by Tanya Lisle
“You need everyone you can spare. I’ll be-”
The phone cut out. No communications. Great. This was going to go well.
Mac shoved his phone in his pocket and hoped that it wouldn’t be dead for long. That, and that Ed managed to make it through the abandoned sections in one piece. After the rescue, there were still a lot of them that had escaped in the confusion and he was pretty sure that just about anyone could take Ed in a fight. Kitty in her condition when he last saw her, unable to stand on her own, could probably take Ed down easily.
It wasn’t his problem anymore, though. He had semi-trucks to stop.
“Listen up!” he yelled at the people gathered. “Communications just went down, so if you need to know anything, ask now or you won’t get another fucking chance. Take your squads and you lay low. Hit them hard and fast and get the fuck back until we know what we’re dealing with. Stay out of sight where you can.”
Mac paused, making sure there were no questions so far. They’d already run this several times over the last few days to the point where he hoped they knew what they were doing by now. They had everyone they could here and it had to be enough.
“Last thing. If it’s safe, you take their shit. We have intel saying they’re better equipped than we are, so if it’s clear, you take their shit. Got it?”
“Yes sir!”
“Move out!”
They split off into groups and separated into the halls between Sections F and G. They knew their squads and who led them, thankfully, and Mac’s group fell in line behind him. He brought them to what should be the front lines, several halls back from the wall with a clear sight line to the outside. They took their positions behind the wall and sat there, waiting.
One thing the new guys were always surprised by was the amount of waiting that happened before the fight. They fidgeted and tried to make casual conversation to fill the air and break the tension until someone started firing on them. They ended up too jumpy to focus for a few minutes while they readjusted to the fact that they were in danger of dying if they didn’t pay attention.
Mac carefully picked everyone for the front lines from those who had fought off the raiders in the past. They knew how to sit quietly, checking their equipment and make sure they knew where everything they needed was. Mac kept his eyes open for the other groups, making sure they were in place and made sure his own weapons were in good order.
He also kept an eye out for the horizon. He could see the trucks getting closer and it made his trigger finger itch. Iris would have been great right now. If those were tires, then Iris might have been able to shoot them out and they could have more of an advantage. As it was, they barely knew what they were up against, but after seeing what their advance party carried, he wasn’t confident about their chances in a fair fight.
A crash shook the building and heads looked up. Mac held his hand out, looking around the corner to see that the trucks hadn’t crashed into the building yet. The crash came from farther away, though it made the walls shake around them and sent the whispers through their ranks.
They wanted to know what that was and if they needed to watch out for something else. What was it and where did it come from? Should they move to find it? Should they leave and see if the Medical Wing and their families were all right?
Mac signaled for everyone to stay put. He wanted to know too, but with communications down, it was better not to go jumping after threats that they knew nothing about. They knew where this enemy was coming from and already had a plan to deal with them. They had no idea what caused that explosion or if they even had the resources to deal with it. They had to hope it was small and that whoever encountered it could deal with it on their own.
A second boom rocked the building and it was harder to keep them from getting up and doing something stupid. Mac did his best to gesture for them to stay down. He glanced back outside and immediately went for his gun.
“Heads down!” he yelled.
The sound was deafening as metal crashed through the thick concrete walls and metal lining. Two trucks burst through the wall, stopping after crashing through a second inner wall and sending the chunks of wall flying far, creating more holes but missing any people.
Everything went very still for a moment as nothing happened at the trucks. The seconds felt like they dragged on for hours until there was a loud, piercing screech of metal scraping against metal and footsteps. The metal clatter followed and Mac pointed his muzzle around the corner, waiting for anything to emerge.
Something flew up into the air ahead of them and Mac ducked back around the wall as a blindingly white flash erupted from the area, followed by gas. He pulled his mask up, signaling the rest to do the same and looked back around the corner.
People poured out of the back of the trucks, many of them dressed in scraps and looking like they hadn’t had a proper meal in their lives. They had no gear on them, but the smoke didn’t deter them as they came rushing through it, yelling at the top of their lungs with weapons that looked new firing at the walls.
Mac opened fire, trying to take out as many of them as he could. The first line looked like they scrounged the bottom of the barrel in terms of what even Regina had to offer, most of them looking like they had deformed after living in subpar shelters in the city for years and barely able to comprehend what was happening around them. They were barely even human anymore, but they were still trying to kill them.
Behind them and through the mist of the smoke bomb, Mac could make out the second line stopped at the wall and setting something down on the ground. He didn’t like the look of it and pulled back around the corner. “Fall back!” he commanded, leading the way back to the next walls.
They missed the rocket that flew into the wall and blew it apart and Mac knew they were screwed. There was no way they could compete against something like that, even with the home field advantage and knowing where and when to fall back.
With all that planning, so much of it was based on times. He couldn’t check his clock like this and neither could anyone else. They had a rough idea of their paths to follow to minimize their casualties and that would have to be enough for now.
