Chapter 0
They had a chess board
resting crookedly across a dining hall table, in amongst the saplings
and the tall grass, though only a handful of the pieces on it had
come from that game.
That wasn’t a problem, for chess wasn’t
their game. No, theirs was much more difficult. It was quick and
complex, so complex that an observer, perhaps one in that peculiar
state of shock, where one notices such things when they should be
running for their life, would think it to be purely random. But it
wasn’t. Too complex for a human player, perhaps, but then, that
wasn't a problem.
They were an odd pair, the men sitting
at the table, thriving on the complexity. The first sat backwards on
an aluminum chair from the cafeteria, with his arms draped across the
back. He wore a threadbare suit, though the pinstripes on the pants
didn’t match the ones on the jacket, and the bulk of armor beneath
it fit better with his weathered combat boots. He smiled as he lifted
a salt shaker and toppled a pile of milscrip chits.
The other man
wore a uniform, or rather, parts of three different ones, from both
sides of the war, all scavenged from the mud, though they were clean
now. He sat atop the chest of a shredded armor frame lying
half-buried and gathering moss on the floor of the small clearing. He
collected the chits, redistributed them, and moved a plastic toy
soldier back a space.
There was a slight sound in the brush,
a specific sound, and they both smiled. Another of their games had
just resumed.
“Right on time.” said the man in
the suit.
The man who slunk silently out of the
brush looked half dead. He was clearly exhausted and didn't see them
for a minute, for the pair was sitting in the shadows, and the
clearing was bright with the afternoon light.
He didn’t look like them.
Physically, – and that was certainly part of it – he was
scraggly, lean to the point of starvation, garbed in ragged and
patched clothing which hid the armor that helped to hide him. But it
was more than that. There was something in the way he moved,
something in his eyes that made him look haunted, almost feral. As he
walked, he leaned tiredly on the crude spear he carried; a rough
wooden staff with a steak knife blade, painted black to hide the
reflection.
Then he saw them.
A split second of shock ran across his
face, as he fumblingly pulled an old knit watch cap over his head and
seemed to... fade from what they called their vision. Then
resignation surfaced in his expression, as he got a better look at
them... at their game. His shoulders slumped and he rolled his head
in a wordless, almost theatrical expression of 'Oh not this again...'
Then he ran. As fast as he could, all
hurts and thoughts of rest forgotten.
The man in the uniform
smiled. “Not much for conversation, that one.”
“Too true. Not like some of them.”
He watched the swaying brush where the man had bolted, for a moment.
“They all cope with going insane differently, I suppose.”
They'd give him a few
minutes head start, before they resumed the chase. This one was
difficult, a thorn in the Movement's side for a long time, but the
challenge was what made it interesting. They always caught them, in
the end, and they'd learned to savor the excitement. There were
precious few left to chase these days.
Chapter 1 Part 1: A
Night in the Ruins
Garret stepped carefully in
the darkness, glass crunching softly beneath his duct-taped boots. It
was always dark in here, the remains of the barricades at the
windows, and the sapling forest outside saw to that, but the sun had
just sunk below the treetops, and the perpetual gloom inside the
building had deepened until he could barely see the uneven ground
beneath his feet.
He never spoke aloud, but
he cursed his luck, his mistakes, and the coming darkness just the
same. His life was hard enough while the others pretended they were
normal; if they found him now, after the sun had set and they'd
dropped the act...
He'd seen what they did to
'deserters.' The fear of those corrections colored his entire life,
such as it was here.
It had been three years
since he awoke to this hell, and he was as canny a survivor of it as
there had ever been – the only one left, so far as he knew, and if
there was one thing he'd learned, it was to stay hidden at night.
He scanned the hall. It
wasn't far now. He could still make it if he hurried.
Here and there, the last
few rays of orange light reached through the leaves and boards and
into the dusty blackness to flicker against the rubble, thinly
illuminating the classrooms and hallways to either side of him. He
checked each room as he passed, peering into them from the deeper
gloom of the main hallway, eyes scanning warily, but never long
enough for his night-vision to fade in the faint light.
He was alone, though he'd
lost time to the backtracking and false trails he'd had to leave
after they found him.
The floor of the hall was
covered in uneven heaps of loose concrete and sheetrock, broken
furniture, and the ever-prevalent shards of glass, but he traversed
it with a practiced, careful stride, bearing his heavy backpack,
equipment, armor, and spear almost silently in the growing dark.
He cut a strange figure, he
knew, but years of living alone in this place had a way of aligning
one's priorities, and every habit he'd formed, every trick he'd
learned, and every piece of equipment he carried had been earned and
proven through painful experience.
He just hoped he wouldn't
need them to survive tonight.
