by Lane, Summer
“What’s your point, Commander Davis?” I demand, agitated.
“My point is that Mauve is a great ally…but she will do anything to keep this place safe and concealed, and what’s more, she has the ear of the people. She can turn the people against you in a second.” Em leans forward, lowering her voice. “Stay on her good side and you’ll have a better chance of finding what you want here.”
She starts climbing again.
I take a deep breath and follow. We climb and climb, until we reach the very top – the fourteenth level. It’s little more than an apartment floor, long hallways twisting around the structure of the edifice, locked doors and stale, undecorated walls.
“Em,” I say.
Em pauses and turns to face me. She looks worried, her eyes rimmed with red.
“I’m not here to hurt anybody,” I say. “I’m here to help.”
She replies, “I hope you’re right.”
Elle pops her head out of an open doorway.
“Cassidy,” she says. “I mean, Commander. This is sweet!”
I peek inside the room where she’s housing with Manny. It’s a basic apartment – small kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedroom. A wide, open window overlooks the harbor below. Bravo has his paws on the windowsill, ears perked up, tail wagging.
“Nice,” I say.
Elle sits on the couch. It bounces beneath her weight, and she grins. Cheng waltzes in from the bedroom and crosses his arms.
“It seems secure,” he mutters. “I don’t know that I like being this high up in a building, though.”
“Baby,” Elle says, making a face.
I keep moving, passing the room where Andrew and Uriah are staying – along with some other men from my detachment. My room is the one on the end. I walk inside to find Vera sitting motionless on the couch, staring out the window. I leave Em Davis in the hall and close the door.
“What is it?” I ask. “Vera? What’s wrong?”
She looks at me, exhaling.
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just…”
“Spit it out.”
“I miss California.” She shrugs. “I just miss it.”
I sit next to her on the couch.
“Me too,” I say.
It’s the truth. It’s my home, and I miss it, too.
“Any luck with President Bacardi?” she asks.
“No. She denies that they have weapons,” I reply.
“Do you believe her?”
“I don’t know.” I sigh. “And she doesn’t want us to recruit.”
“I figured.”
“I hate to think that this is a dead end mission,” I continue.
“You don’t know that it is, yet,” Vera says.
“Right.”
“We’ll keep trying. Give it a couple of more days. Maybe the president will warm up to us.”
I laugh a little.
“Probably not,” I say. “She’s not my number one fan.”
“Here’s a newsflash for you, Cassidy,” Vera deadpans. “Not everybody is.”
Chapter Six
We sleep through the night. I burrow into the bed in the bedroom. It is just me, Vera, Margaret and Isabel here, and I welcome the relative privacy – apart from the rest of the militia. In the early morning, I snap awake, buried under a pile of wool blankets, still fully dressed, my rifle cradled against my arm like a baby.
“Nice hair, ace,” Vera remarks, waltzing past my bed. She’s wearing a clean set of dark fatigues and a thermal shirt, her hair washed.
“Why are you so clean?” I murmur, annoyed.
“I took a shower.” She flicks her platinum-blond hair over her shoulder. “You should do the same – take care of the rat’s nest on your head that you like to refer to as hair.”
I glare at her, patting my unruly red locks, trying to smooth the curls away.
I slowly roll out of bed, laying my rifle on the blanket. I peer into the living room, dimly lit. Elle and Cheng are sitting on the couch, talking in low tones. Elle is smiling, and Cheng is laughing. Bravo watches the whole thing with a look of curiosity while Manny lounges in the corner, flipping through the pages of a dog-eared book.
“Apparently everybody decided to congregate in our room?” I ask.
“Apparently,” Vera replies. “I guess that makes us the popular dorm on campus.”
“I guess.”
I head toward the bathroom, a simple space with a shower, sink and toilet. I find a pile of clean clothes on the counter with a piece of paper pinned to a green jacket. It reads: For Commander Hart. Nice. I peel off my damp clothes and dump them on the floor, shivering in the cold. I step into the shower, elated to discover that there is hot water. I turn the knob and hot water streams out, steaming up the entire room. I beam and step under the waterfall, closing my eyes – thinking.
