Prisoners of War

by Rick Partlow

Memories, the smell of burned flesh, the taste of blood splattered into his face, the sound of Dix’s lifeless body smacking against the hard floor. Memories that were his and not his Prime’s and yet he would gladly have allowed a roomful of DoD technicians to have their go at cutting it out of his head.

  “That is my fault. Robert wanted you, but he wanted you intact, which he couldn’t be sure of if we’d simply attacked. That’s why I was tasked with infiltrating your team.” She looked as if she wanted to spit. “Patterson was an idiot. We kept tying to convince him to get you alone where we could take you, but he dragged his feet, as if it would be too much of a betrayal. The attack on your base in Norfolk was supposed to simply force you out into the open so we could take you without harming you. But Patterson wouldn’t provide us with the codes to get close enough to use a more precise weapons targeting.”

  She ran a hand across her eyes as if she honestly regretted the incident.

  “Make no mistake, Nathan, I have killed men before, for no better reason than that I was ordered to do it. But always with intent, always on purpose. I am a scalpel, and I let Patterson’s blundering turn me into a sledgehammer. I had no reason to want any of your people dead. We only wanted you.”

  He was about to snap an angry response, something uncontrolled from deep in his gut, but she held up a hand.

  “I know this doesn’t excuse what I did, and I wouldn’t expect your forgiveness. Yet we are both soldiers in a war, and death is something that happens to soldiers.” She eyed him with piercing thoughtfulness. “Do not tell me you and Dix and many of the men and women you’ve served with have not come to the life of a mercenary seeking a meaningful death.”

  That hit him right between the eyes and he found himself nodding.

  “When you’ve only got twelve or thirteen years to live,” he said, “thinking about how you’re going to die just seems like good planning.”

  “I understand. And yet this is part of what Robert wanted you for.”

  “I thought he wanted to dupe me,” Nate ground out, motioning to his bandaged thigh. “Though to what end, I’m still not sure.”

  “Part,” she repeated. “Because he has himself thought much about the quickly progressing specter of death, and how it might be avoided.”

  “By duping himself over and over?”

  “This has been a stop-gap. The goal has always been to live forever.” She smiled at him, not beneficent nor could he describe it as evil. Instead, it seemed the smile a dragon might give when it looked out over its vast hoard of gold. “And the goal, Nathan Stout, is in sight.”

  10

  “This seems like a really odd place to meet a friend,” Roach said, clutching at the grip of her pistol.

  “He’s a really odd friend,” Fuller admitted.

  She’d offered him one of their M20s, but Fuller had begged off. Instead, he was carrying an antique even more vintage than Nate’s Glock on his hip, something she’d never seen outside a museum, a Colt 1911 he called it. It was big and heavy and metal and only held eight rounds, but he swore it would be enough.

  “Man, I thought the Fry was sketchy,” Ramirez murmured from just to her right and way too close behind her.

  She eyed him balefully and gently pushed him away a step.

  “Let’s remember our interval,” she said. “And our personal space.”

  She didn’t blame him for wanting to stick close, though, not here. If the Fry was where the winners, the survivors, the stubborn of post-war Norfolk came to congregate, then the Barrens was the habitat of the losers, the desperate, the slowly dying. Tent cities had popped up between collapsing buildings, using the dilapidated and crumbling walls as wind breaks, the parks and back yards and road medians as makeshift vegetable gardens.

  Sullen and envious eyes stared out from the shadows, hiding from the light like the rats they caught for food. Here and there, a child would be standing out in the open, painfully skinny, salvaged clothing hanging off their emaciated frames in rags. Her stomach lurched and she wished she’d brought food…but knew it was better she hadn’t. If any of them had looked like they had anything worth stealing, they would have been mobbed in an instant. As it was, they were visibly armed and had nothing but their weapons and the clothes on their back.

  We should be fine. Yeah, I should just keep telling myself that.

  They’d driven into the Barrens in the old, salvaged pickup truck, leaving it behind when the roads had become impassable. By design. Someone had dragged debris, dumpsters, old tractor tires, refrigerators out into the middle of the street, blocking it off from vehicle traffic. She wondered at first if it was a setup for an ambush, but the level of debris and detritus layered on the roadblocks showed it had been there for years.

