Authors: Robison Wells
THE FUSELAGE OF THE PLANE
ripped in two. Aubrey waited and listened, but there was nothing—no movement or noise.
Aubrey began to sob. She knew she had to get up, she knew she had to run, but she sat on the side of the road and cried. She cried for the boy, and for Jack, and for all the Green Berets, and for whatever had happened to Josi and Rich and even for Tabitha and Krezi. She cried for those nine men she’d killed at the roadblock and all the men she’d killed since then. Enough for a lifetime. More.
“I GUESS YOU’RE GOING TO
be holed up with us here,” Tabitha said. “Until the medics come.”
She was trying to make something in the kitchen out of canned goods. Alec kept speaking to Krezi, kept trying to make her say things. Tabitha didn’t know who he was, but he wasn’t on their side.
At one point, Tabitha moved to the table and, as surreptitiously as possible given its size and weight, holstered her M9.
Still Alec’s mind continued to assault her. She should trust him. They knew each other, back at that birthday party—at the dance—hanging out, getting ice cream. It was like he was feeding her memories so generic that her mind would fill in the details. He never said what kind of party it was, or what ice-cream shop. He’d probably done this very thing to a dozen—maybe dozens—of people. But for whatever reason, her telepathy turned his psychic promptings into plain English and she could understand simply what he wanted her to believe.
Tabitha took the plates of food—mostly crackers and a little Spam—into the front room. She scooted a small stool between Alec and Krezi. Alec bent forward to get a cracker, and as he did so, Tabitha grabbed at his pistol. He wheeled away, faster than any movement she’d seen from him yet, and drew the pistol himself. Tabitha was on her feet, her M9 in a two-hand grip.
“Who are you?” Tabitha demanded. “Why can I hear your thoughts?”
He looked completely in control, even with a gun aimed right at his heart—he’d taken off his body armor, too.
“You can hear my thoughts?” he said, sounding genuinely surprised. “No one can hear my thoughts. You must be special. Lambdas? I got quarantined with all the lambdas, but I was able to talk my way out of it. It’s a shame you didn’t. Now you’re on the losing side of a very nasty war.”
“We’re joining the rebellion,” Tabitha said. “And . . . and . . . it’s none of your damn business. You come in here and play with our minds like you can do whatever you want.”
He held the gun steady on Tabitha but glanced over at Krezi.
“I—I can’t do anything.”
“Liar,” he said with a grin. “I do so much enjoying getting secrets out of people. It’s where I really shine.” He focused back on Tabitha. “Of course, it’s easier without a gun pointed at you. Do you know what the problem with a standoff is?”
Tabitha just stared back at him.
He fired his pistol, three quick shots.
As she lay dying on the floor, staring at the peeling paint of the ceiling, she heard him say, “You always think you’re fast enough to beat the other guy to the trigger pull.”
There was a brilliant blaze of light and a cry of rage.
THE EXPLOSION AT THE GLIDER
had attracted attention, and the tank that had been sitting at the front of the runway came rolling toward Aubrey. She dropped the pistol, and gingerly stood up. She needed to get back to Jack. She needed another gun.
She slowly walked around the wing of the plane and past the sputtering propeller. She could barely see. That didn’t matter. She needed to get back to Jack. He and the platoon were a hundred yards away.
“Aubrey?” a voice called out.
She stopped and looked around. It sounded like Josi. She hoped the tank crew hadn’t heard.
“Aubrey?”
The tank stopped.
“Aubrey? Where are you?”
The voice was coming from on top of the tank. Aubrey squinted in the darkness, trying to make out the face of the person in the tank commander’s seat.
She turned visible. It felt like a huge weight was suddenly lifted off her back, like she could suddenly breathe again.
“Josi?” she asked, exhausted.
“Aubrey! You did it!”
The driver’s hatch opened, and a face popped out. “Aubrey! You stopped them! What happened to your arm?”
“I got shot,” Aubrey said, an exhausted smile covering her face. “How did you get the tank?”
“The crew got out to pee,” Rich said. “Josi killed them.”
“And Rich can understand any machine, including tanks,” Josi said proudly. “We were waiting down there for the plane to come. I have the mounted heavy machine gun.” She slapped the giant gun mounted on top of the tank.
Aubrey stepped toward them. “I’m going to need some help up,” she said. “I’ve only got one arm.”
“We watched you from the end of the runway,” Rich said, clambering out of his seat. Josi was climbing down from her perch as well. “You were awesome.”
