Chapter 15
Raimey fought the darkness for four months before it finally won. He felt sorry for himself. He couldn’t turn over. He was tired of sitting in his own filth. The sponge baths and diaper changes eroded his ego. But watching his beautiful wife slowly break down was what took him.
There was no way to avoid it. She was one of the strongest women Raimey had ever known, but in the six months after the bombing, she had aged a decade. Deep frown lines were visible even while she slept. Streaks of gray threaded through her once jet black hair. And purple moons outlined the base of her eyes.
She was the breadwinner, mother, and wife. And that was all superseded by her nursing duties. He remembered the sex they had when he first came back, the way she had rode him. That passion lasted for a month before the toil of a hundred diaper changes, a spilled catheter ruining a rug, the neighbor’s relentless pity; when all of that dug at her will like a thousand pick axes, chop, chop, chop.
General Boen had kept in touch but even though Raimey had grown desperate enough to beg, Boen had nothing for him.
“In time, John. Just not right now. Is the government coming through?” Boen asked. They were but it wasn’t enough. Tiffany had cut hours to take care of him.
For John, the world was in a constant eclipse. He would catch himself staring at the wall for lengths on end, not even bothering to turn on the TV. He could feel himself shit his pants, the crackle and pop of his fart and the warm pile spreading out inside his diaper. He would try to hold his pee, but if Tiffany was gone too long, he would sit in it, smell it.
She had been getting sick a lot lately and they both knew it was from the stress.
“Babe, you need a break from this,” Raimey said. Tiffany tried to ignore what he was saying. Vanessa had left the dinner table and it was just the two of them. Tiffany started cleaning up.
“Hon! Please,” he said. She turned to him. He remembered when her eyes would bathe him with warmth, when the good times of their life were like embers, keeping the love aglow. She had doll eyes now. Not out of hate, but out of exhaustion. The marathon was longer than she had thought. “Sit down. We need to talk.”
She did. She rested her head in her hands. “I’m fine, John,” she said.
“No, you’re not and we’re not,” he said. He swallowed. “I’m an anchor babe, and I’m dragging both of you down.”
For a second, he thought she was going to slap him.
“You. Are. Not. Don’t think that! I love you!” she said.
“I love you too, but that has nothing to do with it. I’m wearing you out. I’m not saying let me drive out into the cold and don’t look for me, I’m just saying you and Vanessa need to take a break from this. Go somewhere without me. We can hire a nurse or something.”
She didn’t want to say it was a good idea, but he was right. She nodded in quiet resignation. “I just need to catch up on sleep. I’ve had this cold. I should probably go to the doctor,” she said quietly. “We could go to Florida, maybe. That’s an easy train ride.”
She put her hand out to him. “I don’t like leaving you. I feel like I’m abandoning you.” Her bottom lip quivered and she began to cry. “I’m just so tired.”
John wished he could put an arm around her and bring her to his chest and massage her head while she cried it all out, but the days of simple support had passed. So many things he had taken for granted, and so many things he thought were their future, gone like ghosts.
= = =
She had bought the tickets, hired the nurse, and seen the doctor. Raimey and Tiffany fought over the length of time, but Raimey insisted two weeks. She finally agreed. Tiffany needed it, and she needed to sleep until noon a few days in a row and feel sand between her toes.
The VA recommended the nurse. Nikki Johnson was a pleasant woman in her fifties. She was built out of different sized circles: round cheeks, round stomach, round calves and hands.
Tiffany and Vanessa were packed up and their suitcases were at the front door. Raimey wheeled over to them.
“I’ll walk you to the subway,” he said. Already he could see a change in Tiffany. Her head was up higher like the yoke of life had loosened.
It was late January and Chicago winters sucked. John was wrapped in three thick blankets but his mouth had to be exposed to move the joystick. The cold made his teeth hurt.
Vanessa suffered because of this too, he thought. He watched her pull her suitcase—pink and too small— inappropriate for a ten-year-old getting her dad’s height and her mom’s good looks. She has already outgrown childhood and I’m the catalyst. She no longer bounded along like she was skipping from one thing to the next. She moved with the thoughtlessness of an adult.
They reached the subway station three blocks from their house. For a second, it felt like he was saying goodbye forever. Then Vanessa hugged him.
“I love you, Dad. We’ll call.” She kissed him on the cheek.
“I love you, too,” he said. She ran up the stairs with her bag.