  Maybe someone else’s ambush. Wonder how it turned out for them?

  From the roadblock, they’d walked. She and Ramirez hadn’t been crazy about the idea, but Fuller had insisted. It hadn’t been far, barely a kilometer, but she’d felt the stares, seen the skeleton forms fading back into the shadows, and it seemed as if the watchers were closing in behind them. She’d been about to tell Fuller she wasn’t going any further when he’d stopped abruptly next to the ruins of an old fast food place. Nothing she recognized by the design, and the signs had worn down from the years and the weather and probably random vandalism as well, but she made out the word “fried chicken,” though it was missing a few letters.

  “We meeting him for lunch?” Roach wondered, trying to sound casual even as her eyes darted around, scanning her surroundings like a prairie dog watching for red tail hawks.

  “Maybe we are lunch,” Ramirez suggested, a bit of a quaver in his voice. He had his pistol out, held down by his side, though he’d at least kept his trigger finger out of the guard, trailing along the slide.

  “Just give it a minute,” Fuller advised, arms crossed over his chest, his dark eyes searching the end of the street. All Roach could see was an old woman pushing a shopping cart loaded down with plastic tubs of water. The wheels of the basket squeaked in protest and water sloshed out the top of one of the tubs.

  The wind whistled through the suburban streets, taking with it ancient scraps of plastic and leaves still littering the ground from last fall and Roach could smell rain in the air, feel it in grey clouds closing in, full of malevolent promise. She didn’t want to be caught out here in a storm, not even in the pickup. Water could fill potholes large enough to take out an axle.

  “All right,” she said after another few minutes had passed. “We have to get out of here.”

  “Just give them….” She assumed Fuller was about to ask for more time and she was about to turn him down flat when she sensed motion behind her.

  Roach threw herself forward, twisting in mid-air and pulling her pistol from its holster, her forefinger just ounces away from pulling the trigger when she saw the upraised hands, the casual stance and the crooked smile. She was panting from the exertion, the adrenalin and the impact of the pavement on her shoulder, and the sights of her pistol were dancing around wildly, and she was suddenly reminded she’d never actually shot anyone with a handgun.

  “Hold your fire,” Fuller drawled, hands held up in a restraining motion.

  Ramirez had his handgun stretched out, gripped in both hands so hard Roach thought he might crack the polymer, but he hadn’t pulled the trigger. Probably for the same reason Roach hadn’t: the subtle but undeniable difference between firing a missile or a Vulcan round at a faceless mech and pulling the trigger at a face.

  In this case, the face of a middle-aged woman, lined with care and time and a life lived on the ragged edge of civilization. Her hair was grey-streaked blond, her clothes rough enough to fit in on the streets of Norfolk but well made enough to set her apart. She had a military-issue sidearm at her hip and what looked like a drum-fed shotgun slung across her chest, but she was deliberately not touching either of them.

  “That’s all nice and dramatic,” the older woman told Roach, nod
ding toward her lying on her side with handgun extended, “but you need to work on your situational awareness, girl.” She smirked. “Ain’t no radar out here.”

  “This is Jenny,” Fuller said, his raspy chuckling sounding something like a mild heart attack. “She knows things.”

  “Is that your official job title?” Roach wondered, pushing herself back to her feet, careful to keep her handgun pointed in a safe direction. She noticed Ramirez still aiming his right at the older woman and she pushed his barrel down with a finger. “Relax, Mule.”

  “Ain’t nothing official about Jenny,” Fuller answered for her. “But she’s worked for about everyone who knows anything all up and down the east coast and if anyone knows what we need, it’s her.” He nodded to Jenny. “You get the file I sent you?”

  “I got it.” She didn’t seem too talkative to Roach. In fact, once the smile faded from her amusement with Roach’s reaction time, Jenny’s expression transformed as if she’d bitten into something sour. “If you weren’t an old, old friend, James, I wouldn’t have come at all.”

