I rolled away, sprang to my feet, and dashed to the front door while he causally sat and adjusted his helmet. I had dropped the pistol and the other one was buried in my pocket. As he stood, an orange-gold glow materialized around him, meaning that I no longer had the option of shooting the bastard.
Sunny wouldn’t thank me for what I did next, but I had no choice.
During our wrestling match, I’d liberated a grenade from the bastard’s belt. Running for the door, I pulled the pin from the grenade and dropped it.
The son of a bitch shot at me. The fléchette dug tiny holes in the wall ahead of me as I leaped behind the sofa and crouched to stay low. The guy was now toying with me. He was sealed from harm in his shielded armor and thought I had no place to run. About that, he was wrong. I counted to three, then sprang for the door, which I threw open and pulled closed behind me as I tumbled into the hall.
Even if he’d shut off his armor and found the grenade that I’d left on the floor behind the couch, what would the bastard be able to do with it? If he lowered his shield in time, he could open the door and jump out like I had . . . and I would shoot him as he entered the hall.
His armor would protect him from the shrapnel, but I had something else in mind.
I had sprinted forty feet down the hall by the time the grenade exploded, launching Sunny’s front door so hard that it stabbed through the wall on the opposite side of the hallway. Fire alarms screamed along the hall.
I stared into the room and saw what I’d expected to find. That Marine’s shielded armor might have protected him from shrapnel, but it wouldn’t stop the percussion from sweeping his armor-clad ass out through the window. Happy landings, I thought.
“Did you see what happened?”
I looked away from the bloodless carnage of Sunny’s living room. The two men I’d seen standing near the elevator had come to survey the damage.
I shook my head, and said, “Man . . . it looks like a grenade went off in there.”
“A grenade,” one of them repeated. “More like a bomb.”
A strong wind blew in through the shattered glass wall. Sunny’s leather furniture had been blown to shreds and splinters. The sofa had entirely disappeared, probably washed out the window with the U.A. Marine. Her entire dining-room set appeared to have suffered the same fate. Her desk and entertainment center, on the other hand, now existed only as unrecognizable piles of debris.
I checked the floor for the canister that bastard had been holding. Gone. Maybe he took it with him.
“Did you see anyone come in or out?” asked one of the looky-loos.
I shook my head.
Other people came to see what had happened, all dressed like civilians, all the right age to qualify as Marines.
With my brown hair and brown eyes and clone facial features, I did not want to wait around any longer than necessary. I backed away from the crowd as more men arrived. Keeping my head down and hoping not to be noticed, I entered a stairwell.
“Hey! Wait,” someone shouted in my direction. He quieted down quickly when I shot him between the eyes. I opened the door to the stairs, leaped the entire first flight, pushed off against the wall, and leaped the next one.
Sunny lived on the thirty-eighth floor, that left seventy-two more flights of stairs until I reached the bottom. I had not fully recovered from my experiences in the New Olympian Territories, and at this pace my knees would turn to jelly long before I reached the street.
I made my way down two or three floors before I heard the door open and the footfalls of the herd of men pounding after me. Had I had the presence of mind to steal a second grenade during my wrestling match, I would have dropped it on the stairs and escaped on the next floor. When a grenade goes off in the tight confines of a stairwell, few people survive.
I held my little gun out and ready. Two floors down, then four, then ten; my legs hurt, and my heart ran cycles it wasn’t meant to hit. My guts knotting like a rope, I ducked into the next doorway, not even bothering to see what floor I was on.
I stepped into an empty hall and closed the door behind me. Maybe the men who were chasing me would continue past this floor, but I doubted it. I checked the closest apartment and found the door locked. I could have kicked it in . . . maybe, and maybe I could have hung a sign in front of it that said HE’S IN HERE.
The next door was locked, and so was the one after that.
As I tried the next door, I heard the door to the stairwell open and ran as best I could toward the elevator. My strength mostly gone, I found an open door down the next hall and stepped into it.
If Sunny’s apartment was on the thirty-eighth floor, this one might have been somewhere in the high twenties. It looked out east into an extended cityscape and the flatlands beyond. With the pistol still in my right hand, I placed my left hand on to the armrest of a leather chair as I doubled over and forced air deep into my lungs.
I wasn’t sick in the here comes the puke sense, but my heart was pumping and my lungs burned. My head hurt, but I wasn’t dizzy.
If the Unifieds had followed me onto this floor, they could have stood right outside my door without my hearing them. The thick carpeting in the halls would absorb the sound of their footsteps. The doors and walls were designed for privacy.
I went to the bathroom and sipped water from the tap. I went to the bedroom, hoping for a change of clothes. All I found were dresses and lingerie.
I returned to the window for another look. Day had ended in the east, and night would soon settle on that horizon. A few streetlights had flickered to life. I didn’t know how long I would need to hold out. MacAvoy would have sent men to collect me by now. He’d probably come at the head of his column.
