He guessed that Blake and Dana had accidentally triggered the bombs. And that the concussion set off…some of the land mines?…as a rat-a-tat of lesser explosions shook the bunker. He wondered about the dazzling blue flash through the crack between the bunker doors the instant before the huge blast had struck.
On the slight chance Blake and Dana had survived, Carlos counted to a hundred before creeping from the bunker.
*
Roaring flames. Wailing children, in the childcare center and, more and more, spilling out onto the grounds. From speakers across the compound, Marvin’s vain exhortations for calm and quiet. Beyond the fence Antonio and Rikki paced, stymied by the fire that engulfed the twisted remains of a bulldozer.
Dazed, bloodied, Li stood and gaped.
“It’s over,” Rikki shouted through the fence.
In answer, Li shot at her. Chips flew from a concrete fence picket, and Rikki and Antonio dived for the ground.
Nothing is over till I say it’s over, Li thought. But it might have been. What the hell was that stealthy object she had destroyed? What the hell had the peasants tried? To fight bombs with bombs?
Fuck ’em. Après moi, le déluge.
Li took the remote from her pocket. She armed it and the lamp changed from red to green. She flipped up the safety cover, tapped in the security code. The green light started to blink. She pressed the detonator button.
Nothing.
Again and again she jabbed the button. Not a damned thing happened. In a rage, she flung the worthless remote to the ground.
Gun in hand, Li ran deeper into the compound. Someone would pay for this outrage.
*
“Damn,” Dana whispered. She had yet to get close enough to risk taking a shot. And between her sprained ankle and Blake’s maimed foot, neither of them could keep up.
Not that she wanted to shoot the last medical doctor in the world—however bat-shit crazy Li had gone. That wasn’t why Dana hesitated. She saved people, damn it!
But exiling Li and Carlos to some cave far, far away? Letting them break their own backs for a change to feed themselves? Dealing with them only if and when some dire emergency should require their technical skills? That would be just fine.
If only she could get close enough to tase the bitch….
Blake said, “Is this a bad time to mention I seem to have lost my air gun somewhere?”
Not that he could have hit anything at this range, anyway. “It’s been that kind of day,” Dana told him.
“So what now?”
“We hobble after Li,” Dana said.
*
A bunker door was open!
Li tapped on the bunker’s overhead lamps, went down several steps, and looked up into the rafters. No bombs!
Après moi, le déluge.
Gun in hand, she considered how best to spend her ammo. Servers and embryo banks alike had been designed with massive redundancy. Even a clip emptied at close range was no guarantee of revenge.
Maybe there was another way.
*
Rikki aimed a fire extinguisher at the bulldozer’s tortured, twisted remains and the flaming puddle of ethanol beneath it. When the foam spray sputtered, she switched to a second extinguisher. Then a third.
Burning wreckage was strewn across a large area downwind. Antonio ran to douse those fires, lest a shifting wind carry flaming debris into the settlement.
The last flame around the bulldozer succumbed to the foam. The creaks and pings of cooling metal slowed. The smoke cleared. Antonio had returned.
“Good enough,” she decided.
She slipped on insulated gloves. Antonio donned his own pair. One by one, they scrambled up onto the steaming wreckage—
From which they leapt past the edge of the minefield, to run into the compound.
To help Blake and Dana.
*
Her ankle about to give way, struggling not to pant with exhaustion, not to collapse with exhaustion, not to give them away by crunching on the broken glass strewn everywhere, falling farther and farther behind, Dana limped after their quarry. Li popped into the open bunker (Huh! Hadn’t they left the doors closed?), only to emerge after a few seconds with her face twisted into a feral snarl.
Leaving Carlos on the floor, bound and gagged? Not plausible. Li would want help. He must have escaped on his own, leaving the door open in his haste to find her.
The op is falling apart, and so am I.
Li strode into the structure that housed their backup, ethanol-burning generator. This time she didn’t come right out.
“Idiot.” Blake swore under his breath. “I missed a scenario.”
“What’s that?”
“Power to the embryo freezers. The emergency fuel cells in the bunker will last only for a few hours. If Li manages, even for a day, to cut off power to the bunker…”
*
Just for a moment, reflected in a window—one of the few panes she had seen intact—Li had glimpsed two figures, all in black, limping after her. The enemy.
She dashed into the backup power plant, ran through the building, to come out the backdoor. Behind her pursuers.
“That’s far enough.” For emphasis, she fired a round into the air. “Turn around.”
Beneath the face grease, she scarcely recognized Blake and Dana.
“It’s about time you got here,” Li said as Carlos emerged from the darkness. “Take their guns.”
Approaching from behind, he gingerly relieved Dana of two kludged-looking weapons and Blake of a third. Two guns went into his pockets and one into his belt.
“Go. Keep an eye out for the others,” Li ordered. Carlos nodded and faded away.
“As for the two of you,” Li said, never allowing her aim to waver, “it’s time you learn how badly you blew it tonight.”
*
Eve lurked in the shadows.
Mr. Blake and Ms. Dana were on their knees, hands raised behind their heads, fingers interlaced. Throughout the compound, abandoned, children moaned and whimpered and wailed.
And Ms. Li…gloated.
The two forced to kneel before her were irredeemably bad, blasphemers, heretics, fallen from God’s grace. So Eve had been taught. So she felt, so she knew, at a visceral level.
But she didn’t understand.
Why did Mr. Blake play with that little girl, Beth, always so patient? Why did he and
