James Decker - Fallout

“Sam, go.”

Alexei, I don’t want you to go, please don’t do this, please.

“Sam…”

Think of what this will do to Dragan, I tried. He’ll be devastated.

“Go!”

“No,” I said. I won’t leave you. I won’t let you do this, Think about what you’re doing. Think about me, and Dragan, and—

How many of my people do you think Dragan has killed? he asked.

I saw then that whatever it was that had twisted inside of Alexei, it ran far deeper than I ever knew. He’d seemed like a normal kid, all things considered, but now I wondered if I even knew what normal was. While he’d gone to school, and talked about his day, watched cartoons, and even played and joked with me, something that had taken seed inside him had continued to grow without my ever seeing it. Real fear began to take hold as the realization set in that whatever was wrong with him had taken years to get him to this point, and I wouldn’t undo it in a matter of minutes, or seconds.

“We die over there,” Alexei said. “We die all the time, you know? I got no one left.”

“You have me.”

He shook his head, and one of the tears rolled down his cheek.

It’s not enough.

“Please.”

I don’t want to be here. I have no one left at home, nothing left.

“This is your home.”

He just shook his head and sighed, like a little old man. “I don’t want to be here.”

“Please,” I tried again. It was all I could think to do, just plead. Tears ran freely down my cheeks, making my voice crack as I held my hands out to him, and took another step. “Please, I know Dao-Ming wanted you to—”

I wanted to, he said. I need to do this.

He turned back toward Gohan, and raised the detonator up over his head.

Vamp grabbed me from behind, trying to pull me away, to shield me maybe, but I wrestled free. Alexei held the detonator in one trembling hand, gathering the nerve to trigger it, and I knew that my time had run out.

I raised my pistol to Gohan’s head, and pulled the trigger.

The sound of the gunshot startled Alexei, disorienting him as the bullet made a ragged hole in Gohan’s cheek just under his lazy eye. An explosive spray of blood painted the wall behind him, and he stumbled back. His legs dropped out from under him, and he collapsed on the floor in a heap, a dark pool expanding around his head.

Alexei just stared, the detonator still in his hand. He looked like he didn’t know what to do. He’d been ready to die, and now he didn’t know what to do.

He moved his thumb back to the detonator, but before he could do anything else I rushed to him. I knelt, spinning him around, and hugged him to me. I squeezed, feeling the brick sandwiched between us, and buried my face against his neck.

“You have to let go,” he said.

“No.”

He put his arms around my neck, and I felt the detonator, still in his hand, against the back of my neck.

“Let go,” he said.

“No.”

I could hear Vamp calling to me, telling me to get away from Alexei, to leave him. I just held him, terrified. Terrified he’d trigger the detonator anyway, but equally terrified to let go. Over Alexei’s shoulder I saw Ava, still standing there. She watched us, curious, and I felt a twinge through the cluster… I couldn’t quite place what it meant. Sadness, maybe? Then the air warped around her, and she vanished with the explosive bang of air rushing in to fill empty space.

Alexei jumped at the sound, but a moment later I felt him sag, just a little, in my arms. I reached back behind my head. I put my hand around his, around the detonator, and when I took it gently from his hand, he let me.

Only then did I let him go. I rocked back on my heels, and he didn’t resist as I removed the bomb harness from him. I opened my Escher tablet, and fed it through. The gate remote had been returned by either Dao-Ming or Shuang, and I took it, slipping it into my pocket. I closed the field and kissed Alexei on one cheek.

“It’s okay,” I told him. He looked down to Gohan’s body, and I steered his gaze away. “It’s okay. He’s gone.”

“He’s gone,” Alexei said.

“Yeah.”

“You shot him.”

I looked back at the body, and already Gohan’s face had drained of color except for the bright red speckles where he’d landed. One eye stared down into the pool of blood that just seemed to keep getting bigger. I swallowed, and looked away.

“Come on,” I told him. “Let’s go find Dragan.”

“…an attempt to destroy Rapture. Security teams report to the Rapture containment facility immediately….”

“Sam,” Vamp said in my ear. “We have to go.”

Alexei still looked a little shell-shocked, but when I took his hand and led him away, he followed.

“I repeat: Gohan Sòng is presumed to have been injured or killed during an attempt…”

“This place is being monitored,” Nix said. “They’re coming.”

I stepped past Gohan’s body, my legs weak and the room feeling like it had begun to spin around me. Some of the little planets revolving around the spire had begun to wobble. When I looked up at the towering machine, I saw that the ones near the peak had begun to move faster. The vibrations in the air had become more intense.

Groups of heavy footsteps echoed through the halls nearby, and I heard shouting as the guards began to close in. I let Nix lead me to the elevator, and I got in with them. When the doors closed, Vamp pushed the button for the ninetieth floor. As the car started up, and we began to pass the floors, I could hear shouting as news of what had happened spread.

Some were full of rage, some disbelief, while still others wailed in anguish. I rode the elevator, Alexei next to me, and tuned it all out until the car stopped and the doors opened.

The lobby led out onto a wide corridor where signs pointed to the aircar port. A big archway led into the terminal, where chairs and sofas had been arranged for people who were waiting to meet with arrivals. Most of the seats were unoccupied at the moment, but handfuls of men and women in white robes sat, some holding hands and some praying, with their eyes glued to the LCD screens. A Xinzhongzi security officer spoke, while displaying footage of the unconscious guard in the lobby as well as the moments leading up to the bombing, taken from cameras inside the room that housed Rapture.

“…if you see any of these people, stop them immediately and call security to…”

My face appeared on the screen, then Vamp’s, Alexei’s, and finally Nix’s. None of the people in the room even looked our way, though. They were too engrossed in the report to even notice as we headed straight toward the huge sliding glass doors at the terminal’s far end.

The doors glided open, and a gust of wind blew over me as we stepped out onto the aircar port. Rows of matching, shiny white vehicles were parked there, stretching out toward the far edge, which accessed the skylanes. There, the port looked out into the open air above Hangfei, which sprawled into the distance. The civilian gonzos might not have been expecting us, but their security goons were. Several armed men in suits had taken up positions ahead, blocking any access to the skyway. The second they spotted us, they raised their weapons.

They never even tried to give a warning. Bullets thudded into the glass behind us as they began firing, and screams of surprise came from inside the terminal. One of the bullets grazed my cheek, tracing a hot line back toward my ear as I grabbed Alexei and pulled him down behind one of the vehicles with me. Vamp hit the deck right beside us as bullets thumped into the opposite side of the car, and the windows shattered, raining bits of safety glass down over us.