It was a grocery store, once. Or at least seemed like one to Fives, looking around as she stumbled through the creaking doorway ahead of The Captain. Tall shelves made rows out of the wide open interior, and the front of the shop was made out of windows. The shelves were empty now, but there was plenty of garbage on the aisle floors.
"We have three minutes, possibly less. I don't expect that mine to have killed them all," The Captain spoke in a hushed tone, "And there are surely more waiting nearby to reinforce those who do survive." he finished with a hand on Fives' shoulder to guide her from behind.
They crouched and passed one aisle at a time, keeping one eyes on the front windows and another on the way from which they came. There was no movement out on the street except for the gentle rain-like pattering of landing debris. They reached the other side of the abandoned supermarket, and quickly exited into the tall weeds of the opposite alley.
The next building ahead was taller again, like the apartments all around but far thinner. They began to approach it passing through the grass and brush quickly, but froze when a door was kicked open somewhere across the street. The Captain fell to the ground pulling Fives in to the grass with him.
"Watch the street..." he ordered with a whisper. Fives shimmied around until she could get a clear look at the road, her eyes just above the tallest green stalks, and waited.
The distant door shook and stammered as it was slammed to and fro as if it were being wrestled with before it finally went quiet, and the noise of it was replaced with the grating sound of metal sliding across asphalt. Fives watched with bated breath while The Captain calmly looked on, seeming no more on edge than before.
The scraping grew closer as the seconds ticked by, the metal-on-rock cacophany unsettling Fives in a strange primal way she had never felt before, only made worse when the source came into view.
The sole surviving doll from the apartment siege, UMP-45, was limping down the road, half-carrying and half-dragging one of her semiconcious sisters along. Small bits of electronics and metal frame shook and broke away from them both as she went, leaving a gruesome trail of robitics behind on the gray street. The minute-and-a-half that it took for the crippled dolls to make it out of sight felt like an hour to Fives.
"Go!" The Captain's voice was still hushed, but more urgent than before. In the time it took Fives to get up from the ground he had already been on his feet and taking the lead, wasting no time at all in moving to the next building. He guided her to a low window that was cracked open previously, and motioned for her to crawl inside before following himself.
It was a dining room of some sort with a large table in the center and chairs stacked against the walls. Large bay-style windows on the far wall let enough light in to see by, though it was still somewhat dim at the edges of the room. There was a staircase at the back, to the right of where they entered, and The Captain made a beeline for it.
"Stay here, Fives. Watch the road--keep this building secure. Do you understand?" he looked back expectantly, pausing with one hand on the stair railing and one foot already poised on the second step.
"Affirmative!" she snapped, almost automatically. The Captain nodded and slung his shotgun over his back, dissapearing up the stairs silently like some sort of wraith. Fives moved closer to the bay windows to get a view out the front of the building, in the direction the damaged dolls had gone.
Sure enough, a hundred yards away she could still make out the shuffling figure of the surviving UMP unit. She no longer carried her sister, having dropped the now-unconcious android thirty yards or so back behind her. Somewhere upstairs The Captain wrestled with a heavy zipper and then threw something to the ground. The sound of a bolt sliding closed quietly echoed down the staircase.
The injured doll turned her head around and stared back over her shoulder at their building before snapping back to front and shambling even faster down the road, desperately aiming for speeds she could not reach.
She made it six feet before her head was burst open, dropping her to the ground. The hushed crack of the guilty gunshot was almost an afterthought.
Fives heard the bolt cycle again, but not the sound of an empty casing bouncing off the ground. She looked back out to the street, and scanned her gaze from the dead doll to the crippled one closer to them. Its intact arm was reaching out toward its sister, head and body twitching.
A second silenced shot struck true through its chest, closing its mechanical eyes for the last time.
The bolt cycled a third time.
Shuffling sounded on the floor above fives, moving towards the stairs, and finally The Captain reappeared--leaping down two steps at a time with a rifle in his grasp that wasn't there when he left her. An elegant dark-green body with a long black barrel capped with a monolithic suppressor, completed by the matte black hi-power scope on top.
"Not long until a third group is sent. We need to find their insertion site, deal with the commander there giving orders." he spoke quietly, but not in a whisper. Fives realized that this must be his natural speaking voice, calm and quiet but quite pleasant to the ears.
"That doll on the street was probably trying to retreat there." she suggested confidently. It's what she would have done, were she in such a dire situation...
"Indeed. We will go one street over, to the east, and continue north. There are multiple vantage points for us to choose from along that way, but I think we won't need them. They have most likely landed in the old stadium field a half-mile away, in a lowlands. Any building around it will give clear line of sight." he concluded.
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Fives nodded her understanding, and like that they were gone through the front door. The Captain seemed to know the streets well, as if he had spent time here before the collapse. He took Fives across the thru-street in front of the building they'd hidden in, and then along it to the east just like he'd said, until they came to an intersection and turned north once again.
They were heading deeper into the city's heart and the height and breadth of the building all around showed it. She wondered what The Captain was doing here, in the middle of an abandoned city... and why G&K was chasing him like a wanted criminal. She thought that she might ask him when they found somewhere safe.
Sure enough, a half-mile on to the north there was a break in the cityscape giving way to a low field ringed by young trees and a tall panel fence. They stayed low behind it, moving considerably more slowly to avoid detection. Halfway down the perimeter of the field The Captain stopped and pointed a gloved finger across the street.
