6

I fire two shots before I realize that my eyes are closed, and the gun has nearly slipped from my hands. I open them and see the magnificent, gunfire illuminated scene of Amethyst gunning down three of them, body checking the third, breaking his jaw, sweeping his legs from beneath him and snapping his neck.

I’m frozen in trauma as she pushes past me, shoots out the lock on the door grabs my hand and drags me out.

Brief gunfire flashes through the sky accompanied by shouts, orders and strangled cries. I blindly follow Amethyst, my gun held loosely on my hands. Our backs slam against the wall of a tall, black walled building. I see a figure sprinting through the dark passage behind the sole light, only to get gunned down mid-step.

Amethyst beckons me to follow her to the door. She turns the nob, and to my relief it opens. Bullets fly out the door, slicing off one of her braids as she rolls out of the way. Even Amethyst, stone hearted, experience blooded Amethyst has terror in her eyes as she scrambles to the wall next to me.

Thud. Gunshots. Clang. Sizzle. Gunshots.

People are fighting in there. Amethyst must’ve noticed it too because she’s peering back inside. I do the same.

Three men in blue uniforms, unlike our beige ones, take cover behind piled work benches. One of them is on one knee, shooting through a gap in their makeshift wall, one is standing, shooting over, and one is lying down, shooting under. Across the room, figures we can’t see are shooting back. This must be Janns’s group.

Amethyst pulls out her magazine, tosses it away and shoves a new one again. She gives me a look that I don’t exactly understand before stepping right into the room. By the time I’m in beside her, my eardrum’s have nearly burst and there are three blue uniformed men lying in bleeding puddles on the ground.

“Blax’s squadron!” Amethyst hollers, holding her hands in the air.

I barely hear her.

“Thank god,” comes a relieved sigh.

Janns, Cherthur, Horgan, Lorick and Deqar appear from behind my stacked apparatus.

“Sekera?” I ask.

Deqar shakes his head. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since we were split up. I thought she was with you guys.”

Shit. No, no damn way. Sekera cannot be dead. She is not dead. She can’t… die. Please. No please, not like this.

“Weshleri?” Amethyst asks.

Janns grimaces. “Dead. Ficlan?”

Amethyst shakes her head. “Him too.”

Lorick’s jaw goes slack. He blinks and his lips move like he’s about to say something, but no words come out. I feel no pity, but the scene of his burly body wreathing with bullets makes me shiver. There’s a red streak on my left trouser. It’s still wet.

“We’ve got to head back,” Janns says, reloading his gun.

Amethyst nods in agreement. “Soon. It’s only a matter of time before they come barging in here.”

“Alright, no wounds, right? Ok, let’s go.” He makes for the door.

“Wait,” I call.

Janns and Amethyst both glance back at me.

“We can’t go back.”

“And… why’s that?” Janns asks.

“They’ve got men in the ravine. I already tried,” I confess, shamefully. “Over fifteen at our grapples, waiting for us to come down. They’ll bide their time till we’re halfway, then mow us down in a single clip.”

Janns looks at me blankly. “You’re serious?”

“Of course, he’s freaking serious,” Amethyst hisses. “C’mon, we can’t turn back. She storms off towards the only other exit. A dimly lit entirely metal hall. I instinctively jog after her.

The others look at Janns hesitantly, but he soon follows, moving like a wildebeest into a crocodile infested river.

The hall is lined with doors, reminding my instantly of the experiment room in the Raven’s Nest. Amethyst and I are ten meters ahead of the others by the time they even enter the hall. We break into a run, my anxiety to get as far away from the exit as possible, when the world goes into slow motion.

I hear it before anybody else. A hungry whir, like a jet engine mixed with a machine gun, followed by the clack of the door hitting the window. From over my shoulder I see the incredibly massive multi-barrel gun, like a machine gun turret on wheels. We’re trapped, like targets in an enclosed shooting range.

Amethyst and I react at the exact same moment, launching ourselves into the nearest door. By sheer luck, as the bullets begin to fly, her elbow pushes open the door handle and we tumble inside. It’s deafening, like the roar of a mechanical dragon. I scramble off her and glance out the door.

A body with grey hair and wrinkled skin, undoubtably Horgan, slides past us leaving a wide streak of red on the metal floor.

Screams, cries, hollers… we run. I run like I’ve never run before, charging down the metal grate spiral staircase and into another hall. I fling open the first door I see leading me to a bunk. I reach a door but it’s locked, so I shoot through a blacked out window and wiggle through. I barrel down a white hall when I reach an elevator. I slam the button and slide inside as soon as the doors open.

