Written in Fire

CHAPTER 40

Life had been reduced to extremes.

There was silence; and there was the thunder of gunfire. Cold, clean air; and the reek of smoke and gasoline. December chill; and the sudden sharp burn of an ejected casing pinging off Natalie’s skin. Strangest of all was the darkness broken only by flares of brilliant light. Each muzzle flash revealed a living photograph, lovingly composed and yet vanishing almost too quickly to absorb, like a piece of conceptual art.

Flash: Here is a man in a puffy black ski jacket with a pistol in each hand, his mouth contorted in a howl as he pulls both triggers at the same time.

Flash: Here is the kind-faced older man in the neighboring building, tongue caught boyishly between his lips as he fires into a crowd.

Flash: Here is a teenager with a buzz cut hauling his bleeding body across broken ground as he shoots blindly.

Flash: Here is your hand on the barrel of a rifle, pale with cold and carved with the lines of your history.

Flash: Here is gentle Jolene screaming obscenities, lips curled back, hair swinging like snakes.

Earlier, when Natalie had tried to imagine the assault, she had mentally screened old movies, columns of men goose-stepping like Nazis down the center of the street. She had wondered if she would be able to frame the sights up on a living target and pull the trigger, send a hunk of metal screaming through space to tear the flesh of another.

That turned out not to be the problem. Any reluctance had vanished when they started shooting floodlights—when, like the beast that had lived in her childhood closet, they drew their strength from darkness. She had gone through five magazines of ammunition already, and although she couldn’t say for sure how many people she had hit—how many she had killed—she knew the number was far from zero.

No, the problem was that the militia didn’t goose-step down the middle of the street. Instead they sprinted, zigzagging. They hid behind every scrap of cover. They stormed the barricade and leapt from the top and hit the ground at a roll and came up running. They dashed along the paths that ran between the buildings. There were so many of them, an endless stream, and all desperate to live, and even as she lined up and fired and lined up and fired, even as she knew that her rounds found targets, there was always another, and another. It was like trying to poke holes in the ocean, only this ocean was clothed in black and howling and shooting back.

The slide of the rifle locked open. Natalie dropped to her knees, spun so her shoulders were against the filing cabinet. She spared a moment to look at her d-pad, where the battlefield map glowed faintly. Drones circling above tracked heat signatures, motion, and gunfire to build an interactive picture of war as a living organism. It looked like a ring of fire squeezing inward. The colors shifted and flowed as she watched, vortices of furious red spinning against blue as the New Sons broke the city defenses.

And there in the center are the bunkers where your children huddle.

Natalie released the magazine from her rifle and slapped in a new one, then poked her head up. A bullet snapped above, close enough that she could sense its passage. She dropped back down as more rounds blew through the shattered window and tore holes in the ceiling.

I think they’ve figured out where you are.

She grabbed a couple of spare magazines from the bag and crawled on hands and knees to the next window. Earlier she and Jolene had dragged a heavy desk from the corner office of some executive and tipped it up in front of the window. Her ear to the wood, she slowly eased her head up enough for one eye to clear.

Flashes and cracks echoed from all directions, but the area in front of her window, the space she felt responsible for, seemed quiet. She squinted, trying to separate darkness from darkness. The purple light was on the far side of the globe and helped not at all. Was something moving? She thought so. But the shape was wrong, motion here and here and there. How could one person—oh.

Natalie dropped the rifle, stood, and ran back to her window, ignoring the blasts that came from the street, the splintering of the walls, the wood spraying off the desk, just focused on making it to the filing cabinet, at the base of which stood five glass bottles. She grabbed one and the lighter, white plastic, the same Bic available in ten million checkout lines, but this one she was using to light a rag soaked in gasoline, the chemical smell ringing in her nostrils. One spin of the wheel, two, three, and then the lighter flared, and the flame leapt eagerly to the cloth tucked into the bottle. She risked standing up long enough to hurl it out the window as bullets blew in at her. She dropped too quickly to see it break, but she could hear the whoomp of gasoline and the sudden crackle of hair and cloth, and right on the heels of that, screams.

The sound tore at her. Instinctively, she wanted to call a time-out. To rush down and help whoever was hurt, as she might if one of Todd’s friends were hurt roughhousing—put on a Band-Aid and call his mother. Instead, she returned to the other window, picked up the rifle, and made herself look out.

While shooters farther back had tried to pin her down, a group of ten or so had been crawling through her field of vision. The firebomb had landed amidst them, the glass shattering and gasoline flinging out, and now they writhed and screamed and flailed furiously at the flames. In the sudden glow of light, she could see not only the men she had lit on fire, but also many beyond, eyes glinting in the darkness, indiscernible shapes, a horde of them stretching into the horizon, a monster that wouldn’t quit coming, and instead of bandaging the wounds she lined up her rifle and started shooting them, taking advantage of the light from their burning brothers.