by D. J. Molles
He felt one of them bite his ear.
In another world, on another mental plane, he knew that they were bullets. He knew that he was an idiot for standing up. So he started to move his feet. Move away from the truck, that’s what they’d been doing in the first place, right? Moving away from the truck?
He looked behind him, saw Getty limping with his bad leg, and he felt bad, so he stopped and extended a hand, “Come on, Buddy…”
Another voice: “Walter-get-your-ass-in-gear!”
Walter peered up. He could see Virgil, two stoops down from the one that Walter had hid behind, and he was poked up above, just his head and his rifle, and the rifle was burping out its fiery opinions on things, and as far as Walter could tell, it was the only one speaking.
“Oh, shit,” he said aloud.
Something clicked back into place. Like a faulty electronic that needs a good rap to get that loose wire back in contact.
He tightened his grip on Getty’s arm and became horribly aware of how exposed he was. He started running towards Virgil. Then past him.
That was the technique, right? To bound over each other?
Past Virgil was another street. It was the end of the block.
Walter and Getty got there as fast as their shambling bodies could get them there. Getty’s face was a sheet of red, but peering out of that crimson skein, his eyes were clear and sharp and lucid.
They hit the corner and came skidding to a stop.
Getty collapsed backward against the wall.
Walter found it took an enormous effort to change his direction and grab the corner. He needed to provide covering fire for Virgil and Tria to make it back. Was Tria even still alive? It was all a bunch of nonsense right now.
None of it mattered. Just do the job.
He posted his elbow roughly against the side of the wall and took a half second to make sure that he was aiming clearly over Virgil’s head, and then he started firing.
Virgil, ever clear in the face of this shit, immediately got up and started moving. He was supporting Tria, whose head was lolling about like she was on the verge of passing out.
Walter gave two bursts and then he took a moment to look.
He squinted, frowned.
The truck sat there smoking violently, as did the side of the apartment building that had been hit with the other munition—whatever it was. Through the screen of smoke, he couldn’t see shit. But there was something he’d heard about smoke. And that was that smoke works both ways.
Virgil and Tria scuffled around the corner.
Tria landed on the sidewalk like a boxer that was down for the count. Her chest was still moving but she was making wretched wheezing sounds. Virgil had barely cleared the corner before he was shouting, “Help me with her, help me!”
“I’m watchin’ the corner,” Walter called out.
Virgil didn’t respond.
Walter wondered if he should help or watch the corner, but he knew there wasn’t anything that he could do for Tria, and someone had to watch the corner.
Still, he kept looking back over his shoulder.
Virgil laid Tria out on the sidewalk. She looked like a child in the oversized softarmor she wore. Her chest was working overtime to get air, but Walter didn’t think any air was getting in. She tilted her head back. All the way back. She was looking at him. Her mouth open. Her eyes wide. Upside down, she could’ve been a little girl hanging from monkey bars.
Walter stared at her. She stared back.
Then he looked back at his corner.
Smoking truck. Smoking building. Nothing moving.
“Unnnnngh,” Tria’s voice, small.
Walter tried to focus. Then he found himself looking back again.
Tria was still staring at him. But his eyes darted away from hers. Virgil was on his knees next to her, with his hands up underneath her softarmor. He worked his hands around. Trying to find a bullet hole. Getty was on the other side of Tria, undoing the straps of the armor so they could get it off.
Is this the best time to do this? Walter wondered, but then he looked at Tria again, and he confirmed, yes, it wasn’t just the light, her lips were turning blue. What was that on her neck? Was that…?
“Walter!” Getty yelled.
Walter jerked. Looked at the man.
“Watch that corner!”
Walter nodded. Looked back to the corner.
Nothing. Smoke, and nothing.
He couldn’t help himself. He looked back around.
Getty and Virgil, hunched over Tria. Her back was arched. Her head still inclined all the way back, her eyes still fixed on Walter, and he was thinking why me? why is she looking at me? And what was that on her neck? What was that right there in her clavicle?
Her hands grasped desperately at Virgil. He kept pushing them away, trying to find the wound under her softarmor, but Walter knew he wasn’t going to find the wound there. The bullet that had struck her armor had been stopped by the same. But it hadn’t been the only bullet that found her.
“Her neck,” Walter tried, found his voice a quiet croak.
Virgil snapped up. “Watch the corner!” he shouted angrily.
But Walter wouldn’t. He pointed emphatically, angry now. “Her neck, Virgil! Her fucking neck! She’s got a goddamned hole in her neck!”
Virgil’s eyes jerked down. He stared. Then he yanked his hands out from under her softarmor, almost like he was embarrassed that they’d been there, and he let out with a string of curses, but that was all he did. His hands hovering there.
Walter took a step towards them. He was looking down now. Tria was no longer looking at him. Her eyes were on Virgil. Her body wanted air. Her mouth worked desperately and spittle started clotting up along the corners of her mouth.
Walter stared at the hole in her neck. Such a tiny thing. Not bloody at all. It was surrounded by something that looked like mucous, and every time Tria tried to take in a gasp for air, it would wheeze a bit, and then it would issue out another bit a phlegm.
