Chapter 34: Fixin' to Die, Pt. 2

This corridor was familiar. The door to the locker room stood open, light and voices trickling out from inside. Michael held up a clenched fist and stopped in his tracks.

He really did not look well; dark beneath the eyes, skin white as paper. Sweat poured off him even in the corridor, which was significantly cooler than the crawlspace had been.

His pistol hand had a tremor as he half-raised it, listening. When Lily touched his elbow he flinched violently and glanced down at her without moving his head.

“You’re in uniform,” she said softly. “Just walk us through.”

His shoulders stayed tight, but he nodded once and advanced.

It was an upsettingly normal scene, almost pathetic after the ordeal of the day. Four Regulars sat around a small cherry-red stove, playing cards on top of an overturned crate. Pale ribbons of blue smoke trailed from the ends of pitifully thin hand-rolls. It smelled of socks.

They stared at Michael with the wide-eyed stillness of rabbits caught in the open. Lily was struck by how unfairly young they were, with soft faces and skinny shoulders. Three boys and a girl in their teens. Secondhand uniforms. Rifles close at hand.

“We were given permission,” gulped the boy nearest to her. “I—”

The others were trying to hide the cards, shuffling bodies subtly.

“We’re at war,” Michael said softly. The barrel of his pistol dipped down. “Go topside, now.”

“We…were told to guard this door, sir,” the boy said. Clearly he was the spokesperson. He was the only one with rank on his sleeve, a single small chevron. “Sergeant Leone said—”

A radio crackled. It was mostly static, apart from the word ‘fugitive’. All six of them looked at it, lying on a bench like a limpet.

“Ignore that. Fall out, go topside.”

Another crackle. “…Operative. Has anyone seen…”

It was about 63. Lily was certain of it; she and Michael had left no one alive who’d seen their faces. Still, the children were looking at them now. With quick darts of their eyes they took in her filthy uniform, the knife at her belt, how ill and tired the Operative beside her looked.

Her damp palms grasped the scattergun tighter. Michael shifted his weight. Did they see that too?

“…to stop him, he’s…”

As one, the children went for their weapons.

Operative 74, Michael, did not hesitate. Three shots came so close together the sound of them blended into a single report as three bodies crumpled to the floor.

The pistol’s slide snapped back as a fourth trigger pull found it dry.

The boy with the single chevron remained; his very recent training sent him diving for his rifle, flicking the selector off safety and taking aim—

Lily fired first. It was deafening in the small space. As the echoes died away the only sound left was a faint, wet choking from one of the Regulars unlucky enough to take a bullet in the throat.

“…heading topside, do we have a…”

The choking stopped.

Lily picked up the radio. She switched it off.

Something important was missing from inside her, a thing she’d killed on the road east and now feared could never be revived. All that remained in the cavity it left behind was weariness. Not guilt, not grief.

Michael looked at her. Started to put out his hand, then dropped it. “Are you all right.”

Lily swallowed. “I’m operational.”

He did touch her this time, a brief squeeze of the shoulder before crossing to the door. Stepping over bodies that Lily physically could not look at. Her eyes wouldn’t see them, would not accept them.

Freedom was so close she could almost taste it. It had cost so little and so much. The stain of it would never leave her hands.

Ahead of them waited the tunnel. Then the bulk and mass of the Coalition army deployed against — who? The populace of Delphi? An insurgency from New Columbia? It hardly mattered. There was that to get around, and then the shuttered gates, and then…

Then they would find shelter in the tent city. Lost among the winding unmapped streets they would trade in their uniforms for subtler clothes, and she would confess. Everything. All of it. Then they would rest.

Lily wished she hadn’t remembered how to cry. She grasped the wheel lock; no scan panel on this side. It stuck and then began slowly to turn. Michael helped her.

Water jetted through the seal around the door like an arterial spray of blood. Lily had time to gasp, to step back — and then they weren’t alone. The river was there with them.