Patrick Lee - The Breach

The sniper was still looking to Paige for an answer.

"I don't know what to do," she said. She repeated it, looking around as if the answer would come to her.

"Yes you do," Travis said.

She met his eyes. Narrowed hers.

"The grenade," Travis said, and then darted his own eyes upward. Through the ceiling. To something eight stories above their heads. She followed. Understood.

"It's all we've got," Travis said.

"Is it a chess move the Whisper would have expected?" she said.

"We're stuck with it, whether it is or not. Go. I'll help these guys."

She considered it for another two seconds, then nodded. She turned to the sniper and held out her hand for the grenade. He looked like he understood the plan. Or didn't care, so long as there was one. He handed it over.

"Don't take losses holding this floor!" Paige shouted. "Withdraw up the stairs when you have to! One way or another, this'll be over in the next two minutes."

Travis stared at her. Realized he was storing the image. Wondered if he'd ever see her again.

Then she was gone.

He unslung his rifle, thumbed off the safety, and went to the basement door where the others were standing.

Beyond it was the worst thing he'd ever seen. The basement, a vast space maybe twelve feet deep, crawled like a snake pit full of bodies, the living and the dead so intermixed it was hard to differentiate them. As the leading edge of the wave advanced up the stairs and was cut back by the autofire, those behind dragged the bodies aside, between themselves or above. The corpses that rode the crowd pumped arterial blood from bowl-sized exit wounds, spraying and coating the throng.

Men, women, children. No fog to hide them now. The crowd was the sort you might encounter at a mall, or a supermarket, or anywhere. Some of the parents were holding seven-year-olds by the hand, as if unwilling to lose sight of them. Even as they dragged them forward into the gunfire. And even the seven-year-olds looked ready to kill someone. Would have tried to, had they reached the top of the stairs.

The forefront continually surged and was seared back, ten to twelve steps below. Travis shouldered his rifle. Lowered the sights to the crowd on the stairs. Didn't fire yet. Suddenly wasn't sure he could. They were just people. Bloody and screaming, and furious enough to come forward into machine-gun fire. But still just people. It wasn't their fault this was happening to them.

One of the snipers stopped to reload. It took him only three seconds, but in those seconds of reduced fire, the crowd gained four steps, and the back-and-forth cadence resumed there. Their progress was like a ratchet, locking in each little burst of progress, never really losing it.

A moment later, as the first sniper resumed fire, the other two ran dry in unison, and fumbled for fresh magazines. The crowd rushed upward at full speed; the lone shooter could only cover any one spot at a time. An old man wearing a ridiculous green bow tie, like a St. Patrick's Day reveler drunk off his ass, came scrambling up out of the pack wielding a steak knife, aiming for the thigh of one of the reloading snipers, who wasn't even looking his way. Travis pulled the trigger and took most of the old man's head off. The body pitched back and was immediately grabbed and hauled upward, out of the way, by the next two attackers: a teenage boy and a woman no older than thirty. Travis shot them both in the chest, and didn't stop shooting as each new target presented itself. He understood within seconds what it took to do it: you just didn't look at the faces. That was how the snipers were managing. It was a miserable fucking tactic, he knew. And it wasn't a real coping method for what he felt. It was just a kind of debt. He'd pay it back later. If there was a later.

Behind him there came a violent crash. He turned, along with the others, to see some kind of steel shelf unit sticking up through the floor, having broken a wide hole through. It dropped away a second later, and then there were hands gripping the edges of the hole, people below no doubt hoisted on the shoulders of others.

"Fall back to the stairs!" Travis shouted.

A head came up through the hole. Covered in someone else's blood. Could've been either sex, any age. Travis put a bullet into it and watched it drop back through the opening, like the shelf had.

He and the others were moving now. Backing up in stutter-steps so the crowd on the basement stairs didn't surge. They reached the stairs to the second floor and made their way up, reloading and firing as they went, the throng matching their pace as they climbed. Paige rounded the landing on Level Seven. Miller was still there, doubling ammo and spare rifles. Feeders were running armloads to the snipers.

"Get some down to ground level!" Paige yelled, and didn't wait to see her nod. She continued on. Up to Level Eight, then Nine.

The warhead. The red star like an eye, watching her. Daring her.

This would either work or it wouldn't. If it didn't, well, there were worse ways to die than standing near the heart of a thermonuclear blast. Truth be told, there was probably no better way. It would reduce her to loose atoms about ten thousand times faster than her nerves could send the pain signals to her brain. Faster than her eyes could report the sudden light to her visual cortex a few inches behind them. It would literally feel like nothing at all.

Still, pretty goddamned scary.

She knelt before the thing. Considered the grenade and the available space inside the warhead. Right against the primary would be the best place to put it. This primary was an implosion type. A uranium sphere surrounded by shaped charges, precision wired to a detonator. Properly triggered, the shaped charges were designed to blow in millisecond unison, crushing the uranium to critical mass and setting off a fission reaction. That was the A-bomb aspect of the device. The A-bomb, in turn, would set off the H-bomb portion. But if the grenade went off right up against the shaped charges, and scattered their careful arrangement before any of them blew, then none of that would happen. The uranium crush would fail, and the whole sequence would stall.

That was the idea, anyway. It wasn't the sort of thing anyone had tested.

She set the grenade in place, between the shell of charges and one of the aluminum struts that braced the primary. She held it in place with her left hand, and with her right she pulled the pin. The handle swung open, and she heard the fuse ignite with a pop.

Turning now. Running hard. Into the room full of blazing white-orange light and not much else, past the inscription in the floor, past the nest of wires and the Ares and the amplifier and the silvery bond between them. To the far side of the room, putting as much space as possible between herself and the grenade blast. Wondering if she'd hear just the first crack of it before her life ended mid-thought.

Travis brought up the rear, two steps below the other shooters, the advancing crowd just another six steps below him. Slowing them was a lot harder on these stairs; they were wider than those in the basement.

"Landing!" one of the snipers shouted at him, and his next step put him on the flat surface of the second floor. He pivoted around the banister and continued upward, the rifle running dry at that moment. He ejected the clip, took another from his pocket, and as he racked it in he felt the building shudder from the force of an explosion, high above. Paige had closed her eyes and turned away just before the blast. Now she opened them and found the room choked with plaster and explosive residue. Most of the wall around the double doors had been blown out, leaving a huge cavity. The grenade must have triggered a few of the shaped charges. Not bad, though. It could have been about five megatons worse.