Can Mauve be trusted? Probably. She seems like a tough, opinionated woman who is clearly used to getting her way. My arrival is probably difficult for her to accept, isolated as she is from the reality of the bloody war with Omega.
We will win this thing. We will.
I get dressed, comb my hair back and watch the slender, strong, sharp-eyed girl in the mirror staring back at me.
Get the job done, I tell myself.
I leave the washroom with a pile of dirty clothes, dumping them under my cot.
Uriah is nowhere to be seen.
“I propose we go find ourselves some breakfast,” Manny drawls, standing up. “Who’s with me?”
“Count me in,” Elle says.
She stands up, leashing Bravo and pulling on her gloves. All of us lace up our shoes and button our jackets, opening the door. We head down the hall. Andrew and Uriah are here, talking. Uriah meets my eyes as I move forward. He stops talking and falls into step with me.
“Chow hall is outside,” he says. “Em Davis was here early, and she wanted to make sure you knew where to find it.”
“You talked with her?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“What do you think of her?”
Uriah cocks an eyebrow.
“I think she’s just as scared as everybody else,” he says. “But she knows something.”
“Yeah, she warned me to take it easy with President Bacardi,” I tell him. “She’s giving me resistance about recruiting troops.”
“Figures. Nothing is ever easy.”
“Nope. Never.”
Outside, the morning air is cutting and cold, and the dusky twilight of the winter solstice is disorienting. My men are talking, laughing and hanging out around the Begich Towers, coming and going from a large, white tent erected on the back end of the parking lot. Some of them are smoking cigarettes, and others are playing card games on the steps of the buildings.
I find myself smiling. It is wonderful to see them happy – relaxed, for once.
“Commander Davis told us that they use the old wedding party tent for a mess hall because they ran out of room inside the towers,” Andrew tells me, walking hand in hand with Vera. “And get this: before the Collapse, pretty much every citizen in the entire town lived inside the towers. The police department’s office was in the bottom level, where President Bacardi is now.”
“So the entire city lived under one roof?” Isabel asks. “That’s crazy.”
“That’s how it was.”
“That’s how it still is,” Uriah remarks.
We walk inside the massive event tent. Inside, it is glowing with lamplight, and a makeshift buffet table has been set up along the wall. Some of my men are eating at rows of plastic tables, shoveling forkfuls of meat and potatoes into their mouths. It smells wonderful.
There are people I don’t recognize, too. Survivors from the campground and city park. They are fairly clean, dressed in basic clothes, keeping their eyes down and their shoulders hunched.
Manny says, “Are these survivors from Yukon City?”
“Yeah.”
“Look,” Uriah says, gesturing to a sign on the w
all. It reads:
Meal Rotation Schedule
0400 Militia
0500 Camp 1
0600 Camp 2
“They got themselves a feeding schedule, nice,” Manny remarks. “And where do we fit into this? We missed the 0400 hog-call.”
“Davis said we could hit the 0600 this morning,” Uriah says. “But tomorrow we need to be dining with the Yukon City militia.”
Sounds reasonable.
There is a large group of refugees – maybe fifty – inside the chow hall. They keep to themselves, watching my soldiers with baleful eyes. I get in line with the rest of my platoon. Expressionless women spoon food onto my plate. They avoid eye contact and conversation.
Okay, then. Very friendly.
We find a spot at a table. Just as we are sitting down, a man twists around in his seat, staring at Elle and Bravo.
“Oh, that’s a very cute puppy you have there, girly,” he says. “Is he for sale?”
Bravo’s ears twitch. Elle stands at the table, her fists clenched.
“No,” she replies.
Cheng murmurs something to her and touches her arm. She nods, relaxing a bit.
“That’s not very polite.” The man talking is tall and spindly, with dull gray eyes and a hooked nose. “Don’t tell me, the doggy is your friend, right? That’s downright adorable.”
Laughter.
