Abel didn't give a shit. “You have five seconds.” He didn't explain, and he didn't have to. The consequences of staying silent were displayed out in front of us in obvious detail. “Five...”
Badger's other team-member began to yell as loud as he could. He screamed for as long as his lungs could take it, but he didn't give me up. He didn't say my name.
“Four.”
Nick began to yell countless obscenities. Murphy tried to plead with the man to take him instead, but nobody said my name. I felt the sudden sense that I was back in Camp Maxwell. Everything was happening all over again. No matter how many times I had gone over the memory, it had always ended the same. I had never been able to change it, just like I knew I wouldn't be able to change anything now.
“Three.”
Fresh streams ran down my cheeks, adding to the intensity of the warmth so much that I thought I would pass out. My lips trembled and touched each other to form the sounds, but the words didn't come out. I was too quiet. I was too scared.
I'M JESSICA CARTER.
I'M JESSICA CARTER.
I'M JESSICA CARTER.
“Two.”
I closed my eyes and cast out with my mind. I poured myself over the ground and onto the vehicles surrounding my body. I could feel lead-tipped bullets inside of the brass barrels pointed at me hundreds of feet out from every direction in the arms of every owner watching the sight in tepid anticipation. I pulled back to focus on the fallen Knight in front of me, but I couldn't see him. A black hole burned itself into the fabric of space and sucked every thought, feeling and emotion into an endless void exactly where the Arbiter should have been, and Conner along with him.
I couldn't see him. I couldn't—
One.
Abel pulled the pin.
Sound escaped the Earth. I was thrust into oblivion until a familiar voice said my name.
“Tess...”
I looked to my side and opened my eyes to see Jeremy's face in front of mine. He had woken up. He hadn't said anything. I had almost forgotten he was there.
“Don't look.” He kept his eyes glued to my own. I could barely understand what he was saying. “Just look at me. Don't look away. Just stay here.”
Look at me.
I felt the heat on the side of my face before Conner began to scream. The sound was quickly muffled out as a chemical reaction violent enough to melt steel erupted into life inside of his throat, but I didn't look. I kept my eyes on Jeremy the whole time. Even as I felt the immense heat threaten to blister my cheek, even as the body of the man I had once known fell over in liquefying entropy, I didn't look. Because of Jeremy.
“And just what the hell do
you think
you're
doing?”
I glanced back to see Abel turning towards something else. Just off to the side, where the man who had been used as bait had been, Isabel now stood with an unrecognizable amount of blood that ran down her face and neck and weighed down full locks of her hair. But I did recognize the revolver in her hands. She pointed it at Abel only a few feet away, and for a tense moment I was worried that she wouldn't be able to see well enough to hit him.
The Arbiter brought his hand up and the gun in her hands immediately began to glow red, then white hot. She screamed as the metal started to turn into slag and run over her hands, but she didn't let go, and the round inside went off.
The force on my body disappeared in an instant and I fell to the ground. My palms burned as I used them to break my fall and skidded forward onto the asphalt. I glanced up past the bangs in front of my eyes to see Abel clenching his arm in pain. Almost directly halfway in between us, my M4 lay still, beckoning for my touch.
No time to think.
I ran forward and dove for the rifle, bringing it up in my arms and flipping the fire-selector to
full
auto
in one fluid motion, but I was already too late. The Arbiter had closed the distance faster than any human should have and pulled out a sword from his back to swing down and split my skull in two. I closed my eyes and braced for the final blow, yet it never came.
I pried my lids open to see Olivia standing in front of me with her arms up above her head, the blade destined for my soul caught against the metal guards underneath her now split sleeves. I could see Abel's eyes bulge as the pieces of information flared across the surface of his mind until he understood; He wasn't the only Knight in town.
“Surprise, asshole.” She threw her open hands in front of his chest and a sudden whirlwind of fire erupted to life to fling his flaming body into the center of a car halfway across the square.
The deafening roar of splitting air almost left me deaf, though my body refused to wait. I reacted on impulse and pushed Olivia out of my way to bring my sites up and pull the trigger in front of my hand. The pale, skinny man stumbled back a few feet in front of us as soon as the familiar concussion ran through my body and out the front of my rifle.
The pistol in his hand dipped down, away from Olivia, and he put a hand up to the side of his neck to feel an unfamiliar, wet, concave shape drip away from his body. I had shot him in the side of the neck. He fell down a second after we both realized it and he began the drawn out process of choking on his own blood.
“Come on!” Olivia grabbed my arm and dragged me through the square, all the time the sound of an increasing amount of guns starting to open up around us like some sort of endless, whip-cracking machine. Entire patches of concrete exploded directly in our path and on either side, the closer bullets speeding past our heads with a sudden fissure in the air so intense that I thought I had died a hundred times over.
