James Knapp - The Silent Army

She twisted away, and the blade grazed her cheek before it punched through the bag and hit the ground. Blood welled up inside the wound and began to run back into her wet hair as the gun barrel pressed into my rib cage. It fired off its last round, then just clicked as she kept pulling the trigger.

I tried to raise the blade back but I couldn’t. It retracted on its own, and without its support I slipped to one side. I fell into the trash, face-to-face with her. I could smell the alcohol fumes on her breath.

She realized that she’d stopped me and let out a single, explosive laugh. Then the smile faded and her eyelids drooped. The way she flipped between relief and anger was almost mechanical.

“I remember now,” she said. My blood sizzled on the end of the barrel as she pulled the gun away. “Thirty, one hundred, and zero. Respectively.”

She shoved me over on my back as she stood. I didn’t know what she meant.

“In my visions, you like to give percentages,” she explained. “You said we meet three times. You said my chances of winning were thirty, one hundred, and zero. This is our second meeting. You can’t win.”

Her statement implied that she couldn’t either, but that fact seemed lost on her. She reached into her jacket and pulled out a fresh magazine for the gun. She removed the spent one and tossed it away.

“I think this is all your fault,” she said, reloading the gun. “You dragged me into this mess. I lost everything …I lost …”

She put her hands to her eyes, the pistol pressed against her face as she cried. For a second, she looked like a little girl who was lost and on her own. Then, like before, like a switch was thrown, she stopped. She looked down at me, and her face became calm.

I managed to reactivate the stealth cloak just as she aimed the pistol. The air rippled between us, and her face changed as I disappeared from view. She still held out the gun, but looked uncertain. I moved away as she prodded with one toe. When I wasn’t there, she turned in a circle with the gun still pointed out in front of her.

“Were you real?” she asked.

“Hey!” a voice barked from the mouth of the alleyway. I looked and saw a uniformed policeman. Another stood behind him. Both of them had their guns pointed at Zoe.

“Did you see someone else here?” she asked them.

“Drop the gun,” the one in front said. She touched the cut on her cheek, then saw blood come away on her fingertips.

“Someone else is here,” she said.

“I said drop it,” the policeman said.

She looked over at the men and realized then who they were. I watched her eyes turn a shiny, tear-filled black and the men’s guns inched downward.

“You made a mistake,” she said. “You heard a transformer blow or something.”

The policemen both began to nod slowly, despite the fact that they could still see the gun. I managed to push back with my one good leg and roll off onto my side. Still leaking blood, I moved toward the open grate.

“You’re not needed here,” Zoe told the policemen. She’d noticed the black puddle on the pavement. “Go away.”

I gripped the edge of the storm drain and slipped through. I fell down in a torrent of rainwater, then splashed down hard on my back.

Request emergency extraction. My vitals were wavering.

Rain poured through the grate above, the stream splashing over me. I saw the shadow of her head appear there, in that circle of gray light up above me. All she could see was darkness.

“Leave me alone!” she yelled from the opening, and her screech echoed down the concrete tunnel. My vision began to fade.

The swirling cloud of embers, that vast field of stars that were my memories, began to grow cold and dim. Beneath them the void waited, cold and black and without end. I felt myself begin to follow them down, and for the first time since my death, I felt fear.

Her silhouette moved away, before the last of the gray light disappeared.

A blast of ammonia went up my nose and I woke up to a cold floor. My head weighed a ton.

“Easy there,” I heard Buckster say from somewhere in front of me. I cracked one eye open and saw him toss a smelling salt capsule to one side.

“Why did you bring her here?” someone asked.

“She’s okay,” the old man said.

“We don’t need a repeat of the Takanawa incident. Fuel is limited, and we’ve already had to alter our course once.”

“She’s not bugged, goddamn it. I checked.”

“What the fuck?” I was out of it, but I counted four of them. I put one palm on the floor and used the JZI to set off a stim. It hit me, but not as hard as it should have.

“You okay?”

I went for him, and I would have had him, but I was still fuzzy. Even with the stim, I was too slow. His pant leg slipped through my hand; then a big mitt grabbed my arm. It squeezed, and I was hauled up on my feet.

“Easy!” Buckster snapped. The hand let up, but not much. There were two jacks in front of me, plus the one in back that had my arm. It spoke, and I felt its cold breath on the back of my neck.

“They know we’re taking them. Takanawa got them too close.”

“She’s not one of them, I told you. Take it easy.”

“Where the fuck am I?” I asked.

“You’re on the KM Senopati Nusantara .”

“The what?”

“A cargo ship. We’re off the UAC coast.” If it was true, then I’d been out a long time.

“Why the fuck am I on a ship?”

“It was that or kill you under the bridge. Besides, in a few hours this is going to be the safest place to be—trust me.”

I tried to call Wachalowski, but there was no link. I kept the channel open.

“He won’t pick up,” Buckster said. “Local communications only; nothing leaves the ship.”

He gave a nod to the revivor behind me, and it shoved me toward a hatch on the far wall.

“Come on,” Buckster said.

“Where?”

“To the brig. Look, this is how it has to be. If you stayed in the city, you’d get killed for sure. You helped me out, so I’m helping you, but I can’t risk you causing any trouble. You’ll cool it in the brig until this is over. Then you’ll be free to go.”

He went through, and I followed. The revivors pulled up the rear. Past the hatch, I saw dried blood on the deck—a lot of it. Balled up near one wall were a bloody shirt and a pair of pants. I kicked a shell case when I went by.

“What the hell are you mixed up in?” I asked him.

“Our country has an infection, Cal,” he said. “It’s not about politics. It’s about freedom. It’s about the freedom to make your choice, whatever that choice is. It’s about the freedom to act according to what you believe in, not what someone else makes you believe. Someone has to stop them.”

“How?”

“With fire.”

“What are you going to do? Blow up the city?” I asked. He didn’t answer. He just kept walking.

“Buckster, what the fuck are you guys going to do?”

“Can you be sure anything, or even everything, you’ve lived hasn’t been a lie?” he asked. “Knowing even the little bit you know, can you say with complete certainty that everything you did while you were over in the grind happened the way you know in your heart that it did?”

I’m going to unstick the elevator now. When I do …

You don’t know me. Tell me you understand.

“Are your actions truly your own?” he asked. “Or are you a tool, a machine, used by someone else, the same way you used those revivors back in the grinder?”

“Answer me. What are you going to do?”

He pushed open a hatch and the jacks behind me pushed me through after him. I stumbled through a bunch of junk and shell casings that were scattered across the floor. A big table had been knocked over and used as cover, but it looked like the bullets had gone straight through. Blood spatter had dried on the walls and floor, but the bodies were gone.