Suddenly all eyes in the room are on our small table, and I feel like the refugees are looking through us with X-ray vision, whispering amongst themselves. Who are we? Why are we here? Why have we intruded upon their meal rotation schedule?
Elle grips her fork, keeping her back to the man. I know that it is taking everything in her to avoid confronting him, and I applaud her for that. Elle just stands there, staring at the table, her fork in hand. She continues to ignore him, kneeling down and giving Bravo a plate of his own food.
She exhales and relaxes. Good.
The man’s eyebrows arch.
“You’re giving a mutt the food that we’re supposed to eat?” he screeches. “Hey, look! She’s giving our rations to a dog!”
The ragtag survivors stand at their tables, muttering among themselves. A little girl stands on the table, straining to see, pointing.
Somebody yells, “SELFISH ROTTER!”
Elle looks at me. I take a deep breath.
“No,” I warn.
She nods, swallowing.
The man with the hooked nose is clearly an instigator – and he’s angry. He stands up, slamming his utensils against the table. They bounce off the plastic and clatter to the ground. The chow hall is now a swirl of yelling and expletives as the refugees stand on their tables or chairs, staring at Bravo, staring at Elle – staring at all of us.
“No dog should get our rations!” somebody yells.
“That’s right! EAT THE DOG INSTEAD!”
“KILL THE DOG!”
Elle’s eyes widen. I feel a stone drop to the pit of my stomach, sensing what is about to happen. Quicker than a blink, Elle whirls around. She steps onto the table, grabs the man’s head and smashes his forehead against the table. He screams, and she drives her fork into his hand, the tongs digging through his flesh and protruding through the palm.
He shrieks in pain, tumbling backward. Elle calmly rolls back over the table, tight, controlled anger flashing in her cool blue eyes. Cheng grabs her arm.
“No,” he hisses.
There is a moment of total silence in the room, where everyone – survivors and soldiers alike – are watching the spindly man writhe on the ground, a purple bruise blossoming across his forehead and blood gushing from his hand.
The room explodes.
The ragtag survivors lunge across their tables, headed straight for my platoon and the rest of the soldiers in the chow hall. I jump on top of the table, grabbing the head of one young woman and slamming it against my plate. She goes limp. Elle slides a knife out of her sheath and dances through the assault, driving her blade into an older man’s shoulder. He yells, stumbling away, tripping on a bench.
The few soldiers from my detachment meet the force of angry civilians head-on. There is screaming, profanities, confusion. Blood splatters onto the tables and smears across the floor. I see Manny hop on top of a table, swinging a chair by the leg and smacking people in the head. He cackles hysterically, shouting, “Come and get it, you oil-soaked wash rags!”
This is insane. These are civilians. They shouldn’t be fighting us. We’re protecting them.
I get back to the floor, crushed between civilians and my men. There are only fifteen of my soldiers fighting the fifty or so survivors. But my people are trained to fight – they are conditioned to it. My heart thunders in my chest and the blood pumps through my veins. I spin around Elle, dodging the vicious slash of her knife as Cheng does an impressive flip off the wall, propelling himself into the chest of a huge, burly man with a beard. The man crashes to the ground, dazed. Cheng hops to his feet, a roguish smile on his face. I jump over a fallen survivor and duck a punch by a strong, middle-aged woman with a shaved head. A red, ugly scar cuts up her cheek. She throws another punch. I duck it again, driving my elbow into her neck. She stumbles sideways and I kick her down, where she hits the floor with a dull thud.
I keep moving. Chairs sail through the air, people crash into the plastic tables, shattering or bending them. Plates careen to the floor, breaking into thousands of pieces. A man with greasy brown hair slides to the ground and picks up a slice of broken glass, clutching it in his hand like a knife. He blocks my path, taking a swing. The tip of the shard slices my shoulder.
I feel a rush of pulsing red fury.