I could barely keep my balance as I forced my body to sprint faster than I ever had before. I watched as the rest of our group made it behind the nearest line of cars for cover first and popped back up to shoot back. I split off from Olivia and dove behind a sedan just as bullet holes riddled the side in unusual, high-pitched
twangs,
the higher-caliber ones among them piercing all the way through until they burrowed themselves into the ground.
I threw my head underneath my hands and tried to squeeze my body down into an infinitesimal point in a desperate hope to get it all to fade away. All around me, the sounds of war pressed in on my eardrums and threatened to tear me open before the oncoming bullets could. The smell of burnt sulfur was strong and acidic. It burned in my throat.
“Right flank!” Badger shouted.
“I got it!” Someone shouted back.
“He's hit!” Someone else screamed out amidst the sound of gunfire.
Bursting glass fell down between my neck and shoulder. I tried to peek my head up, but it seemed like every time I even tried to move an inch, a bullet came closer to forcing my expiration. Another voice finally snapped me out of my overwhelming paralysis as if I had stepped through the torrent of a waterfall and came out the other side. I was still alive. Jeremy needed help.
“Covering fire!” Badger shouted.
I pushed my rifle up onto the hood of the car and joined in on the percussive bombardment coming from our line. Spurts of fire erupted from the end of my barrel as I pulled the trigger on shape after shape in the distance, each one either dying or trying not to. I didn't care.
It seemed like forever before Jeremy pulled Isabel behind my car and I shoved my head back down as bullets sank into the engine block in response. He dragged her back by the underside of the arms and propped her up against the car. Her hands were charred while gun metal continued to cool on steam rising from her fingers. Her face was covered in small specks of glass that protruded from her skin like thin, emerald towers, and her flesh bled profusely over eyes which looked like molasses in her lashes every time she tried to blink them clean in vain. But she was still alive.
Jeremy leaned past her and cocked his rifle, yelling to be heard over the sound of the firefight. “We need to get her out first! If we can—”
“I can't see,” Isabel sputtered. She started to panic, the whole time the words sinking into the bottom of my body like a stone. “I can't see!”
“Izzy,” Jeremy put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, I'm right here. You're gonna be—”
Fine...
A gaping hole suddenly materialized in the middle of the rear passenger door and Jeremy fell onto his back.
“Jeremy!” I crawled over to him to see a red blotch on his belly slowly grow bigger and bigger underneath his shirt. He strained to sit back up and yelled out of anger more than anything else. The wound must have been caused by a ricochet. He had gotten lucky.
I put pressure on the spot. “Are you okay?” A quick burst of miniature explosions kicked up the cement next to us and I fell back into cover.
Jeremy yelled again. He reached back for his rifle and started firing at flinching silhouettes to our side.
I joined in to see bodies fall until my weapon stopped with a
click
. I dropped the spent magazine from my gun and fumbled with the pouch on my leg. My hand was shaking incredibly. It was amazing that I had even hit anyone at all. I tried to load a fresh row of bullets into my rifle, but I kept flinching and ducking down reflexively as rounds continued to pierce the car against my back.
A sharp pain jolted through my hip and I tilted over in agony, my jaw clenching automatically as the familiar burning sensation forced me to scream air through my barred teeth. Of course it wouldn't be enough to die. We all had to go as slow and painful as possible. We couldn't just get a chance to shoot back. No. Of course not. It really pissed me off.
I finally slammed a new magazine into my rifle and thumbed the catch to let the mechanism load a fresh bullet into the barrel. A new anger striving my body to ignore the pain. Ignore the sounds of bullets falling all around me. Ignore the odds. Instead, fight for my friends. Fight to live. Fight to take as many of them with me as I could for making the last few seconds of my life a goddamn living hell.
I got up on a knee and rested my rifle through a window to engage a pair of targets closer than I had anticipated. Another tried to get around us and it was all he could do as one of my shots took out his leg and he fell onto the ground. The next one entered his chest and colored the car behind him. The last few were sent towards bursts of light coming out of a window and I found myself ducking back down to dump my empty magazine and start the process all over again.
I watched Jeremy peek up over the hood of our car to join in when Olivia dove behind our cover.
“How are we doing over here?”
I shook my head.
She put a hand on Isabel's arm and we all ducked back down as someone began shooting back at Jeremy. I could barely hear her radio crack into life over the sound of metal being forcibly torn up behind us. The vibrations always fell through my shoulders and shook my spine. It didn't matter if I was doing the shooting or not, it seemed.
“Say again?” Olivia yelled into her handheld.
Badger came back on the other end in overridden bursts. “—really fucked up....getting around at us on all sides. We need to make a move.”
