“Now.”
“The Revenant will be range for another hour or so; she’s in a high orbit.”
Both Kassandra and Zara looked at Akio. He nodded. Kassandra then looked back at her mother. “Okay. You’ll have to put on a Defender uniform. We’ll sneak you out. You can ride pillion. We have to get you up to level thirty to get out of the silo, since that’s where the exits are. Actually, let’s go to level thirty-one first, so no one else sees you while you suit up. If they do, we’ll say you’re just there to see me off. Blake and the others know who you are. But even if they stop you, I’m still going.”
Zara stood and hugged Akio. “You sure you’re okay with this?”
Akio pursed his lips and nodded. “Yes. I know you have to talk to your dad. But please come back. Both of you. Okay?”
“We will, Dad. I love you.” Kassandra and Zara both hugged him. After ten seconds, Kassandra broke off. “We have to go.”
Akio, his eyes moist, said: “Godspeed, my loves.”
“Jesus, Kassandra. I’ve never had a normal patrol with you yet,” Blake said, as Zara sheepishly stepped out of the shadows on level thirty.
“Yeah, well, we’re not starting now,” Kassandra retorted.
“There’s nothing normal about things the way they are now anyway,” Taygete said. She sighed. “I sure hope we live through this.”
They walked along the catwalk to door 30F. “We’re going to have to be stealthier than ever,” Blake said.
“Yep,” Asterope said.
“They can’t mess with what they can’t catch,” Kassandra said. “Speed is our friend.”
“Yeah, but you saw their guns,” Thaddeus said, in an irritated, condescending tone. “You know, you’re not some kind of superwoman who saves the world the minute she puts on a uniform.”
Kassandra shot him an angry look, but stayed silent.
The group exited into the strip-lit corridor to the anterooms. They followed Blake as he turned left then right, to one of the rear control rooms. Three gleaming, sleek gray motorcycles were propped up on their kickstands, charged and ready to go.
“Briefing time,” Blake said. He pulled out his display device, and projected a dinner tray-sized map of the city in midair. “Left out of here onto CR20, then right. Heading west. After five kilometers or so, there’s an exit ramp to the D489 highway. That continues west, straight out of the city.”
“Got it,” Thaddeus said.
“Five hundred meters before it exits into open air, we both stop”—he looked at Thaddeus—”and Kass keeps going. If she doesn’t come back within half an hour, we know it’s not safe outside. We head back.” Blake then looked at Zara. “I’m not responsible for your safety, since you’re not even supposed to be here.”
“Yeah, I know,” Zara said.
“Let’s go ghost and walk the bikes out.”
“This stuff’s amazing,” Zara said, after Kassandra showed her how to switch on her active camouflage. Zara patted her pocket to make sure the radio was there.
Kassandra took one of the sheathed knives in her inside pocket and handed it to her mother. “Just in case.”
They wheeled the three motorcycles out of the large, heavy metal door into a shallow alcove on the wide road. Its walls and ceiling were cracked. The asphalt was buckled in places. They looked around. “It’s not quite as crowded as it was earlier,” Blake said. “Might be different once we get on the arterial route though.” Thaddeus and Kassandra nodded. They mounted up; Kassandra and Zara on one bike, Thaddeus and Asterope on another, and Blake and Taygete on the last. Without another word, Kassandra rode out of the alcove and turned left. The others followed. Shock registered on the faces of passersby at the sight of the sleek machines and their mirage-like riders. They picked their way through the crowd at perhaps thirty kilometers per hour. After 200 meters, their intersection came up. The road strongly resembled Rue Borchal. It was hard to see. With half the streetlights out, it was like late dusk on an unlit country road, except it was jammed with obstacles. The crowd was now denser. The bikers had to carefully weave their way through the masses.