  “You sound scared,” Roach said, a challenge giving the words an edge. “You brought us out here into no-man’s-land and that didn’t seem to scare you.”

  “If these people kill me,” Jenny snapped back at the younger woman, “it’ll be by accident. The people I could piss off talking to you, they could swat me like a fly. That’s why we’re out here. Nothing else moving out here, no cars, no drones, nothing but us and the zombie horde.” She nodded toward the squatters with a contemptuous sneer. “We stick out like a whore in church, but so would anyone else.”

  “You didn’t haul me all the way out here to tell me you weren’t going to help,” Fuller said. “You could have done that with a secure message.”

  She shifted her feet, a child called to the carpet by her teacher.

  “Maybe I just brought you out here to tell you to stop sticking your damned nose into something that could get you killed, you wrinkled old coot.”

  Roach felt a raindrop on the back of her neck and cursed under her breath.

  “Shit or get off the pot, lady,” she said. “This place gives me the creeps and I don’t know either of you well enough to stand out here in the fucking rain and wait for you to find your backbone.”

  Jenny regarded her sidelong, the corner of her mouth turning up.

  “I like her,” she decided. “She’s a lot better about not taking my shit than you ever were, James.”

  “Well, she didn’t used to be married to you, sweetie,” Fuller reasoned.

  Roach’s eyes went wide and she stared between the two of them in disbelief. Ramirez was shaking his head as if he didn’t believe he’d heard Fuller right.

  “You two were married?” Ramirez asked. His gun was still in his right hand, hanging down at his side, and Roach was about to tell him to put it away.

  She never got the chance. The sound interrupted her, a familiar whining, growing deeper in tone as it grew louder…

  “Incoming!” she and Fuller yelled the word in antiphonal chorus, each of them lurching forward to protect the person most important to them.

  Roach grabbed Ramirez by the shoulder and pulled him to the ground, while out of the corner of her eye, she saw Fuller throwing himself across Jenny, shielding her against what was surely to come. The former chicken restaurant saved their lives. The mortar round punched right through what was left of the roof, hitting with a gut-level crump before the walls blew out in a wave of pressure and sound. It rolled over Roach like an ocean breaker on a rocky shore, slamming into her in an almost solid blow against every bit of her body at once, sending her and Ramirez rolling out across the broken pavement.

  Jagged rock dug into her back, but she barely felt it, numbed by the blast. Her brain didn’t seem to want to work, but she slugged it into gear and pushed herself off the ground. She’d barely made it to her knees when the next round hit, felt more than heard because her ears were still whistling from the first explosion, but this one was on the other side of the building. The ground shook but she stayed upright and was able to keep her balance long enough to grab Ramirez by the collar and haul him beside her while she ran.

  He was trying to yell something, trying to pull away, but she couldn’t hear him and wouldn’t have cared if she could. She wasn’t a hundred percent certain where she was running, but she sensed the rounds were walking north to south and she wanted to make sure she went east or west. An ancient dumpster beckoned only twenty meters away, perhaps more a psychological comfort than cover capable of stopping mortar fragments, but she’d take what she could get.

  The next round detonated nearly fifty meters away, down the street, sending sprays of smoke and debris into air thick with moisture, but she and Ramirez were already behind cover, ducking amidst shredded truck tires clinging loosely to rusting wheels. She still couldn’t hear anything, but she could imagine the screams. People were running headlong through the smoke, some pushing carts with all they owned in front of them, more afraid of losing the little they had than of losing their lives. Others carried children on their shoulders or pushed them ahead, mouths open, yelling in fright and desperation and ultimately, futility. The only home they knew, as dank and hopeless as it might be, was being torn apart around them.

  Welcome to the club.

  Roach remembered her sidearm with one heartbeat and Fuller and Jenny with the next, trying to pull the gun out while she tried to see back through the billowing, dark clouds rolling off the ruins of the fast food restaurant, tried to figure out where the other two had gone.

  “I dropped my gun!” Ramirez was yelling it in her ear and she could still barely hear it over the ringing.