“Don’t go too far!” Tiffany called after her. She turned to John. “This will be good,” she said. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
“Nikki seems nice. I can really let it go now,” he said. “Tacos, chili, sauerkraut, anything I want.”
Tiffany laughed. “Yeah, yeah.”
Their eyes locked, connecting their souls. We think we know our future, that our plans are just process, but tell that to God.
“We should go as a family next time,” Tiffany said.
“You rest up, have a Mai Tai. Let’s start fresh when you get back. I think I’m going to get a job,” Raimey said. Tiffany raised an eyebrow. “Online,” he explained. “I tested well on the Mindlink and almost all military and police training is virtual now. I could do a lot of things.”
“I hear it’s good for other things too,” she said and winked. She gave him a long kiss. “Thank you,” she said.
“Have fun. Get a massage, lay by the pool.”
He spun around and headed home knowing he had done the right thing. He felt better about what the future had in store.
= = =
It had been two weeks since O’Hare, and Janis wasn’t feeling well. He couldn’t pin it down. The first week he felt fine. They reviewed the footage of the attack, they discussed mistakes, and they drilled new techniques. The engineers pulled him apart to analyze wear and tear from the hydraulshocks. They repainted his armor. The soldiers came into his room dressed in lead aprons to shoot the shit. It was good.
But around a week in, he started to hear things in the night. His room was in the bunker a mile down from the surface. It was a cavern fifty feet by fifty feet cut into rock. The only furniture in it was his maintenance chair. It was a massive slab of metal that he locked into while he slept or when they maintenanced his brain and implant to merge him whole.
He first heard dripping water. If it had sounded far away, it wouldn’t have bothered him, but it sounded like the water was dripping on him. He stood up and searched for the leak. The bunker was carved out of bedrock; water found its way in occasionally. He couldn’t zero in on the leak and he couldn’t sleep with that sound.
The next day someone down the hall wouldn’t stop laughing and they had lungs the size of a zeppelin. They never paused for a breath.
“What’s that guy laughing about?” Janis said, frustrated. It had been going on for hours. A technician was doing his daily diagnostic routine.
“Who’s laughing?” the technician asked quizzically.
Janis gestured, careful to keep his hand away from the man. “The guy! He’s been laughing all day, he won’t stop.”
The technician nodded and finished the diagnostic. Five minutes after he left, two shrinks came down. By then the laughter had stopped. After twenty minutes of probing questions, they went away satisfied. His diagnostic was clean. He was sane.
And then the headaches kicked in. Big ones. No light pressure at the temples, these were railroad spik
es through the skull. Doctors drew blood, checked his vitals, and inspected the implant. Everything was fine. They asked if he had a history of headaches, he said no. They gave him a migraine medication and a sleeping aid.
He woke up the next day feeling a little better. Now the headache felt like a bad hangover. Everything he heard had an origin. And Estevan was here to see him. She wore the mandatory lead vest draped over her wheelchair. They couldn’t save her leg. They talked about her physical therapy. She noticed he was closing his eyes hard and grimacing.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“The headache’s coming back,” he said. His vision blurred, and for a moment, it bloomed with orange burst. And then the pain ramped full force. He reached for his head.
“STOP ERIC!” Estevan yelled.
He opened his eyes. His fingers were inches from his face.
-This isn’t real you know-
“What?” Janis asked.
“What?” Estevan replied, confused.
“Didn’t you just say something?”
She shook her head. “I’ll get a doctor.”
-You died at the UN-
“What are you talking about?” Janis said to Estevan. He looked pained. He stood up and paced back and forth never taking his eyes off her. His glare frightened her and she cautiously wheeled herself toward the door.
-It’s time now-
“I didn’t say anything, Eric. What’s going on?” She spoke like she was talking him down from a ledge.
-We are taking you where you belong-
His vision bloomed again. It was orange and red. For a second a bony chatter echoed through his skull.
“You’re not saying that? You don’t hear that?” he pleaded to her. He searched the ceiling for speakers. Janis shook his head back and forth like a horse shooing a fly.
“I’ll grab a doctor.” She was already halfway out the door.
“Yeah. Okay.” He breathed heavily. Sweat covered his face.
She left for help. But when she turned the corner and looked at him through the safety glass, her eyes glowed like coals and her smile was so wide it halved her head.
Janis was unaware of what he did next when he walked over to his chair, sat down, and fell asleep.
