Rage

FORTY-TWO

Raine led Marshall outside, Loosum just behind, swinging right and left with her gun as though she had done a bunch of tours of duty in the hellish sandpits of the Middle East.

Raine looked up.

And he saw only a few Enforcers looking in the direction of the carrier, probably the still-suspected location of the attack. And why would they look back here, with a small army of Enforcers in the barracks?

That army the three of them had just eliminated.

But then one turned, and he saw the other two react.

“Never any wood to knock on,” he muttered.

Loosum shrugged, not understanding. “I got the one on the left.”

“I’ll take the right,” Raine said.

He started firing, and while Loosum’s target went down immediately, Raine’s shots went wide.

But Marshall, though he looked hardly able to stand, had taken a shot, and now there was just one Enforcer. Loosum took him out.

We’re off the plan now, Raine thought. “We have to get to the gorge.”

It was the only way he knew out of here. He saw Loosum look at him, perhaps weighing whether she should follow her own instincts or listen to this newcomer from the past.

Marshall spoke up.

“They’ll have Enforcers all over the carrier. Protecting the main way in or out. Raine’s right. The gorge is the only way. We have to hurry.” He took a breath. “We’ve got a narrow window.”

Raine looked at him as they kept moving. “You mean before they have their fences all armed, the turret weapons?”

Marshall looked at him.

“No. Something worse. Mutants.”

Raine thought: So what, mutants? He had dealt with them before. Though why the hell they would be inside the Capital…

That didn’t make any sense at all.

Loosum spoke, breaking him out of that train of thought.

“God. What the hell-”

The words were like a spear of ice hitting Raine’s brain.

Before he even looked up, Loosum’s voice had signaled that something was really bad.

When he did look up, he saw a line of attackers, moving together, in formation, armed, a wall of them. Some of them already firing.

Not Enforcers.

Not people recruited from the Wasteland and given a high-tech weapon and armored suit.

No-these attackers didn’t need any armor.

Because they just didn’t go down too easy.

The three of them started firing even as they backed away from the advancing line as fast as they could.

Marshall tried to make it on his own, but when he stumbled and fell a few times, Raine had no choice but give him an arm as he fired haphazardly. “Christ,” Raine shouted, “how can they be mutants?”

“They’re experiments,” Marshall said. “What they were doing in the Dead City… they completed here.”

Raine didn’t need Marshall to explain what that was. It was right before his eyes. Mutants, controlled, weaponized. Ready to do the bidding of the Authority.

Raine looked around, to the buildings nearby. If they were being controlled, was someone watching, in charge of them?

“We gotta move,” Loosum said.

Their own shots seemed to have little effect. There were so many of the mutants that even if they got perfect shots to their heads, there was no way they’d be able to take them all out.

They kept on firing as they turned and ran to the fence along the perimeter of the Capital.

The army of mutants gained on them.

The hopelessness began to hit Raine. To have come this far, to be so close.

You never knew when it was game over.

Now, with their dwindling ammo and the sheer numbers coming for them, he began to let himself consider other options.

Those options that one didn’t voice, when the tide turned, when hopelessness became the reality. When you had to think of other things. About what you would do when the monsters finally fell upon you.

He looked back, the fence not far away.

“Leave me,” Marshall said. “The two of you-you can get the hell away.”

“You’re the reason I came here,” Raine said as he reloaded.

Loosum, still behind them, kept up her shots.

Raine reached into his pack, realizing that the mutant horde was close enough that he could use a dart.

One of the last two.

He threw it, and now aim didn’t matter as much. The wall of mutants coming toward them was so thick he could hardly miss hitting one.

When the dart hit, he sent that mutant crashing into its brothers, tripping some up even though one quickly sliced off its head One, two, through and through.

– but still the nanotrite-overloaded mutant kept moving.

It exploded, and now there were five less of them. And the fence was a few meters closer.

Was the electricity on? Raine wondered. Turret guns already turning to them?

Or had they only restored power to certain areas?

They were close enough to the fence now that he could turn and see the carrier, covered with Enforcers. How long before they realized that the real intruders were back at the Capital buildings?

How long before they faced two fucking armies: Enforcers and a living shield of mutants in front of them?

Raine thought of a legendary battle. Thermopylae. The last stand of last stands.

He turned to the fence, dug out a grenade from his pack and tossed it at the fence.

The three stopped then, waiting for the hole to be kicked in.

The mutants seconds away.

Raine saw that-without his even noticing it-Marshall had taken a shot to the shoulder.

“I’m okay,” he said, seeing Raine spot it.

Loosum kept firing with the shotgun.

At this range, not the most effective weapon.

Raine thought: We’re fucked.

Then he pushed the useless thought away.

The grenade behind them exploded, blowing a hole. Raine had the delusional idea that if they got out and climbed down the gorge, they could get out of the sights of the Enforcers, the mutants, and the gun turrets.

About as an impossible dream as there ever was.

The only thing in their favor was that the mutants, as controlled as they might be, were wild shots. And only half of them had projectile weapons.

But what they lacked in skill and firepower, they made up in numbers.

The fence was open, but Raine didn’t think they’d make it.

“Come on, you bastards!” Loosum yelled.

And as Raine fired beside her, he thought… with people like Loosum in this world, the future had hope.

Regardless of what was about to happen.

