, it’s not like we’re going to live much longer anyway. Count me in.”
“Me too,” Kina says.
Blue nods.
“Sounds good,” Pander adds.
I turn to Blue. “Blue, I’m sorry about what happened to Mable.”
Blue bites his lip and looks right at me. “I’m sorry too,” he says, his voice cracking as he smiles.
I nod, and Pander drives us toward the park.
Kina takes control of the sonic cannon, and I sit at the gun turret—we both have screens in front of us so we can see what we’re aiming at from inside the tank.
The tank moves quietly through the streets. We sit side by side in silence, perfectly ready to die.
The snow has melted to a thin layer now. The sky is black and dotted with stars.
As we move onward, Kina reaches out a hand, and I take it. She smiles at me, and there’s sadness in her eyes. I feel that sadness too, because when we die, so does all the potential of what we could have been together.
As we turn onto Midway Park Road, I can’t help but think it would have been such a lovely evening if it wasn’t for all the death and destruction.
“Here we go,” Malachai says as we turn to face the back of the crowd.
The tank runs on a gravity engine and is so quiet that the only sound comes from the great metal treads rolling along the road.
Slowly, the people begin to realize that something is wrong and turn toward us. At first they don’t panic—this is one of their own tanks—but when we don’t slow down, when we drive right into the crowd, they scream and dive out of the way of the enormous vehicle. And then there’s the sound of USW guns screeching through the air as the soldiers open fire. As their rounds hit us, we can feel the tank rock, but we don’t move from our course.
We travel onward, through the parting crowd, waiting
for the moment that Galen Rye falls into our sights.
Malachai begins to sing Pander’s song, and he’s smiling. I smile too. Pander joins in.
“I see him,” Kina calls out, and at the same time I see him on my screen.
He looks shocked, surprised, and somehow delighted.
I adjust my sights, the crosshairs moving around the screen until I lock them on his smug face.
Then just as I’m about to pull the trigger, I see his eyes begin to glow bright, just like the soldiers standing behind him. That strange expression of glee melts from his face—in fact, all signs of life fall away. He is neutral, blank. His bright white eyes turn orange, and the tank falls still, my screen goes blank, and the sound of the electrics powering down fills the cockpit.
“What happened?” Kina yells, pulling at her trigger over and over to only the sound of an empty click.
“There’s no power,” Malachai says in a quiet voice.
We look at one another, the silence oddly comforting, almost funny. We shrug and grab our USW guns.
Kina opens the hatch and climbs onto the turret of the tank. Malachai and I follow suit, then Pander and Blue climb out and stand beside us.
We stand there, in the middle of the silent crowd, waiting for someone to speak, waiting for something to happen.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Galen says, smiling as the lights fade from his eyes once again, “it appears that a few of the escapees have decided to turn themselves in.” Pander raises her weapon until it’s aiming at Galen. His smile widens. “Or perhaps not.”
“What a way to go out,” Malachai says, and smiles.
“I’m glad I met you, you guys,” Kina says.
All five of us raise our guns to our shoulders. The bright-eyed soldiers behind Galen step forward. None of them carry weapons, but—as if the act of them stepping forward was some sort of signal—every soldier in the crowd readies their weapon for battle.
We stand there, a thousand guns pointed right at us, frozen in time for what feels like forever.
And then half the stage explodes in a fiery blast, followed quickly by another explosion in the crowd near the front.
Alts fly through the air, screaming and wailing, limbs torn off, blood spraying, flames engulfing them.
I lower my weapon and stare at the carnage, and then I hear the roar of an army. We turn to see hundreds of Regulars sprinting into the park, a few of them carrying USW guns, others with twenty-first-century machine guns that take ammunition, some with knives, bows and arrows, lumps of wood, or farming tools. At the front, there are about twenty of them on horseback, swinging great swords.
Someone screams a command, and a volley of arrows sails through the night sky and into the crowd of Alts to our right.
Somewhere among the charging army of Regulars, I see Woods Rafka, the old-school USW pistol from the Loop held in two hands as he fires bursts into the crowd. The rest are hundreds of faces that I don’t recognize at all, and yet somehow I know that these are the Missing; these are the people who have been disappearing from the city year after year.
“Draw. Aim. Fire!” someone calls out again, and a second torrent of arrows flies into the sky.
And then all fifty or so of the archers shoulder their bows, draw knives, and dive into the battle.
I watch the arrows soaring through the sky; I watch them thunder into the Alts. And there—in the corner of the park—I see fifteen or sixteen Alts gathered by the trees, all with headlight eyes, standing still, watching with great curiosity as the battle rages.
I tear my gaze away from the cluster of bright-eyed onlookers, and I see some of our ranks fall, their bodies hitting the ground as the Alts take aim with their more sophisticated weapons. It’s enough to snap me out of my stupor, and I jump down from the tank, firing three rounds at soldiers dressed in black in front of me. All three of them fall down dead.
“Oh, fuck.” I try not to acknowledge that I have just taken three lives, but I freeze up, staring at the corpses.
And then Shion’s voice comes into my head. If you want to survive, you better get good at taking people out before they take you out. And I’m moving again.
