Chapter 13: Heading for the Light, Pt. 2

Through a red haze of exhaustion Lily saw the number three painted white on the wall. She barely comprehended it. Her existence had narrowed to the guardrail, her feet, Michael's back, the labored gasps of Maggie ascending behind her.

They took a moment to regroup.

Michael paused by the door, listening. Even he was breathing hard, although he tried to hide it.

“The barricade is on level one,” he said, as they joined him on the landing one after another. “I got close enough to see it.”

“Before or after the Security offices,” Maggie panted, bent over double. Her coveralls were drenched in sweat. “That’s where our friend should be.”

“If he made it this far,” Michael muttered, cracking the door.

Emergency lights gleamed off a vast, slick redness. A few of the sprawled bodies wore Security red, but there were all colors. Looked like they’d rushed out of the lift and been gunned down. Ellis gasped and Maggie retched as the door swung shut behind them with a final thump.

Death had a smell. It had stayed in the back of Lily’s mind, waiting with images of bloody streets and burning skies.

Michael touched her arm. "We have to move.”

Lily flinched violently, knocking his hand away. "I know. Get off me."

They passed more corpses, some with homemade weapons, others carrying nothing. Lily was glad the Station's only child was safe in Ellis' backpack; seeing tiny bodies would’ve been too much to bear. Too much like Omaha Base.

She’d gone back after the flames died down, still disoriented and nauseous, her dress stiff with blood. The dead were everywhere, shot and burned, left where they’d fallen or piled like refuse.

Michael crouched to examine the body of a woman in red, prying the rifle from her stiff fingers. He ejected the magazine, then checked the chamber and discarded it.

Lily stepped cautiously over a face-down body to examine the crumpled form of another guard. He’d died holding his pistol.

“I don’t understand,” Maggie said, distantly. “Why didn’t they just let everyone leave?”

Because the powerful saw people as possessions. Control was more important than survival.

Lily wiped her dry eyes. “This one’s loaded,” she said. “Michael.”

He took it, nodding thanks as he cleared a spent casing. “Ready to move?”

Blood soaked into her canvas shoes and despair grew like a night-blooming flower in the pit of her stomach. “Sure.”

Michael took point as they followed a rivulet of blood up the long, sloping corridor, past ransacked offices, storage rooms, the door to the holding areas. He kept looking back over his shoulder, forehead creased in a faint frown; Lily mouthed ‘what’ at him the third or fourth time he did it, but he just shook his head.

The door to Naomi’s office had been broken off its hinges and propped against the wall like a drunkard. Inside it was dark and silent.

Bodies lay in pairs and singles, now. Couples died shielding each other. Adults lay over the bodies of teenagers.

Ellis, who had been silent and steady, faltered as they passed a black-suited Engineer wearing cracked wire-frame glasses, eyes staring through the ceiling. Maggie helped him on, murmuring condolences.

The square of orange light ahead grew larger. Jagged shadows thrust into it. Blood streamed in thin rivulets between the tiles.

Shadow and light resolved into a jumble of desks and tables spanning the corridor. The corpses of its defenders draped over it like washing hung out to dry. More bodies, all sprawled together at the end of their last mad dash for freedom, lay at its foot. There was no movement, no sound. Lights strobed fitfully.

Beyond the makeshift barricade the airlock doors loomed larger than life, edged in warning yellow. The door to the Security offices was open and a steadier light shone inside.

Lily unclipped the empty canteen from her pack, hefted it, then rolled it down the hall. It clattered and skipped over the cracked tiles before spinning to a halt. The echoes died away and one of the overhead lights died with a pop.

Something rustled in the darkness beyond the barrier. A strange, inhuman figure shuffled into view. It was humped, jerking — no. It was two figures, struggling.

Michael stepped smoothly to the right, gun out, cutting Lily off. He shouldn’t be able to move like that, so fast and fluid.

Ishmael had his hands raised. Lily thought it was because of them until she saw the pistol jammed into his ribs. Clumps of hair had come loose from Naomi’s perfect bun. Her eyes were bright and feverish.

“Don’t come any closer,” Ishmael cried. “She has my—”

Naomi shoved the gun up under her captive’s jaw, silencing him. “Drop your weapons, now.”