When the light fell across
him, it caught a tall and lanky form, thin to the point of
emaciation, wreathed with a simple camouflage of leafy sapling
branches and festooned with weapons, armor, and cables. His ragged
sweatshirt and jeans, both stained an almost colorless brown with mud
and soot, covered the crude armor he'd made from overlapping strips
and sheets of what looked like thick, stiff felt cloth, colored in a
blue and white camouflage pattern, but which was actually much, much
stronger. The knuckles of his mismatched work gloves were armored
with sheet-metal plates and the tops of his crumbling, tape-mended
hiking boots were reinforced from the inside, the metal poking up
through cracks in the rough leather.
What was visible of his
face in the darkness, framed by the long greasy strands of his black
hair and beard, was marred by vertical claw marks and cold,
calculating eyes. And in his hands he held the five-and-a-half-foot
spear he had carried every day of what had become his new life.
Sometimes, if he moved just
right, the dying light glimmered across one of the old-fashioned
solar plates strapped to his backpack, nested in the tangle of wires
he'd used to connect them to the batteries, and the radio he'd taken
from an abandoned CDF truck. He hadn't heard voices over it for
years, but early on, on one of his good days, when he could call upon
some of his older skills, he'd managed to tie it into an early
warning system crafted from dead parts scavenged in the ruins. It had
saved his life enough times to justify the work he had to do to keep
the various parts charged, though the extra risks which came with
doing so sometimes made him wonder.
Something Garret couldn't
quite name caught his attention then, breaking him from his thoughts.
He looked down expectantly, nodded to himself in a self-satisfied
sort of way, and stepped a little further than usual, lifting his
feet a little higher off the ground. There were tripwires stretched
through the ruins in many places, hidden amongst the crushed, loose
cement and the broken furniture, and he looked thoughtfully at the
length of knotted string and strands of wire for a brief moment,
before moving on.
His ability to spot their
traps was getting better. He decided. That was a bad sign. There was
no denying that he was good at it, years of constantly watching for
tripwires, pungi sticks, pitfalls, and all manner of other traps had
sharpened his instincts and taught him to recognize the signs, but
something, ever so subtly, had changed. His understanding of where
the traps would be was slowly moving past what could be accomplished
with a careful eye and good instincts. He knew where the
others would set them, or at least he was starting to. And that
worried him.
There was something inhuman
in the others' thought processes, a strange sort of logic which
swerved and melted around the unchanged survivors' attempts to
catalog and anchor and predict it. But there were times, when his bad
days began, when he got close to understanding them.
Garret froze suddenly, eyes
alert as he sank into the deeper shadows of the rubble, settling
until he looked like a part of it, every sense straining to find the
source of a sound so faint it had brushed the outer range of his
hearing. The campus was full of distant sounds, but something about
this one worried him.
A cold fear swept through
him as he waited, sweat prickling his skin despite the chill,
late-summer air. He watched the doorways around him, listening in the
stillness over the pounding of his pulse in his ears, searching for
even a single clue that they had found him.
Praying all the while that
they hadn't.
God damn, he was tired.
The regular patrols were
bad enough, and he could deal with the erratic, sometimes friendly,
sometimes violently hostile behavior the rank and file displayed, but
this... he hated this.
They'd sent specialists
after him before, whenever he made enough of a nuisance of himself,
whenever supplies got scarce or the area became crowded, and he'd
always dealt with them, but these two were different.
For someone who survived by
always staying two steps ahead, by always having a trick or a plan,
or a place to hide, they were terrifying.
A minute crept by.
Getting paranoid. He
thought with a faint, bitter smirk. They didn't bother sneaking
around; they'd wait for him to come to them.
He leaned on his spear and
pushed himself to his feet, tired muscles and a long-gone injury
making the movements difficult, and for a moment, he looked much
older than he was.
He heard the noise a few
more times as he walked, mixed in with the blanket of sounds that
came with the new growth forest outside, and its many, varied
inhabitants. It was coming from up ahead, further into the building,
and he approached it carefully. Part of him wanted to simply leave it
be, but he didn't have any other safehouses nearby, and going outside
so late was dangerous. The patrols wouldn't come inside his buildings
until they had the numbers to overwhelm any Federal ambush, and they
had to wait for more of their brethren to snap out of their dormancy
before they'd be any use, but there was no doubt they'd be active out
there this late in the day.
He could see the old double
doors now, where this wing of the building met the main structure.
The portals hung open, one crookedly, where the bottom hinges had
been snapped. The remains of the barricades were still screwed and
welded to the metal panels. He eased past the closest one and stepped
into the deeper gloom of the last stretch of the hall between the
doors and the corner. As he crept forward, he found himself checking
the long, dark hallway behind him, silently reassuring himself that
any remaining threats lay ahead of him, not behind.
The noise was louder now.
Recognizable. Faint, distant music, still barely audible.