Olivia looked at the way we had come in, a long, empty street with matching shops on either flank. It was the only exit we could possibly reach in time, but it was also incredibly exposed. Even if we could somehow make it their without being mowed down from behind, there would be no good cover. All the shops were facing the wrong way, perpendicular to our retreat, and they were covered in wide glass openings.
She turned around to face the newly christened battlefield with a trained eye and I tried to see what she could, but nothing good came of it. A large remainder of the ones shooting still held their positions in elevated windows above the ground. They could easily pin us down no matter where we went, as they had already done. We had gotten the jump on the rest of the group, but they had quickly recollected themselves and sunk in towards the center of the square, also splitting off to shoot as us from the left and right.
We would either be slowly whittled down to wet pieces, shot in the front or sides if we tried to make a move, or shot in the back if we tried to run away. A tense frown escaped the mask on her lips and the fear began to set into my stomach again. It had never left. It had only been covered up by pain and anger, but now it was back in full force. I could feel the familiar dread that was hopelessness hollow out my limbs as I stared at the Knight in front of me. After seeing what she had done to Abel, I was sure that the stories of the Knights had all been true. Every single one. But what about the stories that I had never heard about? What about the ones where they never made it out alive because they had given themselves up selflessly in a scenario that promised death no matter the outcome?
Her muscles tensed and she got ready to make her move, only to pause for a moment at a hidden sight. I felt it a moment later. The vibration first, followed by multiple bass-ridden
thuds
in quick succession and the squeal of twisting metal.
“What the hell is that?” said Jeremy.
The shooting all throughout the square seemed to die out for a moment in response. I peeked back up from cover just in time to see the towering form of a yellow school bus slam through the nearest barricade on our side and plow throw parked cars like a train slicing through a snowdrift.
I covered my head as the bus screeched to a stop just in front of us and littered my hair with glass, even coming as close as to shake what was left of our car and press us back an inch. I looked up first to see Olivia point her gun at the driver, but she couldn't seem to decide whether to shoot or not.
I followed her gaze to see the man that had cut off the view that I had thought I was going to die with. It didn't make any sense. For a moment I thought I had gotten shot in the head.
Nathan Grey.
He leaned out from the doorway and shot someone in the chest with his sawed-off shotgun before they could get the drop on us, even taking the second to yell at us as if parking his giant, yellow bullet magnet in the middle of a shitstorm on the nose of a firestorm was costing him money by the second. “What the fuck are you waiting for?”
Right.
I sprung up and spewed out hot metal in an automatic burst at the men and women that were trying to get at us from the side. The rest of our group quickly fell into action as the orders organically fell into place.
Olivia stood out of cover and yelled at all of us to get onto the bus, only pausing every so often to point her gun at weaponized teenagers to drop each of them with the utmost precision. I landed a hit on someone in the gut and watched them scream out in pain until another one flew over my shoulder and shut him up in an explosion of red. The increasingly closer sights of gore made me want to throw up, but I swallowed the sensation back down. There would be time to think about it later,
if
we were still alive.
I helped Jeremy carry Isabel onto the bus as Grey stood off to the side of the doorway and swung out a hidden sub-machine gun from underneath his coat to open up on more would-be-killers. The quick bursts of patter seemed to muffle themselves as I stepped up into the musty vehicle and holes began materializing out of nowhere. I had already told Isabel to lay on the floor when something dug itself into my side and I fell down in another round of screaming agony.
I tried to pull myself back up by a padded seat and quickly thought better of it while the entire side of the bus burst out in sections like pin pricks through tin foil. I had to look away as exploding glass cut at my face, the whole time clearly aware that the thin skin of the walls in front of me would hide the bullet that would finally keep me still until it would be too late. The pain around my hip burned excruciatingly hot. I wanted nothing more than to give up. But I couldn't. Not when everyone else was still alive. At least, I hoped.
I forced myself up onto a seat and jammed the butt stock of my gun to clear out what was left of a window before poking it out and shooting at the nearest shapes. Shapes, I thought, that were actually human beings shooting back at me. But I couldn't let myself think about it. They had pulled the first straw. They wouldn't let up just because I said so. They were trying their best to kill us and I would give nothing but everything I had in return to make sure that they stopped breathing before I did.
I reloaded another magazine and pulled the trigger on my M4 again and again, each time rounds coming out that made my ears ring and my shoulder ache. I could feel the sharp
wack
of rounds piercing the soft metal around me, some even grazing the seats in the isles to end up as puffs of white stuffing. I kept my focus on the targets exposed enough for me to shoot. It was all they were. Just targets. I'd pull my trigger with my sights on a body and watch their back violently transform into an exit wound as their being failed miserably to cope with the tremendous amount of energy before moving on to the next. It was nothing more than cause and effect. I decided who lived and who died. I was the spur that rotated them through the circle of life.