“MOVE!” Pook shouted, and just as he did, a thundering explosion rocked the front of the shop, blowing away the door and a portion of the building with it. The sentry who’d just warned everyone was killed instantly.
“Out the back!” Ducky yelled as smoke and dust and flying debris filled the air around the team.
Two more of the men on Ducky’s squad were cut down immediately. Dawn grabbed Jed by the hand, and before he could really register everything that was happening she’d pulled him down so that they were low-crawling toward the rear of the building. Jerry was pushing Jed forward as they crawled, and seemed to be protecting him from fire from the rear. Phosphorescent projectiles sailed overhead and exploded when they came into contact with the structure, sending glowing plasma raining down like magma. Jed looked back over his shoulder, and over Jerry’s head he could see a floating TRACER drone hovering just outside the massive new hole in the structure and firing rounds into the building. Red and green laser beams emitted by the drone crisscrossed through the smoke and dust, searching for targets to destroy.
Looking back where they were crawling, Jed saw the rear door open, and he, Dawn, and Jerry bolted for it, falling in line with the rest of the team as they flowed out of the building like water escaping a crumbling dam.
(12
IN THE STREETS OF THE CITY
Jed and Dawn ran along an alleyway with Ducky’s team, and gradually a protective formation of TRACE fighters took shape around Jed. The troops began barking to one another in staccato bursts of commands, signals, and responses that everyone else in the group understood, even if Jed found it hard to make heads or tails of any of it. Out in the open, TRACE worked like a well-oiled machine as they fled the scene of the destroyed antique shop.
Jed was impressed at the discipline displayed by the team as they moved deliberately and as clandestinely as possible through town. When the whole group reached a good chokepoint in a darkened alleyway, the unit that was surrounding Jed and Dawn pushed forward and took cover behind a series of large dumpsters while the rest of the squad scattered and took positions on both sides of the alley.
Two of the men scaled an ancient fire escape and Jed watched as Pook walked out into the middle of the alley. Pook pulled something out of his pocket, fiddled with it a moment, then dropped it on the ground and ran for cover.
From his position behind the dumpster, Jed finally made out what it was that Pook had dropped on the ground. It was the bloody BICE unit that Donavan had cut from his own head before he died. Pook must have attached some sort of battery to the device, which would have reactivated the signal. Dawn pushed Jed further in behind the dumpster and everyone went silent as they waited. Jerry, Dawn, and Billy had formed what seemed to Jed like a protective wall in front of him, and he could barely see what was happening over the backs and heads of his defenders. He also noticed that Billy took Dawn’s hand for a second, but she turned her hand loose and thrust it into her pocket.
It seemed as though minutes passed, but it was probably only seconds before the TRACER unit that had attacked the antique shop came hovering around the corner from an adjacent street. A glowing missile fired from the drone destroyed the BICE unit as it lay on the ground, and tracking lasers began scanning the alley for signals or targets.
The men on the fire escape and those hidden in place in the alley opened fire on the TRACER unit before it could lock on to any other target, and a well-placed shot coming from one of the elevated positions struck the drone right above its laser-sighting lens. The machine hummed for a moment and shook with violence, spinning drunkenly as it attempted to maintain level flight, before it exploded and a thousand pieces of high-tech shrapnel scattered around the alley. The largest portion of the TRACER drone caromed down the alley like a beach ball until it bounced off of the dumpster that shielded Jed and his defenders from the battle.
Once again, the team wordlessly snapped into motion and Dawn was pushing Jed from behind out into the alley. Pook pulled on a heavy glove and he and Ducky began to remove smoking parts from the damaged portion of the drone, stuffing the parts into a backpack.
When Pook and Ducky were done stripping the drone, the team formed back up, and in moments they were all moving eastward again, leapfrogging forward in groups of two or three as they crossed the open and seemingly abandoned streets of the City on their way toward the river.
Ten minutes later, the squad gathered together outside a darkened tavern. The faintest hint of the coming morning was only then touching the eastern sky—or at least the bit of it that could be seen between city buildings. The tavern was still shrouded in darkness, and since most of the streetlights had been extinguished due to the rebel offensive, the squad was able to gather near the door of the tavern without worrying about alerting anyone who might be in the area, or peeping out the windows of nearby buildings.
Above the door where the team was gathered, the name of the tavern was written in Old English script, and Jed studied it with interest. If it weren’t for the things he’d been through in the last few days, he might have laughed…
Ye Olde World English Tavern. Didn’t that name just say it all?
Pook knocked on the door while sentries moved into position on both ends of the block. One of Ducky’s men, with a long rifle slung over his shoulder, scaled the building across the street from the tavern with the skill and agility of a trained mountain climber, and in under a minute he was peering down at the rest of his team from the roof of the opposite building.
A dark figure came to the door, and after pleasantries were exchanged, Pook, Dawn, Ducky, Jed, and the remaining soldiers from Ducky’s unit all filed into the tavern.
Two of Ducky’s men helped a few of the bar employees as they darkened all the windows before lanterns were lit throughout the tavern. The man who’d opened the door to let them in stepped behind the bar for a moment and returned with a handheld electronic device that he held up in front of Pook.
“Sweep ’em all,” Pook said.
As the man activated the device, Pook noticed that Jed and Jerry were looking at it curiously.
“BICE scanner,” Pook explained. “Detects TRIDs, too. It’s crazy expensive and highly illegal. We keep one here because most of our operational planning takes place here. There are only two other functional scanners in the whole resistance, as far as I know. We couldn’t afford to lose one of these like we just lost my antique shop.”
Wordlessly the man began to scan everyone in Pook’s party with the device. He gestured to the two Transport officers, Conrad and Rheems. “What about those two?”
“They’ve turned their units off,” Pook replied. “It’s a workaround we came up with a few months ago. Sweep ’em anyway, though. Make sure they aren’t broadcasting.”
The man scanned Conrad and Rheems with the machine, and nodded affirmatively to indicate that they were clear.
Jed would later learn that the tavern owner—the man with the scanning machine—was a respected veteran resistance officer named Jeff Wainwright. Jeff and his people never asked any questions, and the bar was virtually silent as Jeff went from person to person, scanning them from head to toe.
The silence gave Jed his first chance to think, really think, since this whole thing began. Since arriving in the City, he’d witnessed three men murdered right in front of him. Because of him. Was it only three men? Maybe it was four. Or had there been more? Jed didn’t even know. That realization filled him with shame. Was he losing his identity? His humanity? How can human life, he thought, become so cheap? The questions piled up like the firewood he would stack just outside the back door back home. Why were these people helping him? Why were they concerned at all about a young Amish immigrant? Strangers—the English—putting their lives and futures at risk so that a farmer could make it to the Amish Zone? None of these questions had answers, or at least none of them had any answers that he could fathom. No one had asked him what he thought. No one had asked him his opinion or permission for anything at all. It was disconcerting to be swept along by events like a leaf floating down a stream. And were these deaths somehow being registered to his account? Perhaps that was the biggest question of them all.