For the first time, as I wait for the doors to close, I look back. Amethyst careens into the hall and sprints faster than a tidal wave, diving into the elevator before it closes. She lies, a panting heap next to me.

“Shit. Shit. Shit!” she hisses, hammering her fist into her knee.

“What? Were you shot?”

“My gun! My damn gun!” she exclaims.

I look for her gun to see what’s wrong, only to realize that there is none. “We’re… screwed.”

She snatched the pistol from me, which I’m surprised to see I still have, along with my last clip and reloads it. The doors slide open and she aims out, but rather than another hall, we’re in large, low roofed vehicle hanger. She shoots the elevator’s control pad and ushers me outside. We duck down behind the nearest tank.

Casual, relaxed muttering echoes through the room. It’s hard to tell how many of them there are. We peer around the tank, seeing three men playing cards on the hood of a rover, and several more milling around behind them. A couple have their heads craned to see what the gunshot was.

“Eh, Lars, could you check at the elevator? Heard something.”

“Yeah, yeah. One second.”

Somebody starts to walk our way. As I expect, as soon as he passes us, Amethyst rams the stock of the pistol into his temple and silently snaps his neck. “C’mon,” she whispers, darting from the tank to some other sort of missile backed truck. I follow.

Somebody yelps as the see us, and Amethyst quickly shoots him in the face. The body drops before us.

“Holy shit, we got some intruders!”

“Everybody split up, let’s find these little shits.”

“Damnit,” Amethyst curses.

We slide under the rover as a pair of them shuffle past us and pull ourselves out the other side.

“We’re screwed. We’re dead god damn meat,” I panic.

Amethyst doesn’t respond but notices another one cross our path. She spin kicks him in the jaw, turning his shout into a weakened huff as he collapses to the ground. She drags him under the rover, grabs my arm and leads me to the next aisle of vehicles.

“We can’t keep this up. We need to get out of here,” I urge.

“I know that,” she hisses.

“Oi! You say something, Hansen?”

“Naw, but I heard something.”

I look under the truck and see legs shuffling slowly. I look at Amethyst, who’s face tells me she’s seen more on the other side. They’re coming from both sides.

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She literally shoves me to the door of the truck and motions for me to stay still. She moves back to the front, where the first guy rounds at the same time as the second, at the rear. She leaps into the air, landing a solid kick to the man’s neck, twists and shoots the other in the forehead.

The first man’s cry, combined with the gunshot and the brief moment of her upper body is enough to start a string of hollers.

“There they are!”

“Those bastards!”

“We got ‘em now!”

I take off, sprinting as fast as I can. One of them springs out at me, forcing me into a roll to make it under his grasp. Another one chucks a wrench at me as I slide over the hood of a rover. Somebody launches themselves at me as I box jump onto the mirror of a truck and scamper to the roof. Two others wait for me to come down on the other side, so I leap over them barely reached the next truck. I hear two gunshots in rapid succession. Amethyst.

I slide down the windscreen and use the hood as leverage to jump over an assaulter, landing with a perfect roll, sliding under a huge wheeled car and scramble to my feet. I bullet around the next tank only to see nearly crash into Amethyst. She’s standing still, gun in her outstretched arms with a full semi-circle of the mechanics or whatever around her, holding various tools.

“Hey now, nobody else needs to be shot,” says one with a thick, handlebar mustache.

“Get back,” she hollers, jerking the gun in her hands.

The mechanics that had been chasing me creep up behind us, so I pull her by the arm and we scamper up the tank. We’re completely surrounded.

“If any of you move any closer, I will shoot you. Move back!” she orders.

I gauge the jumping distance. No way I’ll make it. They’ll grab me by the legs. Even if I do, the roll will be difficult to perfect, and I’ll probably sprain an ankle or bruise my shoulder. She edges closer to me.

“Hey now. Drop the gun and everything’s gonna be fine,” he continues.

“Get… back!”

“When’re the guns getting here?” whispers one of them.

“Less than a minute,” another replies, glancing at a device in his hands.

Amethyst must’ve heard it too because she flinches. “You’ve got three seconds,” she says, aiming the gun at handlebar mustache guy.

“Hey, hey now, let’s talk this out.” He’s trying to stall.

“Three.”

“If you drop the gun, maybe we can get some proper negotiations in.”

“Two.”

“If you shoot we will most definitely kill you,” he says with a sick smile.

“One.”

She pulls the trigger. No gunshot comes. She pulls it again, but only the click of an empty clip is heard.

“Shit.”

All of the dive forwards, scrabbling to get up the tank to us.

Thinking quickly, I notice the top hatch, pull it open and drop inside. Amethyst follows, pulling it shut just before one of them reaches us. She spins the wheel on the roof, locking it.

