“Don’t do it, V,” Stump warned. “Shit in staggering amounts is what these ones are full of.” Bryan thought he could detect the lilt of an accent—Irish, maybe?
“General Creen guarantees my safety?” Verlander replied. “Is he here? Is he here now?”
“The general is close, Verlander. We can take you to him. Show yourself. Your men will be spared.”
In that moment, Norton was all but assured that they would all be slaughtered. The bull’s words dripped with treachery. Norton bit his lip, suddenly heartsick for his wife and parents.
“Ha!” Verlander shouted. “Ha, ha! You open, weeping, godforsaken sores! You stains upon the face of the good goddamned Earth! You abortions of justice and nature!” He spat the words in a guttural snarl.
“Have it your way,” the bull replied calmly. “Archers.”
The room went still again, and then Verlander was shrieking at his men. “Cover yourselves! Take cover, men—move!”
There was a flurry of activity and Norton felt Fausto’s arm on his shoulder, and then they were sprinting toward a storage closet, the air around them filled with a buzzing like a great swarm of locusts.
Norton didn’t know the weapon, but it was cruelly efficient. The metallic points tore into the soldiers of the resistance, cutting them into ribbons and spilling their blood on the stained concrete floor. He heard men screaming, their cries terminating with muted thunks as flesh met steel.
Fausto shoved him into the door and Bryan tore it open just as a volley of arrowheads—heat-seekers, he supposed—sliced into Ruiz’s midsection. They exited through his stomach and slapped into the wooden door with a sharp twang.
Bryan screamed and pulled Fausto’s limp form into the closet. Outside, carnage raged. He could hear Verlander shouting instructions and then there was a furious explosion, the building shaking as if it sat on an awakening fault.
“Oh, Jesus! Fausto…can you hear me?” Bryan knelt at the man’s side, applying pressure to his wounds. “Fausto! Fuck! Come on, Fausto!”
Those sleepy eyes opened. He smiled, a thin film of blood coating his teeth. “Is it finished, Bryan?”
Norton wasn’t sure. It had grown still outside—particles of dust and grime drifted beneath the closet door.
“Can you…can you walk? We’ll go out together, Fausto. We’ll get you some help and get you home to your Carmen.”
Ruiz’s smile widened. “My Carmen? Yes, my Carmen…I think I can make it, Bryan Norton, for my Carmen. Let’s…let’s walk out together.”
Norton pushed the door open, revealing a ruin of steel and concrete. The far wall was gone. The forest loomed behind a curtain of dust.
Norton supported Ruiz with his arm around his shoulder. They picked their way over the bodies of the deceased, around stacks of rubble.
“Over here,” Verlander croaked. He knelt near the ruined body of Stump, whose head and chest just peaked out from beneath a pile of concrete. “He did it. Such a hard man, this little one. We called him Stump, but his name was Jonathan. Jonathan Kenney.”
“And now what? Now what do we do?” Bryan said, his tone plaintive. He wept as he felt the life leaking from his friend.
Verlander stood. He bled from multiple wounds. Three of the metallic shafts protruded from his thigh, held fast in the solid bone there. When he opened his mouth to speak, blood washed down onto his shirt.
“Now?” he coughed. “Well, now we finish it. Creen’s still here—I can feel him. He’ll go down with the ship, if it’s starting to flag,” he gagged, a geyser of blood staining a crimson bib onto his shirt. “Stump sent out a transmission prior to disabling the digital obstacles. The world knows what we have done here. The world will bear witness. All that’s left is to finish it.”
They picked their way across the floor to the stairwell, moving slowly, their footsteps echoing heavily on the iron grating as they descended into the bowels of the brewery.
There was a dimly lit corridor at the bottom of the stairs. “A bunker…at the end of the hallway,” Verlander panted. He was losing steam quickly. Fausto nodded in and out of consciousness.
Norton was confused. How could he do this himself?
He stopped midway down the corridor, propping Ruiz against the wall. “Wait for me, Fausto. I’m going to get you some help.”
The man with the sleepy eyes smiled in return. Verlander slumped heavily against the wall, confusion spreading on his features. “What are you…”
“I need you both to wait here, Alain. Wait for me. I’ll meet with the general.”
Verlander looked exhausted, his hooded eyes and gore-streaked beard telling the story of a man in his final hour. “God be with you then, Norton.” He stumbled, caught himself against the wall and slid into a seated position.
Bryan smiled as the wounded men leaned against each other, forming a crux of support in that dark place. He shrugged out of his rifle, opting instead for Verlander’s sidearm.
He walked to the end of the hallway. The door before him had a pane of frosted glass—LABOR stenciled on the front in black ink.
“General Creen,” Norton called, his tone even. “Come on out of there.”
There was a moment of silence, then: “So…Norton is it? Come in, come in. You will not be harmed.”
Norton considered the situation. He closed his eyes and saw his wife. He saw his father and his mother—pictured the little house he and Maggie shared in the Sellwood district. He saw the ruined bodies of the men who had fought for the rights to raise a family.
His hand went to the doorknob. It was as though he were outside himself—watching himself enter the lion’s den.
He was not afraid.
Creen was very old. He looked frail, his face a story of time and hardship. Still, aged or not, sharp eyes peered out from beneath wild, gray eyebrows. He couldn’t discern their color, but they were unwavering.
“Please. Sit down,” Creen said, motioning to the chair before him.
Norton did, the muzzle of Verlander’s sidearm fixed on the general’s chest.
“You have nothing to fear from me, Bryan Norton. You can put that gun away. Or you can keep it out. It doesn’t matter.”
“Do you have children?” Norton asked. He was surprised by the strength in his voice.
Creen smiled. “I do. My daughter is thirty-six years old. She works for the authority. My son is twenty-four. He will face Labor in four months’ time.”
“Why? Why would you condone this… this barbaric exercise?”
Creen put his palms up, as if to say what are my choices? “This is how it’s always been, Bryan. How it’s always gone.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t change it, Creen! We’re talking about your son’s right to have his own family. Don’t you see the flaws inherent in this… this torture?”
“My son is strong. He will win his family. Just like you, Bryan Norton. You have navigated the contest. You have survived Labor, and your prize is somewhat grander. Do you mind if I show you something?”
Norton nodded and the general touched a button on the arm of his chair. A bank of video monitors blinked on and Norton’s mouth fell open at the images they revealed.
“200,000 of them. Maybe more. The Authority has called in the National Guard. I don’t think it’ll make much of a difference, though. That,” he said, pointing a finger at the monitors, “is the beginning of the end of the current way of doing things.”
Norton couldn’t reconcile what he was seeing. Throngs of civilians marched up and down Portland’s streets. There were, indeed, many thousands of them, pressed into the parks and streets of a burning city. The monitors were silent, but a quality of anger seemed to bleed from the images there.