The flesh is burning, the spirit is ascending
Sam ran out from around a stack of pallets and waved at Gradie to get down. In the blue light of his NVGs, her soft mouth stuck out of the dark rough texture of her battle gear in a drastic frown. An adorable softness out of place in the apocalypse. He would have kissed it if she had given him time.
“What the fuck are you doing? Did you find it?” She had ditched the Ultimax somewhere and scanned behind him with her SIG Rattler.
“No,” he said softly, not taking his eyes off her. “It’s in that office.”
“What? How do you know?”
Just fifty yards away, Luke’s MG screamed like it would never run empty, and her voice echoed in his ears, the earbuds taking milliseconds to parse through the noise.
“I just know,” he said. Her mouth hung open. She glanced at the unbroken pallets behind him and snarled.
“You didn’t even finish! God dammit, this place is burning to the—”
He swept his shin hard into the side of her knee and she went down with a squeak. He had his rifle up and firing before she hit the ground. Three taps to one, two to the other, he dropped both as their bullets cracked past him. Like shooting pop-up targets in the clubhouse. They crumpled just inside the bay door on either side of the barrier pallet as the machine gun fire on the mezzanine reached a crescendo. He scanned the staging area to make sure they were clear, then offered Sam a hand.
“You’re welcome,” he said. She grabbed his hand and pulled herself with a yank meant to pull his arm out of the socket.
“Good job. Come on!” She pushed past him towards the returns pallets. He watched her ass bounce for a bit then slinked away towards the back office.
Another explosion in the center of the warehouse rattled the ceiling. Out in the lot, police lightbars flashed and spotlights swept the smoky air. He stepped quickly up to the office door and tried the handle. It turned easily, like it didn’t know there was a war on, and he stepped inside.
The burning jet fuel had nearly engulfed the central maze of pallet racks and the blaze rolled out through the massive tear in the ceiling and lit up the warehouse like hellfire. A police helicopter spotlight shone through bullet holes in the roof and lit up the smoke in glittering beams. One of the police vehicles in the lot aimed a light that glared in the blown open bay doors and peeked in at the edges of the other ones like a UFO mid-abduction.
Fire sprinklers had soaked everything that wasn’t burning. Water and blood pooled on the floor. Sirens and helicopter noise flowed around the building and bounced under the roof like the trapped sounds were growing louder out of anger. It was all misty, steaming, smoky, hazy as a dream, but one that was melting into a nightmare.
Luke tried to get up and his hand slipped on the pool of water and blood. Casings clinked in the wake like brass jetsam. He got hold of the MG3 and saw he had somehow loaded a fresh ammo belt before passing out. He tried again and got up on one knee this time, and immediately guns went off all around him. Philip or Lindsey responded with a burst from the mezzanine, or maybe it was just the echoes and he was already alone. He stood up with a strength so foreign and distant it felt like being lifted, and shouldered the MG3.
Three drone-illuminated men were moving up on the other side of the conveyor belts, hugging the mezzanine, with rifles flashing. He pulled the trigger and two of them died in an instant. The muzzle blast shook the bloody water and smoke in front of him into a blurry cone and the recoil knocked him back slipping on his own blood. He came down hard just as the third gunman finished dying.
Geysers of water and blood shot up around him as someone somewhere returned fire. He brought the gun around as he bounced up into a crouch and drew a crescent of muzzle flash in the wavering air. He felt two punches to the chest and a few to the gut as he stood up, leaning into the recoil like a crutch, never letting off the trigger. He sprayed the crumpled pile of shelves and boxes and eventually the dark forms strobing under dronelight until the belt was empty, then he gave himself permission to die.
Lindsey watched him, silhouetted against the fire, the flames reflected mirror-like in the water at his feet and even in the blood down his face and arms, throwing fire at his enemies. He looked like he had been made of fire and death all along, and now it was breaking out through his skin, consuming him into nothing. The belt went empty and he collapsed into the pool of blood, casings, and links at his feet. Everything went quiet, besides the fire’s rushing roar, blending into the noise of her own bloodflow. She sighed and felt the blood fly off her lips.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She turned to scold Philip for dropping the fucking ball, and found his eyes staring at her, empty. The armored platform under him was dark with blood. For some god damned reason, like a breeze of sweet perfume intruding on an operating room, she remembered his laughter.
“God damn, I haven’t seen anything like that in years.”
And a part of herself that she didn’t know how to speak to cried and wailed that all her friends were dead.
