Will McIntosh - Defenders

Dominique rubbed her eyes, which were burning from lack of sleep. The war just went on and on; there was never an opportune time to sleep, and hadn’t been for the past five months. Mostly, Dominique slept in her chair in the war room.

“We have to find a way to get populations in occupied territories to rise up,” Peter Smythe said. He punched his palm. Smythe had been a baseball star, once upon a time. Despite that, he wasn’t an arrogant dickhead. Dominique appreciated that. “That’s the defenders’ weakness: The forces they leave behind to hold captured territory are wafer-thin. If they had to keep backtracking to put down insurrections, we could wear them down.”

Trying not to show the exasperation she felt, Dominique went to the back for more coffee. They’d been broadcasting pleas for resistance to the captured populations almost from the start, but the defenders were ruthlessly effective at making gruesome examples of anyone caught listening to those pleas, let alone plotting resistance.

With the coffee warming her hand through the Styrofoam cup, Dominique studied the big map at the front of the room. The defenders were positioning themselves to storm their facility, as well as Alliance headquarters in Baghdad. Those were their two primary targets. So far, Alliance forces were repelling the defenders in both locations, but the defenders were choking off supply routes, and once those were under defender control… well, you can’t fight without food and fuel.

“How are you holding up?” It was her Secret Service guardian angel, Forrest.

“Tired. Depressed.” She looked up at him. “They’re my children. At the end of the day the defenders are my children, and they’ve done unspeakable things. You know?”

Forrest put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. His touch felt good, nourishing. “I don’t think you can think about it like that. The mistake was provoking them, not making them.”

Dominique nodded, wiped a tear from the end of her nose.

“I think we’re all well past our breaking point. Hang on. We’ll get through this.”

“Somehow,” Dominique whispered.

“Somehow.”

July 15, 2045. Provo, Utah.

“Kai? Come on, Kai, you have to get up.”

Kai didn’t want to wake up. Waking meant returning to the pain—the relentless, maddening pain. But someone was tugging on his cheek, pulling him awake, away from his only means of escape. Whoever it was had better have a very good reason.

“Let’s go. You have to get up.”

Kai opened his eyes. The pain was there, waiting for him.

“Come on.” It was Evelyn, the nurse who was playing the part of MD and chief surgeon in the tent that was playing the part of hospital in this nightmare farce. Evelyn put a hand behind his head and lifted, as if she were trying to get him out of bed, which was absurd.

“What are you doing?” he groaned.

“You have to get up. Right now. You have to walk out of here.”

Although there was no morphine running through Kai’s veins, because there was no morphine at this mobile hospital, Evelyn’s face was hazy and swimming as it hung over him. “What are you talking about?”

Evelyn lowered her voice. “There are three defenders outside. They’re going to burn the hospital. If you can walk out under your own power, that means you’re strong enough to work, which means you can live. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Suddenly Kai was wide awake. His wounds were throbbing exquisitely, simply at the thought of standing and walking.

He lifted his head and looked at his wounds more carefully than he’d been willing to before. Most of his right hand was gone. The bandage over his thigh sagged in the middle where there was a hole that resembled a crater. His shoulder was only partly there. There was just no way.

Only, he could see in Evelyn’s eyes that he had no choice.

“I have to keep moving, we don’t have much time. Get up. ” She hurried away.

Gritting his teeth against the grinding pain, Kai slid over to the left side of the cot—on his uninjured side. It wasn’t too bad as he let his left foot slide out from beneath the sheets and drop until it reached the dead grass on the floor.

When he tried to swing his right leg around, blistering pain shot up his thigh, across his side. Gasping, every fiber in him not wanting to do this, he let his right leg drop until it touched the ground, and grimaced as fresh pain shot up the leg.

He took a moment, allowed the worst of the pain to recede, then used his good hand to push himself upright.

He screamed, then realized the defenders might hear him. He bit his lip, staggered to his feet, putting most of his weight on his left leg as tears rolled down his cheeks.

The world grew fuzzy—he was passing out. “No. No.” If he passed out he’d never wake up. He took a few deep, whooshing breaths, trying to clear his head.

“Okay,” he hissed. He took a step on his bad leg, and immediately shifted the weight back to his good leg. He felt blood dribble down his pant leg, off his shoe and into the yellow grass in a series of streams. He didn’t know which wound it was coming from. Maybe all of them. He took another step, stifled a scream that instead turned into a high mewling, then grabbed the end of the next cot to steady himself.

There was a man lying in the cot, his eyes open, watching Kai. A tube trailed from the man’s chest, draining blood. Avoiding eye contact, Kai took two more steps, leaving the man behind.

If anything, it got harder as he went. His limited energy quickly became depleted, and his injured leg dragged. Two defenders were waiting, one on either side of the door as he staggered out of the tent, covered with sweat, trailing blood, gasping from the pain.

The defender on the left said, “You—go back inside.” Kai stared straight ahead and kept walking, not sure if the defender was speaking to him, and not wanting to find out.

“ You ,” the defender barked. Reluctantly, Kai looked up, saw the defender staring down at him. “Go back inside.”

“I’m fine,” Kai stammered. “I can work.”

“With one hand?”

“I can—” Kai tried to think. What could he do with one hand? What would the defenders value?

His pulse slowed as it came to him. He looked the defender square in the eye and said, “I’m a nuclear physicist. I worked at the North Anna Power Station, in Virginia.”

The defender studied him for a long moment, then motioned him to step to one side. “Wait there.”

Kai waited, remaining on his feet through sheer force of will. He’d never even been inside a nuclear power plant. Hopefully the people he was assigned to work with would cover his ass until he figured it out.

July 15, 2045. Colorado Springs, Colorado.

It had taken Dominique less than twenty minutes to stuff her belongings into a rucksack, but when she reached the hangar, the transport plane was already on the tarmac, its engines revving. Trying to tamp down rising panic (and the irrational, childlike voice in her head saying they were leaving her behind on purpose, as punishment), she swung the bag over her back, put her head down, and ran. Surely they wouldn’t leave people behind. Of course, they were leaving everyone behind; all of the soldiers defending the facility, all of the noncrucial facility personnel they couldn’t fit in the transport plane. They were leaving them here to die. The defenders had their underground command complex surrounded. Anyone still inside was going to die.

“Come on, let’s go.” Forrest was standing at the bottom of the stairs, waving her up. She hustled inside, took a seat along the wall. The president, his wife, his brother Anthony the ex-president, and a dozen others were already strapped in, but there were still plenty of empty seats. She wasn’t late; it was a relief to know she hadn’t been holding up the flight.