= = =
Xan planned the drop time twenty-four hours after the third and final stage of the program went into effect. He and his team were now two hours away, flying at ninety thousand feet in an aircraft that was built for a time when fuel was assumed. He and the twelve soldiers wore suits designed for high altitude jumps. While the entrance was grand, they would be leaving on foot.
The second stage of the program gave them the complete layout of the military base and the bunker where they kept the King Sleeper. They had used both Tank Major Janis’s cameras and then the wireless transmitter built into him to hack the security cameras and access computers on the network.
Each of them carried a submachine gun, a pistol, a knife, and a brick of plastique for door breaches, but none of them expected to take the guns off safety.
Xan closed his eyes and pictured what the base would look like at this very moment. He wondered when they jumped if they would see the flames from space. It was possible.
= = =
Janis woke up in hell. His room was on fire, and ghastly creatures had stormed in. Their mouths were stretched long and filled with molten ash. Their eyes glowed like coals and spilled with blood. The demons chattered like snapping bones and their bodies moved in and out of focus, in and out of frame, like they were being projected from another dimension. The room itself boiled and the air shimmered like thermals down a long, hot highway.
Three surrounded him. Janis jumped off the table and fell to the ground. The three demons swarmed him and he screamed in fear and confusion and rolled over two of them like he was playing steamroller at a slumber party.
The other demon ran to a door engulfed in flames, impossibly so, impossible that the door could still be there with the intensity at which it burned. The demon tried to get out but Janis ran over and slammed it down with an open hand like he was squashing a fly.
He moved away from the door. The fire rolled off it and raced across the ceiling. He ran over and grabbed his helmet. He didn’t have hydraulshocks, but he’d have to make do.
Did I die? The voice had said so.
Did I deserve this? he wondered. Did he deserve Hell? He had killed many in battle but it had been for country. Did that admonish his acts? In God’s eyes did that justify what he had done? Was he good, was he bad? He thought he was good, he felt he had done good.
“But here I am, in Hell,” he said. He cackled, sweat beaded on his face and rolled down in sheets. He ran through the door. Demons were all around him, some running toward him, most running away. Two wore white lab coats. Funny. Others wore dark black, others wore camouflage.
Tank Major Janis ran through them all, hunting them down, ignoring their gunfire. But he couldn’t ignore their howling faces, the bone chatter from their mouths and the constant blood pouring from their eye sockets.
If he was going to Hell, so be it. If they were going to drag him into the depths, let them try. But if sins made the monster, he wanted to be king.
= = =
Xan was two minutes from the drop. His body thrummed with anticipation. The world around him felt more intense, more crisp.
“Sir, you need to see this,” the pilot said in their helmet.
“Put it up on the screen,” Xan replied. A flat screen lit up the front of their compartment. The belly of the plane was loaded with telescopic surveillance cameras. Below them was a warzone.
A thick black cloud covered the area, crackling with a lightning storm of orange as gas mains, ammunition stockpiles, and fuel depots exploded.
“Holy shit,” one of his soldiers said. “Is it that powerful?”
Xan nodded. He touched a device on his shoulder that looked like a hockey puck. It blinked.
“The Wi-Fi scrambler is more important than your gun. Protect it at all costs. If it breaks, he will see you.”
Each of them had the device attached to their shoulder. It sent out an individual IP address. When Tank Major Janis received the address, it would vector the vicinity of the transmission and blur his vision to it, blinding him to the location. Without it, they would be demons, just like the rest. With it, at the very most, they would be an eye protein floating past his vision.
They had an extra scrambler for their prize, the King Sleeper. Their transport, parked one mile away, had a more powerful version just in case the giant wandered past the border of trees and found the truck parked at their pre-chosen exit point.
A red light blinked above them and the screen switched to a thirty second count down.
“Opening the bay,” the pilot said in that detached pilot way.
Xan and the others turned on their oxygen and gripped the handholds near their seats. The bay door opened and the atmosphere around them became so hostile that without their jumpsuits, their blood would boil.
“Go! Go! Go!”
One after another, the team dove out of the plane and into the quiet of space. Xan was the last to go. There was no oxygen at this altitude and in his field of view he could see the entire earth and the black it floated in. A GPS tracker in his visor pinpointed their destination. Right now, they were slightly over the Atlantic Ocean. With the spin of the earth, by the time they landed, they would be one mile from the base.
