“Soldiers are moving,” Leah whispered to Wolfgang. He nodded and checked his sighting of the location where Sergeant Goetze had determined they would shoot the couple in the red dress and tuxedo. The heavy cloud cover darkened the skies long before complete sunset and having enough light to target by remained a concern. He might have to shoot in the dark.
“When this happens, when I fire, we need to run.”
“I know, Captain. We run to the rally point.”
“I’m not a captain. I’m not even a soldier. And we keep running if we have to.”
“You’re better than a soldier.”
Wolfgang chewed on his lip for a moment, then said, “I’ve never killed anyone, Leah.”
“I know,” she replied. “But didn’t you tell me your mormon book captain had to kill his enemy to protect his people? Aren’t the aliens our enemy?”
“They are.”
He returned to checking his sight again, not wanting to talk any more. Leah busied herself with her range finding telescope, respecting his silence.
The former Fifth Under Captain Third Assault, now Sixth Under Lieutenant Second Grenadier, but more importantly Gerrel Otdessig to her, finished conferring with another soldier and returned to where Jayla and several other squad members waited outside their combat craft.
She smiled at him with all of the love she could muster, but he maintained a serious expression.
“We’ll hover in quadrant zee fourteen until the Lord Admiral is away,” he explained and the squad entered the combat craft. Gerrel moved forward to the seats right behind the pilots, and Jayla went into the back with the other soldiers as would be expected of her. They seemed nicer to her now that she and Gerrel were engaged. Some even congratulated her.
Jayla Otdessig. She wanted to find pen and paper and write the name a hundred times, lingering over every syllable and contemplating what her future with Gerrel would hold. What would it like being a Hrwang wife? Would it be hard to learn all of his customs? How many of hers would he accept? How would they raise their children? Would they live on Hrwang or on Earth?
Too excited to focus, too giddy to care about the answers to her own questions, Jayla strapped herself in her seat and hoped this duty would end soon. Did Hrwang soldiers get leave when they got engaged? She knew some Earth armies did that. Where would they go?
Shut up Jayla. Focus.
Her commands to herself didn’t work. She wanted to jump up and down and run around the craft high fiving everyone.
She felt the familiar lurch as the Hrwang combat craft jumped from its location on the ground to one in the air somewhere, its engines taking over and allowing the vehicle to hover in the sky. She looked up toward her fiancé and out the windows beyond. It was getting dark.
Eva hugged the Lord Admiral tightly so he couldn’t see her face. Always proud of her poker face, her ability to display on it whatever emotion she chose, Eva didn’t trust that she was in such control right now.
“My dear,” the Lord Admiral explained. “I’m so happy. Thank you.”
He took her reaction for assent. She’d leave it that way. She didn’t know if she could trust herself to say anything.
He wanted her to go to Hrwang? Two and a half years in cold sleep there, two and a half years back. Five years of her life! She didn’t know anything about Hrwang. She could barely follow a conversation in Est and must have sounded like a kindergartner when she spoke it. She couldn’t go to Hrwang.
Her mind evaluated a thousand things she could do and rejected every one of them, while she held the alien leader in her arms.
He caressed her bare shoulders and kissed her head.
“I will take you hiking up Mount Esrain and we will jog along the beach every morning at my vacation home. It will be wonderful. And then we will be back here before you know it. It will only feel like we will be gone a few weeks.”
Five years!
Eva didn’t know how, but she had to run away. How much time did she have?
“When do we leave?”
Her voice didn’t sound as excited as she tried to make it. Her insides felt only panic, and she knew she was going to blow her cover. She felt like she had to use a bathroom. Now. Were there any in this overly decorated hell hole?
“Soon. I will give you more than ten minutes notice.” He grinned. “There are many things I must do first. I don’t know how long they will all take.”
She nodded, her eyes darting everywhere, her mind still figuring out options.
Get a grip, Gilliam, she ordered herself, and felt relief at the Lord Admiral’s next words.
“My dear, could you allow the Lieutenant Grenadier to escort you back to our transport? I will follow shortly.”
