CICADA: A Stone Age World Novel (28 page)

No looking back
. She grabbed her gun and jogged to the shelf Carrington had told her about. Reaching back, she clutched the small clock radio right away and slid it into her backpack.

She hesitated over Richards, who was either dead or out cold. Then a sly smile crept onto her face. She drew her knife and bent over him. He would help her after all.

When she was finished, she picked up the pipe and hoisted it back onto her shoulder and hurried back to the entrance.

Just in front of Richards’s desk, where he buzzed people in, she could hear several security guards calling for him, probably wondering where the man who never left his post was. They filed into the main Supplies room, and Melanie ducked behind the first shelving area. Two passed, jogging and calling his name. She slipped past the check-in area and then the exit and headed to B216, feeling what she was sure would be a short-lived sense of relief.

Just before she reached the end of the T-intersection in the hallway, someone yelled, “Hey you… stop!”

“Did Max actually tell them to go blank themselves?” Sally asked Preston, who was making rounds to convince everyone to take up arms or at least to hunker down and prepare for a fight. She had been keeping company with Webber while he rested on a cot in the infirmary. Sue and Pel, who were injured in the failed assault led by Max and Tom, were also there sleeping. Sally had
The Stand
open and resting facedown in her lap.

Preston couldn’t help but smile at her self-censorship, refusing to quote the F-word. She was raised well.

“I’d like to fight,” Webber offered, lifting his head and grimacing at his discomfort.

“No, son.” Preston held his palm out to stop him. “You need to rest. You know you have nothing to prove to anyone.”

“My face attests to that, right?” Webber’s bandages lifted with his smile, but even smiling hurt too much and his bandages sagged back.

“Here.” Preston rested the AR-15 Webs had been practicing with over the past months beside the cot. “Keep this by your side, just in case.”

He looked to Sally and hesitated, knowing what a struggle it had been for her.

She glared back at him, feeling the debilitating fear flood back again, and then turned to Webber. “Webs, please tell me you weren’t fibbing when you said we have a plan?”

The men flashed looks at each other. Either they had ESP or they shared a big secret and Webber hadn’t yet received approval to respond the way he wanted.

“Sally, we do have a Plan B,” Preston stated in his usual composed voice, “but until then, only if it’s needed, you know how to shoot, don’t you?” He held out a rifle for her.

She grabbed the M4, pulled back the charging rod and let it slide a round forward. Then she flicked the safety on and rested it on her lap, barrel away from them.

Both of them grinned.

Sally looked back up to Preston. “Uncle Max taught me. He said, ‘Sally, it’s easy. Just aim at the bad guy and squeeze the trigger.’” Of course, everything was easy for Uncle Max.

Preston chuckled at the obvious Maxism. Then he became serious. “So, you’re staying here with Webber?”

“Yep,” she confirmed.

“All right then. Keep your eyes open,” he said to both of them. To Webber he added, “Listen for the air-raid horn, son.” He waited for Webber’s confirmation. “You may need to help these folks too.” Preston motioned to the two sleeping in their beds.

“Got it, sir. And thanks for standing up for me.” Webber smiled and offered his hand.

Preston squeezed it and laid his other hand on Sally’s shoulder, then walked to the other two occupied cots to wake their occupants with the news.

“What horn?” Sally asked.

After he explained that part, they waited.

The night’s green auroras were now rumbling like angry storm clouds, their illuminations making everything look jaundiced and sickly. It was an aerial mirror of how each of them felt right now gawking at what was coming their way.

After Max had delivered Cicada’s reply to the three red-robed representatives—the red looked gray—of the army of men and women outside, they said nothing and left, blending in with their hordes. A few minutes later, he watched hundreds of red robes begin walking in a mass around both sides of Cicada’s walls. Like puddles building up from raindrops, pools of red robes swarmed and clustered in positions around the complex. They seemed completely unconcerned about being shot, staying approximately five hundred meters from the wall, just as Cicada’s flyers demanded. Perhaps he should have just had his people start shooting, but even with the advantage of their protective walls, this enemy had the numbers, and with numbers, there was a chance to overwhelm. Plus, he was curious what they would do next and wanted to play it out a little more first.

The moat of red-black stretched around the entire circumference of Cicada, now a narrow band as far as he could see. Max signaled for his guards to be ready by swinging a propane lantern back and forth. Fifteen of the sixty-four breathing residents of Cicada were on its walls.

