I hacked a reply. “So glad I can help.”
“It does not feel good to be on the other side of this conversation, does it?”
“You didn’t die. There’s hope for me.”
“None of us have enough hope about the future to do anything as irrational as what your friends did. You were right, William. You should’ve killed me.”
“I still might,” I said, wiping my bloodied face.
“If that is my fate, I welcome it,” she said, as she opened the door, “but your fate is sealed.”
She was gone. I cried out in pain as one of the guards, by accident or not, kneed me in my injured leg, as they rushed in to subdue me. I say subdue, but I never offered a fight. Neither fact mattered much to them as they pushed and prodded me down a dark corridor and ultimately through a door and into an empty courtyard.
The one thing about the Order you could count on: they didn’t waste much time. They had me and two other men, who I had never seen, strapped to poles that had, by the mound of freshly dug dirt, been recently put into the ground. There were only three of us and ten poles. This wasn’t their first rodeo.
One of the men cried. The other one was more on the angry side of the fence, yelling out in Korean whatever the hell he was saying, to anyone in the slowly growing throng of angry-faced bastards, who surrounded us.
Shots rang in spits and sputters. Nothing like what I had heard earlier. The slow punctuated gunshots made me think of my eventual fate. What would it feel like to be shot? I’d like to lie and say I stood death in its face and laughed. The reality of it was much different. I was so scared I had pissed my pants without knowing it until my pants had frozen. Every second seemed to last a minute, and every minute magnified the horrid nature of it all. How absolutely senseless it all was. It cleaved every ounce of dignity from you and left you a nothing but a sub-human bag of meat and bones.
I was freezing. My feet, still uncovered, probably was on the verge of frostbite. If they didn’t hurry, I’d probably die of hypothermia. That would’ve taken the zing out of Janna’s party, I thought. I imagined several people hanging on the poles afterward. It would make things easier for me.
I heard murmuring and shuffling from somewhere behind me. After several seconds, I saw Janna and two guards walking towards us and coming to a stop near the angry man. She pulled a chrome revolver – my chrome revolver – out of a holster – not mine —put the gun barrel against his head and waited. He spat in her face. I thought that would be the end of him, but she didn’t pull the trigger. The voice that came from her mouth didn’t sound anything like the woman who had talked to me just minutes earlier. Her timbre had lowered to a growl as she spoke to the man. There were roars from the crowd. They liked what she was saying.
Recognizing their rising zeal, she smacked him with the pistol. This seemed to have the opposite effect. He began yelling over her. Trying to get him back under control, she hit him repeatedly. He somehow kept at it, even after he had been walloped several times. He was stealing her energy, and she didn’t appreciate it. Not one bit. Worse for her, whatever he was saying seemed to have some resonance with those gathered. As a result, she hit him harder and harder, and he yelled louder and louder.
She pulled the hammer back and shot him in what I thought was his leg. He cried out in pain, but within a few seconds, he was back at it. She must’ve hit an artery. With every beat of the man’s heart, he lost more blood, but that didn’t cause her to ease up her assault. She hit him in the face again. His nose was practically torn off with the force of the impact. I was sure I heard her gasp, but she had to continue – had to prove that she had the resolve to lead these people. She came in close to him, whispered something. He seemed to nod. She then put the gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger.
The man beside me had cried himself out. He couldn’t bear to see what was about to happen, so he didn’t look, but that didn’t mean he had wholly given up. I didn’t need to speak Korean to know that he was pleading with her. She ended his suffering quickly with a bullet to the top of his head. There was no value in torturing him.
The spotlight was on me, literally and metaphorically. I was the final act. I inhaled deeply as she stood before me. She began to speak, but as odd as it may sound, something else, a buzzing of some sort, held my attention. I couldn’t understand her, anyway.
I thought maybe I was going crazy. More sporadic gunfire startled me back to my senses, or so I thought. Janna seemed to be aware of the buzzing as well. She stopped. We shared a glance. Seeing that I heard it too seemed to take the energy out of what she was saying – to dampen her despotic pep-rally. Murmurs filled the gallery, and Janna shouted something towards her guards. They began looking into the dark sky.
Shots came from a direction other than the front of the base. Confusion filled Janna’s face. She yelled something before slowly pointing the gun at me. The end was near. As much as I wanted to stare the bitch in the face as she pulled the trigger, I couldn’t. I began to close my eyes when I heard it. It was as if a million bees had launched themselves at us. A fast whoosh then followed before finally a loud WHACK!
Janna was on the ground, kicking her feet, and screaming. What the fuck, I thought. A large drone lay next to her, two of the propellers still spinning. Her guards quickly grabbed hold of her and dragged her away from the courtyard and towards cover. I could see her face, even though her hands were grasping at a loose fold of skin and trying to keep it in place. If she lived, she’d be severely deformed.
Gunfire flared up. The sounds of pops and whizzes let me know they were too damn close. All it would’ve taken was someone aiming at my copious self, and I was doomed.
The courtyard had emptied entirely. All that remained of the gathering were the ones who hadn’t managed to find cover before they were gunned down. By whom, I had no clue. All I knew was if they were killing the Order, they couldn’t be that bad.
I saw the headlights of a vehicle: its engine revving hard, heading in my direction, followed by the sounds of what I knew were Grays. They were in the base. The vehicle locked up its tracks as it slid up beside me. A man quickly opened the door and hopped over the tracks to the ground in a single bound. Without saying a word, he began to cut the ropes that bound my hands to the pole. Even after my hands were untied, I continued standing there, unsure what to do – what the hell to think. And completely surprised by who I was seeing. But goddamn did it make me happy.
“Jesus, man, you are needing do ged your ass moving,” Aadesh said, crouching behind the truck for cover. “Quickly, drough dis side of de cab.”
The sounds of bullets hitting the side of the truck could be heard over the din of the gun battle. “We can’t leave… where the hell is everyone?”
“You have do drusd me, man. Bud led’s go.”
“Behind you, Aadesh!” I yelled.
Aadesh spun around and fired two rounds into an incoming Gray. Two more were on her heels. “Go, dammid.”
I struggled to get onto the tread as Aadesh dispatched the two Grays. He then swung the rifle over his shoulder and gave me a push. “Fuck,” I yelled, as my leg twisted on the slippery treads. I managed to make it to my seat without further aggravating my wound. Aadesh, for his part, had taken out another two or three Grays in the meantime.
“Dere is a rifle in the back sead,” Aadesh said, panting for air.
“Where are we going?” I asked, as reached for the rifle.
Before he could answer, at least three Grays had launched themselves on the truck. In short order, one pounded on the front windshield, while two others bashed the passenger and driver’s window. Aadesh swerved hard, back and forth, trying to dislodge them but to no avail.