Jeremy Robinson - SecondWorld

“I get it,” Miller said. “We’re not getting through.”

Two quick knocks came from the door.

Adler tensed.

Miller walked to the door, weapon ready to shoot whoever might be on the other side. He opened it, saw Vesely, Pale Horse, and an unconscious third man dressed in red propped up between them like they were three chums. He opened the door and let them in, closing the door behind them.

“What happened?” Miller asked. “Who is he?”

“Is maintenance staff. Pale Horse broke his neck,” Vesely said, pointing to the man’s shirt. “I have idea. Well, Charlie’s idea.”

“Actually,” Miller said, “so do I— Wait… Charlie’s idea?”

After hearing Vesely’s plan, which was risky as hell, but perhaps their best chance of success, Miller added his idea to the mix. The combined plan was bold and messy, but if it worked, the enemy wouldn’t know what hit them.

Ten minutes later, they were ready. Miller put the general’s shirt back on, covering the fresh bandage on his arm. He threw on the coat next and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. The sight of himself dressed in Nazi regalia was disconcerting, though not nearly as much as the dead maintenance man lying in the tub. The man was just as dead as before, but was now stripped to his underwear, covered in his own blood, and missing a hand.

He left the bathroom and found the others ready to go. Vesely was now dressed in red, and had the maintenance man’s satchel over his shoulder. He still wore his two guns and Stetson despite Miller’s protest. A cowboy to the end. The satchel, which had been full of tools, now held a severed hand—Charlie’s idea.

Vesely shook Miller’s hand. “Good luck, Survivor.”

“You, too, Cowboy.”

After tilting his hat toward the other two, he opened the door, looked both ways, and then slipped out into the hallway, heading up.

Miller wasn’t sure he’d see Vesely again. They were about to embark on suicide missions. That both of them would survive seemed unlikely. Still, they’d come this far, so he decided to hold on to the hope that he’d see the quirky Czech cowboy again.

Miller turned to Adler and Pale Horse. “You two ready?”

Adler held out her hand. She had changed into a brown uniform that was a few sizes too big. The rolled-up sleeves and pant legs looked a little off, but she looked far less conspicuous. With her loose-fitting clothes and her hair tucked up inside a brown cap, she could almost pass for a man—a very short and pretty man. “Have a gun for me?”

Pale Horse handed her his sound-suppressed Sig Sauer along with three spare clips. “I seem to be a slow draw with this,” he said, and then patted his UMP submachine gun. “Besides, I think I’ll have more use for this in the next few minutes.”

Miller confirmed the man’s thought with a nod and headed for the door. He looked to Adler. “Ready?”

She stepped around him and opened the door. With seriousness Miller hadn’t yet seen, she said, “Let’s go,” and stepped into the hallway. Miller and Pale Horse followed.

A quick check revealed no one nearby and no robo-Bettys. They approached the railing and looked down. The atrium at the bottom of the complex looked like a galleria at Christmastime. The sea of voices. The bustling bodies. The sound of the fountain. There was an energy to the place. An excitement. Miller saw coins in the fountain and wondered if he would find George Washington printed on them, or Adolf Hitler.

He could see a hallway entrance across the way. Above the doorway was a sign that read SECURITY AND CONTROL. According to Adler, the vaultlike door was at the end of that hallway. With all the security, they would never get the door open from this end, so Miller came up with a plan that would get them to open the door from the other side.

Miller reached into his pocket and took out the plastic Ziploc bag in which he had kept his painkillers. Now it was full of still-warm liquid—his blood. He poked several holes in the plastic with his knife, then sliced it down the middle for good measure. “Stand back,” he said to Adler and Pale Horse. Better if they didn’t get the blood, containing his DNA, on them—like everyone below them was about to.

He gripped the corner of the bag and sent it flying out over the atrium with a flick of his wrist. The bag spun out over the open space like a Frisbee, spraying his blood in every direction.

The first reaction came fast, but was confused. A woman below yelped and said, “What was that?”

A chorus of voices soon joined the woman, none too fearful until one person said, “Is that blood?”

Another replied. “It is!”

And then it happened. An alarm.

Miller peeked over the railing. The crowd below was frozen in place, some looking up, trying to figure out where the blood had come from. He could see specks of it covering their faces. But that’s not why they weren’t moving.

A single robo-Betty at the center of the group was flashing red. An electronic voice spoke from it, “Anomalous DNA detected. Please remain still until security arrives to assist you.”

Miller realized that if he hadn’t shot the robo-Betty in the elevator, he might have gotten the same message. But at the same time, it might have alerted security to his presence. This turn of events threw a rather large monkey wrench in his plans.

Another alarm sounded. Then another. Ten more followed. All of the robo-Bettys in the atrium had detected his blood and sounded the alarm. But none of them were activating, and probably wouldn’t unless… someone disobeyed. That’s why the crowd had frozen. If they ran, the Bettys would activate. These people had been trained well. Too well.

A loud pinging noise drew his attention up. High above, where the flags were attached to the ceiling, were sparks. When the first five-story-tall flag fell, Miller knew what had happened. Vesely had seen their predicament and fired on the flags. The giant flags would send people scattering, or set off the Bettys themselves upon reaching the floor. The second flag fell moments later.

“Go!” Miller said, and began running down the spiraling ramp. No one was paying any attention to them.

As they rounded the second floor, the flags fell past.

“Run!” Miller shouted. “The flags will set them off!”

That’s all it took. The people below realized he was right.

And ran.

The Bettys sprang into action, even as more of the killer devices arrived on the scene, alarms sounding. Screams rose up from the atrium as a thousand metal balls blasted through the air, cutting down at least fifty people. Miller felt a moment of regret for the people. They weren’t soldiers. But they were complicit to genocide, so his regret didn’t last long.

As Miller rounded the ramp to the ground floor, he noticed a robo-Betty up ahead. He slowed and let Pale Horse and Adler catch up. “Grab that thing,” he said to Pale Horse. “Don’t let it see the blood, or me.”

Pale Horse ran ahead and picked up the device. It scanned him as he held it, the light turning green. Then the wheels just spun as it tried to move on. Pale Horse kept the sensor turned toward the ceiling as Miller passed and said, “Let’s go.”

They rounded the ramp onto the atrium floor and were greeted by a war zone. At least a hundred people lay dead and dying, many of them wearing blue and brown. A few survivors clung to the far walls, afraid to move. A single robo-Betty sat at the edge of the atrium, flashing its red light at a corpse and ordering it not to move.

Miller led Pale Horse and Adler across the opposite side of the atrium and headed for the hallway to Security and Control. As he approached the hall, he saw that his plan had succeeded. The four security personnel that had been guarding the large vaultlike door had rushed toward the atrium when the first alarms had sounded. Three of them lay dead. A fourth, farther down the sloped hallway, was injured. Miller took aim and shot the man as he walked past. The man would have died from his injuries, so it was a mercy, but Miller also didn’t want the man shooting them in the back when he saw what came next.