Loosum moaned. Raine looked down. A shot right at the kneecap. She fell forward.

Raine went to her. No way she could move, her blood glimmering even in the predawn darkness.

But she reacted quickly.

“Give me that last dart. The grenades. As much ammo as you can.”

Raine didn’t understand.

“ Give me the fucking stuff, and get the hell out of here now. Get Marshall out.”

And half lying down, half squatting, Loosum turned around and began firing at the line of mutants.

“Go!” she screamed, without looking back.

“We can’t-” Marshall started.

But this wasn’t the first time either of them had been in such a situation. The moment where a sacrifice is offered, where a decision had to be made. For the greater good.

And you moved.

Raine gave her the grenades, another box of ammo. The last dart.

“Loosum-”

“Get the hell out of here,” she said.

Raine turned and led Marshall, bleeding badly from the shoulder, to the hole in the fence.

As they went through, shots echoed from below them, around the front of the carrier in front of them.

And from behind, Raine heard the steady firing of Loosum and the shotgun.

Fast. She was reloading and firing so goddamned fast. Then the sound of an explosion as she used the dart.

Raine kept lugging Marshall farther into the darkness, the turret guns on the fence not tracking them, still dead, not laying down a line of fire as he stumbled toward the gorge leading down.

He heard a grenade.

Another.

Raine didn’t dare look back.

Every second counted if Loosum’s sacrifice wasn’t to be totally in vain.

Then just the shotgun, all explosives gone. Mixed with the sound of the rifles the mutants fired.

Perhaps Enforcers had arrived.

Then No more blasts of the shotgun. No more grenades.

Raine felt Marshall-this hero of the Resistance, the man who came from the same time as he did, and started this world fighting back-turn more and more into dead weight with each step.

Neither spoke.

They reached the edge of the gorge, rocks leading down. It looked hopeless. How the hell could he get Marshall down? And even if he could, did they have enough time?

“Okay, okay,” Raine said. “We gotta, we just gotta-”

He knew that Marshall was too experienced a military man to not know the impossibility of what they had to do.

And yet they would try.

“Gotta get down.”

When Raine heard something, it took a moment. But it was a noise he recognized. A wheezing engine sound. The sound of a prop turning.

And with no lights on, looking like a rock rising out of the gorge basin, floating upward… the same balloon craft that had brought him from Wellspring to the Resistance base.

There were two shadows on the deck of the clumsy aircraft. As it came nearer, Raine could see Elizabeth at the wheel and Portman at the front, standing next to what looked like a small cannon.

So close.

“Get in!” Elizabeth said.

The craft hovered, rocking back and forth, actually banging into the rocks, as Raine dragged Marshall closer. Had Loosum bought them enough time?

The mutants weren’t firing-which meant that he and Marshall were hidden by the rocks here. But they had to be only seconds behind.

Portman had left his weapon to help haul Marshall in. Raine leaped without help, freed of the captain’s dead weight.

Portman’s two strong arms grabbed him at his forearms, pulling him into the ship.

Raine was surprised, then, to find that instead of rising, instead of flying up as he expected, the airship dropped down.

He thought: Are we too heavy? Is the thing sinking?

But as he saw Marshall sprawled on the desk, he caught Elizabeth talking to Portman. Saw that she was in control. And Raine could put together what was happening. They were dropping as far down as they could, to get lost in the jutting rocks of the gorge, to where they could level out… and follow the gorge basin away.

A plan. A goddamned plan.

But then Raine heard the familiar sound of bullets, now ripping into the deck. A few shots into the balloon of the ship and they would simply crash to that basin floor, and wait for the Enforcers to come down-if it even mattered at that point.

Raine looked up to see where the shots came from.

Something in the sky.

“Goddamned hovercraft! ” Portman said. “Shit.”

“Got to make us weave,” Elizabeth said. “Hold on.”

Raine looked over to Marshall, who really only had one hand to hold on. He saw that the captain had locked that hand onto one of the mastlike pieces of wood at the ship’s center.

Raine held on to the ship’s edge as it began to veer right and left.

He heard more bullets, landing dangerously close.

We’re sitting ducks here.

But when he looked forward, he saw Portman at the weapon at the ship’s prow, both the cannon and its user dark shapes. The bore of the small cannon now pointed up at a sixty-degree angle.

And finally Portman started firing.

The cannon produced shakes in the ship, a recoil that sent the airship knocking against the gorge’s side. Portman kept firing, shot after shot.

Raine saw a bullet tear into the balloon; had to be a few there already. Was there enough lift in the balloon to keep this thing in the air, this flying technology ancient and absurd?

Like a rejoinder to his disparaging thoughts, an explosion from above them produced a brilliant fireworks display as the Authority hovercraft exploded.

While the balloon craft kept moving forward.

And for the first time in a long time, Raine didn’t hear any gunfire.

They weaved their way along the gorge bottom, the only sounds the wind and the ship’s boiler.

Portman had moved over to the wheel while Elizabeth crouched beside Marshall, tending to his wound. With the amount of blood he’d lost, there was no telling if he’d survive… even after all they’d gone through.

Raine thought of Loosum.

The feelings… overwhelming. Confusing.

He saw a bit of color in the east.

The dark night finally giving way to the first hint of the sun about to rise.

And finally he let himself close his eyes.