Tales of the Republic (The Complete Novel)

by M. G. Herron

  His eyes swept down to the lower right hand area. A dozen red circles had been drawn around riverside areas southeast of the city. Two or three of them had red Xs drawn through them. His eyes lingered there.

  “The docks. We have to go here.”

  “I already know that.” Felix pointed at one of the circles. “These are all the storehouses owned by the government. Which one is the right one?”

  Ari shook his head. “I have to see it to be sure.”

  Felix reached out and snatched a fistful of Ari’s shirt. He pointed to one of the red X’s with his free hand. “Jinyang was beaten to death by a patrol while he was casing this place. And this one here? A security drone blew Ali’s head clean off. Marcus made it back to tell us what happened, and then he died from blood loss. He’d been shot three times.”

  “I have to see it.” Ari said. “I’m sorry, but there’s no other way.”

  When Felix reluctantly released him, Ari knew he was finally sold on the idea. It wasn’t that Ari was so convincing—it was that Felix really wanted whatever lay guarded in that warehouse.

  And for some reason, Ari didn’t want to give it to him.

  But he’d come this far. If he backed out now they would certainly kill him.

  CHAPTER 37

  THE RIVERSIDE STOREHOUSE

  Felix pocketed the map. He replaced the lid on the plastic crate where the map had been stored, and put that crate back on the floor behind the sarcophagus. Felix unclipped the lid on the second crate, and digging into it, pulled out a handful of darkly-colored cloth.

  A synthetic mask with mesh across the mouth was pushed into Ari’s hands. He followed the others’ example and tied it over his face.

  Four bulletproof vests also came out of the crate. Ari put one on under his shirt. The others armed themselves with guns and spare ammunition, trading the rifles for guns they could conceal more easily under their clothes. No one gave Ari a weapon.

  “How much can you carry?” Felix asked Ari, waving toward his backpack.

  “There’s not much in here, I’ve got room.”

  Felix, Sasha, and Bishop all shouldered empty, dusty backpacks of different colors and styles.

  “Follow my lead,” Felix said. “It’s easier to walk through this part of the city now that the army abandoned Telerethon Square to the protestors, but keep your eyes on the sky.”

  Ari nodded. No one needed to tell him that again. He followed Felix out the wooden door and into the graveyard.

  The graveyard was big and flat and empty. Headstones dotted the ground in neat rows. Once through the gate, they walked along a city block where a few homeless people had found shelter beneath the awnings of shops and restaurants and bedded down for the night, curled up with their blankets and bags. For each person sleeping, another three walked the streets. Ari was grateful for the mask covering his face. Fortunately, others walking the streets often had bandannas or t-shirts tied over their faces, too.

  The group moved southeast again, blending with the crowd of civilians. They walked past a pair of police cars parked at a wide intersection No barriers were erected anymore. The cops standing by their cars made no move to stop anyone that passed. New policy, Ari supposed, after what happened in Telerethon Square yesterday. Still, his back tingled as they walked away. His guilty conscience made him sweat.

  A few blocks beyond the police cars, they came to Telerethon Square. The crowds grew even denser, which made going slow as they meandered through the crowd. The square was lit with bonfires and electric lamps that were attached to solar panels spread on the ground, the cells still hot from charging all day in the blazing sun. Music played, and people drank and laughed together. A long line snaked out from the middle of the square where the kitchen tents had been set up. The line only seemed to move a few inches at a time. People shuffled slowly forward. Ari wondered how long their supplies would last. There were a lot of mouths to feed here.

  The crowds thinned out again as they exited the square. The streets grew narrower, the buildings moved closer together with smaller faces. Litter filled the gutters. Packs of urchin children roamed the streets or huddled in groups in the shadows.