Xan felt like he wasn’t moving. He rolled over. The plane was already a silver dot streaking across space. He realized that while the plane was getting the hell out of there, it wasn’t going up any higher. He was falling.
He and his team descended at six hundred miles per hour. There was no flap in their suit, no push from air, no sensation other than sight as the earth got closer.
Xan began to feel resistance as they entered the thin atmosphere. They were dropping until eight thousand feet, where the parachute would aut
omatically deploy. His team was in a halo formation. They didn’t need any strays.
The wind noise rose to a whipping roar around his helmet. It would be another eight minutes before they deployed their chutes.
“Check,” Xan said. They had broken into the atmosphere.
“Check,” each soldier said around him, indicating they were fine.
The moon was nearly full and that gave Xan and his team enough light to see the white plumes of clouds approaching. They looked solid, and before impact, Xan closed his eyes for a moment, the old brain ignoring the new brain’s knowledge that it was water vapor. It took just a few seconds to get to the other side and then they were looking at earth, their GPS coordinate now directly below them, but completely covered in black.
Their chutes deployed and each person felt the rip of deceleration as their parachutes grabbed at the air.
Xan couldn’t see land. Instead he saw a clearer vision of what they saw on the plane. It looked like they were floating into a volcano. A ruptured gas main was a geyser, spewing a half-mile ribbon of flame and smoke into the air.
“Stay on course,” Xan said. They had no visual on their DZ, but the GPS showed them the way. They entered the toxic black ceiling.
The noxious cloud broke two hundred feet from the ground. In its place was an oily haze. They landed one mile west of the base, detached their chutes and gathered in the cover of forest. They shrugged off their spent oxygen tanks.
“Turn the map on,” Xan said. The air was so thick it felt like he was breathing through a straw. The GPS map on their helmet visors zoomed in to a detailed map of their surroundings. It showed them in relation to their destination and each soldier in relation to each other. It pointed them directly to the King Sleeper.
“Avoid engaging the enemy. They should never know we’re here,” Xan said. The soldiers nodded.
“You understand the priority,” Xan said. The team had been briefed: if any of them got shot and couldn’t keep up, they would be euthanized. If they were trapped with the King Sleeper, they must kill the boy and then themselves.
Their silence was agreement.
“For China,” Xan said. They moved through the forest toward the base. Even from a mile away, they could hear anguished screams.
= = =
Glass was in the bunker, navigating through the gigantic round air ducts that were laced throughout the facility. When Janis went berserk, Glass quickly grabbed a submachine gun and night vision goggles. Within a fifty-foot radius around him, Janis was death. But not above. He had no projectile weaponry. Glass registered this and scurried up into the ventilation system like a rat.
The vents were dark and now the hallways were as well: Janis had destroyed the power grid. Glass flicked on the night vision goggles. The vents were large enough for Glass to move hunched over. They were thick enough that he didn’t worry about falling through. He moved quickly and quietly and with intent.
His mission wasn’t survival. It was to protect the King Sleeper. From above, Glass had watched Janis’s rampage. Nearly everyone was dead, horribly so. But the King Sleeper had to survive.
He got to the King Sleeper’s chamber. The Data Core was dark and so was the rest of the room. The King Sleeper was still there. His little body squirmed in his shackles like a newborn waking up from a long nap. Without being linked in, the King Sleeper would wake. The world he inhabited had disappeared.
Glass was at least eight stories above the floor. He looked for a place where he could exit the vent and climb down. He saw a vent near the Data Core.
He worked his way through the duct over to it and quietly popped open the vent, and pulled it in. He looked down. Fuck, he thought. This was a one-way trip. Once he dropped down, there was no way to get back up. He couldn’t sling the boy over his shoulder and climb eighty feet up the Core. He would either have to hide with the boy or hope that Janis leaves the area. Neither were great options. Janis had night vision, he could see just as clearly as Glass could now. And apparently everything he saw pissed him off.
Glass gripped the edge of the opening and leaned outside with his legs coiled. After a silent three count, he jumped to the closest scaffolding. He made it. He pulled himself in and worked his way toward a large bracket that held the huge glass tube in place. He bellied up to the Core and shuffled his way around it as if he was on the window ledge of a skyscraper. On the opposite side was a large coolant pump. It was ten feet down and a good jump away. He lunged for it and when he hit, its thin metal case shattered the silence. He froze. In the distance he heard someone plead for their life. The room shuddered from Janis’s answer.
