Will McIntosh - Defenders

“I don’t want to be in charge of a platoon,” Kai protested.

I don’t want to be in charge of ten thousand humans. We do what we have to, Boy Who Betrayed the World.

Kai would have laughed at that, if he hadn’t lost his stepfather an hour earlier. What a strange, strange world he lived in, that he would be having this conversation.

He passed a bright orange sign, warning that he was trespassing near a defender military installation and would be shot on sight. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he muttered, nodding to two women who were hurriedly setting up a machine gun beside the bough of a big ironwood tree.

The air was saturated with the sound of gunfire. The woods thinned out and gave way to scorched open fields. Thousands of people dotted the landscape, some of them crouching or lying on their stomachs, pointing rifles. Others stood clutching bladed weapons. Many others were already dead—bloodied or blackened, dismembered and disemboweled. Kai counted five Luyten as well, two dead. Power lines supported on big steel towers hung overhead.

A dozen or so people, and one Luyten, were running toward Kai. Your platoon. There’s a lull right now, but the bombers the defenders have managed to get in the air are battering our positions, and in ten minutes a dozen defenders will attack.

“Wonderful,” Kai said.

I positioned you where resistance was lightest, because of Five.

If this was light, he couldn’t imagine what the people defending the roads were facing. “How is Five doing?”

Five is alive. He’s fighting. He says he hopes to break bread with you when this is over.

“Tell him I’d like that.”

He also sends his condolences. Despite their past, he had deep respect for your father.

Kai blinked back tears. “Thanks. We’ve all lost a lot.”

Yes, we have.

Kai turned to greet his platoon. “How many of you have guns? Hold them up.” Three people raised weapons: two pathetic 1911A-1 pistols—standard twentieth-century US Army sidearms—and one M-4 carbine.

The growl of an enormous engine cut through the other battle sounds.

Bomber , a new Luyten voice warned. It took Kai a moment to realize the Luyten speaking to him now was the one who was part of his platoon.

There were no ditches, and the tree line was too far away, so their only defense was to lie flat on their stomachs.

The first bomb landed on the opposite end of the long, rectangular field. Each subsequent explosion shook the ground a little harder until one landed close enough that Kai felt a blast of scorching air on his left side. He clung to the ground, his face pressed into the dry wild grass.

The bomber roared out of sight over the trees. Kai jumped up, scanned the tree line where the defender infantrymen would appear soon. Kai waved his rifle in the air to get his platoon’s attention. “As you can see, I have an awesome weapon. We’re going to fuck up some defenders with it.”

A tank is coming. It will try to provide cover for the infantry trying to break through. They’re desperate to get troops inside. They’ve got parking lots full of idle weapons.

The crack of falling trees preceded the enormous tank, which broke into the field and immediately started firing, its turret swiveling left and right, its report deafening.

Kai led his platoon left, trying to get out of its range.

A dozen defender infantrymen broke from the trees close by. Kai dropped to the ground, bracing his rifle against the edge of a bomb crater. He chose a defender, pointed him out. “That one’s ours. Harass him. Draw him this way. As close to me as you can.”

Easy , his Luyten platoon mate said. They’re engineered to hate me; I’m like a red cape to a bull. The Luyten headed toward the defender.

The faces kept changing, but Kai always had twenty, as new troops poured into the battle faster than the defenders could kill the old ones. There had to be forty or fifty defenders firing from the trees. A dozen charged onto the field, trying to make it to the base.

Kai closed one eye, squeezed off a few rounds. He was almost out of ammunition, then he’d be nothing but a guy with a gimpy leg swinging a shovel or a butcher knife, whatever he could pry out of a corpse’s hand. The people who had to get that close to a defender to hurt it died quickly.

There were bodies everywhere, just everywhere. So many wounded, dragging themselves through the dirt, or just lying there screaming. Kai could no longer hear them; his ears had stopped ringing an hour earlier. The explosions and gunfire now registered as nothing but thumps in his chest and gut; otherwise, the battlefield was blessedly silent. His foot throbbed; the toe of his boot was gone, and, Kai assumed from the pain, some of his toes with it. There was a bloody shrapnel wound in his good side; Kai had no idea how bad it was.

He was glad he hadn’t promised Lila he wouldn’t let himself get killed. Surely some of them would survive this, but not many.

More defenders broke from the trees, rifles blazing. An explosion threw Kai forward; razors of agony tore through his back. He struggled to his hands and knees, wiped dirt out of his mouth. It felt like there was something stuck in his back, near his left shoulder blade.

“Jesus, this is a slaughter!” Kai shouted into the air. “Where’s the help you bastards promised?”

Soon. Hold on. Hold them back.

Kai wasn’t sure he could stand. He found his rifle, dragged it toward him, wedged the butt into a long scar in the ground, thought of Oliver, and looked for a target.

The defender closest to him was cutting people to pieces with his assault rifle, turning and spinning to keep people from coming up behind him. But people just kept coming, even the ones who had nothing but knives.

Look in the woods.

Kai lifted his head, strained to see. Bright colors were moving around in there, and the wall of defenders that had been pummeling them from the edge was now facing the other way, some of them backing into the open field.

A Luyten in full battle gear burst from the trees. Kai let out a full-throated scream of joy. Two more appeared, then a third, swooping down from above the trees in a flight sleeve. It sped right at the defender Kai had been watching, leveled a heater at it. The defender’s head and shoulders blackened; it collapsed to the ground, smoking.

Struggling to his feet, Kai limp-trotted toward the tree line, wanting to help. He made it halfway before he stumbled and fell hard, felt searing pain in his shoulder blade. He pressed the ground, got back on his feet. Thousands of people were storming the tree line, burying the defenders under a crush, hacking them with knives, machetes, axes. Kai desperately wanted to join them, but he fell again.

He stayed on the ground this time, content to watch the others cut every last defender down.

January 29, 2048. Washington, D.C.

Lila dropped the shovel on top of the pathetic pile of dirt she’d managed to accumulate. She looked at her palms. There were blisters on the pads below each finger, plus the jagged cut in her left palm she’d gotten trying to move debris to get to Oliver. Surveying the eight-inch-deep rectangle she’d managed to carve out, Lila sighed, gave the handle of the shovel a kick. How could anyone dig a hole six feet deep?

Tongue jutting from the side of his mouth, Errol retrieved the shovel and gamely tried to pick up where Lila had left off. The shovel looked enormous in his little hands. Lila knew she should take Errol inside where they were relatively safe, but Erik was still in there.