  Another half-mile onward and they passed the side-street where he and Po had been jumped by the gang of criminals. Amazingly, a few blocks later, Ari saw the rat-faced man who had attacked them. He wore a makeshift splint on his arm and a familiar sneer on his face as he leaned back against the stairs of a stoop. They made eye contact from across the street. He didn’t seem to recognize Ari with the mask on, but when he took in the four black clad, bulky figures, he quickly ducked back into the run-down house and out of sight.

  Three blocks later, they turned down a delivery alley running between two identical six story apartment buildings. Felix pulled down the fire escape ladder and began climbing the switchbacking metal stairs to the roof. Ari followed, careful not to catch his backpack on the metal as he went back and forth up the stairs.

  They came out on a flat roof, walked to the far edge, knelt, and looked out over a muddy river where docks jutted out into the water. The others all turned and looked at Ari.

  He knew what they wanted. Taking a deep breath, and ignoring their intense gaze, he focused on the layout of the river below.

  The near shoreline lay a couple hundred yards away. The river seemed low—mud and rocks ran for twenty feet between the top of the water and the edge of the shoreline. The docks seemed unnaturally exposed. Perhaps the water level had something to do with the food criss. He stored that thought for later.

  Shipping containers were stacked dozens high. Boats and barges were moored in the water. Behind the docks was a full parking lot. Beyond that, office buildings presumably reserved for the shipping companies. Buildings and pavement had pushed out all of the green space along the waterfront on this side of the river. He couldn’t see what was around the bend in the river to his left, but knew from the map that it was likely the direction of the state buildings, where the mech attack had happened and where the army now camped.

  The utilities were located on the far side of the river. Electrical lines ran down the hill toward the river, over some kind of recycling facility where the discarded remnants of life were piled high, all the way down to the shore. Ari followed the power lines to the right and saw they concluded at a gated facility with a stone building and smoke stacks. Beyond, a drainage pipe dripped onto a pavement gutter that led into the muddy river.

  It was the power plant. But their vantage point had a different angle on the plant than he had seen through the tiny, barred window in his dreams. His gazed swept back across the river, beyond the far end of docks, beyond the shipping containers, to a one-story warehouse isolated from the group. It was a squat, nondescript, unremarkable building that sat inside a fence of barbed wire at the far end, almost out of sight.

  “There,” he said, pointing.

  “Are you sure?” Felix asked.

  “I don’t see any guards on the place,” Sasha said as she looked through a collapsible pair of binoculars. “Are you sure?”

  “If there were guards on it, you would have found it and cased it already, right?” Ari said. “I saw your map.” He swept his arm across the river to indicate all the other warehouses on this side of the river, and a few others that were out of sight to the left, the ones that were circled and crossed off with a bloody pen. “You didn’t circle that building.”

  “It makes sense,” said a startling quiet voice—Bishop. That was the first Ari had heard him speak.

  “I agree,” said Felix. “If there were guards posted there, we’d have found the place weeks ago.”

  Ari knew it would be better to keep his thoughts to himself, but his curiosity got the best of him. “I don’t get it,” he admitted. “Why not keep their supplies close, where they can get to them easy?”

  “You really don’t know?” said Felix.

  Ari shook his head.

  “According to your own information, the police
knew we had a mole working somewhere in the government, but they didn’t know it was you or where you had infiltrated. When General Greif took over city defenses and learned that the police hadn’t been able to find the mole, his men scattered their munitions stores to several warehouse throughout the city. They started to hunt us down after we raided the first storehouse in Fields for supplies. That was when the fighting really began.”

  “But you didn’t know about this one,” said Ari.

  “Exactly.”

  “So how exactly did I find out about it?”

  Felix cocked his head as he stared at Ari. “Well that’s the big mystery, isn’t it? You went and got killed and lost that story along with several pints of your own blood on the pavement in Fields.”

  CHAPTER 38

  JACKPOT

  They had crept through the parking lot to the far end of the docks where the storehouse was located. Now, they lay in the grass at the edge of the fence, staying low while Bishop snipped a man-sized hole in the chainlink with a laser cutter he produced from his pocket.