“Yeah,” Aubrey said, pain in her voice. “The plan worked.”
“Where’s Jack?” Josi asked.
The two of them pulled Aubrey up by her armpits. She wanted to scream, but she held it back.
“He’s in a place where a tank would really come in handy.”
The tank rolled across the airfield, passing the wreckage of the earlier bombing run and ignoring the calls from annoyed soldiers. Aubrey sat in the commander’s seat, and Josi in the gunner’s, both of them sticking their heads out of the turret. A dozen soldiers still stood around the tower.
“Josi,” Aubrey said. “Clear us a path. That tower’s full of fuel, I think, so try not to blow us all up.”
Rich had given Josi all the basics in how to operate the machine gun, and she pointed it at the soldiers sieging the tower. She only had to fire a dozen rounds—dropping five men and sending the rest of the infantry running. Their own tank was firing on them.
Jack was ready. Aubrey had been talking to him the entire drive over from the glider. Rich pulled the tank in next to the tower, smashing the fence as he did so. Aubrey ducked inside the tank, watching as Jack scrambled down the ladder and climbed in to her commander’s seat. These tanks technically were only made to hold a crew of three, but Aubrey was tucked tight in the center.
Rich revved the engine and in a minute the tank was going fifty miles an hour away from the airfield and into the residential streets of Ellensburg.
“Hey,” Jack said, peeking down inside the body of the tank.
“Hey.”
“I killed that sniper.”
“I noticed.”
“Senseless. That was the word.”
“Senseless. Agreed.”
“Are you okay?”
“Not really. Let’s go home.”
AUBREY’S ACU JACKET WAS SOAKED
in blood, from her collar to the middle of her chest. Jack and Josi began to help her take off her Kevlar vest. Together they opened Aubrey’s jacket to reveal an even-more-soaked T-shirt.
“I promise I’m not being forward,” Jack said, “but we have to get you out of that shirt.”
Aubrey stuck out her tongue. “You say that to all the girls who get shot.”
Josi used her knife to slit Aubrey’s shirt from collar to sleeve while Jack opened Aubrey’s first-aid kit.
The wound was gruesome—a jagged hole that punched straight through the collarbone. Josi exchanged a glance with Jack.
“What does that look mean?” Aubrey asked.
“I don’t know,” Josi said. “The bleeding has mostly stopped, so that’s good. This is going to hurt a little bit.” She reached to Aubrey’s back and felt for the exit wound. Aubrey gritted her teeth in pain.
Josi pulled her hand back, wiping the blood—new and old—onto her pants. “It might have hit your scapula. I’m not sure. It’ll be a while before you play baseball again.”
Jack wiped the wounds with alcohol pads, as gingerly as he could, which wasn’t very gingerly at all. Aubrey managed to keep from crying out, but he could tell it was taking all she had. She bit her lip until he was worried that she’d bite it clean through, and her fingers were wrapped around the strap of his vest, squeezing like a vise.
Finally, he was able to apply gauze to the oozing bullet hole and secure it with tape. Josi held up a piece of cotton cloth tied into a loop.
“It’s not perfect,” she said. “But you need a sling.” They closed her jacket and helped her lean forward enough to get the sling over her head and shoulder.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You guys done?” Rich called.
“Yes,” Aubrey said.
“Do you want to know how to work the radio?”
“We can call our base from here?” Aubrey asked.
“We can. Normally the Russians would hear us, but I’ll walk you through the procedure of how to get a secure line.”
Jack was sitting in the commander’s chair, so he pushed the buttons on the radio in the order that Rich dictated—the red button, the yellow one in the bottom corner, a series of numbers, the red one again, then the other yellow.
Jack handed the headset down to Aubrey. He had to help her slip it over her ears.
“FOB, this is Lambda Private Parsons from ODA nine-one-one-nine. Come in.”
There was a long pause, and then Aubrey repeated her name. “Serial number eight-oh-one-six-nine-one-nine-one-one-five. Yes, I’m calling from a Russian radio. We’re in a Russian tank, actually.”
There was another long pause, and Jack began to wonder whether they’d disregard this as some kind of hoax or disinformation campaign.
“I understand,” Aubrey said. “I understand. We need to report: the Russian lambda who could disrupt electronics is KIA. Repeat, the Russian lambda who could disrupt electronics is KIA.”
It seemed to take whoever was listening a long time to process that information. Aubrey was waiting, not answering more questions.
