Chapter Twelve
The Second Sun
Evangeline lowered her gun, pointing it down at the ground.
Lee kept his raised.
“You think that putting a small-caliber round in my skull will kill me?”
“Armor-piercing FMJ,” the legionnaire said.
Lee whistled through his teeth.
“Well, that might get through. Might. But if you're going to shoot, I'd suggest you do it; I've got no reason not to shoot your boss.”
The tall man grinned, the skin around his eyes wrinkling, and his thin lips forming a down-pointing arrowhead.
“You look familiar, Mr. Big,” he said, walking in a slow curve to the left, Lee kept the gun trained on him, “you were traveling with the Water Merchant and a guy wearing MOPP gear, weren't you?”
“Don't know who you're talking about. Don't even know what MOPP gear is.”
The man chuckled.
“MOPP gear. Protective armor worn by the pre-war soldiers and Ijtihadi. You should see it in action, Mr. Big. I remember seein' an army wearin' that. Not white like your buddy's, but painted in urban camouflage...”
Martin groaned, feeling the muscles in his shoulders and chest singing with tension, like guitar-strings wound too tight. His bones groaned, and his pulse pounded.
With screeching protest, the door opened, separating.
The gap was wider. He stuck his head into the darkness beyond, and wiggled his arms and shoulders through. He was suffocating, pinned between two heavy slabs of metal.
Grunting, he pushed himself through.
Laying on the ground, he took a series of deep breaths and listened to his own heartbeat.
Dragging himself upright, he supported himself against the wall, and glanced around.
It was dark, lit only by the deep, blood red of the emergency lights. The only sounds from outside his own straining flesh were the tick of his wrist unit and the groaning of the metal.
There was another sound; a beeping noise.
Blinking, he turned towards it, walking closer to the sound, he looked down. The noise didn't come from somewhere outside, it came from the wrist unit.
He read the display, surprised.
HOMING
He waved his left hand in front of him, and walked in the direction the signal seemed to come from.
Lee squeezed the trigger, the Legionnaire followed a half-second later, and Evangeline dove into the stream-bed that had given them a path up from the foot of the mountain.
The giant mercenary slumped down, a hole having been drilled in his skull. He was not yet dead, but the wound had made a difference.
Turning, he sprayed the man behind him with bullets, dropping him.
Evangeline belly-crawled through the wash and up the bank, into the brush and sharp-edged rocks.
She took short, shallow breaths.
Making her way towards a short precipice, she wound around it, going for cover.
She glanced around, looking for danger, and looked over the edge of the hillock.
There were several dozen of the men with red bandannas; it was impossible to tell how many of them there were.
She checked her gun, counting the number of bullets she had available. She could hear Lee's gunshots, and those of the Crimson Legionnaires.
She forced herself to relax, gathering all of her tension into the pit of her stomach and then exhaling it.
Her eyes narrowed, and she began to plan.
Martin forced another door open, and found himself in a room that was once white. Hanging from pegs on the wall were suits like the one he wore, but there were also pedestals, on which were coiled black cords.
Walking into the room, he picked up one of the cords, and looked down at his wrist unit; a stainless steel port on the unit caught his eye, and he plugged the cord in.
Immediately, the yellow bar indicating the battery level of the suit began to grow, shifting steadily toward green, and finally toward blue.
BATTERIES FULLY CHARGED
POWER LEVEL OPTIMAL
DATA TRANSFER 75%
MILIMETER-BAND RADAR ACTIVE
WIRELESS CONNECTION FOUND
A wire frame graphic appeared on the inside of his helmet, and various markers appeared in the frame, pointing him to various features of the bunker.
One caught his eye, and his pupils dilated, knowing what he had to do.
Lee had only winged the tall man, causing him to spin and drop. The bullet entered his own skull at an angle, and he felt a molar explode.
Turning, he fired into the other man's stomach. He fled the opposite direction from Evangeline, making himself visible. There was the high-pitch whine of bullets whizzing through the air all around him.
One bit his shoulder, and he allowed its momentum to spin him toward the shooter, squeezing the trigger.
He dropped to the ground, flipped onto his stomach, and belly-crawled up the mountainside.
Martin clutched his new weapon in his right hand as he ascended the stairway. The suit's pneumatics buttressed his tired flesh, pushing him upward as he climed toward the surface. The display on his helmet made the lights unnecessary, showing him every damaged spot on the floor, every broken rail, every buckling wall.