  “Surely they didn’t leave the supplies completely unprotected,” Ari said.

  Bishop gave Ari a look that would have melted a fresh Slovakian snowfall in midwinter.

  “Did you lose your common sense when you were shot, too?”

  Ari felt his skin burn at the criticism.

  Felix barked a low, harsh chuckle. “They probably wired it with a security system and, if we’re lucky, tripwire explosives. But Bishop here is a demolitions expert. After many years of dangerous work, he still has all his fingers, so I’m happy to leave it in his capable hands.”

  Bishop ducked through the hole he’d cut and slowly circled the building, then approached an electrical box mounted on the wall facing their position. He worked on it with his hands and a set of tools in his belt. After five minutes, the lights on the entire building went out. He pocketed the tools and gestured for them to come across.

  The skies were clear when they stepped to the side of the building.

  “No explosives,” he said when they got close. “Only a security system, which I disarmed. Someone is going to notice that the lights and security system are out. We have five, maybe ten minutes tops before security guards show up.”

  “Let’s move,” said Felix.

  The door was locked tightly with a padlock, but Felix and Sasha made short work of it together, severing the padlock with a handheld laser cutter and punching through the lock in the door with another a device Sasha fished out of her pack that looked like a bolt gun used to stun cattle.

  When the door swung open, Bishop shone his kinetic lantern inside. The building had maybe two thousand square feet of floor space. Shelves were arranged in rows in the middle of the room like a department store. They were half-filled with packages wrapped in a dull silver tarp. The ceilings were twenty or thirty feet up, made of bare rafters and exposed insulation. The only windows were up high near the ceiling line.

  Felix used his knife to cut open a couple of the wrapped packages. “Rations in that one,” he said. “Painkillers and antibiotics over here. Take as much as you can carry of both.”

  Felix moved over another row and opened a third box. Inside, a dozen rectangles wrapped in black plastic were stacked in layers. The yellow lettering on the packaging read, “1-1/4 LBS COMP C-4.”

  Felix drew in a sharp breath through his teeth. “Jackpot,” he said.

  Behind Ari, a dotted line of red light flashed across the window.

  “Get down!” Sasha whispered.

  Ari crept to the nearest shelf and crouched out of sight. The drones barely made a sound as half a dozen craft circled the building.

  “I thought you said ten minutes,” Ari hissed at Bishop. The sight of drones had him on edge.

  “Until the security guards showed up. Not drones!”

  “They must have known we were coming,” said Felix. He and the other two stared at Ari.

  “What! No,” Ari said. “I’ve been with you the whole time.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” said Sasha. “How do we get out of here?”

  A brief, high-pitched whine cut the air. High above, a window exploded inwards, raining a shower of glass down.

  Bishop drew a Glock and sighted up at the ceiling as a drone moved in through the broken window, sweeping its scanning light across the warehouse. He fired, three quick pops. Two bullets dinged off the side of the drone. Its propeller smacked against a steel beam and a piece of insulation in the ceiling and one of the blades sheared off. The drone began to wobble and then curved in a graceful arc into one of the shelves near them. It bounced to the floor, unable to fly again. But its scanner was still active. It swept across Ari and Bishop.

  Felix and Sasha had run to the shelves. They stuffed rectangles of C-4, detonating cord, and charges into their empty backpacks.

  By the time they made it to the door, two more drones had entered the building and hovered near the roof. They had zoned in on Bishop, who took shots at them as he backed toward the doorway. Bullets ricocheted off the drones and ceiling beams, shooting sparks where the bullets made contact with metal. A turret lowered out of the bellies of both drones at exactly the same time.

  “Move! Move! Move!”

  The pewpewpew rattle of an automatic needle gun sounded from above. Something small hit Ari’s backpack with force. It caused him to stumble, but he felt no pain—the bullet must have been stopped by something in his backpack. He was outside with Bishop behind him firing toward the open door.