"Radio broadcast tower. Three stories, many windows. It will make a fine overlook... and, if we are lucky, we may find what I came here to retrieve within." he whispered.
"What you... came to retrieve?" Fives repeated curiously. He nodded and knelt.
"The K.C.C.O. used to keep a communications and reconnaissance post in this town. When I found its remains, most of the equipment had been moved... the rest was destroyed. This is the only other broadcast station that I know of here—if we assume that they merely changed locations, then this is where they most likely went.” His tone of voice was the same soft stoic that Fives was growing used to, but it was fringed with excitement. She guessed he had written off the mission until he’d seen this place.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Fives said with an encouraging smile. The Captain grimaced and shook his head, switching his gaze back to the fence on their left… and the open gate some twenty yards on down it. “Oh…” her head shook with dissatisfaction.
The Captain raised his right hand up to his shoulder with one his index finger extended. After a few seconds weighing options, he turned back to Fives and pointed the radio on his vest that matched the one he’d given her. She pulled hers out and nodded, double-checking the frequency. The captain reached for it and turned the volume knob down to the third notch before doing the same to his own. He mimed for her to put it up to her ear, and he did the same.
“Can you hear me?” his voice was less than a whisper but crystal clear, save for the barest static coming through.
“Perfectly,” she replied. He nodded, satisfied.
“Go to the gate there, quiet like we’ve been moving. Report what you see inside and if it is safe to cross the street to its front.” He ordered softly.
His pupils were black pinpoints set in wide grey-green pools. They weren’t cold eyes, not yet, but they were troubled. His face too was hardened but not cut from stone, though with his apparent age and whatever history led to his reputation with G&K… it wouldn’t have been out of place. Atop it all he wore a faded blue beret, stripped of whatever insignia it once held.
His eyebrows raised expectantly, snapping her out of her trance. Fives nodded rapidly to ensure her comprehension, and immediately stepped around him toward the gate assuming a crouched posture. His hand on her shoulder held her back.
“Don’t be seen.” His voice seemed to lack any personal concern. With that he let her go, following behind her only to stop ten yards back from the gate.
She looked back at him over her shoulder once, crouched there like a panther in the dark waiting to make his move with radio in hand. He had slung the rifle around his neck and drawn his revolver, so that he could keep the radio near his left ear. It was a comfortable pose for him, one that he must have taken up hundreds of times before.
By comparison her own posture was sloppy, even she could tell, and she struggled to stay quiet due to the weight of her all-metal frame while his footsteps were silent when he wanted them to be. She frowned at the disparities between their capabilities, but kept her chin high. She’d adapt, learn how to be the partner he needed.
He didn’t drag me out of a graveyard to be fodder, she thought. Her steps lightened then, if only slightly.
The gate was about twelve feet wide made from red iron bars, the sort of entrance Fives imagined a farm might have—nothing close to what she thought a stadium’s front gate should look like. It was pushed wide open to the inside, and the lack of dust over the paint told her that it had been moved recently. She inched closer along the fence, her left arm braced against it, until she could only just see beyond the threshold.
Right away she could see two dolls standing guard nearby, though she didn’t recognize their model. They were about thirty yards into the field under a short tree that had grown up in the stadium after it was abandoned.
They weren’t paying much attention, apparently. Another forty yards past them was a hastily-raised white canopy tent. Inside was a man crouched over a folding table, almost unmovingly transfixed on a hardcase laptop set on the table. Fives couldn’t make out what was being displayed on it from so far away, but her best guess was the telemetry data from the dolls that had attacked them mixed with orders and intelligence from whoever was above him in the chain of command.
Another three dolls were there in the tent with him: two of the type she didn’t recognize, and one that she did—an AN-94 that stood right behind and to the left of the man at the table. Fives figured that she was his secretary.
To the left of the tent sat two transport helicopters, and a few boxes of supplies that had been taken out and set on the grass. Most of his squad must have gone after them to the apartment… and she had seen that none would be making it back. She ducked back behind the fence and recited what she saw into the radio.
“There are two guards by the gate, under a tree, and their Commander is under a tent in the middle of the field. His secretary and two other dolls are there with him.” She whispered into the reciever. A moment later, The Captain’s voice softly crackled a response through her radio.
“Can you distract the guards?” he questioned. She saw him turn to look in her direction. She nodded before turning back toward the fence to look in again.
The two dolls under the tree seemed inattentive but not completely blind or deaf, merely disaffected by their current task. There was an old and overgrown tractor off to the left of the guards by about twenty yards…
Fives leaned down and picked up a rock from the ground by her feet. One last look to properly gauge the distance. She ducked back behind the fence and raised her arm high behind her head, carefully calculating the arc, before rocking her arm forward and releasing it to sail through the air like a far too-big bullet.
It pinged true off of the tractor’s rusted metal body, instantly grabbing the attention of the dolls under the tree—who Fives could hear shuffling about and talking amongst themselves. She poked her head out again and saw them moving towards the tractor, as predicted.
“They’re not paying attention! Go!” she spoke into the receiver with a hushed and hurried inflection. She kept watching them as they meandered towards the old machine with guns raised, only looking away for a second to check on The Captain when they stopped to investigate it; but when she looked back towards the street he was gone. She hadn’t even heard his soles on the blacktop… but when she looked across the street at the radio station’s front doors, she could make out the ever-so-subtle swinging of the two-way door before it finally went still.
Behind her came the sound of a gun barrel poking sheet metal, and then the sound of two pairs of feet moving back towards where they had previously stood under the tree.