“Yes,” she finally said. “Yes, sir. This is Lambda Private Parsons, ODA nine-one-one-nine.”
She tried to turn to look at Rich, and winced.
Jack was quicker to ask the question. “Rich, where are we?”
“Forty-six degrees, fifty-nine minutes, thirty point zero-zero-eight seconds latitude, negative one hundred twenty degrees, thirty-one minutes, twenty-three point six-five-six-eight seconds longitude.”
Aubrey repeated the coordinates to Major Brookes on the radio. “We’re in a Russian tank—”
“A T-eighty,” Josi said.
“A T-eighty,” Aubrey repeated. “We’re trying to get back across the lines. Preferably before you bomb this place again.”
They made Aubrey relate the entire story of how they found the lambda and how they killed him. Jack offered to take the headphones from her and let her rest, but she seemed to act like it was her duty.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “All the Green Berets in our ODA are either KIA or MIA. And two of the lambdas are AWOL.” She paused. “Yes, sir, we’re very lucky. Thank you, sir. We’ll be waiting.”
She looked up at Jack and moved the mouthpiece away from her mouth.
“They’re not sure they believe us,” she said. “They’re going to try to find some way to confirm our story.”
“Some way to confirm it?” Josi said. “Can’t they just fly some planes in and watch them not crash?”
“That’s just it,” Jack said, having listened to the entire conversation. “They think this might be a trap to get us into another one-sided fight.”
“So what do we do?” Rich asked.
“We find somewhere to wait,” Aubrey said. “And hope we don’t get caught. We’re supposed to check back with them in forty-five minutes.”
TABITHA WAS DEAD. IT WAS
too hard to handle the thought. Tabitha was dead.
Whatever Tabitha had known about Alec, she’d been right. Alec was bad. Krezi still didn’t know how, but he had fired his gun, and he had smiled while he’d done it. Krezi had let loose when she saw Tabitha fall, blasting an arc of energy that even she didn’t know she had within her. Alec had been thrown like a rag doll across the room. He didn’t bleed; he was far too charred to do that.
Krezi didn’t know what to do now. Tabitha could be bossy at times, but she always had a plan.
No plan prepared her for this.
And her chest hurt. Her fever was back. It felt so good to release all of her energy and to have her fever drop, but it came back soon enough.
She had to move before she got much sicker—she couldn’t stay in this house. She stumbled into the cold night air of Ellensburg, keeping to the shadows. She could feel the breath-stealing, sharp grind of her ribs rubbing against one another. It started mostly as a sensation of pressure, a feeling that something was moving that shouldn’t be, but soon the stinging jolts began.
She didn’t dare stop.
Why had she listened to Tabitha? It wasn’t because Tabitha had made any great sense; it was because Krezi was scared, and Tabitha treated her with respect.
No. Tabitha’s arguments
had
made sense. Every time she talked to Krezi about being too young to be in a war, about being used by the government as a weapon, about being taken away from her family—that made sense.
But it was all too scary now. Krezi wished she had never heard of the rebellion. She wished that she’d stayed with her team, wished that she had someone watching out for her. She didn’t know what had happened to Aubrey and Josi and Captain Gillett and all the others, but they were probably sleeping in their tents now. They were powerful lambdas with a whole team of Green Berets. They would have made it. They would be fine. It was Krezi who was alone and sick and freezing.
There was no way she could get to the American lines, not in her condition. She needed to find shoes and painkillers and a coat.
And a bed. She couldn’t keep walking like this. Her entire chest was shattered.
When she reached a corner she turned off the sidewalk and onto a short driveway. There was a house with yellow siding and a pillared porch. The concrete felt like ice under her numbing feet as she put her hand on the knob and set off a tiny explosion from her palm, blasting the lock inward and shattering the edge of the wooden door. It still wouldn’t give, so she did the same thing to the deadbolt, looking over her shoulder to make sure no one was watching.
She pushed the door open, stepped gingerly inside, and then closed it behind her.
The house was dark and abandoned, but the carpet felt good under her feet and it seemed at least twenty degrees warmer than outside. She thought about starting a fire in the fireplace, but didn’t want the smoke to attract attention. Instead, she pulled a blanket off the couch and wrapped it around her shoulders.
She searched the house for the bathroom, and when she found it she raided the medicine cabinet. There weren’t any prescription drugs—but there was ibuprofen. She took four tablets, swallowed them with a handful of water from the tap, and then found a bedroom. She’d worry about escaping later. Right now she just needed to lie down.
Sleep came easily.