J Bryan - Dominion

Lucia leaned up over the tailgate and flung the bomb. It cracked into the lead pursuer’s windshield, then she pressed the remote and dropped to the truck bed, covering her head with her arms.

Red light filled the rearview mirror. Ruppert had no choice but to slow even more as he approached the gate. Fire engulfed the truck behind them. Fortunately, the driver had managed to hit the brakes and slow the truck, or it would have slammed directly into Ruppert’s tailgate, and into Lucia.

Then the truck immediately behind that one crashed into it, which boosted the flaming truck forward. Ruppert waited, idling, at the western gate, and could only watch it approach, like a burning barge on a swift current.

Lucia scrambled toward the open window. Already, another Goblin Valley truck was nosing its way around the side of the bombed truck, its driver struggling to avoid the burning pyre on one side of him and the solid concrete wall on the other. The truck crept forward.

A guard leaned out the passenger side door and raised something long and black in his hands.

“Get the fuck down!” Lucia screamed as she slithered in through the window. She smacked Ruppert’s face sideways into the seat, then rolled on top of him. Ruppert reached for Nando, but the boy was gone-he’d already tucked himself down on the floorboard, knees drawn to his chin. His face was eerily placid. A sane boy would have been screaming right now. Ruppert felt like screaming himself.

The machine gun sounded like a thousand corks popping from a thousand bottles of champagne. The guard strafed the truck, obliterating the front and rear windshields, the headrests, chunks of the steering wheel and upper dashboard, the side view mirrors. Lucia tumbled down to the floorboard to protect Nando with her body.

The stutter of bullets ceased, and Ruppert dared to poke his head up and look over the dashboard, through the remnants of the windshield. Miraculously, the western gate was rolling aside. Already it stood half-open, nearly wide enough for the truck.

He turned his head and looked out the rear at the next Goblin Valley truck, the one that had shot at them. It had forced its way past the burning truck and now accelerated towards him.

“We’re going.” Ruppert still spoke in a whisper, despite the sirens screaming behind them and the loudspeakers chanted Arabic battle prayer. “Get ready with number six.”

Lucia pulled herself up to a kneeling position on the floorboard and grabbed the final bomb.

Ruppert swung his feet down to the pedals, so that he was halfway between sitting up and lying on his side. He stomped the accelerator and swerved the truck to drive it through the opened portion of the gate. Twin metallic squeals sounded along the sides of the truck as the side mirrors sheared away. The truck scraped between the gate on one side and the concrete wall on the other.

Then they pulled loose and they were free, charging towards the menagerie of stone goblins filling the valley. Ruppert squinted against the wind pressing in on him through the open windshield area.

“Now!” Ruppert yelled, but Lucia was already pitching number 6 out through the demolished rear window. It struck the ground just outside the open gate, a few yards ahead of the caravan of trucks.

Lucia clicked the remote, and a fireball engulfed the gate area, which was still close enough behind that a wave of heat ruffled through Ruppert’s hair. She hurled the remote itself, entirely stripped and useless now, out the window, and it shattered against a passing boulder.

With all his mirrors shot away, and a field of giant boulders ahead, Ruppert couldn’t waste time looking back to see whether the bomb had destroyed the next truck, or in some other way blocked the gate. They would know soon enough.

He pushed himself upright and rammed the gas pedal to the floor, and soon he was dodging the maze of elevated boulders on their narrow sandstone stalks. The fire and smoke at Goblin Valley School retreated behind them. Ruppert let himself breathe again, and glanced down at Nando, who’d remained silent through the entire ordeal.

The boy glared up at him, his mouth fixed in a thin, straight line, his dark eyes blazing. Was the kid going to cause trouble now?

“Incoming!” Lucia cried. She grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it to the right. A screaming, whistling sound punctured the air next to Ruppert’s ear. He saw the artillery rocket slam into a cluster of the big goblin boulders ahead, enveloping them in flame, kicking up wide jets of sand. The dirt track they were traveling led directly into the flames and the swelling black cloud of smoke.

Two large boulders, the first one the size of a beach ball, the next one much larger, hurtled out of the smoke, rolling towards them.

Ruppert slewed off the road into sand, and found himself dodging rock formations that seemed leap towards him wherever he turned. Some of them towered above the truck.

More artillery pounded the unbalanced spires of rock around them, and a rain of shattered stone hammered the roof of the cab, denting it in more than a dozen places. Ruppert threaded among the goblins as best he could, losing most of his speed to the difficult maneuvering and the jagged, rocky ground. A few times he even caught a tire against a boulder and had to reverse and change course.

The rockets screamed down at them, toppling more of the rocks, which not only pummeled the truck but also blocked off many of their potential escape routes. Ruppert noticed they all seemed to land very close to the truck. The guards, or perhaps students, weren’t shelling the valley at random, but knew exactly where to find Ruppert and Lucia.

“GPS!” Ruppert shouted at Lucia. She was reaching down and trying to take Nando’s hands, but the boy wanted nothing to do with her. Nando ignored his mother, but he was glowering at Ruppert.

Lucia kicked at the underside of the console, then grabbed underneath it, gritted her teeth and pulled. She ripped free a plastic module the size of a poker chip and flung it out the passenger window.

Ruppert continued to push ahead, and within a minute they were out of range of the falling shells. He looked behind him, but saw only solid black. Smoke and clouds of sand occluded the valley.

He found his way back to the dirt road, and at last he could really make some time.

“Sir?” Nando asked. He was still lying curled on the floor, staring up at Ruppert.

“What is it?” Ruppert asked. “Are you hurt?”

“You’re not really a staff sergeant, are you, sir?” the boy asked.

“Nando,” Lucia said, and the boy cast her a sharp look. “Don’t you know who I am?”

Nando stared at her for a long moment. “Are you in the movies?”

“Nando, I’m you mother.”

The boy’s brow furrowed. “Is this…an interrogation exercise?”

“Please, Nando.” Lucia’s eyes glistened. “Try to remember.”

They climbed up out of the smoke-filled valley, heading northwest. Then, at last, the fires among the ordinance sheds must have touched something serious, because a narrow geyser of flame ejected straight up and out of the smoldering school compound, reminding Ruppert of the pillar of flame in the movie Exodus. He thought of the boys he’d left standing at attention, and hoped they’d had the sense to scatter and lay low when the fighting started.

Nando climbed up to look out the passenger window, and Lucia moved aside to let him sit.

“My parents died in the wars,” Nando said. He stared at the pillar of fire. “Like all the kids at school. My dad in Nigeria, my mom in the Philippines. Commandant Redding told me. He showed me pictures.”

“It isn’t true, Nando.” Lucia reached for his hand, but again he jerked away.

“Why do you keep calling me that?”