Eva noticed the vaguely familiar man who had sat at the Lord Admiral’s left at dinner enter the room.
“Of course,” she said, and she reached up and grabbed the Lord Admiral’s face, pulling his mouth to hers. She kissed the Lord Admiral with all the passion she could muster. She knew she couldn’t act her way through the next minute, so her kiss had to throw the Lord Admiral off guard, appeal to his lust, and allow her to make her escape.
It worked.
“I can’t wait to get back to Hearst with you,” he mumbled through the kiss and she squeezed him again, then rushed out of his presence, past his next visitor, and back into the mad king’s bedroom.
Tomes waited dutifully there.
She took his arm and he started to pull away.
“You’re to escort me back to our transport,” she said loudly.
“Someone could report us,” he hissed.
She squeezed his arm in hers, holding it against her body.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “Before I knew you. Before I loved you, I flirted with you to make him envious. Powerful men like to think they’ve bested a rival. I’m so sorry, but if anyone says anything, he’ll think I’m just doing it again.”
“He won’t think you like me?”
“No. I took care of that the first day we met. He believes I think you are just a boy.”
Tomes stiffened a little.
“Is it what you think?”
They were in the dining room now, the table back down in the kitchen below, the chairs sitting in their strange, empty rectangular formation. No one else was in the room.
“We have to leave, Tomes. We have to run away. Soon.” She walked quietly next to him for a moment, waiting for him to ask why. He didn’t. She had to persuade the man next to her to help her escape. It was the only thing she could think of. If he believed she loved him as much as he loved her, he would do anything for her.
She could escape.
“He wants to take me to Hrwang,” she revealed. “He says we leave soon. I’ll be gone five years.”
The wheels began spinning in his mind now. They left the Lower Hall and headed down the stairs to the exit, passing a squad of soldiers.
Out of their earshot, he whispered, “He’ll take me to Hrwang with you. We’ll run away there. We’ll be together. I promise.”
“Will we?” Eva never felt such fear for the future as she did now. She’d rather face the gangs of Las Vegas with her MP-23 than deal with what she had to deal with now. “Earth is more chaotic. We’ll find someplace where he can’t search us out.”
“I don’t know. I have friends. Family on Hrwang.”
She had to convince him to help her escape from Hearst. She had to get to Juan and Mark. But she wasn’t sure she knew how to make him listen.
What was she going to do? This was a mess.
Everything was happening too quickly.
Soldiers opened the main doors for them and they stepped out into the cool night air to head down the steps to the courtyard, both concentrating on their uncertain futures.
“Target
acquired,” Leah whispered formally. “They’re coming up on the spot. Wait. They’ve stopped.”
Wolfgang took a deep breath.
Eva grabbed Tomes and hugged him, not caring who saw them or what they reported.
“Promise me we’ll figure something out,” she whispered.
He hugged her quickly, guiltily, then used his arm around her to face her back down the steps and on their path to the combat craft that would transport them back to Hearst Castle. Eva allowed him to lead her.
Wolfgang could tell through his sights, even in the dimming light, that the blonde woman in the red dress was uncommonly beautiful. What sort of a person was she? A spoiled, rich girl who used her looks to charm her way into wealth and power? Or was she a conniving Lady Macbeth, desirous of furthering her own ends by using everyone around her? He convinced himself she was the latter, and he thought of his wife and how the alien attacks had caused her death.
His finger caressed the trigger. The targets were almost at the agreed upon spot. They just had to take two steps forward.
When the couple released their embrace, Wolfgang saw something else on the woman’s face. Fear. Worry. Concern for something. She was clearly upset. She wasn’t in charge of her life. She didn’t have control over everything around her.
She wasn’t who he wanted her to be.
“Ready?” Leah asked in a whisper.
Ready? How does one get ready to take a human life?
He squeezed the trigger.
Tomes’ head exploded all over Eva, his body bucking into her and pushing her against the protruding, uneven stones of the wall next to them. One of those stones exploded next to her, showering her with dust and grit that caked on the blood and gore from the lieutenant that covered her and her dress. She ducked, crouched, her training assessing her tactical situation, and she knew she couldn’t stay by the man she’d just tried to talk into helping her run away.