  One of the drones in the warehouse went dead and fell like a rock. A bullet had taken out its battery and killed it. The other drone advanced toward Bishop, still spewing needle rounds in his direction.

  Bishop twisted through the doorway and slammed the door shut on his way out, wedging the metal in the frame. They heard the muted sound of needles ricocheting off the inside of the metal door. The red light of the scanner drone shone through the crack around the door as it scanned. Finding no exit there, it reversed direction and left the building using the window through which it entered.

  Ari turned and ran after Felix and Sasha, who had just clamored through the hole in the fence and were now rising to their feet on the other side.

  Sasha cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled, “Bishop, hurry!”

  Ari bent and threw his body along the ground, then scrambled through the hole in the fence. Felix pulled him up and Ari glanced back. Mid-stride, as Bishop lifted his knee, the upper part of his body suddenly pitched forward. He hit the ground hard and his body bounced back up, his arms limp and flailing like a rag doll.

  Bishop’s body skidded to a stop, and he lay perfectly still in the grass.

  The blood-curdling scream that came from Sasha’s throat made Ari flinch. He didn’t need to go back to know that Bishop was dead, but Sasha tried to scramble back through the fence to run to him. Felix and Ari managed to grab her backpack and haul her back. She twisted and fought against them, thrashing her arms and screaming in their ears.

  Felix hauled her back as another barrage of needles pelted the ground around them. One projectile struck Ari in the left side of his face. Reaching his hand up, he pulled one of the needles, thinner than a pencil and two inches long, out of the silicone in his face.

  “Cover us!”

  “I don’t have a gun.”

  Felix tossed Sasha’s Glock to him. Ari turned and fired. The drone that had shot at them careened to the ground in a drunk circle. Half a dozen more headed straight toward them from over top of the building. He shot at them as Sasha and Felix staggered toward the edge of the docks.

  Felix lowered Sasha onto the stinking muck of the shore, the waterline several feet below them. At the level of his chest, a drainage pipe big enough to crawl through dripped into the river. Felix helped Sasha shove the backpacks through, then pushed her through with his hands on her butt before climbing into the pipe himself.

  The Glock Ari held in his hand clicked em
pty. Out of bullets, six drones hovered above him now. Ari stood at the edge of the shore, out of ammo and away from any cover. He jumped as a needle embedded itself in the ground by his feet. The red lines of their scanners swept over him. Then the barrage of needles stopped and the drones just hovered in the air above and slightly in front of him.

  “Ari, let’s go!” Felix called from the darkness of the drainage pipe.

  Ari stumbled down the muddy shoreline and shoved his backpack into the drainage pipe. He struggled up into it.

  Ahead of him, two forms shifted in the darkness. He crawled toward them, pushing his backpack ahead of him.

  Ari looked back once. One of the drones hovered there in the opening. It waited for a moment then rose out of sight and buzzed away.

  CHAPTER 39

  SURGERY

  “Doc!” Felix cried into the orange glow of the tunnel. “DOC!”

  Unlike the other platforms they’d carried Sasha by, the one that lay ahead was brightly illuminated with standing fluorescent lamps.

  They had stopped once, somewhere in the dark sewer system, to rip an extra shirt in Ari’s bag into shreds and bind Sasha’s wounds as best they could. They pulled four needles out of her shoulders and legs with slick fingers wet with her blood, but one, buried in her stomach, was too deep to remove without tools and antibiotics.

  She passed out shortly after that.

  Ari’s shoulders and arm muscles throbbed as he and Felix lifted Sasha onto the faded yellow line painted at the edge of the subway platform.

  Nianzu knelt at her side. “Her pulse is weak. Let’s get her on a table.”

  Felix and Ari clambered up onto the platform and picked Sasha up and carried her to a wheeled stretched laid with clean white sheets that became damp and red the moment Sasha was laid upon it.

  The needle had pushed part of her shirt into her stomach and staunched the flow, but blood oozed around it.