One thing about Pernell MacAvoy—he didn’t waste time worrying about the subtler things in life. Most commanders try to win battles using the least amount of force that will still guarantee them victory. Not MacAvoy. Be it battle or skirmish, he came to crush the opposition, and he brought as many men as he could muster, logistics be damned. When his men came to find me, they would march right up to this building. I hadn’t found apartments filled with rockets, but I had killed four U.A. Marines so far, and the night was still young.
The door to the apartment opened. Either the Unifieds had found themselves a passkey or they had a device that scrambled computerized locks. I heard the soft whir of the bolt sliding and turned in time to see the door open. By this time, my combat reflex had waned, and I chose to hide instead of shoot.
I dropped to the floor and belly-crawled into the master bedroom and, beyond that, into the master bathroom, ending up on the tile floor wedged between the toilet and the shower. I aimed the little pistol at the bathroom door, held my breath, and willed my heart to beat slowly.
They didn’t give the room much of a search, might not have even stepped in the door. They didn’t so much as peer through the bathroom door.
I waited another minute before squeezing out from behind the toilet. The difference between live Marines and dead heroes is often the extra minute the live ones wait before crawling out of their hiding places. That’s probably what separates live hares from dead ones as well.
The Unifieds really hadn’t spent much time searching the apartment. I came out from behind the porcelain and chrome, the little pistol still ready, and saw that the apartment was indeed empty. I mentally chided the U.A.M.C. for the laziness of its recruits, then I saw what they must have seen, the reason they gave up so quickly. Out on the street, tanks had rolled into the neighborhood. Gunships hovered in the air, flitting between the buildings like prehistoric hummingbirds. Jeeps and Jackals led the procession, followed by a full battalion of men.
The Unifieds must have spotted the battalion’s approach and interpreted it as an invasion. Maybe they were right. As I watched the force roll in, I realized that MacAvoy might have used rescuing me as an excuse for carving new boundaries. If he didn’t run into resistance in this demilitarized area, he might just keep rolling wes
t, but he was going to encounter resistance. Of that much, I would make sure.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-FIVE
The three men standing in the hall were dressed like civilians and armed. I shot them. I opened the door, shot the first man I saw, then the two men gabbing with him. This is a war zone, assholes, stay alert or die, I silently told the dead men.
The men had been standing outside an open door, so I went to the door for a peek. Inside the apartment, a man held a large hammer. I shot him.
These men hadn’t come looking for me. They had other business in mind. A line of crates ran parallel to the glass wall on the far side of the apartment. I knew the contents of the crates without opening them—DL-148 shoulder-fired rockets.
I had come to this building looking for Sunny, and now I was doing scouting. Here were rockets, and powerful rockets at that. Around the corps, our grenadiers told jokes about “burying enemies at 148 Dreary Lane.” The address “148 Dreary Lane” referenced the name of the rockets, “DL-148s.”
I looked at the line of boxes and the dead man lying near the window with the rocket launcher in his hand and the Army parading up the block, and realized that I had stumbled into something a lot more dangerous than a few rogue officers vacationing in my ex-girlfriend’s abandoned apartment building. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, these bastards had selected this one.
Specking coincidences, they shoot you in the ass every time, I thought.
This building had approximately one thousand apartments, five hundred of which faced east toward MacAvoy’s advancing army. They couldn’t possibly have men with rockets hiding behind every door, could they? I wondered.
I’d heard stories about bullets bouncing off skyscraper windows. Somewhere along the line, somebody had told me these windows were nearly unbreakable and that they were stronger in the center than along the edges. I picked up the dead guy’s hammer and swung it like a baseball bat, rolling my wrist at just the right moment and connecting with the window along the side. The glass shattered like a poor man’s dreams.
The spot I hit exploded into a million microscopic pieces. A moment later, the rest of the window slipped free from its mold and dropped in one jagged scale.
I borrowed a page from Ray Freeman’s playbook and fired a rocket at an empty stretch of road. I aimed in the general direction of the approaching soldiers to make sure they saw it but several hundred yards ahead of them. My rocket flew through the window, crossed open air leaving a very traceable smoke trail, and left a fiery crater in the street.
MacAvoy’s troops couldn’t have missed it.
I was feeling pretty good about myself as I watched one of the EME gunships fly toward the smoke. I remembered the way MacAvoy’s pilot had responded earlier that afternoon, stood rooted in place just long enough to see the bird turn so that one of her chain guns faced in my direction, and I bolted for the hall.
I was already out of the room when the gunship opened fire. Let me tell you, the fifty-cal armor-piercing bullets that gunships shoot aren’t slowed by skyscraper glass or aluminum-frame walls. Those bullets entered one side of the building, drilled through walls and halls, and exited the building on the opposite side.
I had hoped to warn MacAvoy. Instead, I had initiated a firestorm. It wouldn’t matter any longer if the Unifieds had a thousand men standing at a thousand windows firing a thousand rockets; they would not win this one. Never in a million years.
A single well-placed missile would bring down this entire building, and so would the right shell from a tank. The fighters circling outside had bombs that could reduce the entire neighborhood to rubble. I’d seen it happen. Early in my career, I had served under an officer who referred to this as his “urban renewal plan.”