Faster.
He hopped down as deft as a gymnast. The boy was nearly awake. Glass began unhooking him from the Data Crusher.
= = =
Xan and his team moved quickly through the base, heading directly for the bunker located on the northeast side. Xan was in awe. The Tank Major had only been in the hallucinogenic stage of the program for three hours and already the majority of the base was in ruins. It looked like the giant had quickly gone for the utilities—power and gas. The exploded gas main was like a sliver of the sun that had been brought to earth. The team tried to stay in the shadows, but the main wouldn’t allow it. The fire followed their every step as if it were aware of their motives.
Remains of people were scattered throughout their footpath. Like shit at a dog park, Xan would avoid the leftovers of a hand just to step into a large intestine ejected from a crushed carcass. Xan had counted fifty dead, but that was just in front of him. All around, in his periphery he saw the ragged remains of soldiers and staff.
The Tank Major had found hydraulshocks. Two of the buildings looked like they had been shelled from above, the telltale sign of this weapon, from the reports Xan had recovered. A Humvee with a mounted turret was torn in half and hammered down into scrap. The hydraulshock, just like a bomb, created a shockwave from its lightning fast movement and the shifting of mass through the air. Soldiers grinned up at Xan with their faces completely peeled off from the wind shear.
They saw the bunker. Blast doors designed to withstand an indirect nuclear strike were torn off their hinges.
Xan saw no one alive but he felt their presence. They were in hiding. Up in trees, underneath rubble, cowering under the force of nature that was unleashed, that they thought they could control.
His team made it to the bunker doors without incident. The dark gaping hole dared them to come in and they took the dare without blinking. It was their mission. The elevator lift was working, but it would take too long and be too conspicuous. They took the stairs down into the unknown.
“No guns, unless absolutely necessary. He will see and register live fire,” Xan whispered into his comm.
The GPS switched to map mode and used Wi-Fi access points to determine their location. When Xan got to the bottom, he immediately turned right and they headed directly toward the King Sleeper’s quarters, a half a mile away.
The bunker was a simple layout, but gigantic in its scope. The hallway was over one hundred feet tall and nearly twice as wide. The rooms that jutted off this artery were massive too, some approaching the size of airport hangars. In all of them were bodies. Some vibrated with last gasps of cellular life. Some open and closed their hands. None made a sound.
Xan had a hard stomach, but even then, he almost gagged when he saw a woman whose upper and lower body had been hyphenated with her organs.
He tore her in half.
They heard the giant and all of them became statues. It sounded like a diesel hammer rhythmically driving a pile into the ground. He was walking.
Xan saw his silhouette as he crossed the hallway three hundred yards ahead. He was big. Reading his size and specs was different than seeing him in motion. He hoped the scramblers worked or they would see heaven or hell quickly.
“Keep moving. Stay against the walls and out of his path,” Xan whispered. They continued toward the King Sleeper’s lair.
&
nbsp; They were ten yards from where they had last seen the giant when he came out of the room. He looked directly at them. Through the face shield smeared with black tar—Xan’s night vision’s interpretation of blood—Xan could see the lost look of the insane. Janis looked tormented and confused, as logic and reason were raped by his senses.
He stared directly at Xan and his team. Thirty feet away, four steps for this giant, and he squinted at them like he saw a girl he recognized from grade school. Xan knew what he saw: a deeper black. Xan could hear his team breathing over their comm.
It’ll work. He’s too far gone. If he understood, we’d be in danger, but he blew past reason a long time ago.
The giant didn’t move. He just looked at them.
“You win. I can’t take it anymore,” the giant said.
Was he speaking to them?
“Someone kill me. Someone take me away from here,” he pleaded. He turned down the hall toward their destination. And then suddenly he howled in rage and ran toward the King Sleeper.
= = =
Glass heard Janis scream and then he felt him charge like a bull. He pulled Justin off the crucifix, the mounted interface of the Data Crusher. The boy groaned. The harnesses didn’t take long to remove from the boy’s body, but the face shield took delicate hands and time. It was the fiber optic mount into the boy’s brain. Glass pulled the boy down and into his arms. The room shook from Janis’s approaching doom.
Glass spotted a back section of the Data Crusher that would be difficult for Janis to get to. It had girders and cement, things Janis could hammer down, but even then, there was a maze of thick supports that would give Glass time. Maybe, if Janis tried to get to the back of the Core, Glass would have a chance to escape.
