Fausto smiled in return. “I look forward to meeting Maggie when this is all done. We’ll be ok, kid.”
Just as he said it, the digital obstacle disappeared, triggering an alarm. Warbling sirens polluted the air with their cries of calamity; Verlander growled the men forward and their forces sprang into action.
Bryan felt a cry bubble from his lungs, and then he was sprinting toward the camp, bullets snapping from the muzzle of his rifle. The powerful spray went wild at first, but he soon controlled it, feeling a sick elation as he watched his ammunition plow into a group of men sitting around a fire.
The bulls shrieked in surprise. Their cries surprised him and made him feel sick—they were the high and perfectly startled cries of ambushed men.
As the bulls returned fire, he became aware of his comrades falling away. All around him they fell, torn asunder by violence. Bullets whipped past him like buzzing hornets. Fausto took a round in the shoulder and fell to the ground with a sharp cry.
Bryan stopped to help, just as a round caught him in the thigh, passing through his leg and punching out the other side of his blue jeans. He shrieked in pain and disbelief, and then there were hands on them both, half- dragging and half-shoving them toward a little dip in the turf. They fell into the hole as a fresh wave of gunfire perforated the air above them.
“Fausto!” Bryan shouted. “Fausto!”
“I’m here! Aw… shit! I’m ok, I’m ok!”
The man who had rescued them, one of the bulls who had chosen to stand with them, angled up and snapped off a volley of gunfire. He put his back to the ground as bullets chewed the terrain above them. “Three doors on the east side of the brewery,” he panted. “We go in at the corner. There’s more cover there. Can you two keep going?”
Bryan clutched at his leg. The wound seeped blood—thankfully, it wasn’t arterial. There was a groove in his flesh. He pressed down on it, agony flaring through him. “I think so.”
“I’m good,” Fausto said.
“Ok, then stay low. We crawl. Follow my lead.”
They did, and they moved like a trio of phantoms across the scarred ground. Bryan tasted dirt; he felt stones and sticks and grime grinding into his belly. Fausto’s boot inadvertently slapped his cheek more than once as they struggled toward their goal.
All around them, the battle was losing steam. Bryan thought the surprise of their attack had led to an advantage, but he knew soldiers were converging on them from other parts of the brewery.
The bull, their hero, looked back at them. “I’m going to blow the door. You’ll have to fight your way in. His name is General Creen and he’s in the basement.”
Fausto nodded, his face deathly pale. He’d lost a lot of blood.
“Listen to me. Please. My name was Ryan Butler. The Authority took me when I was eight years old.
With that he peeled the adhesive strip from the face of the grip charge he’d been holding and threw it toward the fortified door of the brewery. The charge buzzed through the air, drawing shouts of surprise from the guards stationed there. They dove for cover but it was too late; the explosion obliterated concrete and flesh alike, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the facility.
Butler was on his feet before the charge had found its mark. He ducked the burst of debris and, when the smoke had cleared, filled the space with gunfire. Stunned bulls returned fire, cutting the man down, but his bravery had better than evened the odds for Ruiz and Norton, who easily cleaned up the few remaining bulls.
Norton was unnerved by the stillness inside the brewery. The three of them had killed at least ten bulls— maybe more. He scanned to his right as Verlander guided a group of about twenty remaining soldiers through the campground. Verlander fired single shots from his sidearm into injured bulls along the way.
“Unbelievable!” he said, joining them in the brewery. “I knew you two were something special. Let’s move, men! The basement!”
Enormous vats stood rusting on the warehouse floor. The Authority occupied offices against the far wall but, if anyone remained inside of those rooms, Norton couldn’t see them.
The remaining fighters formed a loose phalanx, Stump and Verlander and Ruiz and Norton in the center. They crept toward the offices. Verlander stopped them; he motioned silently for his company to make their weapons ready.
Then, as if cued from some producer backstage, armor-clad bulls funneled into the distillery, fanning out behind the vats. Fresh rounds of automatic gunfire erupted in the confined space and Norton understood, in that moment of perfect fury, what the end of the world would sound like.
Norton gulped air as the firefight raged all around them, but they were outnumbered and outgunned.
When the smoke cleared, the room fell silent. “Alain Verlander!” called one of the bulls. “The general requests a conference. We guarantee your safety.”
“Don’t do it, V,” Stump warned. “Shit in staggering amounts is what these ones are full of.” Bryan thought he could detect the lilt of an accent—Irish, maybe?
“General Creen guarantees my safety?” Verlander replied. “Is he here? Is he here now?”
“The general is close, Verlander. We can take you to him. Show yourself. Your men will be spared.”
In that moment, Norton was all but assured that they would all be slaughtered. The bull’s words dripped with treachery. Norton bit his lip, suddenly heartsick for his wife and parents.
“Ha!” Verlander shouted. “Ha, ha! You open, weeping, godforsaken
“Have it your way,” the bull replied calmly. “Archers.”
The room went still again, and then Verlander was shrieking at his men. “Cover yourselves! Take cover, men—move!”
There was a flurry of activity and Norton felt Fausto’s arm on his shoulder, and then they were sprinting toward a storage closet, the air around them filled with a buzzing like a great swarm of locusts.
Norton didn’t know the weapon, but it was cruelly efficient. The metallic points tore into the soldiers of the resistance, cutting them into ribbons and spilling their blood on the stained concrete floor. He heard men screaming, their cries terminating with muted thunks as flesh met steel.
Fausto shoved him into the door and Bryan tore it open just as a volley of arrowheads—heat-seekers, he supposed—sliced into Ruiz’s midsection. They exited through his stomach and slapped into the wooden door with a sharp twang.
Bryan screamed and pulled Fausto’s limp form into the closet. Outside, carnage raged. He could hear Verlander shouting instructions and then there was a furious explosion, the building shaking as if it sat on an awakening fault.
“Oh, Jesus! Fausto…can you hear me?” Bryan knelt at the man’s side, applying pressure to his wounds. “Fausto! Fuck! Come on, Fausto!”
Those sleepy eyes opened. He smiled, a thin film of blood coating his teeth. “Is it finished, Bryan?”
Norton wasn’t sure. It had grown still outside—particles of dust and grime drifted beneath the closet door.
“Can you…can you walk? We’ll go out together, Fausto. We’ll get you some help and get you home to your Carmen.”
Ruiz’s smile widened. “My Carmen? Yes, my Carmen…I think I can make it, Bryan Norton, for my Carmen. Let’s…let’s walk out together.”
Norton pushed the door open, revealing a ruin of steel and concrete. The far wall was gone. The forest loomed behind a curtain of dust.
Norton supported Ruiz with his arm around his shoulder. They picked their way over the bodies of the deceased, around stacks of rubble.
“Over here,” Verlander croaked. He knelt near the ruined body of Stump, whose head and chest just peaked out from beneath a pile of concrete. “He did it. Such a hard man, this little one. We called him Stump, but his name was Jonathan. Jonathan Kenney.”
“And now what? Now what do we do?” Bryan said, his tone plaintive. He wept as he felt the life leaking from
