15 HOURS LATER. BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA. 9:35 AM EST. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2025.
Roger put in his
next-to-last magazine. Counting the one in the chamber he was down
to nine rounds—eight, saving one for himself.
More than twenty
tribals on the ground floor below him.
They could come up
two staircases, one at each end of the concrete hallway, but he
could cover both of those from his improvised fort at the central
desk on the floor. They could set the building on fire and make him
come down one staircase, but on his way down he’d have another
chance to take one or two with him. When it
comes to getting shot at the end of the game, everybody wants to be
in the back row.
Angry shouting: “All
right, follow me!”
Roger set himself.
Just like rifle range.
The man lunged from
the right stairwell. Point and squeeze.
He fell over. Another clean head shot. They’d
be so proud of me back in Pueblo.
He got the next one
from the right staircase, then another from the left. He was down
to one in the chamber, one in the magazine, one magazine to go. He
fumbled the last magazine out of his pocket.
It was empty. He must
have absentmindedly tucked it back into his pocket sometime in the
last three hours of being chased around the U of I campus. It
seemed really unfair that he had just lost count.
The two rounds left
were what he had. In a few minutes there’d be another rush. He’d
take one more with him, and then, remembering Ecco, he’d use the
last round to take the fast dark exit.
Since it was almost
over, he might as well go comfortably. He stood, stretched his
legs, and treated himself to a long, luxurious piss into a drinking
fountain drain. He could hear them arguing and squabbling below
about who would rush him next.
The big room he’d had
his back to was a chem lab; he smashed the window in its door with
a chair. Downstairs, they yelped and whined “What’s he doing?” at
each other. Wish I had the ammunition to
invite them up to find out.
The supply closet was
familiar territory; a year ago he’d been finishing his first year
as a ChemE major.
Except for some
strong caustics, the dry chemicals had been in plastic jars that
had rotted. He swept the heaped-together powders, and the goopy
remnants of the jars, into a dustpan, carried the pan down the
hall, and emptied it just out of sight of one stairwell entrance.
He went back and got more, putting that at the other end of the
hall, dragging one body out of the way as if it were furniture. He
wiped his hands on his pants, noticing he didn’t care that the man
was dead but hated how grimy his skin and clothes were.
Funny, before Daybreak the only corpse I’d
seen was at Grandpa’s funeral.
Next he took the dry
chemicals stored in glass, which were generally the most reactive,
and poured them onto the tops of his piles. They were still arguing
about whether they should rush him, and what it might mean that he
was moving around up there.
Back in the supply
closet, he set aside the strong acids. The rest of the liquids in
glass were mostly complex organics, which had turned to something
like cheese, but a few flammable solvents seemed all right; these
he carried, bottles and all, to add to his piles.
Sudden scuffling
downstairs. Shouting. Screaming.
Two
shots.
RRC agents or maybe
TNG troops; Daybreakers had no working guns. Roger froze and
listened.
“Hey, don’t shoot.” A
grinning Dan Samson burst from the stairwell. “Roger! I didn’t know
Heather had sent you too! I surprised’em a little,” the big man
said. “If we go now, I think we can shoot our way
out—”
“Need ammo,” Roger
whispered. “I have two.”
“Seven,” Samson said
quietly.
“Let’s set off the
surprise I’ve been fixing up and see if we can get out with just
hatchets. What are they doing down
there?”
“Trying to figure out
what to do because you killed the big boss and two little bosses,
and they’re afraid to go home and say they didn’t get us, and even
more afraid to come up the stairs. Let’s try your idea. I’ve always
loved surprises.”
A few seconds later,
they hurled one jug of nitric acid to the far end of the hall; the
mess of powder there foamed, fumed, burst into flames, and poured
out dense blue smoke. They charged down their own stairwell,
staying well separated, and at the first landing, threw the big
bottles of hydrochloric and sulfuric acid up behind themselves,
through the propped-open doors and into the piles of chemicals.
There was a low, pulsing boom and more dark smoke gouted into the
stairwell.
Holding their
breaths, they plunged down the stairs. At the double doors Samson
plowed into a Daybreaker sentry coming in, pinned her to the wall
with the door, and chopped her forehead, twisting the blade to
wrench it free.
Roger yanked the
other door open and charged into the now-terrified group, slashing
and thumping with his hatchet, and Samson was on them a moment
later.
The surviving
Daybreakers fled. “This way,” Samson said. They climbed through a
broken window onto a low fire escape, dropped to the ground, and
ran.
“Those were some
pretty shitty soldiers,” Roger gasped, as they ducked between two
buildings. Behind them, the chemistry building was pouring dense
blue smoke from its lower floor.
“Those weren’t
soldiers. They were slaves. Their leadership was three
sorta-soldiers from Castle Earthstone. More afraid of their bosses
than they were of us.” In the chemistry building, a window belched
orange flame. “What did you do back there?”
“I have no idea.
Where to from here?”
“Well, not back to
that building. South, I think. Let’s
go.”