He bolted with the child, ducking underneath the supports that anchored the base of the Core. He weaved between them with the boy in his arms, carefully protecting his head. The boy could lose a leg, lose an arm, but his brain was priceless, irreplaceable. Glass treated it like an egg, sacrificing his own body as he dove onto his back and shimmied deeper behind the Data Core, away from the crazed giant.
Janis ran directly through the Data Core. Fifty tons of ten-inch thick hard treated, non-conductive glass shattered and crashed to the ground. For Janis, it broke around him, drenching him in a hail of razor sharp plates. He moved forward as if the sky wasn’t falling, as if the billion-dollar structure collapsing onto him was nothing more than rain. His eyes were wide as he watched Glass continue to worm away from him.
The shattered Data Core became a million falling knives. Even deep into the foxhole, Glass rolled over so his back protected Justin. The sheer tonnage crashed all around him. He felt both of his legs and lower back get pierced. He heard the crack of the ground beneath him and understood that at least one of the pieces had penetrated all the way through.
Glass breathed deeply and took the pain. Even now, he thought clearly. His heart rate was even, his adrenaline in check. He heard the equipment behind him get tossed aside and torn apart. He understood the giant wouldn’t relent until it absolutely couldn’t get closer. Glass rolled over onto his back and shoulder-walked deeper, holding the squirming boy to his chest. Glass’s right leg didn’t work. His left leg was fine. When he rolled over, he felt glass push deeper into his back, a fiery pain, and then the clear dagger broke off against the ground.
He could go no further. He was buried underneath the Data Crusher to a point that no one—had they not known Glass was there—would have been able to spot him. But the giant continued forward, pulling industrial equipment out like weeds. His murderous eyes never leaving theirs.
Glass pinned Justin between him and the wall and turned the boy’s head so he knew he could breathe. He pulled out his submachine gun. He might as well have pulled out a straw and spitballs.
So this is it. He thought he was going to live longer. He checked the thirty round magazine on the MP5 and pulled back the bolt to make sure it was loaded. He had another magazine in his vest pocket.
The giant ripped apart metal beams that could hold up a skyscraper and then he was there. Glass had them against a cooling vent recessed five feet into the wall. The giant got on all fours, dominating Glass’s field of view, as if he was searching under a couch.
He raked his hands into the opening, but Glass tucked his legs under his body. And then his body jolted and he started to get dragged out. Glass realized his right leg was tucked and out of harm, but his lame left still hung out. He reached for it and tried to break it free, but it was pinned between the floor and the giant’s hydraulic fingers. The giant howled and scraped its fingers against the ground, dragging Glass out underneath them.
Glass had no choice. The giant’s fingers crushed into his pelvis and shattered it instantly. Glass pushed with his good leg and got a foot reprieve. The giant had his knee. Glass turned the MP5’s muzzle into his own thigh, careful to make sure that it was pointed through the thick. And then he fired.
Glass emptied the magazine, destroying his femur and shattering the leg, turning a two-inch swath into ground meat. The giant pulled and Glass—through all the pain—watched the leg tear away like it had been held to his body with string cheese. He felt the last of the skin stretch off like taffy. His leg vanished under the giant’s hand and both disappeared from view.
He took the shoulder strap off the gun and tied it around the remains of his thigh. He screamed—something he never did—when he pulled it tight. Already, he had lost a liter of blood. But the boy was alive. Maybe only a few more minutes, but he was still alive.
= = =
Xan couldn’t believe what unfolded in front of him. The giant had broken through the Data Core pursuing a man carrying an unconscious boy who must have been the King Sleeper. Xan had known the King Sleeper was young, but just like seeing the Tank Major, the abstract knowledge was vastly different than witnessing it first hand. The child, limp in the man’s arms, caused his heart to sink.
Xan and his team had spread across the perimeter of the room after a third of the Data Core crashed to the ground. It was everywhere. Xan could feel himself breathing in glass dust and he and the others covered their mouth and nose the best they could. Their mission was in jeopardy.
“Give me your C4 charges,” Xan said. The others moved to him quickly and handed over small bricks wrapped in a tan paper. “Get the boy at all costs. Meet at the rendezvous.”
Xan had to work quickly. He put a detonator into the first brick of C4 and after a deep breath ran through the shattered field of glass zigzagging toward the back of the titan.
