“Gather your strength, men. Pray to your god. Think of your family. Then…then orient yourselves to the task. We fight hard and we strike the head from the body of the snake.
“There,” he pointed at a gentle hill. Norton wondered what it had been all those decades before—before the Labor fields had been created. Maybe a golf course fairway? A lawn at a local college? “That is our route. We move in single file. We stay low—we stay concealed. Stump here has the codes to disable the eastern moat. That’ll be our way in.”
Stump grinned in the dark, his teeth dual strings of luminescent pearls. Norton didn’t like the smile—it was unnerving—but he was thankful the slight man was on his side.
Verlander allowed the men another ten minutes of rest, then they were moving again. Adrenaline coursing through his veins, Bryan fell in behind Fausto at the rear of the line, the muzzle of his weapon angled toward the ground.
Their objective awaited them at the eastern boundary of the brewery, an ivy-strewn building that was slowly melting into the reaches of the forest. Bryan swallowed heavily. His eyes watered.
Before them was a shimmering field of energy. It looked like black water, but he knew it was electric current—a mirage of deadly technology. On the far side of the illusion, at least thirty or forty soldiers milled about campfires. A line of bulls stood, still as topiary, on the edge of the camp, their eyes trained on the forest.
Here it was. Here it all was, Bryan thought. It was the place where his story would be written—one way or the other. The emotion seemed misplaced, he knew, but he felt calm—satisfied that things would be resolved one way or the other very soon.
From the corner of his eye, he saw a cloud of energy moving toward the moat. It was Stump, crouched beneath a night cloak, two soldiers flanking him with weapons at the ready. Brazenly, they made their way to the edge of the digital obstacle, where Stump fell to his knees. He opened his briefcase, plugged a cord into a box in the ground and began to tap the keyboard of his computer.
Bryan watched all of this, breath frozen in his chest. He let it go in a torrent when Fausto lightly tapped his right shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Bryan. We’ll make it. When that digital obstacle is gone, we run. We do it for our families—for our children.”
Norton nodded. “Thank you, Fausto. I… I owe you my life. I’m here because of you.”
Fausto smiled in return. “I look forward to meeting Maggie when this is all done. We’ll be ok, kid.”
Just as he said it, the digital obstacle disappeared, triggering an alarm. Warbling sirens polluted the air with their cries of calamity; Verlander growled the men forward and their forces sprang into action.
Bryan felt a cry bubble from his lungs, and then he was sprinting toward the camp, bullets snapping from the muzzle of his rifle. The powerful spray went wild at first, but he soon controlled it, feeling a sick elation as he watched his ammunition plow into a group of men sitting around a fire.
The bulls shrieked in surprise. Their cries surprised him and made him feel sick—they were the high and perfectly startled cries of ambushed men.
As the bulls returned fire, he became aware of his comrades falling away. All around him they fell, torn asunder by violence. Bullets whipped past him like buzzing hornets. Fausto took a round in the shoulder and fell to the ground with a sharp cry.
Bryan stopped to help, just as a round caught him in the thigh, passing through his leg and punching out the other side of his blue jeans. He shrieked in pain and disbelief, and then there were hands on them both, half-dragging and half-shoving them toward a little dip in the turf. They fell into the hole as a fresh wave of gunfire perforated the air above them.
“Fausto!” Bryan shouted. “Fausto!”
“I’m here! Aw… shit! I’m ok, I’m ok!”
The man who had rescued them, one of the bulls who had chosen to stand with them, angled up and snapped off a volley of gunfire. He put his back to the ground as bullets chewed the terrain above them. “Three doors on the east side of the brewery,” he panted. “We go in at the corner. There’s more cover there. Can you two keep going?”
Bryan clutched at his leg. The wound seeped blood—thankfully, it wasn’t arterial. There was a groove in his flesh. He pressed down on it, agony flaring through him. “I think so.”
“I’m good,” Fausto said.
“Ok, then stay low. We crawl. Follow my lead.”
They did, and they moved like a trio of phantoms across the scarred ground. Bryan tasted dirt; he felt stones and sticks and grime grinding into his belly. Fausto’s boot inadvertently slapped his cheek more than once as they struggled toward their goal.
All around them, the battle was losing steam. Bryan thought the surprise of their attack had led to an advantage, but he knew soldiers were converging on them from other parts of the brewery.
The bull, their hero, looked back at them. “I’m going to blow the door. You’ll have to fight your way in. His name is General Creen and he’s in the basement.”
Fausto nodded, his face deathly pale. He’d lost a lot of blood.
“Listen to me. Please. My name was Ryan Butler. The Authority took me when I was eight years old. Eight years old. I’m so sorry…” he said, pausing to gather himself, “I’m so sorry for what I’ve done.”
With that he peeled the adhesive strip from the face of the grip charge he’d been holding and threw it toward the fortified door of the brewery. The charge buzzed through the air, drawing shouts of surprise from the guards stationed there. They dove for cover but it was too late; the explosion obliterated concrete and flesh alike, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the facility.
Butler was on his feet before the charge had found its mark. He ducked the burst of debris and, when the smoke had cleared, filled the space with gunfire. Stunned bulls returned fire, cutting the man down, but his bravery had better than evened the odds for Ruiz and Norton, who easily cleaned up the few remaining bulls.
Norton was unnerved by the stillness inside the brewery. The three of them had killed at least ten bulls—maybe more. He scanned to his right as Verlander guided a group of about twenty remaining soldiers through the campground. Verlander fired single shots from his sidearm into injured bulls along the way.
“Unbelievable!” he said, joining them in the brewery. “I knew you two were something special. Let’s move, men! The basement!”
Enormous vats stood rusting on the warehouse floor. The Authority occupied offices against the far wall but, if anyone remained inside of those rooms, Norton couldn’t see them.
The remaining fighters formed a loose phalanx, Stump and Verlander and Ruiz and Norton in the center. They crept toward the offices. Verlander stopped them; he motioned silently for his company to make their weapons ready.
Then, as if cued from some producer backstage, armor-clad bulls funneled into the distillery, fanning out behind the vats. Fresh rounds of automatic gunfire erupted in the confined space and Norton understood, in that moment of perfect fury, what the end of the world would sound like.
Norton gulped air as the firefight raged all around them, but they were outnumbered and outgunned.
When the smoke cleared, the room fell silent. “Alain Verlander!” called one of the bulls. “The general requests a conference. We guarantee your safety.”