Chapter 125

The combat uniforms Rain and the others wore were made from the most advanced technology in the world. Even at close range, the Military Mothers’ bullets could not penetrate most of the material that covered them from head to toe--except for their faces, which were exposed and their hands. That didn’t mean that none of the Military Mothers’ bullets would make its way through a weak spot in their uniforms or that one of them wouldn’t take a bullet in the eye and lay them out, but it did mean, as the invading forces returned fire on the women in brown uniforms, they had a much better chance of taking out their targets than the soldiers from Michaelanburg.
One of the soldiers behind Rain screamed and fell to the ground. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the scene in front of her to find out what had happened to him as her fingers continued to pull the trigger. She aimed precisely at the militants in front of her, the fear she’d once felt about the possibility of taking another life having dissipated now that her training took over. She knew that at least a few of her bullets had entered the bodies in front of her because she’d gotten so accurate with her aim. Blood squirted from holes blown in the familiar brown uniforms, the very same outfit Rain had stolen to leave this place to begin with. Screams and shouts of pain echoed down the hallway as more and more Military Mothers poured into the hall in front of them to take the place of the fallen.
It didn’t last long, only three or four minutes at most. Then, a shout came up from the other side of the doorway, and those that could retreat headed off back down the hallway.
“Advance!” Seth shouted, urging his forces to move forward in pursuit of the retreating Mothers. Rain couldn’t trust that this wasn’t another trap. She could see their initial objective now. As they ran down the hallway, leaping over and stopping between bodies whenever possible, their boots coated in blood, she noted the doors on either side of the hallway. Though she’d never been in this place before, it had been described to her more than once, and she knew, if she were to take a moment to turn her head and look through the narrow glass windows in the doors, she’d see men on the other side. These were the men they’d failed to rescue during the rebellion. Seth’s team’s objective had been to free these men. Instead, they were in pursuit of a large mass of enemy soldiers.
He wasn’t thinking clearly. She had known Seth long enough by now to see when he was acting rationally and when his emotions took over his mind so that he couldn’t make the same decisions he normally would with a clear head.
Rain turned to look at Adam, and he caught her eye, giving a small shrug that let her know that he understood what her concern was. They shouldn’t be chasing the enemy. They should be freeing the men and then moving on with their next objective.
Their forces were much smaller in number than the attacking Mothers had been. Rain had a feeling that there were even more Mothers hiding behind closed doors, lying in wait, watching them. Every once in a while, she’d catch the familiar shape of a camera mounted high on the walls around them, near the ceiling. She could almost feel the eyes of the enemy on her. In the back of her mind, Rain wondered if that awful Mother White was watching her now. Would she be in Gretchintown, protecting the secrets of Michaelanburg, or would she be further south, defending the border with Spanish America?
Her internal questions were interrupted when a door opened behind them with a loud bang, and suddenly they were taking fire from the rear. Seth gave the command for them to swivel and return fire, but Rain wasn’t stunned at all when the Mothers that had retreated earlier suddenly reappeared in full force with even more soldiers than they’d had the first time.
“Seth! What do we do?” Rain shouted, not sure which way she should be shooting at the moment.
She looked at her friend’s face and saw the shocked, stunned look of someone who was about to panic and mentally shut down. Seth didn’t know what he wanted them to do.
“Seth!” Rain shouted again, but he didn’t respond, only stared at one group of Mothers before swiveling and looking in the other direction.
“Shit,” Rain muttered. Adam was shooting at the force behind them while the soldier directly in front of Rain was shooting toward the front. Most of the soldiers seemed to just be picking a side and doing their best to keep from getting hit.
The man in front of her jerked backward suddenly, his head nearly hitting Rain in the nose. He fell into her, his head hitting her shoulder, before he slid to the ground, bleeding profusely from a hole right between his eyes. The medic in her wanted to help; the soldier in her said there was nothing left to help.
“Seth!” Rain demanded again. He still did not answer.
Rain knew she was going to have to take control or none of them were going to make it out of there alive.
There was a door directly behind her. Slamming into it, Rain discovered it was locked, which didn’t surprise her. A number pad next to the door waited for the correct series of digits to be typed in for the door to slide open.
She didn’t have any clue what the code might be, so if she was going to pull the squad out of the hallway, she’d have to figure out another way to get in.
She needed a few seconds and some space to operate. Bullets were bouncing off of her now that she was in the front of the line. The sting of bullets hitting her uniform and ricocheting off was distracting. Rain pulled a smoke bomb from her pocket and yanked the pin with her teeth before hurling the bomb at the Military Mothers in front of her.
A few seconds later, an explosion rocked the hallway, and Rain realized that it wasn't a smoke bomb; it was a grenade. “Shit,” she mumbled, glad that she hadn’t injured anyone in her party. The firing from the Mothers in front of them stopped, and the hallway itself seemed to be stable enough that the ceiling wasn’t caving in on them, so at least she hadn’t accidentally brought the building down.