Garret pressed himself up
against the smooth concrete-block wall. The other hall came into view
a little at a time as he peered around the corner, his eyes scanning
the broken doors, the concrete, and the rubble, before reaching the
open space of the foyer, where the afternoon light glitzed through
the shattered glass of the second-floor skylights. His eyes worked
their way down. There, in the shadows where the sun had already set,
he saw it.
He examined it carefully and glowered.
It had line of sight on the door to his safehouse.
It wasn't on patrol – it wasn't even
armed, as far as he could see – in fact, it appeared to be painting
something on the wall with a roller and brush. Old-war propaganda,
probably. One of the six or so images their inflexible, per-arranged
minds brokenly repeated. Chances were, he could walk right past it
and it wouldn't pay him any mind.
But it would see where he went. And it
would remember.
Night wasn't far. They wouldn't be
dormant much longer.
Garret avoided combat where he could.
He'd learned long ago that real fights were brutal, uncoordinated,
and won by the combatant who cared more about hurting their opponent
than their own preservation. The starved, alone survivor, whose
entire purpose had slowly been stripped down to living through the
next week, or hour, or minute, didn't fit into that. Not against the
others' training, their vicious speed and strength, and their
numbers.
But where other people had been
killed, or taken, he'd gotten smart. When hiding and running weren't
enough, he'd killed, he'd experimented, and he'd learned how to fight
back. After three years, he wasn't without tricks, or his own wells
of strength. And to those who wandered into his territory alone and
unarmed, he was exactly the kind of threat they'd hunted him like
long ago.
Garret leaned back around the corner;
said a prayer he didn't believe was heard.
There was a pouch fastened
to the right hip strap of his backpack, full of little things that he
used to survive, nasty little tricks and traps he'd made and tested
over the years. Most of them were situational at best, but several of
them had potential here, could even mean the difference between
success and death, but as he took inventory of them, he noticed a
rough chunk of cement laying on the tiled floor not far from his
feet, blown or kicked there from one of holes knocked through the
wall further back.
And he smiled. Sometimes
the old tricks worked best.
He picked it up with one
hand and set it quietly down between himself and the corner of the
hallway, watching the other carefully as he did so.
***
The other was technically
dormant, but that was more of a spectrum than a binary switch. During
the night, he fought with his comrades, ranging out and staging
attacks against the invaders, sabotaging infrastructure, recruiting
from the civilian population. During the day, he played the role of a
citizen under the occupation, he acted as normal as he could while
running on autopilot, a sort of waking sleep.
Business hours had almost
ended, though. He was becoming more alert, watching for
opportunities, targets, threats. Enemies. Just like he was supposed
to. He'd meet with his squad as soon as he finished this painting.
One of thousands he'd made over the years.
He turned when he sensed
something in the distant darkness.
“Well, well. We have a
volunteer.” he said, recognizing the man. Then he charged.
***
Garret scrambled across the
hall as if he'd just spotted the other, leaving just enough time for
his knee to 'give out' so he could clamber back to his feet. He
caught a glimpse of the changed man as he started to run, moving with
a fluid grace and speed which surprised the survivor even after all
this time.
It. he corrected
himself firmly. Some faint analytical part of his mind smirked at old
habits. Dehumanizing the enemy. Not so difficult, in this situation,
perhaps, though he wondered where he'd learned to do that.
He made as if he was going
to run down the hallway, but put his back to the wall as soon as he
was out of view.
Hidden there, he had to
strain to hear its approach, for it's footfalls were terribly soft,
despite the inhuman speed with which it moved.
He tightened his grip on
his spear.
He had scant seconds before it reached
him.
Garret managed to take two calm
breaths before the sounds told him it was time, and he made his move.
With one smooth motion, he kicked the cement block out across the
floor in front of the creature, stepped, pivoted, and swung the spear
staff as hard as he could at what he knew would be its head level.
And it worked. Thank god it
worked.
Despite it's excitement,
the changed man was still transitioning from its dormant state, and,
just for a moment, it turned its head reflexively to follow the
cement block as it skittered across the floor, just as the survivor
leveled the two-inch-thick oak staff at a point some two feet behind
the creature's head, three hard years worth of muscle, fear,
desperation, and no small amount of anger driving the blow.
The crack of wood against
bone resonated through the ruined halls, and the creature bucked up
off the ground as its momentum reversed itself, it's feet kicking up
as it flipped onto its back.
It landed with a dull thud
that likely drove the air from its lungs.
Blood streamed from the
changed man's nose and mouth and left eye, but it wasn't dead, and it
wasn't unconscious. It would only be down for a short moment, and
Garret made the most of that time while he had it.
He stepped closer as it
rolled onto its side and tried to push itself up with one arm. The
survivor kicked it down with the heel of his boot, reversed his
spear, and slashed the thin metal blade through its throat, using his
leverage to saw through everything he could.
It took a substantial
amount of damage to keep them down, but between the bleeding and the
drowning, Garret was pretty sure this would be enough.

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