“I’ve got direct control of half the base already,” snapped Smith.
“But not us,” said Stealth. “St. George and I are too strong-willed for you to influence directly. I would imagine Captain Freedom is too strong for you as well.”
“Freedom will put a gun in his mouth the moment I ask him to,” said Smith. His own voice was rising to match hers. “They all would. Don’t you get it? This has been my base for almost two years now.”
Harrison cocked his head and looked back and forth between the soldiers.
“Is that why you killed Colonel Shelly? Did he become a threat to you?”
“Shelly was my sock puppet up until he died,” said Smith. “He had just enough willpower to turn his own brain into mush trying to resist me. He’s lucky I let him live as long as I—”
“Sir,” barked Harrison. He held up his hand. The soldiers were looking back and forth at each other. The staff sergeant snapped his fingers, then again, then once more. Taylor tapped his collar and Hayes rubbed his own between his fingers.
Polk pulled his duty cap back on his head and coughed. They all looked at him. He blinked. “What?”
“You’re keying,” said Harrison with a glance at Stealth. “She turned your mic on!”
*
Ummmmm... did everyone else just hear all of that?
They’d just made it back to the main gate. Freedom and Kennedy exchanged looks. All the super-soldiers gave each other uneasy glances. St. George looked up at the gleaming wraith.
I never liked that guy.
*
Sorensen sat in the workshop and watched figures stumble by outside. He’d stayed hidden in the back office for an hour, but at some point he’d wandered out without thinking of it. From here, hidden in the shadows of the shop, he could see groups of soldiers running by, or the far more frequent mobs of exes. Several of them wore his non-functioning Nest units, but many more did not.
He tapped the fingers of his left hand against his thumb. His right fingers traced lines back and forth on one of the worktables. He was aware he was doing it. It was one of those faint moments of clarity when he realized he looked like a madman. He also realized he needed to trim his beard. Eva hated it when his beard got long.
He heard the cries and the screams, the clicking of teeth, and various shouted calls and orders. Someone would probably come to collect him, soon.
It all seemed distant. The guilty thoughts about the Nest and the ex-soldiers that had weighed on his fragile mind were gone. For the first time in over a year, he felt peaceful.
A trio of exes stumbled in through the wrecked doors. They weren’t any of his. These had all been civilians. The woman was dressed in a pant suit, bleached from ages in the sun. The two men were in plaid shirts and jeans. One of them had a thick beard. The other tripped over the edge of the door and fell forward. Its skull hit the ground with a solid crack, but Sorensen could hear its limbs moving on the floor, trying to push it upright. Not enough damage to the cerebellum, but it may have broken its jaw from the muffled sounds its teeth now made.
The dead woman saw him and stumbled forward. Her skin was like leather, and there were a few twigs and tiny leaves in her dark hair. He could see an elaborate cobweb stretched from a ragged ear to her shoulder. Her brittle lips were pulled back in a smile.
“I knew you’d come,” he said. “I kept telling them you were out there somewhere. None of them believed me.”
He pulled her close. His wife wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his neck.
Chapter 30
NOW
“HOW MUCH LONGER WE GONNA KEEP THIS UP?” Hundreds of dead faces split into hundreds of grins. “YOU ASK ME, YOU GONNA RUN OUTTA BULLETS LONG BEFORE I RUN OUTTA BODIES.”
“First things first,” said St. George. “Let’s get this gate blocked.”
Freedom gave three quick hand signals and the chisel-nosed truck coughed to life. It was a long, eight-wheeled vehicle with a crane mounted on the end of it. They pulled it across the gate and the soldiers fired around and under it as the driver leaped clear.
St. George hooked his fingers under the truck’s frame and heaved. The flatbed’s side lifted up and he grunted. The damned thing was armored and weighed twice what he’d thought. He got the tires three feet off the ground, then four. He heard a rattling noise as some of the chains on the bed slid off the far side, but he couldn’t get it to the tipping point.
His forearm throbbed. He could feel his pulse in the wound and the wet bandage over it. It felt like the fang was tearing into him all over again.
Legion laughed from a hundred throats.