Steven Santos - The Culling

RATATATATATAT!

More bullets zip past our heads.

Close.

“I’ll put you down just as soon as we’re out of firing range.” He turns to me. “C’mon!” He tramps down the remainder of the hill after Ophelia, carrying Cypress in his arms as if she were light as a baby.

My eyes search the dark. I stop dead in my tracks. “ Wait ! Where’s Gideon?”

Digory freezes and turns. His eyes dart from me to the blazing turret.

Ophelia shakes her head. “There’s no time- leave him .” She starts to run, but another blazing turret springs from the ground and fires. She dives onto her stomach and holds still.

“Look! There he is!” Cypress points behind me.

I whirl.

Gideon’s sitting down in the grass a few feet up the hill from us. He’s completely immobile, eyes opened wide as if he’s in some kind of meditative state. He’s sitting in the shadow of another turret, right underneath its swerving barrel.

“Gideon?” I take a few steps toward him. The weapon roars to life, flinging death at me in fiery flashes.

I dive to my right, slamming into the ground on my injured leg.

“Lucian!” Digory yells. Still carrying Cypress, he runs a few steps toward me. Yet another turret springs to the surface and fires at them.

Digory drops to the ground and Cypress rolls away from him, still clutching her bloodied hand. When she attempts to get up, another gun breaks through the ground and swivels her way.

A blast of pain rips through me, and for the longest second in my life, I think I’ve been hit again.

But it’s only the old wound in my leg, squishing open to douse my bandages with the warmth of fresh blood. I roll onto my stomach to take the pressure off.

Dead ahead, the barrel of the second turret faces me, a dark, gaping snake just waiting to spit its lethal poison through me.

And still Gideon sits there, beneath it, staring right past me, past the field, as if he’s relaxing under the shade of a tree on a hot summer day.

WHIRRR …

I lift my head and risk a glance behind me. The first turret veers until it’s pointing at my back.

They’re motion activated, I realize. Its sensors must be tracking our every movement. That’s why Gideon hasn’t been fired at yet.

And now we’re all trapped right along with him, each at the mercy of one of the turrets, unable to move forward or backward without getting ripped apart.

The hum in the air is louder now. From the circle of sky above, five lights zoom toward us like angry wasps in a perfect V formation.

Squawkers.

It’s a no-win situation. If we stay still, the turrets won’t get us. But we’ll be easy targets for these aircraft to take out.

Unless …

I raise my cheek off the ground as far as I dare without entering into the turret’s sensor range. “Everybody listen! These guns are motion activated. As long as we stay close to the ground and don’t move too fast, they won’t fire on us!”

“Great!” Cypress shouts back. She repositions her hand and winces. “You know how long it’s going to take to crawl our way down like that?” Her voice barely carries above the approaching craft.

Digory sighs. “We’ve got bigger problems. Those birds are heading our way. They’re almost on top of us. We’ll never make it in time.”

The Squawkers blaze a path in the sky like shooting stars.

Shooting stars. I glance from one turret to the next, calculating the distances, approximating the angles of the barrels, tracing a mental line from one to another just like I did with the star patterns I showed Digory on top of the Observation Tower.

Picking up a handful of pebbles, I toss them at random turrets.

One … two …

Ratatatatatatatatatatatatat!

“What are you doing ?” Ophelia shrieks. “You’ll kill us all!”

It might just work …

My heart pounds against the grass beneath me. “We can do this if we work together . That’s the key, how this Trial was designed.”

The wind picks up, rippling through the grass as the Squawkers roar into the simulated valley.

“Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast!” Digory shouts.

I clutch fistfuls of damp grass and raise my upper torso. “I’ve been timing the blasts. It takes just under three seconds for the gun sensors to track their marks and fire. When I give the signal, Gideon and I will run toward each other’s turret, while you guys run toward the turrets ahead of each of you-Digory over to Cypress’s, Cypress over to Ophelia’s, Ophelia to the final turret by the wall.”

“Let’s just make it easier for them to kill us, why don’t we?” Ophelia cries.

“We’ll be safe as long as we drop to the ground no later than two seconds in!” I shout back. “The guns will react to our movement and take each other out before they can redirect their course. Then we’ll be clear.”

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The ground rocks with the force of the Squawker’s blasts, which rip out chunks of landscape in bright red fireballs. The air’s filled with acrid smoke that clogs my lungs. Burning tears streak down my cheeks.

Digory’s eyes meet mine. “I’d rather go down trying than just wait here to die.”

“I’m in, too.” Cypress chimes in.

Ophelia’s eyes are glued to the sight of the Squawkers as they bank back toward us. “Let’s do it then,” she groans.

I turn to face Gideon. His eyes remain blank, unfocused. He’s the last cog in this carefully constructed machine. If I can’t get through to him …

“Gideon.” I lower my voice. “ Please . We need you.”

He blinks, removes his glasses, wipes them with his shirt, then pushes them back on his nose.

“I’m ready,” he says.

Thank you , I mouth.

I turn to the others, four sets of desperate eyes, trusting me with their lives. “When I give the signal, we move . Remember-drop at two seconds, not a moment later.”

The growl of the Squawker engines rips through the sky toward us.

My heart’s thundering. My breaths come in quick, shallow bursts.

“Run!” I sprint, heading right for the dark eye of my gun turret, a black hole of unblinking death.

Everything’s a slow-motion blur. I bolt toward Gideon and his turret, ignoring the searing pain in my leg, the piercing shriek of the Squawkers overhead-nothing matters except the cold gleam on the barrel of the gun, blinding me. For a split second I can taste its metal, but it’s only the blood of my lower lip as my teeth sink through.

One second …

CLICK!

The sounds of the guns locking onto our movements are like gigantic tumblers shifting into place, crushing my brain …

Gideon’s a blur almost parallel to me …

Two seconds …

“DIVE!” I shriek at the top of my lungs, half expecting the blast of the gun to rip me apart before the word’s last echo fades into nothingness. I drop, slamming against the hard earth. The breath I’ve been holding bursts free. The flesh on my palms and cheek burns as my momentum slams me into the base of the gun placement …

BAM! BAM! BAM!

I shove my palms against the sides of my head, barely able to suppress the blasts ripping through my eardrums. Then the turret above me bursts apart in a flaming ball, singeing my hair and spraying the air with a geyser of smoldering shrapnel. I clamp an elbow over my eyes to shield them from the onslaught digging into my uniform and roll away from the impact.

My eyes risk a peek over my arm.

One by one, the gun turrets topple over in a haze of smoking, twisted metal until they’re all nothing but silent, steaming heaps, casting wispy trails up the hill.