Now that she had a few seconds to study the keypad by the door, she considered what the code might be to punch in so that the door opened. She had to wonder if any of the rebels had programmed in a code that might work for them to be able to access the men locked behind these doors in the Insemination Ward. If so, what would that number be?
Rain quickly punched in the date of the rebellion, the month and the date. The door stayed closed, and the shooting behind them increased as the Mothers behind them got closer and closer.
Rain decided to try the date a different way, the day and the year. That didn’t work either. Swearing under her breath, she decided to use a different date, the day and month of Mother Michaela’s initial attack on the men after the end of the Third World War. Instantly, the door in front of her opened.
“Go!” Seth shouted, still shooting at the Mothers from behind them as he ordered the rest of their group through the narrow opening. Rain didn’t want to go first, but she was the closest, so she dodged inside, trying her best to get out of the way so the others could get out of the line of fire.
A few of the others came through before Adam stepped past the doorway sideways, an injured soldier who’d gotten hit in the face by one of the Mother’s bullets beneath his arm as he swung the man inside. Seth was the last one to come through. He leaped through the door, and Rain slammed her hand onto the mechanism to lock it. “How do we keep them from just punching the code in?” she asked, frantically.
“Stand back!” Seth shouted. Rain and the others got out of the way as Seth shot up the keypad. On the other side of the door, Rain could see Mothers in their familiar brown uniforms through the small glastic window. They were tapping on the keypad but nothing was happening.
“Let’s go!” someone shouted. They headed down a hall lined with doors, all of them closed, but there were no keypads outside of any of them.
“Where are we?” Rain asked. “What’s behind these doors, Adam?”
“These are our compartments,” he said. “I mean… the Dicks’ rooms. They’re all locked from the outside with keys that only the Mothers have.”
“So how can we get into any of them?” Seth asked.
“We can’t get in this way, but down this hall, we will probably come to another entrance with a keypad.” His voice was strained as he struggled to walk with the weight of the injured man leaning on him.
“Leave me here,” the soldier said, his hand still over his injured eye. “I’m just slowing you down.”
“We’re not leaving you here, Leavenworth,” Seth said. “We don’t leave people behind.”
There were six of them rushing down the hallway, desperately looking for a place to disappear before the Mothers found a way in. Rain knew that the broken keypad they’d shot up was only going to slow them down for a few minutes.
She prayed that the other team was having better luck than they were. She was worried about Mist and Walt and wished they were still together.
At the end of the hallway, there was another door with a keypad to their left. “This is how you get into the inseminators’ rooms,” Adam said.
“What code did you use before?” Seth asked Rain.
“Uh… 0619,” she said.
Seth pushed the corresponding buttons, but nothing happened. “Damn it. They must’ve changed it since we punched it in last time.”
“Any idea what they would change it to?” the other woman that was with them asked.
“No,” Rain said. “Probably something random.”
Seth tried another group of numbers. “Not today’s date,”
“They’re going to be in here any second,” the other male soldier, the one that wasn’t bleeding, said.
Rain began to look around for another option. Her eyes landed on the vent cover above them. She knew that the vents in the building were large because she’d seen the blueprints before when they were studying the layout before the attack. “Up!” she said. “We can go up.”
“Will that work?” Seth asked. “Will they hold us? Are they big enough?”
“Yeah, yeah, they will,” Adam said, already moving with Leavenworth that way. “I know a Dick who tried to escape that way one time. They tracked him down, but he was able to get pretty far in the vents.”
“All right, Rain come here,” Seth said, kneeling with his hands out for her to step on.
Again, Rain didn’t want to be first, but there was no time to discuss it. She let Seth boost her up to the metal grate, which popped out of its opening almost immediately. She was able to slide it out of the way and grab hold of the sides of the vent, pulling herself up.
Quickly, they launched Leavenworth up next. Rain grabbed hold of his arm and yanked him up. The duct was big enough for her to move him out of the way so that she could get the next person. The other male, whose name she didn’t know, came up next, followed by Seth. Beneath her, she heard Adam and the other girl discussing what should happen next.
She was saying, “If I boost you up, you should be able to grab hold of my hands and pull me up, right?”
“I hope so,” Adam said. “All right.”
She wasn’t strong enough to launch him very far off of the ground, but Rain and Seth were able to reach down and grab hold of him and yank him up. After he was up and out of the way, he turned and reached down for the other female soldier. She leapt up, and Adam grabbed her hand. Seth reached further down toward her elbow, and together, they managed to pull her up into the duct.
Once they were all in the vent, Rain slid the grate back on top of the opening. “Now what?” she asked.
Seth asked, “Now… which way to the records room?”