The pistol wavered in Michael’s hand. Then he shook himself and squared his shoulders.

“I am Operative Echo 1074.” The tone was wrong, the cadence too human. “The Coalition sent me. Open the door."

Naomi seemed taken aback by this. Her mouth hung open, soundless, jaw working. “Operative?”

“Echo 1074,” Michael repeated. This time he almost sounded like it. “The envoy. This was a test, and you passed. Let him go and open the door.”

It almost worked. Then Naomi looked back over her shoulder, and whatever she saw there in the gloom tempered her resolve.

“Last warning,” she said. “Put it down.”

Michael sighted on her, but Lily knew he didn’t have the shot. “Do we need him?”

She swallowed dry, felt her throat click. “Yes.”

Lily almost thought he wouldn’t do it, but after a long pause he set the weapon down.

Naomi dug the barrel in hard. “Kick it.”

After a long, pointed silence, Michael put his boot on the pistol and slid it back the way they’d come. It richocheted off the wall and was lost.

Out of the corner of her eye, Lily saw Ellis unshoulder the rucksack, nudging it with his foot into a shadowed corner out of the line of fire. “You ok, Ish?”

Blood was drying on the silvery rubber of his biosuit. “No. You?”

“Shut up and let me think,” Naomi said. “All of you.”

“We can fix this.” Ishmael’s face was bone white. “We can fix the door. Your orders are to open it when the envoy comes. We read them together, remember?”

Naomi rested her forehead against his shoulder for a moment. “I tried. I let you go on your surveys. I radioed for help, all bands, all frequencies. But they’re all dead. Every Outpost, every Station. He’s not an envoy, there is no envoy. There’s nothing out there.”

“Yes there is,” Lily interrupted. It was only half as strong as she’d intended. “There’s a whole world. Just let us go.”

“It’s too late.” Naomi released Ishmael as he sagged, leg buckling. There was a wet hole in his suit, in the thigh. “If the surface is viable, if we could’ve left any time…why did you abandon us? Why didn’t you come twenty years ago, when there was still hope?”

Michael tensed, looking back over his shoulder. The hallway sloped down into a pit-blackness, gaping like a maw. He moved closer to Lily.

“When there were still children,” Naomi finished, weapon drooping.

To Lily this mattered less than the way Michael had shifted his body between her and whatever was coming up behind them.

He was the only familiar and tolerable thing in this nest of snakes. There was no one she’d rather have with her; the realization felt like swallowing a raw egg.

She barely registered Maggie’s cry of alarm, Ellis’ abbreviated curse. They were no longer alone.

“Why, Naomi.” Abigail’s voice could’ve cut glass. She marched out of the gloom, one hand behind her back; muscle bunched in her arm and shoulder. “Why aren’t there any children.”

She didn’t falter at the sight of the bodies, at Ishmael down on one knee, at Naomi’s wavering pistol.

“I remember you.” A facade of professionalism flickered over Naomi’s face. “You’re that doctor from Upper Med. The — the death.”

Abigail brought her hand around, and Lily saw that she was clutching a pistol so hard it wouldn’t stay steady. “It was in the shots. That’s how you did it, right? The vitamins?”

“It was humane,” Naomi said. Her gun dropped heavy to her side. “We knew it was over. Why let a child be born only to suffer and die? I wanted to spare—”

The gunshot was louder than the end of the world. It echoed through the high-ceilinged space as Naomi staggered, catching herself on the barricade. Darker red spread across her jumpsuit.

Abigail fired again, and Naomi fell.

“That’s all,” she said, to no one in particular. She handed the gun to Michael. “I’m done now.”

Something rustled in a nearby doorway. Michael hardly seemed to move; it was as if the pistol had always been trained on the shadows. He was so fast it made Lily’s head hurt.

Abigail swore and clapped her hand over her mouth, unsteady with shock as a young boy stumbled out into the light, shading his eyes. He was scrawny, his shiny biosuit puddling around his ankles.

It threatened to trip him as he sprinted headlong, face crumpling, to throw his arms around Ishmael’s neck. All in complete, eerie silence — like Em, playing with her blocks.

Slowly, Michael lowered the gun.