I push past a pile of bodies and almost trip over an Alt choking the life out of a Regular. I press the barrel of my gun against the Alt’s head, pull the trigger, and keep on running.
There’s a sense of unreality, like none of this can possibly be happening. Dozens of Alts and Regulars dying all around me, mud and blood splashing into the air as stray bullets and rounds thump into the ground, death rattles and screams piercing the air. And throughout all of this, the huddle of Alts with the glowing eyes is still gathered by the trees, just watching the carnage, not helping, not fleeing, just watching. I see a stream of bullets rip up the middle of one of the glowing-eyed Alts, and she falls down dead. I stop and watch, perplexed, as a nearby Alt’s eyes glow. He stops, turns, and joins the small group, watching, still.
I feel a sonic bullet whoosh past my right ear and turn to see a teenage girl taking aim for her second shot. There is no time to react, and I know she won’t miss this time. Before she can pull the trigger, she convulses, almost dancing on the spot as pockets of blood burst out of her. She falls to the ground, and behind her is Woods Rafka, on one knee, the barrel of the old USW pistol glowing orange from the heat. He nods at me while getting to his feet and then turns and moves deeper into the park.
I shoot an approaching soldier twice in the chest as I fight through to the front. As two more Alts fall ahead of me, I see Blue firing a pistol at three soldiers—he hits all three and then turns frantically, aims his gun, realizes it’s me, and smiles. I almost have time to smile back before his left shoulder and part of his chest disappear into a cloud of dust that dissipates in the wind. His eyes widen in shock, and he falls to his knees. Blood begins to pump out of the gaping hole in his side.
“No!” I scream as I run toward him, firing over and over again at the man in black who swung the Deleter. I pull the trigger five times, six, seven, and even though he was dead before he hit the ground, I fire thirty more rounds into him, screaming in anger, before dropping down beside the young boy who had been free from the Loop for only three days.
His eyes search mine, begging for me to help him as blood begins to spill from his mouth.
“Stay with me, Blue! Stay alive!”
His eyes fill with so much fear and pain that I have to look away. I stare into the gaping wound down his left side, and I can see his struggling heart. The skin is frantically regrowing, bone fragments like tree roots reaching out, veins snaking and fusing together.
“Luka—”
“Shut up, Blue!” I scream, my voice hoarse. “You’re going to be fine; just shut up.” I want the boy to conserve his energy, want him to lie still and wait for this strange magic that we have been imbued with to fix him.
“Luka—”
“Just shut up, Blue, please!”
But the magic is slowing. His weak heart misfires and stalls between his partially regrown ribs.
“Luka …”
“No! Blue, No! Do not give up.”
And the healing stops completely.
I look back into the young boy’s eyes.
“Luka, I’m so scared.”
I can feel the tears falling onto my cheeks, and I wish I knew how to take away his fear. I wish I knew the words to say to make him believe that everything will be all right.
A USW round slams into the ground beside us, sending a shower of dirt and stones into the air. I shield the dying boy with my body.
“It’s okay, it’s going to be okay,” I say.
“I don’t want to go … I don’t want to …”
“It’s going to be okay, Blue,” I tell him again, as if repeating the lie will make it true.
“Am … am I going to be alone again?” he whispers. And before I can think of an answer, his eyes stop seeing, they drift off to the sky, and his body falls limp in my arms.
&nbs
p; I hold him close, pressing his lifeless body against mine. I can feel the sorrow welling up, and if I let it take over, I’m as good as dead. Instead, I let the anger win the raging battle inside me. I tell Blue I’m sorry one more time, rest his head against the ground, and then pick up my gun in my left hand and the Deleter in my right and kill every Alt that I see, whether they are a threat to me or not, whether they are attacking me or my people or not. I scream as I swing the Deleter, erasing a hand, an arm, a head. When it finally breaks, shattering into a fireworks display of sparks, I throw it at a dying soldier and keep moving forward.
At some point, I remember that I have to get to the stage; I have to make sure Galen is dead. I fight my way through, firing at the Alts, losing count of how many crumple to the ground before me. I climb over bodies, slip in the blood and the mud, take life after life until I’m at what remains of the smoking stage. Galen is gone. I can only hope that the explosion killed him, but I don’t see a body.
What I do see is the executioner getting to his feet, looking over at his destroyed Deleter, and reaching into his holster for his pistol. He drags his burned left leg behind him, stumbling toward Wren, who sits, dazed, on the remainder of the stage.
The big soldier staggers up to her and places the barrel of his gun against her head.
I climb through the wreckage of the stage, fighting to get close enough to aim at the relentless executioner, but I know I can’t make it in time.
The executioner’s finger presses against the trigger, but before he can kill Wren, he falls back, eyes blank, dead.
Malachai runs onto the stage, grabs Wren in his arms, and carries her away toward the city.
I hear a cry from the crowd: The army of the Missing is retreating. I turn to see five gigantic trucks pulling up at the edge of the park. These things are ancient, diesel-powered monsters that you’d only see in museums.
I see Regulars piling into the backs of them. I jump down from the stage and shoot three more soldiers before sprinting to a statue of a rebel leader who helped stop World War III. I see Kina hiding behind a fountain, her leg cut open and bleeding. I run to her, firing seven rounds at a group of Alts as I go.