I block his next swipe with my wrist, snapping his hand backward. He screams, and the shard of broken plate falls out of his hand. I jam my knee into his stomach. He careens forward. I spin around, still grasping his arm, and pull his hand backward. His arm cracks, the sound of bone breaking. He screams again, and I let him go. He lands face first on the floor, writhing in pain and shock.
I feel nothing for him.
I look up, sweat running down my face, and see Uriah. I wipe the corner of my mouth with my hand, tasting blood. He flashes through the fight and comes to my side.
“You hurt?” he asks.
“No.”
A heavy man wearing a baseball cap tries to grab Uriah from behind, but Uriah is far too agile. He whirls around, trips him, and kicks him into the ground.
I feel a jolt of pride – of power. We are the alpha dogs here. We are the fighters.
As soon as the thought floats through my head, something shatters against the back of my skull. Color explodes before my eyes and I stumble forward, crashing into the glass hood of the buffet counter. The hood crumbles under the weight of my body. Pieces of broken glass dig into the palms of my hand and cut my face. I hit the ground, feeling pain crack through every bone. My head is fuzzy, jarred with pain. Something hot and sticky drips down the back of my neck. Blood?
I struggle to stand, but I am too unsteady. I look up. I see the man with the hooked nose advancing on me. Pieces of a broken plate lay at his feet – and probably in the back of my head, too. He still has a fork embedded in his hand. He lunges toward me, but Uriah grabs him around the neck. He lowers the man to the floor, his face turning a muted shade of purple. I am disoriented – everything is louder than it should be, rushing. I vaguely see the fury in Uriah’s black eyes as he steadies his grip around the man’s neck. The man kicks and claws, but Uriah is too strong. After a long moment, the man goes still. His limp hand hits the ground, the fork clattering against the concrete floor.
Uriah shoves him aside and rushes to me.
“Cassidy, are you okay?”
I blink.
“Yes,” I say. “It just looks bad.”
He helps me stand up. And that’s when I see it. Leaning against Uriah’s body, I see the woman with the shaved head standing in the corner of the room, surveying the chaotic scene around her. She holds a gun in h
er hand – a small gun, maybe nothing more than a Glock. She lifts it up, gripping it with both hands, until it is even with her chest.
Oh, no you don’t.
Pure instinct drives my next movements. I slip Uriah’s handgun out of his holster, bring it up, take a breath, aim and squeeze the trigger. The motion is so organic – so fluid – that I do not even have to think about it. It’s simply an extension of who I am.
The bullet cracks through the Mess Hall, loud and clear. My aim is spot-on. The woman’s head snaps backward, a small, bloody hole blossoming in the center of her forehead. The gun clatters to the floor. She falls to the floor, dead.
Vera sprints across the room and seizes the gun, shoving it into her belt. The refugees freeze, a hush falling over the crowd.
No, no, no. I didn’t want to kill her. I didn’t want to. But I had to.
The refugees slowly begin to shrink away, and Uriah and I back out of the chow hall. Elle spits on the ground as we exit, her knuckles bloody, a gash above her eye. Bravo follows her closely, his ears down, a fierce growl boiling deep in his throat. Cheng puts his hand on her arm, muttering something that I cannot hear.
“Here comes trouble,” Vera says.
A strong detachment of thirty or so National Guard troops screech up to the chow hall in pickups, armed to the teeth. Em gets out of the truck, her gun jammed into her shoulder. Her dog is not here. President Bacardi and her personal detachment of guards flash out of the Begich Towers. She is wrapped in a thick wool coat, towering above most of her men. Her hands are balled into fists.
“What’s going on?” Em demands. Weapons are trained on us. All of them.
I hold my bloody hands up.
“Your men confronted us,” I say. “We were just defending ourselves.”
Em takes a deep breath and nods at a lieutenant on her right. They go inside the chow hall, searching it out. Refugees have begun to disperse as the soldiers arrive, but I hear screaming and wailing from inside the tent.
Em emerges from the tent, her face pale. She whispers something low to Mauve, casting a dark glance at me. Mauve’s expression tightens.
“Commander Hart,” she says, tightly. “May I have a word?”