= = =
Glass was weak and barely conscious. Janis continued to scream and howl at them. His hands shot in and snapped like alligator jaws, but he couldn’t get closer. Janis retreated for a moment, and through his night vision, Glass saw a small man approaching the Tank Major. He had a package in his hand. Bomb. The man placed it beneath the giant’s feet and sprinted toward the exit. Glass turned his face against the wall.
= = =
Xan hit the trigger. The C4 blast was just enough to knock Janis forward. He fell to one knee and rolled back to his feet, frantically looking around him. The field of shattered glass was now gone. The blast turned the enormous shards into razored bullets as they exploded outward against the wall. Two of Xan’s soldiers were mutilated and died instantly. The other ten were still alive, some with penetration wounds, but stable.
The giant forgot about the two howling demons burrowed into the crevice and he searched the perimeter of the room. He saw a demon staring at him from a corner. He ran at it.
Xan watched as the giant tucked his shoulder down and ran at one of his soldiers. The soldier tried to get out of the way, but it was no use. Without slowing down, the giant slammed through the soldier into the wall. The soldier splashed to the sides in a bloody puddle.
His scrambler broke.
Xan stood at the mouth of the tunnel. He put another brick of C4 down. The giant walked back toward the two demo
ns buried in the electronics. Xan turned off his scrambler.
“I am the one who brought you here!” he yelled.
The Tank Major turned and Xan ran, knowing full well that Janis saw him. That now his eyes were coals and his mouth was stretched and deformed, and every movement gave off a shivering bone chatter that drove the giant nuts. He felt him give chase.
When the giant gave chase and ran over the C4 Xan had dropped at the front of the room, Xan popped the trigger. The explosion sent the giant careening into the wall. Janis ground into it, but his legs kept pumping and he used the wall like a training wheel.
Xan dropped another C4 brick—he had four more—and continued to sprint toward the exit up to earth.
= = =
Glass saw nine soldiers appear out of the dark. Their faces were covered, but he knew: Chinese. Brilliant execution. They moved in toward him and he didn’t fight. He sat in a pool of his own blood and his leg continued to contribute like a leaky pipe. One of the soldiers pointed a submachine gun at him. Two others worked their way in to the vent pocket.
They pushed Glass over and he was too weak to stop them. He felt the boy get pulled past him. He watched the boy, covered in his blood, get dragged out of the recess.
Then they were gone. Glass pulled on his tourniquet one more time to try and stop the flow and closed his eyes.
= = =
Xan couldn’t continue the pace. His lungs were on fire and his legs were rubber. He was out of C4. It had knocked the giant off course and confused him, but it also infuriated the Tank Major beyond belief.
“We have the boy,” one of the soldiers said in his comm. Good. Ahead, Xan saw the stairway that bordered the lift to the surface. He could feel the giant on his back. If he could just make it. He reached up and powered on the scrambler.
Janis was fifteen feet away from the demon when it flickered in and out of his vision. The demons couldn’t teleport. He had seen none of that in this battle. But this one was different; it had put up a fight. It vanished and in one final salvo Janis detonated toward its last location.
Xan was twenty feet ahead of the hydraulshock impact. While the explosion was contained in the Tank Major’s shoulder, the concussive blast still threw Xan forward. His eardrums ruptured and the blood vessels burst in his eyes. His head snapped back, cracking vertebrae, and the rubble from the wall pummeled him, spinning his body like a rag doll, breaking his bones like toothpicks. He crumbled to the ground, unable to function. He fought to stay conscious.
The giant looked his way, but not at him. It walked around him, searching through the mountain of debris it had created by punching the ten-foot thick reinforced concrete wall. The giant’s foot crunched down inches from his face. But by the grace of God, his scrambler had not broken. The giant walked past Xan to the other side of the bunker and chased another poor demon hiding in the dark.
Xan’s team approached him. They had the boy. Against his orders two of the men picked him up. He quieted down. He wanted to live. He wanted to see this boy take the U.S. down. The irony of it would be too much. The weapons they had so willfully used for their salvation would be their demise. Two weapons that should have never been created in the first place. In a rational world, in a good world, the demented mind that came up with these should have been rejected, cast out into the dark. The mind that created these gods of destruction should have been imprisoned with the key lost forever.
But the man was alive and well, with a nation behind him. And that couldn’t stand.