Patrick Lee - The Breach

Down the hall in the living room, Manny's screams have ebbed to a whimper, and in the past minute he's begun choking on something-blood, no doubt. The sound of it has an effect on Travis's mother; her poker face slips. She is thinking about her own death now. Really thinking about it.

If he cared to speak to them, Travis would ask them how they could have expected any other outcome than this. They sculpted him to be what he is: a corrupted human being. A cop whose only real job has been to keep them pre-informed of police activity against them. A man whose moral compass points wherever the hell he wants it to point, at any given time. Didn't they know their animal would turn on them, after what they did?

Manny's choking climaxes in a series of convulsive heaves; he is trying with all his remaining air to purge the obstructing fluid from his windpipe. All his remaining air is not enough, and a moment later there is no more sound coming down the hall. Mrs. Chase begins to weep openly. Mr. Chase looks at her with disgust, and Travis suddenly understands the mini-plotline that has just reached the end of its reel and begun flapping against the projector arm. It is all he can do to keep from laughing at them both.

Then the window bursts and the shutters are knocked aside by a projectile that arcs across the room and ricochets off the dresser. Pepper gas, thick and orange-white, seethes into the air, and Mr. and Mrs. Chase begin to scream, because they know what's coming.

"We're your blood, goddammit!" Mr. Chase shouts.

"So was the kid she had on the way," Travis says.

He sees them react to that, and decides to let it be their final thought. He raises the.44 -and finds hesitation where only a second ago there was resolve.

Another second passes. The gas fills half the room now, its outermost tendrils stinging Travis's eyes. His next breath will fill his lungs with it, and there will be nothing in his world but pain. At the same time a window shatters somewhere in a nearby room, and bodies clamber through. If he doesn't do this now-right now-it will never happen.

He forces an image of Emily into his mind. Emily standing right here with him, deserving retribution in her name. But instead of willpower it brings him understanding: he knows now why he hasn't pulled the trigger. It's not pity. It's her. It's the thought of how she would feel about him, if she were here to see him doing this. Travis does not believe in the afterlife. Emily is gone, gone forever, but all the same, he knows what she would think of this. She would be fucking ashamed of him.

He feels the gun slipping from his hand even before the SWAT commander appears in the doorway and screams for him to drop it, and a moment later Travis is on the floor, deep in the gas, unable to hold his breath any longer.

"This can't be happening," Paige said.

They could hear the screams coming up out of the fog, from the leading edge of the incoming swarm, less than a block away now. The buildings directly around 7 Theaterstrasse were corporate and commercial structures, empty at this hour, so the crowd had originated from farther away. But not by much. The frenzied movement of the nearest flashlight beams drew closer with each second. Travis thought of the feral rage of the test subjects in the video, rushing inward toward the man in the cage. The scale of the situation had been amplified a thousandfold in this place. Seven Theaterstrasse was the cage now, and all of its occupants stood in the crosshairs of the effect, which extended at least as far as the edges of Zurich.

The forefront of the crowd was maybe fifty seconds away, surging between buildings to the west, and onto the two nearest bridges spanning the river just to the south.

Paige's cell rang. She answered. It was someone aboard the AWACS, circling high above. Travis could just discern the tinny voice over the phone, reporting a visual on something strange happening down in the city.

"We noticed," Paige said.

In Travis's ear, the sniper and spotter teams reported in, one by one, as they retook their window positions.

The reality of what was about to happen descended on Travis like a poison cloud. He saw it settling over Paige at the same time, as she watched the flashlights race in toward the building. The nearest were past the bridges now.

The last of the snipers reported in. Travis could picture their rifles silently tracking the advance of the crowd while they waited for the order.

"We should just let them in," Travis said.

"They'll kill every one of us," Paige said.

"Yeah."

He was surprised by how little fear he heard in his own voice. How little he felt, for that matter. Maybe there was just too much of it to process. What he had in place of it was logic.

"It's not their fault," he said. "A few of us dying, instead of hundreds of them, that's not a hard choice at all."

For a moment he saw agreement in Paige's eyes. What other option was there?

And then her eyes changed, and in the same instant Travis understood why. The wicked effectiveness of Pilgrim's trap became clear. There would be no simple way out of it. Not even by suicide.

"Christ," he whispered.

He saw in his mind what would happen in this building, less than a minute from right now, if they held their fire and let the crowd in. He saw the rush of bodies coming up the stairs like fluid under pressure. Saw them clambering over one another, tearing at the jungle of wiring that filled the space of every floor. Crashing through the clearings with the metal boxes, and the delicate wires for the pressure pads that were almost certainly not decoys.

"If the nuke goes off, the crowd dies anyway," Paige said. "The whole city dies."

Travis could hear it in her voice: confirmation of everything she'd feared about this building. Here at last was the spare hostage. The one Pilgrim wasn't afraid to pull the trigger on.

But she also looked confused. Damn confused. And even in the tension of the moment, Travis thought he knew why. Because the whole building seemed to have been devoted to creating this effect. The whole building was the second hostage. So where the hell was the weapon Pilgrim had spent a decade working on?

Travis's line of thought was broken by a singular cry from the mob, clearer than the rest. It was furious, and wild, and so high-pitched that it could only belong to a very young girl, maybe younger than ten.

The crowd's leading edge was less than twenty seconds from the building.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck…" Paige breathed.

Travis wondered how many kids were among the crowd, but only for a moment, because he already knew how many. Every kid in Zurich would be out there, soon enough.

"Miss Campbell?" one of the snipers said over the comm unit, the voice tight like a wire.

The question was obvious.

So was the answer.

Paige swallowed hard, bit down on whatever she was feeling, and said, "Weapons free."

The night came alive with gunfire.

Travis saw the muzzle flashes from a dozen windows below him, across the face of the building. Saw the red paths of tracer rounds cutting through the fog, the snipers picking out individual targets for each shot. And though he couldn't see the victims at street level, as the snipers could with their FLIR goggles, he saw the results as clearly as he needed to. The flashlights at the forefront of the charge were suddenly kicked backward, their beams flipping end over end. The front ranks were cut down in rapid succession, and Travis heard screams of pain, mixed with surprise and fear. Men, women, children.

But the charge didn't stop. Didn't even slow. The rest of the surge, coming from behind the fallen, hardly faltered over the bodies. Travis saw the wave of incoming flashlights stutter-step where the first victims had gone down. The dead served only as speed bumps for the horde.