After four kilometers, they saw two black armored personnel carriers in the distance. Their headlights made them easily visible. Kassandra indicated right. They took the next turn. The riders were able to divert around the danger, and then resume their planned route. Then came the ramp. They headed up this at speed, onto a wide highway. This normally carried fast traffic. That day, it only carried downtrodden, weeping pedestrians. As the debris-filled, badly lit kilometers passed, the number of people slowly decreased. The bikes were able to maintain a consistent fifty kilometers per hour, even as they swerved around obstacles. Zara looked all around her as they rode.
Eventually, a small rectangle of daylight was visible ahead. They kept going until it was about the size of a large postage stamp held at arm’s length. There were hardly any wanderers on the road at this point. Kassandra slowed to a stop, as did the others. She turned around and looked at them, before making an X salute with her fingers. They returned the gesture. Zara looked on quizzically at the ritual. Then, she and Kassandra locked eyes for a few seconds. Without a word, Kassandra gunned it. Zara was sweating profusely. She and Zara accelerated to 100 kilometers an hour. The light ahead grew larger and larger, until they were finally outside! They kept going. The sky was gray and overcast. The lifeless eyes of men, women, and children looked up at them. Their faces were masks of terror. There were men, women, and children. Blood had pooled around their mouths and noses, and dried brown on the ground. Zara closed her eyes. Kassandra kept riding.
Two kilometers later, Kassandra stopped. She and Zara both dismounted. They hugged, as they both tried to blink away tears. “So it’s true,” Zara said. “He really did it.”
Kassandra merely shook her head as she looked at the human devastation around them. “Un-fucking-real.”
Zara shook herself back into reality. “Right. Four minutes until the communication window closes.” She pulled out the small radio, touched its small screen, and began to speak into it. “Zara to Revenant. Do you copy?”
Silence.
“Zara to Revenant. Do you copy?”
“We copy you loud and clear,” came a German accent.
“Hans! Thank God! Put my dad on please.”
It went quiet for a second, and then Kato said: “Zara! Oh my God! You’re alive!”
“So are Akio and Kassandra.”
“I have no words…”
“We were underground in Lyon when it hit.”
“And you found Kassie?”
“Yes. She and her friends are all fine. I’ll call you again when I can. Don’t change orbits, else I won’t know when you’re in range.”
There was a garbled response, and then silence. Zara turned to Kassandra. They hugged tightly. “I think we just made his day,” Zara said.
“We’d better head back,” Kassandra said. They mounted up, did a U-turn, and sped back into the city.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The March
----
“We’re truly leaving this time,” Lord August said over Silo 7’s PA system. His voice was weary. All members of The Excluded were assembled levels twenty-nine and thirty, as before. “It is safe to venture above ground. Hence, our plan hasn’t changed. You’ll stay with your units, escorted by Defenders. We will head west, as it’s the quickest way out of the city. Once we’re comfortably distant, we’ll regroup and take it from there. That is all.” There was a catch in his voice as he said the last words. He and JC made up the front of the pack again, as they headed to the exit. The masses fell in behind.
JC and August looked out from the alcove that led onto Rue Borchal. “Seems a little less crowded,” August said. Without another word, they turned left and began to head down the road. Several Raiders followed. Each group of residents had roughly a dozen people in it. There was little talking as the narrow procession, bearing backpacks, bags, rolls, and carts o
f belongings threaded its way through the refugees. Their pace, though slow in order to accommodate the slowest-moving members, was still quicker than the shuffling of many of the lost souls around them. Most of the passersby kept their eyes down, but some looked up in surprise on seeing the black-clad Defenders traveling alongside.
“Ironically, survival may be easier once we make it out of this hellhole,” Lord August said to JC. “If the virus thing is still active, of course, all bets are off. If not, between eighty and ninety percent of France’s population is likely dead, but their supplies and facilities are probably intact. That means there’s a lot to go around now.”
“Land grabs will already be being made,” JC said. “The government and rebel armies, Block B, and whoever fancies themselves a tribal chief or a warlord will be staking claims.”