“Okay, I must be fucking losing it. I really—"
“Truck office!” EP yelled in her ears. Two muzzles flashed in the square of bomb-blasted office and she felt a round fragment on her chest plate and slice up her face. She whipped the PKP around and fanned the belt, and in the corner of her eye, like razors moving in slowly, she saw two more gunmen moving toward the north side of the DC.
The office was bizarrely calm and quiet. An L desk against the wall, two stacking office chairs, file cabinets, mail baskets, boxes, all in a still darkness that smelled of paper and old carpet. After the jet fuel and gunsmoke smell of the warehouse, it felt like stepping into another world.
Sam came in the door behind him and shut it softly.
“Ok then mother fucker. Go get it.” She was crouched down in front of the window. Light glared in the warehouse behind her and twinkled in his NVGs. He nodded at the soft silhouette of her head and looked around the office.
He knew now that pushing on a Hardworld didn’t feel like asking or praying. It felt like remembering. It felt like waking up. So he listened, he waited, looking for something to jog his memory.
His gaze stopped on the desk, and a realization seeped in like dream knowledge.
They had taken it in here. They had tried to think of a way to get it out, past all the metal detectors and security. Maybe they had even succeeded, but they had left something else behind. He opened the top drawer with a certainty he had never felt in his life.
Just old pencils and post-it notes and plastic utensil packages and salt and ketchup packets. His fear and regret rose up like bile as he rummaged through the drawer, his fingers clawing desperately, until—
He looked down at the trashcan under the desk. Wal-Mart bag filled with Styrofoam cups and empty energy drink cans. He dumped it out, and there was the plastic clamshell box for a Go-Pro Max and the quick-start guide. He found it taped to the third page of the guide with clear packaging tape.
There was something nostalgic about it. A dull quarter. Nothing worth killing over for anyone in this world, but for him…
He held it up to let Sam see behind him.
“Holy fuck.”
He smiled at her then looked back at the quarter, and his smile dissolved as a question crawled across his mind. What if the guy had taken the camera with him case-and-all? Would they have all died for nothing? How could he have been sure that hadn’t happened? How had he known? What if it really had been in the last two pallets?
His mind was spinning so fast around a central axis of broken causality that he felt on the verge of vomiting. This was not like remembering. No matter how he looked at it, he felt that reality had buckled under the force of his mind, and rather than being a triumphant feeling, he felt disconnected, vulnerable, like the whole world was about to drop out from beneath his feet and leave him floating forever in—
“Ok get going!” Sam hissed.
“What?”
“Are you serious?” EP screamed suddenly in his ears. “Drop out! Did you forget how to take it with you?!” She sounded on the edge of tears. Gradie exhaled and reached for the drop-out pouch under his magazines. Then the window exploded.
“Fuck!” Sam shot up and opened fire, spraying shells into the filing cabinet. IR lasers moved through the air and bullets followed their path. One caught her in the neck, and she threw herself backward into the wall. Gradie brought his rifle up with one hand and started firing, but the shooters fell behind cover like phantoms.
“Get out!” Sam hissed at him between clenched teeth as blood pooled in her mouth.
“Alan! Get the coin out now!” EP screamed. Sam’s eyes went wide as she glared at him. He let the rifle drop and rolled away from the window, fighting a nearly crippling urge to run to her. He got the syringe out and fumbled with the cap.
Sam flicked the selector to full auto. Blood was streaming down her chest and she knew she would be out soon. The world outside the window bloomed in her eyes as one of the police spotlights beamed in through the broken bay door. She saw the gunmen clear as day as two of them advanced from behind cover. Her Rattler took the first one full in the chest and head, then she stepped forward and fired four rounds over the other gunman’s head before she brought her hand off of her neck and down to the fore grip, steadying her fire. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. Somewhere out of sight, she was sure Philip was watching her, and it all felt like the breeziest run of the killhouse.
Gradie watched her die as he plunged the propofol into his vein. She was an angel. Beautiful, radiant, overflowing with death. Bright blood sprayed out of her neck as the gun rocked her body. Shells glittered in the spotlight like glass tears. She moved the gun from target to target and he knew without even looking outside that they were dying like flies. In a few seconds it was over, her bolt locked open, smoking like cathedral incense. The last thing he saw was a bullet sparking off her gun as she fell to the ground, wingless, her task completed.
As he slipped into darkness, he squeezed the coin in his hand and knew that he would take it with him.