They fell into a pattern of firing and retreating, managing to pick off their numbers well enough without losing their own, though the opportunity never came to go back and regain ground. They could fight them back, but there was no way to get behind them. They would take a few of them out, but their numbers never dwindled and they were not nearly as tired.
It was the damn city folks they brought with them. The armed people from Regina made up so many of their numbers that their enemy was kept well hidden behind those numbers and out of range of their own bullets. They had the technology to destroy the walls they hid behind and kept doing so, leaving fewer and fewer hiding spots.
They needed Iris back online if they wanted a chance. With Ed and Iris, they would still be outclassed, but they might have a chance.
“Give us the mountain girl and we will kill you quickly!” one of them yelled.
Mac almost stopped at that, but kept his wits about him to keep himself moving. They kept yelling things, but he could make none of it out. He’d never heard the languages before, but this one he heard clearly through the accent and it was the first time he understood what was going on.
The mountain girl. They were here for Snow.
Ed said something about them being after her and that they wouldn’t stop even if they got her. He hadn’t fully believed her until this moment and somehow it pissed him off even more. He went along with the insanity because there was no better explanation before, but now that he had validation it angered him that it was real. Ed was supposed to come up with something reasonable. Snow wasn’t supposed to end up being right about everything in the end.
He fell back another wall and looked around. The different squads clumped together as they moved back and Mac was surprised at just how many of them were still alive. Even without knowing the exact times, Snow�
�s help had at least managed to ensure none of them had anyone sneaking up on them. They were mostly still here. They just needed to keep it together a little longer and hope Ed could get her shit together enough to get Iris back.
“If we can get someone to the second level, we could drop behind them,” Mac muttered. There was a stairwell to the left that they could use, but he didn’t know who he’d send or how they’d actually get through the concrete floor. They’d have to go back far enough where there was already a hole and hope that there was no one waiting there.
“We got it.”
Mac looked up, seeing several people head for the stairs. He reached out, grabbing the last of them and pulling him back. “No you — Get down!”
He heard the rocket shooting through the air at the last moment and yanked the arm back, covering the man as the wall blew toward them. The stairs scattered into shrapnel and flew over them, showering them in bits of metal and drywall.
Mac felt a pain in his back and shoulder as well as his left arm, but he ignored it, looking down to check on the man he covered. Clyde looked shaken as he looked back up at him, but nodded his thanks and helped Mac out of the line of fire, bullets now raining on them from the new hole in the complex.
“Any time, Snow,” he heard Clyde mutter as they got out of the way.
“Don’t count on her to save you, kid,” Mac told him. He looked down at the end of his left arm draped over Clyde’s shoulder, finding that his hand was missing. That would explain the stinging from the end of his stump of an arm, the nerves now exposed for the first time in years and not much liking the sensation.
Screams came from the direction of their enemies, the gunfire pointing away from them and going instead wildly up in the air. Turrets opened in the ceiling, firing on the enemy and hiding away again as a new set opened fire from another direction. They were disoriented and, more importantly, they were starting to fall.
Iris was back online. Mac grinned and felt a second wind breaking through the fatigue. They might still have a shot.
Chapter 22
Once the phone cut out, Ed knew she had to hurry. Iris had finally given out and the trucks hadn’t even plowed into the side of the building yet.
Her breath came ragged and grated against her throat, but she pressed on. It had been too long since she ran like this and even longer since she had to come out through this part of the complex. With Iris down, she couldn’t remember where anything was.
The halls were so much different from Section J. There weren’t rooms and halls so much as a series of walls that never reached the high ceilings. It was once a workshop of some sort, tools left behind and scraps of metal lay in discarded piles ready to be melted back down and formed again, but Ed had no idea how anyone could work like this. Worse, it was probably intended for large groups of people working in the separate sections, which would only mean chaos.
At least there was light. The heavy hum of the electricity told her there was something wrong with the power, but at least it worked. It didn’t have to work forever. She just needed to figure out where the servers were in here and hope it held out for a few days.
The crash behind her made her turned back, watching the ceiling rock and knock the dust loose. It came down in a soft powder as Ed looked back, trying to decide what just happened. It wouldn’t be the trucks. She shouldn’t be able to feel those crash quite like that from this far away. Whatever it was, it came from above and was much closer.
“No time,” she muttered to herself, forcing her feet forward so she could look through the sections for the server room. It had to be here somewhere. Once she found it, she could worry about things crashing into the complex. Semi-trucks. Rockets. Planes. She had enough without worrying about random crashes that rocked all of Janus.
She rounded another corner and something grabbed her left shoulder and the left side of her head, slamming her hard into the wall. Ed saw stars flutter across her vision and tried to push back the pain, only to have her face forced back into the wall. Her arm was twisted behind her and she let out a groan of pain as she felt her joints strain to stay in place.