He was dead.
She somersaulted down the stairs, the stone tearing at the fabric of her dress, her heels getting in the way. She tried to kick them off as she tumbled, but they stayed stubbornly on, the straps around her ankles anchoring them to her feet.
Another shot crumbled a stone in the wall.
Something tugged at the skirt of her dress as it flailed around her and she heard a shot ricochet off the stairs. She didn’t stop to look, but she knew there would be a bullet hole in her clothes and the next would hit her if she didn’t move faster.
She angled to dive over the side of the stairs, falling at least four feet to the courtyard below, scraping hands and knees. She tried to scramble up on her feet, then thought better of it when a heel caught in uneven bricks, and she threw herself forward. Another shot hit the side of the steps and may have hit her if she’d gotten to her feet. She scrambled for the only safety she could see, a building that was hopefully between her and her attackers.
She reached cover, another shot hitting uselessly off the side of the building above her. The shooter had led her correctly and had fired, even though he must have known the building intervened.
In the shelter of the building, she breathed finally, then reached down and undid the straps of her heels, throwing them as far away from her as she could. One of them, as soon as it came to rest, flipped up again in two pieces, torn in half by another sniper round. She knew she would be dead if she even peeked around a corner.
Soldiers scrambled everywhere and the feeling of being alone against the sniper dissipated. She lay against the uneven wall and looked back to where she’d come from, the headless body of the Lord Admiral’s security chief still slumped over where she dropped him.
All of her resolve. All of her self-control. It meant nothing to her. She let it all go and wailed her grief and hoped the distant, bloodless sniper could hear her. She hoped the Hrwang found him and killed him and killed his family and his friends and everyone he ever loved. She hoped they tortured him, flaying him alive like they always threatened to do.
She cried and moaned and it didn’t help.
When hands reached out to her, she punched them away blindly, grief and fury tangled together, then she balled up on the ground, sobbing, the adrenaline gone and a growing emptiness replacing it, filling her soul.
“You missed!” Leah cried and Wolfgang ignored her. He timed his next shot to look like he had simply misjudged, striking the wall behind the woman in red a second time. Another shot rang out, this one from Goetze, and almost struck her. Her tumbling made her a difficult target. Wolfgang tracked her in his sights and saw Goetze almost hit her again as she scrambled and dove into cover. Wolfgang fired a third, useless shot against the side of the building.
Everything he had done, he could justify. No one would know he had missed on purpose. He couldn’t even admit that to Leah. He had simply missed a moving target, one more difficult than shooting a deer. He’d simply explain away his first missed shot to her uneven movement after she and the man in the tuxedo had embraced. Goetze’s shot had hit first and pushed her away from where Wolfgang had fired. It was as simple as that.
Something blocked his view of the courtyard where enemy soldiers scrambled for cover and moved to aid the woman. He stopped thinking of how he would explain away his misses and moved his eye away from the scope. He saw a large aircraft hovering in the sky in front of them, between them and the castle. It was so close, he thought he could reach out and touch it.
“Run!” he cried and grabbed Leah, pulling her away from their shooting spot, abandoning his highly specialized sniper rifle, abandoning his backpack and his food and his water, abandoning everything except her, pulling her with him down the slope and into the cover of the trees below.
The woman in the red dress had run from them, and now it was their turn to run from her soldiers. Leah said something, wanted to go back for something, but he held her arm like a vise and pulled her. She didn’t fight it, but slipped and ran and slipped again down the muddy slope with him, back down the hill and toward hoped for safety.
“It’s too dark,” Jayla heard a pilot yell back at Gerrel as another shot pinged off the side of the combat craft.
“Just hit the whole ridge,” he replied, and Jayla felt the craft moving. She knew it spewed lightning from its belly as it moved along the ridge the snipers had probably fired from. She wondered if the snipers had killed anyone or even who they had been targeting. It had to have been someone important for all of the security the Hrwang had put in place.
As they swept back up a second time, fires from burning trees and brush lighting the sky, no more shots hit them. The snipers had fled.
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