He held the lantern up toward the Observation Tower and covered the glass with his hand. Then he uncovered it and then covered it and then uncovered it again.

A light flashed there, in similar fashion. Shingles was ready. Shingles was a scary-good shot, too; he literally could pick off a bird from the tree line, almost a mile away.

He had instructed all his people to not shoot until one of those red-robes had crossed the line, or if it looked like they were processing forward. The near-impossible part was keeping a two-and-a-half-mile wall secure with only fifteen people. On their side, the walls were very hard to scale, with razor-sharp barbs everywhere along the wall, which also had a slick coating, making it impossible to free climb. With grappling hooks, it was possible, but still difficult. And of course, everyone in Cicada knew how to shoot. It was a requirement that they train with an M4. First Preston had trained them, and then when Tom came on board, he took over. Each had their assigned M4, having stopped by Operations to pick them up on their way to the wall. And finally each had plenty of ammo, in spite of the enemy’s large numbers. They just needed to be patient.

They waited.

Johnson crouched low and hid in the dark shadows cast by the Comms building on the soccer field. Every time he heard a set of footsteps, he pressed himself lower to remain unseen. In a way, he had been in the shadows all this time, operating as one of two moles in Cicada. After Sampson was killed, it had gotten pretty dicey for him. But the timing couldn’t have been better, with the army preparing to attack; he would have to ask Westerling how he’d arranged that.

It wouldn’t be very much longer until he could leave this place. He craned his neck up, waiting to see the sign that told him when to do his part. And when he was done, it would mean the end of Cicada.

The first shot rang out like the screech from a giant turkey vulture alerting the other vultures about a newly dead meal and the feast that awaited them. This vulture must have been nested up in the tree line, hidden from the auroral light.

Max spun around to the sound’s location and searched for a sign of its target. Another shot from the opposite side, and he saw one of his people on the corresponding wall crumple and fall into a heap.

They had snipers.

“Take cover!” he bellowed through his cupped hands. “Take cover. They’re in the tree line.”

More sniper shots, followed by two white flares arced into the air toward them: one from the east and the other from the west side of Cicada.

That was their signal.

The throngs of darkened robes swarmed the walls. Where the walls were on a mesa, they scaled the rocks leading up to them.

The red-robes should have been easy targets, but whenever one of Max’s people would take a shot, the snipers would fire and force them behind the protective cover of the wall.

They were being pinned down.

First it was just one… then two… then it was many. Grappling hooks clinked against the tops of their stone walls, many of them grabbing hold.
That’s how I’d have done it. They’re scaling the walls.

Max yelled for them to cut the ropes as he hurried over to the closest sentry, but they couldn’t. Guns, not knives.

Holding his .45 close to the rope, Max fired off three shots to sever it. He handed his knife to the sentry and signaled for her to cut the next one.

The sentry closest to them shot at the top rope multiple times, trying to hit it where it crested over the top of the wall while trying to stay behind the wall’s cover, but he was felled by a sniper’s bullet.

Max leaned over the inside of the wall and yelled down to a woman on the ground, already bounding up the first steps of the stairwell closest to him. “Go grab all the axes and heavy knives or swords you can carry.”

It was Magdalena. She nodded and dashed off toward Operations.

The others futilely attempted to shoot at the rope, or waited for help.

Max handed out axes and large knives to each sentry, who then raced, bent double below the wall’s protection, to a rope that nested itself nearby and severed it. Magdalena was doing the same further away. When she had handed out everything, she occasionally stopped to cut a rope herself using the knife she always carried with her. Once, as they passed each other when she was slicing away at a rope, the M4 she carried loosely around her slipped forward and she had to stop and readjust.

Max asked, “Do you know how to shoot one of those things?”

“Yes, of course,” she said and then stormed off, otherwise very calm under fire.

There were just too many of them. All their people were running around the walls, desperately trying to keep up with the newly appearing ropes and people climbing them, and so far they’d succeeded in preventing anyone from gaining the top of a wall. It seemed like this could go on forever. Then he realized this was their plan to keep them busy. He scanned the walls and noticed that no one was climbing the north wall, by the gate. It was all a diversion.

He ran toward that gate, at least half a mile away, hopping over a couple sentries sawing at the enemy’s thick ropes with their knives. He was almost there when he glimpsed a cart being pushed by two red-robes toward the gate. He fired off a couple of shots while running, not expecting to hit them but hoping at least to slow them down. They were already running away from the gate; their job was done.