The man’s breath was on the right side of her face, speaking in a language she couldn’t understand. She couldn’t see him through her bad eye, but he sounded desperate and angry. He pulled something out and Ed felt the point of a knife brush back her bangs to he could see her milky eye.
She couldn’t make out more than a blur, but she could see several dark marks clearly on his hands and face, all of them faded away except for one on the hand holding the knife.
Ed planted her feet on the ground, placing one foot hopefully behind where the man currently stood, and put her free hand against the wall. As soon as the man relaxed behind her, hissing something in her ear, Ed slammed her body backwards into him.
They fell into a tangled mess of limbs on the concrete. Ed got up as quickly as she could and took off, weaving around through the walls and trying to get away. Her mind raced. She stopped after a few walls, gasping for breath and trying to think of what to do. She opened her mouth to call for Iris, but quickly shut it. Iris wasn’t here to help her until she found that room and turned the backup back on.
Jangling footsteps followed her, echoing strangely in the room so she couldn’t quite tell where they were coming from, and she couldn’t think of anything else to do but keep running. Maybe she would get lucky and find a room with a lock on it, but for now she had to wonder how he managed to follow her. She wound and twisted through the random walls and the footsteps were behind her, the man’s voice laughing and taunting her in another language. She knew she wouldn’t like what he was actually saying.
She looked down at her waist. Her tool belt jangled with every step she took. Of course he could find her.
Ed grabbed a mallet out of her belt and kept going. If nothing else, she needed to feel like she had some way to protect herself against a crazy guy with a knife. She couldn’t quite remember the things Liah taught her all those years ago, but she knew how to hit things until they stopped working.
The taunts stopped and Ed couldn’t hear the footsteps anymore. There was a clunk somewhere and she kept moving. Either he had given up on trying to hunt her down or he had been taken down by someone that Ed would need to be more worried about. Either way, she needed to keep running and find that server room. She prayed the room had a door with a lock.
From above her, someone screamed. She looked up as her attacker jumped down with a knife in hand. He caught her by her shoulders and slammed her down onto the ground, knocking the wind out of her and slamming her head against the concrete floor.
She took in a desperate breath to refill her lungs. Her back and shoulders were nothing but pain. His knee landed in her kidneys and she wasn’t sure if he had popped them in the fall. Above her, he drew the knife back and yelled something as he brought it down.
Ed closed her eyes and swung the mallet wide, feeling a crunch as it smacked hard into flesh. Something wet splashed against her face and the man above her fell off at the force of the mallet, crumpling to her side in a limp heap.
It was impossible to catch her breath. She curled up, trying desperately to refill her lungs, but she couldn’t manage it. Her throat hurt and she felt very warm. She brought her hand to her neck.
There was a knife in her throat.
Panicked, Ed ripped out the knife and threw it away, the effort making her back and side scream in pain. It was even harder to breathe without it and she grabbed at the hole in her throat, feeling the blood drip over her fingers. She coughed and worried that she might be choking herself from holding so tightly, but her breathing started to get easier.
She stayed like that, curled up next to an unmoving man and clutching at her throat, until she could feel her lungs responding to the air. Once she knew they were working, she tried to get up. Her body protested, but she had to get moving.
Shakily, Ed got to her feet and started walking. She had to find the server room. Sh
e had to turn on Iris. She had to save them. Her body shook and she coughed up every drop of blood that slid down the back of her throat, but she forced herself to keep moving. She just needed get Iris back online.
She didn’t have to go far. Around the next wall was a room with complete walls and fans built into the tops to keep whatever was inside cool. “Server” was written on a sign across the top of the door.
Ed hobbled toward it and let herself in, the lights inside coming on as soon as the door opened. There was no lock on it, but she didn’t try to close it, going over to the panel on the wall. Ed started to talk, but her words came out as raspy breaths.
Carefully, Ed removed one hand from her throat and continued to breathe. It was harder, but she wasn’t suffocating. It would have to do.
Opening the panels and pulling out the keyboard, Ed entered her password with a single hand and turned on the servers. She kept working her fingers across the keys to check and make sure they would connect to the central database and pull the right set of information. The last lights flickered on from the boxes around her. She had to keep going.
Her body groaned in protest at having to stand, but she had no other options right now. Her pain was probably nothing compared to whatever Mac and the others were going through. She wondered if the trucks had crashed into the building while she was running. They must have by now.
She got the cameras up first so she could see what was going on. The screen was large, at least, though placing them was slow when she had to move her hand from the keyboard to the touch pad and back.
Worse, she had to find a camera that was still online. So many of the cameras in both sections were offline and the ones that weren’t showed only the fallen left behind in the wreckage. Most of the bodies didn’t look like theirs, at least. They looked like they came from the city, the clothing worn and their forms disfigured from years under the radiation.