She’d grabbed ahold of Virgil now. Locked with him.
“It’s okay,” Virgil said stupidly. “We’re gonna fix you, okay? Just…just…”
“Fucking do something!” Walter cried out.
Getty seemed the only calm one. He looked up at Walter. “Hey. If you don’t watch that corner they are going to get us.” Then he looked at Virgil. “What can you do? What can you do? She needs to breathe.”
Virgil said nothing. He only stared down at Tria while she stared back up at him, her mouth blabbing soundlessly and spitting, and the hole in her neck wheezing mutely and coughing up thick yellow clots.
Virgil shook his head. “She’s not even bleeding,” he said, as though it mattered. Then he looked up at Getty, even while Tria clawed at his neck. “I don’t…” he trailed off.
Walter peered around the corner. Two dark shapes moved with the grace of prowling animals, skirting out from around the smoking truck, across the street.
“Shit,” he said. “They’re coming.”
A glance over his shoulder. Tria’s efforts were growing weak.
Couldn’t someone figure out how to get some air into her? There was some way to fix her. There had to be. They just didn’t know what it was, and that was the pinnacle of frustration.
“They’re coming,” Walter repeated.
The concrete wall that he hugged exploded.
He cried out, flinching away as the sound of gunfire hit him and the shards of concrete sprayed the left side of his face.
He rolled away from the wall. “We need to go!”
Virgil was on his feet, but Tria was still clinging to his legs.
Getty was on his feet as well, and he was trying to pull Virgil away, pull him into cover, but Virgil wasn’t about to leave Tria. The two of them hated each other, and yet in this moment, with bullets flying, they’d found out that they would die for each other.
“Help me with her—” Virgil started, trying to drag her by one ar
m further into cover behind the wall.
Walter watched the words come out of Virgil’s mouth as he pleaded for help moving her, and then any other words were cut off.
A bullet hit him in the side. He had just enough time to jerk from the impact, before another one struck his face, and it rearranged his features into something ghastly. Walter watched and saw that Virgil was still alive, his eyes still pleading for help…
Then the back of his head burst.
That was it.
He collapsed instantly.
Fell directly atop Tria’s dying form.
She struggled beneath him briefly, weakly.
It wasn’t enough. None of it was enough.
Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit.
The concrete sprouted dust motes.
Little volcanoes of gray.
Walter felt rough hands on him. Pulling. But they weren’t very strong.
He looked, and he saw that it was Getty pulling him, and poor Getty with his eyes wide open, he was no longer the calm one, he just happened to be one of the ones that wasn’t dead yet, and with his busted leg he couldn’t pull Walter very hard.
But Walter got the point.
Run.
There wasn’t any deep meaning. No poignancy. He didn’t look back at the bodies. He didn’t feel a welling of emotion, though perhaps it would drive him to dust later. He just ran. He ran, pulled by Getty at first, but then overtaking him and going past him, and then Walter was pulling Getty. He ran to save his life. He ran, he ran.
His muscles roared for more oxygen that he simply wasn’t capable of giving them.
Everything ached for rest, and he couldn’t give it that either.
They ran down the streets, and Walter felt it was mindless, but somewhere in the intervening blocks, as he pumped his legs and hauled Getty along with him and gasped for air that was thin or thick or too smoky with destruction, he realized that Getty was shouting at him, telling him where to turn, and as absent as his mind felt in those moments, somehow he was obeying.
Chapter 23
A flight of gunships went overhead. So close to the tops of the apartment buildings and shops that Walter could feel the downdraft as they went. They came upon them quickly, and the second he and Getty heard the rotors, they froze and plastered themselves to the side of the building next to them.
They knew that if the pilots were looking through their thermals, they would see them. They just hoped that if they weren’t seen running into the fray, they might not be taken as combatants. So far, either the pilots were too busy, or their luck held.
A family of five passed them on the opposite side of the street. Dirt and smoke-streaked faces. Walter didn’t think they even noticed them. They were moving quickly, but they had a dazed, zombie-like look on their faces. A man and a woman, an older boy, and a younger girl who trailed in the back, hanging onto the hand of an old man. Single-file they fled mindlessly away from the Town Center.
Ahead of Walter and Getty, there was a hole in a building that still smoked like a crater in a volcano. Strewn all around the hole, little lumps in the street. Not soldiers, Walter didn’t think. Too small. Too lightly clothed.
They stopped at the recessed entrance to a small hardware store.
Walter looked inside. It was dark. There was a bullet hole in the glass door. He had been to this hardware store many times. He knew the owner. Didn’t know him by name, strangely enough. They’d never exchanged names, but they talked the latest news in a friendly, fluid manner. Walter had last been in there to buy wood glue for a broken kitchen chair. The man that had owned it had helped him find it.
He breathed, breathed, breathed.
Getty’s chest went along with his.
Neither spoke for a moment.
In the background, the gunships roared over the sky. Small arms fire pop-pop-popped and echoed around and punctuated everything and then was responded to. Sometimes a hiss of rockets. Sometimes a muted explosion. The fighting had largely moved to another section of the Town Center.
