We moved to the corner.
Angie popped her head around.
“Clear,” she said.
We stepped into the corridor and started toward a room with a double–wide doorway at the far end, checking side doors as we went. Halfway there and the double doors cracked open. I stitched them with fire, but not before a canvas satchel slipped out and slid toward us across the polished floor.
“Oh shi—”
Angie and Ace yanked me sideways into an office, and we all landed in a heap as the satchel charge exploded, blowing shrapnel past our door and filling the corridor with fire, dust, and the loudest noise I’d ever heard in my life. My ears were ringing like fire alarms. Shit, my whole body was ringing. I felt like a gong hit with a sledgehammer.
I was in a cocoon of shock and thought it would be really nice to just lie there and stop moving for a while, maybe think about life a little, but after a few seconds — minutes? hours? — I heard faint whispers behind the roaring.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re fine! Stay where you are.”
I opened my eyes to see Angie shouting into her walkie. She sounded a hundred miles away.
“I said it’s fine, Vargas! They missed us!”
I smiled up at her as she looked over at me, then closed my eyes again. She shook me, hard.
“Get up, Ghost! We gotta keep moving!”
I groaned, then staggered up and saw Ace leaning on the desk and tying a bandana around his forehead. I was going to make a smart–ass comment about his fashion sense, but then I saw he was doing it to keep a flap of torn flesh in place and decided to keep it to myself.
Angie squeezed his arm. “Okay, babe?”
He nodded. “Good thing it ain’t my face you fell in love with, huh?”
She gave a dirty chuckle and headed out into the hall. I grunted and followed, glad I was behind them and didn’t have to look either one of them in the eye. Too much information.
We leaped over the fire guttering in the corridor and plunged on into the room with the double doors. The blowback from the satchel charge had ripped the doors off their hinges and turned them into very pointy kindling. One of the Guardians who had been hiding behind writhed on the floor looking like an anguished porcupine. The other two were luckier. They only looked like pin–cushions. Angie killed porcupine with a shot to the head, and Ace and I put the other two out of their misery.
“Now,” said Angie, clambering over an upturned wooden desk. “What were they guarding?”
She tore the door off what looked like a walnut wardrobe built into the room’s back wall. Behind the wood was a titanium door with a combination lock. Her face fell.
“Crap.”
“I got it,” said Ace, and set his rifle aside as he squatted down next to the lock.
Angie looked back at me. “Ghost, go stand guard.”
Nothing like your girlfriend disappearing to make a man feel like a fifth wheel all over again. “Yeah, sure. Have fun.”
I stepped back into the corridor, slapping another clip into my assault rifle as I went, and crept past the office where we’d found shelter from the satchel charge, listening as best I could over the ringing in my ears. My nerves were still vibrating and I still felt like I was walking around with a couple of pillows wrapped around my head after that blast.
At the intersection I stopped and peered around the corner. Nobody in the corridor leading to the grand hall. I started down it, checking the doors as I went, making sure nobody had slipped in behind us. They were clear.
I crouched down just back from the end of the corridor and studied the darkness of the grand hall beyond, looking for movement. Aside from drifting eddies of dust, nothing. There were more Guardians somewhere, I was sure of it, but not here. Where were they? What were they waiting for? I keyed my walkie.
“Vargas. What are you seeing?”
A bit of static, then. “Found the mess hall. Cook tried to fry us. We settled his hash. Now we’re in some kind of museum. Lotta display cases, and—” There was a noise of shattering glass, then Vargas chuckled. “Hey. Whaddaya know. Another one of the keys.”
“Two down, two to go. Good work.”
“Tell it to Thrasher. He found it. Meet you back at the main hall when we’re done here.”
“Already there.”
I settled back against the wall of the corridor with my rifle at the ready, watching and trying not to let my imagination get the best of me. The Guardians would be coming again, but how would they be coming? Had they found more weapons and armor? More satchel charges? Shit, the way this place was crammed with junk they probably had an old tank in here somewhere.
There was a noise behind me — at least I thought there was. My hearing was still so messed up I was hearing random pings and pops from my brain cells dying. But this had seemed different. A sort of hissing, sliding–door kind of sound. Has Ace opened the safe? Were he and Angie coming back? It hadn’t quite sounded like that either.
I turned around and started back toward to corner. “Angie? Ace?”
No answer.
I checked the side rooms again as I went. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but—
But no, I wasn’t. There was a noise from the next room. A footstep. I padded to the door, rifle up, and listened. Nothing now, but there had been. I swung in, sweeping the room with eyes and gun. Desks, chairs, cabinets — no Guardians. But as I held still, a soft ticking noise came from the near corner, behind a desk. I sidestepped to it, keeping my gun on the rest of the room, then risked a glance over the desk. A crumpled piece of typing paper was slowly unwadding, like someone had just thrown it.
I whipped around. A slim silhouette was standing up in the far corner, holding a gun on me. It stepped out of the shadows.
Athalia.
There were tears in her eyes.
“Why didn’t you come away with me when I asked?”
– Chapter Six –
I stared at her.
“Athalia. What the fuck?”
“I tried to get you not to come here. I guess you’re just too stupid to take a hint!”
“I don’t… wait. Does this mean you’re not a Servant of the Mushroom Cloud?”
Athalia rolled her eyes. “Tsk, I was wrong. He’s a genius!”
I didn’t feel very smart, and I bet I didn’t look very smart either, standing there with my mouth hanging open as my brain replayed all our time together, looking for clues to this crazy betrayal. I still couldn’t see it.
“But… but you helped me — you helped us — the whole way.”
“Of course I did,” said Athalia. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, is he not? The Base Cochise AI determined that the greatest threat to its existence was Finster and his mutant monsters. You and the rangers were going there, so I joined you and helped destroy him.”
A memory jumped out at me, stark and brutal. Athalia putting her pistol to Finster’s heart and pulling the trigger three times. “You killed Finster. You were the assassin he was talking about.”
“I had to make sure it was done,” she said. “Rangers can sometimes be confusingly merciful.”
I fast forwarded to another memory. “But… but what about the armor from Sleeper One. Why would you help us get that?”
“What better way to bring it to Cochise than have you wear it there? But you wouldn’t go to Cochise! You just had to come here! I… I held on ‘til the last second, praying you’d give up when you saw what you were up against, but you’re all so damn stubborn!”
“So you were urging us to go directly to Base Cochise so the robots would kill us and take the armor? Is that it?”
“Not you!” Athalia cried. “You would have been spared. You would have come with me!”