I pant with anxiety and sit up, scooting the wall.

Amethyst’s hands fall to her sides and she doesn’t breathe. Her eyes are stunned and her mouth is open. We can hear clanging on the roof of the mechanics and their tools, ready to clobber us to a pulp.

“Th-the-uh-the-ta-tank!” I stutter. “We’re in a tank, so let’s blow them up!”

Amethyst nods, catching on. She moves to the control panel looking over the buttons. I peer over her shoulder expectantly. She reaches for a lever and yanks it down. Nothing happens. She tries again. Nothing.

“What? What is it?” I ask.

She says nothing, panic visibly rising up within her. She reaches over and hammers a button, but there’s no response.

“What’s going on?” I demand.

She stands up, pushes past me and moves to the back of the tank, pulling down a lever from the wall. A dim light flickers on above us. “Ok, we’ve got power.”

“D’you know how to use this thing?”

“Yeah, but it’s not working,” she replies through gritted teeth, checking a container within the wall. She moves back to the control panel, turning dials, pulling levers and pressing buttons, but nothing’s working. “No!” she cries, exasperated, slamming her fists down.

“Hey, hey, it’s ok,” I say in a feeble attempt to calm her down.

She leans forwards, pinching the bridge of her nose. I move to lay a hand on her shoulder, but as soon as I make contact she jolts, pushing the chair away and dropping down beneath the panel. She looks over something I can’t see, then turns to me. “Screwdriver,” she says.

“Uhhh,” I reply, turning and glancing around the interior of the tank. The two of us rummage through every possible thing that can be rummaged through, until we eventually slump against the wall. “So… we’re screwed?” I ask over the clanging.

She chews on her lip for a moment, then stands up, strides to a corner and yanks a thin, short metal pole from some contraption on the wall. She picks up and empty assault rifle and rams the butt of the gun down onto the end of the pole. She repeats the process a few times until she’s got a semi flat surface. She crouches back down and lodges it into the screw and starts to twist. It slips out constantly, so I imitate her process and make the same makeshift screwdriver and set to work. After a few minutes of slips and re-flattening we manage to pry the panel open, revealing a set of wires.

I manage to find a torch and illuminate the mess of cables for her. I wince as she fiddles with the wires, finds a specific one and tries to cut it.

“Shit!” she hisses, recoiling as sparks fly. She shakes her hand in pain and frustration, then get’s right back to it.

My eyes are wandering around the tank when I hear another zap, and see Amethyst clutching her hand to her chest and breathing raggedly through her teeth.

“Amethyst… this isn’t working. You’re just hurting yourself.”

“No,” she grits. “This… it has to. Damnit why the hell isn’t this working? We have god damn power! Why isn’t it starting?”

The clanging has been replaced by occasional gunshots and what I hope isn’t a blowtorch.

She gets to her knees and bends over to try again, but I lay a hand on her shoulder. This time, she doesn’t flinch. “It’s over,” I mutter.

She sniffs, and slumps down, across from me with a heavy sigh. “So that’s it?” she asks. “This is how I die? Trapped in a damn tank, surrounded by enemy soldiers with a… you… to keep my company?”

I shrug. “Pretty badass way to go. I guess.”

We both fall into silence, absorbing the racket around us.

“How long do you reckon it will take?” I ask her eventually.

She shrugs. “Who knows. I’ve got no idea what equipment they have.”

“Why don’t they just tape a grenade to the hatch?”

“If this tank blows up, it’ll trigger a chain reaction and blow up every other vehicle in here. We’re not worth that.”

I sigh, shifting my position. “So, we might be here for a while, huh?”

“No. Thirty minutes tops.”

“Huh. Are you… are you going to pray? You a believer?”

She looks me in the eye. Despite what we’ve gone through together, I still feel tingly when she does. “I believe in myself. I believe that everything that I’ve done, everything I’ve accomplished, was my own doing. Not somebody else’s. Nobody else takes credit for the things I worked my ass of to do. Guess that was a failed belief though,” she says with a half-hearted laugh.

“Yeah, I’m not much of a believer either. I think that if there is a pure, divine being, it’s down here on earth. Or at least it was.”

“Like what?”

I shrug. “Trees maybe. Most animals really. I mean, if you think about it, humans are the only things that really bring any of this dark, sinister behavior into the world. I mean sure a wolf kills a deer, but you won’t find a wolf hunting deer to extinction to build a new forest route, right? Does that make sense?”

She doesn’t reply.

I sit in silence for a while, dwelling on in my own thoughts, before I realize, upon closer listening, that she’s crying. “Holy shit, um, are you ok?” I ask, before I realize how stupid I sound. I scoot over to her, putting my arm around her. To my surprise, she leans into me, sobbing onto my shoulder. “Hey, hey it’s alright.”