“Who are they fighting?” Walter asked.
Getty had his head back against the wall of the hardware store, looking skyward at nothing and working his mouth as though trying to moisten it. “There’s more resistance out here than just us.” He lolled his head to look at him. He looked horrible. Beaten. “You think they did all of this just for us?” He shook his head. “Eighty-Eighty-Nine has been a problem for them since day one. They’re just cleaning house.”
Cleaning house, Walter thought.
Just cleaning house.
Just the two of them now, huddled in the sunken entrance to the shop.
They had purged other Districts.
“Cleaned house,” as Getty had put it.
Fed-run media had little to say about it, though.
They’d straighten up the mess they’d made. Make it all sound like the resistance’s fault. That was their go-to move. Then they’d just stop talking about it altogether.
Construction would patch things back together. For every few people that were fighting right now, there were a hundred that just didn’t want to be bothered. And they would go back to work when they were told to go back to work, and all of this night would be squashed down and compartmentalized in their brains and it would simply be “That night that the CoAx did that round-up and a few buildings got shot up, yeah, that was crazy, fuck the CoAx, wanna go grab a beer after work?”
That had been him, in fact.
It was so many of them.
But it wasn’t him anymore.
He could never be that way again.
He was fighting now. Just like the others that were fighting, deeper in the Town Center. And a for moment Walter felt a spaced-out, unreasonably emotional connection with them, and it nearly caused his eyes to water, and he bitterly wondered at the incredible ridiculousness of it all—that these resistance fighters knew so little about each other, that they refused to band together, that they stayed divided over small differences, and so would resign themselves to death and defeat.
Dear God, if they could just decide to work together, Walter thought with frustration. Then we could win. If they could stop arguing over small shit, then my Carolyn would still be here. Or at least I could have a chance at getting her back.
We should know who that is down there fighting the CoAx. And they should know us. And we should be working together.
Too late now. They were separated by ignorance.
They were all going to die tonight.
No, he thought to himself fiercely, feeling that angry fire in his gut. It was tempered by exhaustion, but it was there. That’s not what I’m going to think. I’m not going to resign myself. I’m never going to resign myself. I don’t care how tired, I don’t care how broken, I don’t care how many of my friends they slaughter. I’ll make them regret coming after me and mine.
“We’re close,” Getty said, after a while of breathing.
“To what?”
“To the safehouse.”
“Oh.”
“How are you?”
“What?”
“How are you feeling?”
Walter looked up at the other man. Getty’s eyes were rimmed with tears. He blinked rapidly as though to ward them off, but they only spilled over. He made no sound. He didn’t sob. His voice didn’t even constrict, nor his face contort with grief. It was like his eyes had simply grown a mind of their own and begun to weep.
“I’m sorry,” Walter said.
Getty nodded. “Just fight.”
“I will.”
“Come on,” Getty said.
They moved on through the intersection.
The gash on Getty’s head had slowed itself to a trickle. He limped along, sometimes with Walter’s help, sometimes leading the way. Occasionally he would hiss or curse at a random pain, but mostly he was quiet and they walked to the soundtrack of the apocalypse around them.
They reached the corner.
Getty nodded t
o the right. “Keep your eye on the right and behind us. I’ll clear the corner.”
Walter put his back to the wall, his shoulder to Getty’s back and he scanned with his rifle up. He wondered if he looked like he knew what he was doing, or if he looked as awkward and clumsy with the rifle as he felt. He wondered how many rounds were left in the thing. He wondered, of the rounds he’d expended, had a single one of them found what he was aiming for?
“Looks clear,” Getty whispered, and Walter wasn’t sure why he whispered. Maybe just the tension. “And the building looks intact. Which is a good sign.”
They slipped around the corner. As they went, far back through the Town Center streets, Walter saw movement, but it was brief, and he couldn’t tell in that single glimpse what it was, or whether it looked like it was heading in their direction or not.
Getty was very circumspect as they moved to the stoop of the apartment building. He looked around manically, up and down the street, up and down again, then again, then again. It seemed every time he took a few steps closer to the entrance, he was re-worried about being watched. But that was good caution. The safe house would not be so safe if two resistance fighters were observed going into it.
Walter wished he had Virgil’s thermal scanner to see if drones were watching them.
He looked upward again at the thought and realized that it was getting light out. Night was over now. A gray sky hovered over them, shot through with menacing contrails and pillars of black smoke that diluted themselves into the sky like ink in water. To the east, the sky was blood red, like history’s greatest massacre had occurred there, and the sun was simply reflecting off the sea of gore left behind.
“Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning,” Walter mumbled.
Getty looked over his shoulder at Walter, then the sky, then sneered at it stubbornly, not in the mood for ill-portents. “This ain’t the sea. We ain’t sailors. Come on.”
With a final, desperate look around, the two of them plunged up the stoop and into the entrance to the apartments.
The vestibule was open. Dark. The light fixture that usually lit the small space was dead. The door to the staircase and elevator that led to the rest of the apartments was locked. Walter wondered if the power had gone out.