I sprinted toward the stairs, not bothering to look back at the damage that gunship had inflicted in the hall.
Someone had propped the door to the stairwell wide open, so I slid in like a baseball player stealing home. I sprang to my feet, and started down the first set of stairs. Dozens of men ran ahead of me. Judging by the clatter, hundreds more were at my back.
I found myself panicking along with the Unified Authority Marines. In another minute or two, the Army of the Enlisted Man’s Empire would bring down this building and everyone in it. Anyone unlucky enough to trip in this stairwell, be he in shielded armor or wearing civilian clothing, would find himself buried under a thousand thousand tons of rubble, so we all had the same need—we needed to escape. Then again, the bastards were Unified Authority Marines. I pulled out my little pistol and shot the guy in front of me in the back of the neck. The way he fell, it probably looked to everyone else like he tripped, and his dead form tackled four people in front of him. I leaped over his corpse and kept running.
Then MacAvoy shut off the lights. I didn’t know if his men turned off a circuit breaker in the building or cut through the cables to the entire neighborhood; all I knew was that the stairs went from dim to dark, then to dusk as the emergency lights produced what little glow they had to offer.
When I reached the landing for the twenty-third floor, I shot the guy to my left in the gut. He fell, and people trampled him; I lost track of what happened after that. If it weren’t for the combat reflex saturating me with adrenaline and testosterone, I wouldn’t have lasted these five more floors. Now though, with my endurance boosted and mind alert, I had all the strength I needed to continue. Without looking back, I aimed my gun over my shoulder me and fired three shots. Somebody shrieked.
None of the people in the stairwell carried rockets. Only a few wore armor. As I crossed a landing and approached a ledge overlooking the next flight of stairs, I pushed the man to my right over the top of the rail. It didn’t take much strength, just a quick shove, and he cartwheeled over the railing.
Killing him might have been a mistake. He fell onto the next landing, crashing down on five or six people, who formed a human snowball that clogged the next flight of stairs. As I reached the sixteenth floor, a tangle of heads, backs, and limbs formed a dam at the top of the stairs. While other escapees stood staring, mindless and confused, I climbed over the rail and swung myself so that I dropped onto the next set of stairs. Dozens of Unifieds saw what I had done and tried to follow. When I did it, I’d been alone. With so many men clamoring on such a short stretch of rail, they climbed on top of each other, kicking and punching and trying to knock everyone else out of the way. A few of them might have followed me down to the next landing, but I saw a steady stream of men falling past the stairs and dropping sixteen floors.
When I lowered myself, I landed on the heads and shoulders of the men ahead of me, inadvertently causing a human avalanche that conveyed me down to the next landing. Men fell on top of me, behind me, in front of me. I shot some and clambered over others.
Somewhere deep inside me, I realized that I had become a vampire feeding off the panic of these men, these enemies of my state, these sons of bitches who had returned to my world hoping to reclaim it for themselves. In the darkness of the stairwell, I saw their writhing bodies as silhouettes, as shadow-men; they were something less than human, and I felt no worse about killing them than I would about stepping on roaches or ants.
That was when I threw that little pistol away.
I had slipped into combat reflex overdrive, killing for the fun and the adrenaline boost in my blood. That was happening more and more frequently. Killing enemies in battle came with the job; shooting men in the back as they ran for their lives held no honor.
About the same time that I had tossed away my pistol, the lights came back, and soldiers wearing the uniform of the Enlisted Man’s Army and clear plastic breathing masks entered the stairwell. They had guns and they had orders—anyone who surrendered was a prisoner of war, anyone who resisted would be shot.
As I stood, a captain approached me and asked, “Does your shirt match your pants?”
I looked at my pants—khakis with blue piping. All the while that I had
spent hiding my blouse, it never occurred to me that my pants would give me away. I opened the jacket, and the captain said, “General Harris, would you come with me, sir? General MacAvoy would like a word with you.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-SIX
The real battle for the capital began that evening. Everything else had been a prelude, just a feint that enabled the Unifieds to establish a beachhead from which they could infiltrate our strongholds.
I had exposed them.
With that jacket off and my blouse on display, MacAvoy’s soldiers recognized me. They gave me an Army helmet and a flak jacket and led me outside. Warm darkness now covered Washington, D.C. In that darkness, a gunship flew low to the ground, taking advantage of a wide avenue to fly lower than the rooftops. The men in that bird were hunting, daring any Unifieds to fire their rockets, while fighters circled overhead, and tanks rumbled down the boulevard.
The building across the street lay in ruins, its walls unrecognizable, a mere corner still standing while flames danced on its bric-a-brac slopes. I looked along the street and saw glowing light shining from street gutters.
I pointed and told the captain escorting me, “There! Under the street.”
He didn’t even give it a glance before saying, “Yeah, yeah, they’re under the street; there’s not much we can do about it. We don’t want to blow up the streets if we can help it, sir. General MacAvoy wants to keep the collateral damage to a minimum.”
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