The markers indicated that behind most of the walls of rubble lay a reactor.
He looked at the weapon, a pistol with a foot-long canister attached to the front of it, he had a half-dozen more of the canisters in his webbing, strapped to his body.
Emerging from the broken mountain into the blazing sunlight, he looked down, seeing Evangeline cowering not twenty feet away.
Moving down to where she lay, he raised his new weapon, waiting for the crimson legionnaires to converge towards him.
Evangeline looked up at him, her eyes wide.
The weapon was pointed upward and to the right, into the wind. He waited until the enemy was in just the right place, and squeezed the trigger.
A pneumatic jet launched the canister upward, tumbling end over end.
A gyroscope signaled to the simple computer inside of it, and the solid fuel sparked.
It lanced through the air, streaming toward the middle of the Legionnaire's loose grouping.
He pressed the button on the weapon's butt, a signal was broadcast and the simple computer in the canister sent its final signal.
The hafnium charge inside of the canister strobed, and a fusion reaction was sparked.
A blinding white light appeared over the northern horizon, and a wave of hot air washed over them. Martin's wrist unit crackled, the “N” in the CBRN glowing brightly.
“What is that?” Evangeline shouted over the roar of the explosive.
Martin pulled a canister from his webbing, and held it up.
LUCIFER-TYPE INTERPERSONNEL NUCLEAR DEVICE
“NOW I AM BECOME DEATH, SHATTERER OF WORLDS.”
“Nuclear grenade launcher,” he said.
Her eyes widened, and he grinned behind the faceplate.
“Don't worry,” he said, “it's a hafnium device. No fission takes place.”
“What?” she asked.
“You might get sick, but you won't die.”
The tall man dragged himself off, he had burns all along his back, and he was mostly blind.
He could hear feet crunching in the bone-dry dust of the mountainside, and pulled himself away from it as fast as he could, but his arms were tired.
“Bit off more than you could chew, old man,” the giant mutant's voice cut into his consciousness, an oily sound, not quite a growl, not quite a hiss.
He rolled over, belly-up.
“Lee, wait!” a voice called out. The white-suited man.
“What? You want to kill him? He had me shot in the head, and you just nuked me, I get to kill him!”
The mutant's clothes were burned, and his skin was covered in a layer of black dust. His teeth, yellowed but surprisingly bright, emerged from behind his lips in a sneer.
“I want to ask him something,” Martin said.
“Ask him, then!” Lee roared.
The white-suited man came into his field of vision, looming up with the sun at his back.
“Who are you? Where did you come from?”
“It's not important,” the tall man said, resigned to his fate, “I'm a dead man. Have been for too long.”
“How long?”
“Ninety goddamn years,” the tall man said, “I've been wandering this fucking desert. I've been shot at, stabbed, starved, left to die, and robbed.”
“You're one of those people who underwent life-extension,” Martin said, realization dawning on him.
“You say that like you know what it is.”
“I do. I'm a defrostee.”
The Tall man grinned.
“A consicle? Well fuck me. Welcome to the party, jackass.”
Martin looked down at him, his eyes full of pity.
“What drove you to this? To be a murderer and a thief?” he asked.
“That's more than one question,” Lee rumbled, leveling his new weapon, a shotgun, at the man's stomach.
“Just let me ask.”
“Simple,” the Tall Man said, “I had to live with it all, the big war, when the Chinks and the Unionists and the Russians started lobbing nukes, and we got into it. I had to watch as the army and the contract police and everyone else decided that they were in charge...you know what I was, to begin with, con? I was a doctor.”
The Tall Man's head lolled to the side.
“I was an army doctor. You know how many Janes I saw raped? By their comrades-in-arms? You know how I found out that I gave my wife cancer because of the life extension? We thought she was pregnant, but it was a fucking tumor, Whitey. I tried to make things better...”
He laughed, a dry chuckle like rattling bones.
“We all thought that great men pulled us up from the shit-eating barbarism of the past. That's a lie. Only when the ball gets rolling do things get better. When we tear things apart, you can't get better. One man can't make a difference, you jackass. One bullet--not even in a vital organ!--and your dead.
“But we can certainly make it worse. I saw good men and women die, great men and women. So...I wanted to tear it all down. Show all those fuckers who shit on everything what's what. Does that make sense to you cocksuckers?”
Lee shot him in the stomach.
“No. It doesn't make sense. And I've never sucked a cock in my life.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Let's get back to the boat,” Martin said, quietly.