“True. There are still many more resources than people for now though. There is going to be one other problem to deal with, however: body disposal.”
“Yes, been thinking about that. Decomposition will already be at an advanced stage.”
A hundred meters behind JC and Lord August, David trudged on. Etienne was on his shoulders, wearing a light, flowery sleeveless shirt and shorts combo. David’s face brow was furrowed and his eyes moist. Vivianne walked beside him, her brown hair dirty, pulling small two-wheeled cart made of square steel mesh containing their few possessions. Annabelle walked silently and morosely with them. Antonio’s tall, lanky form was behind her. Kassandra, in her black uniform, walked beside him. She had a large pack on her back. Her ski mask was in her left hand. Not far behind her were Akio and Zara. Kassandra patted her right side, where her concealed pistol was located. There was no conversation as the terror-stricken faces of strangers passed by. Indeed, Rue Borchal was nearly silent apart from footfalls and occasional crying from somewhere. The procession walked around holes in the sidewalk and other obstacles like a line of ants.
JC stopped and took out a tiny pair of binoculars. “Soldiers ahead. Right at the highway exit ramp.”
“What faction?” August asked.
“Their lapels have the Tricolor, so government.”
“What’s happening around them?”
“There are a couple of APCs there. But no fighting. They’re just waving people on,” JC said.
“Hmm. Okay. Let’s keep going.”
Ten minutes’ marching brought Lord August and JC to the group of soldiers, who wore black uniforms and helmets. The one closest to them wore a puzzled expression as he looked at August and JC, and then the procession behind them. “You have a large group,” he said. “May I inquire where you came from?”
“No, you may not,” August said curtly.
The soldier’s eyes narrowed. “Hmm. Well, we are encouraging groups of all sizes to leave the city.”
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” August said, irritably.
“Okay. Well, take the ramp up. We have units stationed all the way to the end of the tunnel, to provide safe passage.”
“What should we expect outside?” JC said.
“Almost everybody was wiped out.”
“Yes, we know that. I mean, what are the main threats?”
The soldier sighed. “It’s safe within a few kilometers of the exit. Beyond that… the situation is developing.”
“In other words, you don’t know. Surely you could have drones up surveiling the area?” JC said.
The soldier shrugged. “Most of our intelligence officers are dead.”
“Oh…”
“Carry on,” the soldier said. “You may be able to get a small amount of food and water on the way out.”
“Thank you,” Lord August said. They began to ascend on ramp for the highway, with their units in tow.
Soon after they had climbed the twenty-meter slope to the wide highway, one of the Raiders nearest the leaders said: “The units behind are complaining of being tired. They want to stop and rest.”
“Negative,” JC said. “Not until we’re out of the city.”
“It’s a long march for the elderly and the children,” Lord August said.
“We can’t risk the military tide turning while we’re still in here,” JC said. Lord August frowned, looked ahead, and kept walking.
“Is this the way we came in?” David asked.
Vivianne looked up at the highway’s wide tunnel walls and the roof, twenty meters above. “Could be. They probably all look the same.”
“Can you carry Etienne for a bit? My shoulders are aching something fierce.”
“Okay.” He passed the little girl over to her mother.
“Hungry,” Etienne said. David passed her a cracker from a small supply he kept in his pocket.
“Are we going to be stopping any time soon?” David asked Kassandra.
“I’m afraid not. Been listening on the radio. Some of the others have been asking the same thing, but JC won’t let them.”
“Hmph. I bet the older people are having a hard time here.”
The rate of complaining from the tired, frightened, grieving former residents of Silo 7 increased as they trudged the seemingly endless kilometers of the D489 highway. Troops were stationed at regular intervals to keep the crowd moving. At last, they reached the exit, where tunnel gave way to open air. Two French Army vehicles and a dozen soldiers guarded it, waving the marchers on with their guns.
“Is there any food available?” JC asked one of them.
“We ran out.”
“Who’s out there? What bad guys?” JC asked gruffly.