  Damn, this shit is loud outside of a mech cockpit.

  “What do you want me to do about it?” she snapped at him, not sure whether he’d hear it or not. “I’m not giving you mine!”

  She had a feeling she was going to need it. This wasn’t a random attack—she didn’t believe in that sort of coincidence. Fuller might have been confident this Jenny wouldn’t betray them, but someone had been after them, specifically, and she doubted they were going to give up after a few mortar rounds.

  “Keep your eyes open, Hector,” she yelled, trying to make sure he heard this time. Her words sounded muted in her ears, abused by the concussion of the mortar rounds. “Watch behind us.”

  Nothing through the swirling smoke, not yet. The wind was catching it, wafting it across the street toward the dumpster along with the smell of cordite and ozone and just a hint of burning human refuse. Had there been anyone inside the building? The thought nagged at her. She couldn’t dismiss these people as quickly as Jenny had. Yes, they could have risked leaving, tried to make it to one of the government refugee camps and been resettled farther west, but taking to the roads on foot, unarmed was nearly as big of a risk as sitting in the stew of pollution and radiation Norfolk had become.

  Ramirez was trying to say something, but she couldn’t make it out. He shoved at her shoulder and she turned, ready to snap at him to keep his hands to himself, but she saw he was pointing frantically down the street toward the roadblock. There were six of them that she could see, and they weren’t trying to be stealthy, weren’t hiding in the shadows or even staying to the sides of the streets under cover. They just walked along the broken pavement, assault rifles held at low port, walking slowly and steadily, visored helmets scanning back and forth.

  They know who they’re dealing with and they’re not afraid of us one bit.

  And maybe they shouldn’t be. None of them was an infantry soldier, none were used to fighting dismounted and between the three of them, they had exactly two handguns, and that was if Fuller was even still alive. These guys wore body armor and helmets, their camouflage an older Russian pattern and their weapons old AK28’s, which could have made them Spetsnaz, Naval Infantry or just mercenaries who’d bought the equipment surplus.

  We have to get back to the truck and get the hell out
of here.

  She grabbed Ramirez’s arm and ran, slipping between the dumpster and a two-meter-tall stack of tires and nearly tripping over debris piled around them. She thought hard at the soldiers behind her, urging them to see her and Ramirez as just another couple of refugees running away in a panic, not to notice their flight suits or the gun in her hand. There was smoke, haze, they were a good thirty or forty meters away…they might not notice.

  The petulant chatter of a 5.45mm assault rifle dashed those hopes, punching through both sides of the dumpster just as she and Ramirez cleared its shadow. Jacketed slugs ricocheted off the street only meters to her right and she ducked reflexively and ran harder, aiming for the crumbling hulk of what had once been a garbage truck. It had slammed into a power pole decades ago and only a stump and the rusted-through remains of a dent were left as a monument to the accident, but the metal looked thicker than the old dumpster and it was the closest thing to cover she could find.

  She thought she’d make it, thought the dumpster and the smoke and the running squatters would distract the soldiers just enough. The running squatters were the downfall of those hopes, a particular wide-eyed, wild-haired teenage girl who had been crouching in the shadows of a makeshift tent, plastic tarps stretched over a pair of traffic barriers. She’d dashed out as the gunfire grew closer, deciding to run just a moment too late and too frightened to look where she was going.

  The girl slammed into Roach’s right shoulder, bowling her over and taking them both to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Ramirez’s arm slipped out of her hand and she barely held onto the gun, twisting around to take the impact on her left shoulder. Roach tried to pull away from the girl but she was clinging with desperate strength, her greasy hair falling across Roach’s face, the air thick with the stench of sweat and unwashed grime.

  The soldiers were advancing, skirting around the dumpster, only thirty meters away. Ramirez stood there, his face frozen with indecision, looking like he very much wanted to run but was unwilling to leave her, which she thought was commendable but incredibly stupid. Roach pushed the girl away long enough to bring her pistol around, hoping she could at least get a shot in before they mowed her and Ramirez down, not that the handgun rounds would even penetrate the Russian body armor…