“No… no it freaking isn’t,” she sobs. “We’re going to die. We’re going to die soon.”

“Hey, everybody dies at some point, right? We just hopped on the bus a little early. It’s ok, dying isn’t the end. It’s just part of the journey. We just have to find out what’s on the other side. You’ve already accomplished more than most people ever do in their whole lives! I mean, look at me, what have I ever done? Everything I do isn’t because I wanted to do it, it’s because my raggedy life just rolled me into it somehow. If there’s a judgement day then you haven’t got anything to worry about.”

She inhales deeply, pulling away from me, and to my surprise, her sobs turn into feeble laughs. She rocks back and bites her lip, shaking her head. “Hey, wanna check if there’s anything to drink? In the rations compartment?”

I nod. “You, my friend, are an absolute genius,” I tell her, standing up and making my way to the rear of the tank. I rummage through the assorted dried rations but find nothing of use. “We’re dry, unless you know a way to get drunk off water,” I tell her, looking deeper. “I heard that you could get a quick buzz by injecting it into you…” my words fade away as I turn back to her.

She’s standing in front of me, with teary, red rimmed, beautiful hazel eyes. Her uniform shirt falls from her hands, landing in a heap at her feet and revealing her impeccably godly bra covered breasts. She moves swiftly to me, wrapping her arms around me, pressing her plump, soft lips to mine as sliding her thighs across my crotch. I’m too stunned to move as she kisses me with the ferocity of a lion her hands caressing through my dirty hair.

My consciousness thuds back into me, and I grab her by the waist, flipping us around and ramming her against the tank wall. I unclip her bra and fling it aside, then move to her neck. I kiss and I suck the way I’ve learnt girls love from all my years of school-girl seducing. I squeeze her truly magnificent ass, which is too big for me to handle with my usual control but release it and move my hands to the back of her thighs as I kiss down her chest. I take her large left breast in my hand and think about how I’m going to suck it dry, when she grabs the back of my head and pushes my face into it. I’m lost in the softness and warmth, locating her nipple and unleashing my tongue.

When I finish, I move swiftly to her right breast and work quickly. We might not have much time left. After I finish, she’s started to moan. Soft, weak, and vulnerable. Everything that she isn’t floods through me. I kiss down her flat stomach. Usually I work slowly, so as to build up the tension, but now I glance over, unzipping her pants and pulling them down. She steps out of them, but rather than letting me become the crocodile that I am, she pulls me up and kisses me again. With her long, strong fingers, she pulls off my shirt. As she kisses down my chest, I barely hear the racket outside increasing, and don’t even register the fact that this means they’re close.

By the time she unzips me, I’m throbbing like I’m about to pop. She takes me in, moving in slow, excruciatingly pleasurable rasps. Her tongue moves along the length of my shaft, twirls around the head, and laps its underside over the top. She moves closer, taking me into her throat, and it feels like I’m being swallowed by a goddess of pleasure. It’s been less than thirty seconds, but I know I can’t last. Electricity sizzles within me like a lightning bolt within a human shaped container made of mirrors. Ever closer it draws to the sole exit, ready to explode with the magnitude of a volcano.

I manage to grab her face, my palms resting on her cheekbones, and gently push her away. To my amazement, she falls backwards, back arched, chin tilted backwards, and her legs wide apart. I don’t waist a second, placing my hands on her knees, then gliding down to her waist. I slide into her, softly and slowly. She lets out a soft, tingly, electric moan. It fuels my lust, and I quicken my pace, thrusting into her with the physical embodiment of the culmination of my primordial desires. I move with the strength of a wolf, and she with the grace of a deer. Predator and prey, we work as one. After so long of chasing, I have finally arrived. I have finally succeeded. I have finally achieved my sole evolutionary purpose.

Suddenly, she pulls herself away, and for a second I think I’ve done something wrong, when she goes onto her hands and knees and slides back over me. I grab her hips and thrust back inside, reentering the hunt.

Her moans grow louder as I move deeper, faster, stronger and harder. I thrust my soul into her, tilting my head back and gripping her hips tighter. I close in on my prey. The final stretch is upon me as I move every inch of my body with every drop of prehistoric lust within me.

Her moans have turned into screams, and my huffs into grunts as the cycle as old as life itself nears its finish. It builds within me. The final runner’s high. The last bursting thrash of a shark to its prey. The ultimate stretch of the wolf’s chase, the final ultimate culmination of oneself at last reaches its endpoint.

The hatch above us at last cracks open as Amethyst climaxes, and my life juice erupts into her.