“We are trying to restore control, but there are a lot of desperate people and few troops.”
“That’s enough,” the sergeant next to him admonished. “Keep your group moving.”
Fifteen minutes later, all of The Excluded had left the city. Some of them had to walk with their eyes almost closed, as they were not used to the glare of daylight nor the sting of ultraviolet rays on their retinas. Those who could see eyed the piles of bodies at the side of the roadway. Either side of the road were flat, open fields. The smell of decaying flesh permeated the air.
“We’re about to have a mutiny on our hands,” a Defender’s voice said from JC’s radio. “If they go any further, they’re just going to sit down on the spot.”
“All Defenders, take your units to the field on the left of the road. We’ll rest and regroup,” JC said.
Soon, the large group was sitting in a corn field 100 meters from the road. At the beginning of spring, it was mostly dirt covered with the dead, wizened stems of the previous year’s harvest.
Akio looked behind them at the towering, gently curved face of the city, 500 meters away. The glass was punctuated with Gothic arches every kilometer or so. “I guess it didn’t all collapse,” he said to Zara. “Maybe just the part where we were.”
“Yeah.” The exhausted mob laid down, on their belongings, on each other, or on the dirt. Some ate what little food they had managed to bring. Some of the travelers on the road looked over at the large group. Civilian passenger vee-tols flew overhead, both into and out of the city.
Lord August and JC sat near the center of the group. “Now what?” Lord August said.
JC held a display unit that projected a map of the local area in midair. “We need to get to a town,” he said. “The closest ones are Feurs, to the west, and Tarare to the northwest. The problem we’re going to have is that the thousands of people leaving the city are all going to be trying to do the same thing, to find food.”
“Yes.”
“This means we’re going to have to travel further.”
“And how do you propose to get our hungry, weakened flock dozens of kilometers from here?” Lord August said.
“I never said I had the answer yet, did I?”
Blake happened to be sitting nearby, listening to the conversation. “What if we could take buses or planes or vee-tols? Surely there have to be some of those sitting around, disused.”
JC shrugged. “Maybe if a bus comes
along the road here we could hijack it. But, we’d need a few of them for nearly three hundred people. Vee-tols would be godsend, but they’ll be worth more than their weight in gold now. We’d likely get shot before we could even get close to one. If only we weren’t encumbered by the weak…”
Lord August looked stunned. “What? They’re all part of The Excluded, young or old, sick or well. How could you say such a thing?”
JC’s eyes narrowed as he looked at August. “It’s going to be survival of the fittest.”
Lord August stood up, as did JC. “I can’t believe you. One minute you’re looking out for everybody, and the next minute you’re wishing half of them away. You just want to run your own military-style community with an army at your command. If that’s what you want, go and do it.”
“Don’t tempt me. You won’t make it without me, though.”
“You’re just one man. We have plenty more men and women, very able fighters, who’ll fill your shoes.”
“Not if I take them with me.”
“Like hell you will!” Lord August shouted. The rest of The Excluded was now watching the fight. “This community is mine!”
“That’s what you’d like to think, old man,” JC said with a calm, measured coldness. “But given the choice, I think they’d rather survive than not.” Blake looked at Thaddeus and Aimee. They looked as nervous as he did.
JC addressed the crowd. “Look at your leader! This weak old man is supposedly going to deliver you all from evil. Do you really think he’s going to get you through the hardships ahead?” They looked at Lord August and then back at JC. “Come with me if you want to live. Whoever is with me, stand up.” JC scanned the crowd. “Even the impostors are welcome,” he said, looking straight at Akio and Zara. “Come on, stand up!” Thaddeus rose slowly to his feet. Blake remained seated, glaring up at him. Nobody else rose. “Who else?” JC said. A family of six stood up.
“You’ll split my community apart over my dead body!” Lord August said.
“Like I said before, that can be arranged,” JC said. The two men stared each other down.
The Extinction Switch: Book three of the Kato's War series Page 22