Chapter 133

Following Walt down the hallway, Rain tried to keep her heart from hammering so loudly that she couldn’t hear anything else. They needed to find Lightning and get her to a computer that was hooked up to the rest of the Mothers’ databases to see if they could possibly get behind the firewall that protected the records. If anyone could do it, it was Lightning, the brains behind this entire rebellion. If she was even still alive.
“The quickest way to get downstairs is going to be going back toward the front of the building, away from all of the action,” Walt said as they rushed back the way they’d come. The further down the hallway they traveled, the more distant the sound of gunfire sounded. Rain just hoped it stayed that way.
“Won’t the Mothers be watching us on cameras and know what we’re up to?” Adam asked as they ran along through the corridor so close together, they bumped shoulders from time to time.
“Probably. We’ll need to hurry.” Mist didn’t turn her head to respond, but she was heard loud and clear anyway.
They went around a corner to discover a mob of fallen bodies and body parts. Lots of them were wearing the brown uniforms of the Mothers, but there were a few torn and mangled bodies wearing the same color uniform as Rain had on. She tried not to look at their faces, but it was hard.
One girl in particular was lying flat on her back, her cold, unblinking eyes focused on the ceiling above her. Pink lips were parted just enough to show her white teeth. She didn’t look pained or shocked. Rather, she looked as if she were about to speak, like she was just opening her mouth to whisper something to the soldier standing next to her.
Rain didn’t stare at her long enough to discover what had brought her down. Adam grabbed hold of her arm and tugged her away. Careful not to slip in the sticky blood on the floor, Rain kept her balance and skirted around a severed arm, a few scrap pieces of clothing in black that must’ve been Quebecian uniforms, and a boot with part of a leg left sticking out the top. Mangled muscle and jagged bone protruded a few inches from the top of the footwear. Not a single drop of blood seemed to have stained the boot itself. It was surreal, seeing it sitting there, blown from the rest of the body in some sort of explosion, Rain imagined. The walls here were blistered and charred, and an acrid smell hit her lungs when she finally managed to suck in a breath.
“Hold up,” Adam said as they started to enter a less macabre area of the hallway. He had let go of Rain’s arm, but she was only a step away from him. She halted and turned to see what he was doing.
A new weapon. Adam was fetching a rifle that was lying on the floor. It wasn’t attached to a person, so he picked it up to check to see if it was loaded and found that it was. He turned and fired a round back the way they’d come. The weapon seemed to work just fine.
Satisfied, Adam nodded, and the party took off again. Rain hoped they weren’t about to encounter another weapon that would turn them into the same parts and pieces they’d just waded through.
Navigating precisely where to go was difficult because even though they’d all spent a considerable amount of time in this building, the men weren’t free to roam at all, and the women had only had access to certain sections. It was basically the blueprint they’d seen before they left Quebec that was helping them figure out which way would be the best path to take. The halls were not as linear as Rain had always assumed them to be when she was in IW for her required practices or when she came to the medical building for labs. Rather than a system of perpendicular and parallel hallways as one would imagine, there were plenty of layers to the hallways and only certain passages led further in or out of the pattern of squares that surrounded the inner circle.
They came to the end of the hall they’d been following, and a choice needed to be made. They could head right, which should lead them further away from the center of the building, where they expected the records room to be, or they could go left and head closer to the records room.
“I think we should go to the right,” Walt said. “I think I remember seeing a sign when we first came in that said stairwell. If it leads down, we might be able to find where they’re keeping the prisoners.”
“Good idea,” Mist said. The others had no better idea, so they followed Walt.
The hope that they wouldn’t meet any resistance because they weren’t far enough into the maze was shattered when a volley of bullets came from around the corner. The moment they entered the hallway, they were right in the line of fire.
Mist and Walt dropped to their knees to get out of the way so that Rain and Adam could shoot as well. The Mothers didn’t outnumber them by much, and the four of them were not only good shots but were also driven to complete their mission.
Rain aimed at the woman directly across from her, pointing her gun at the Mother’s forehead because that was one of the few places where she wasn’t protected. The Mothers wore protective helmets but not face shields. Rain pulled the trigger, and almost instantly a dot of red formed on the woman’s forehead. It spread quickly, but Rain couldn’t see it for long as the woman toppled down onto the ground.
The Quebecian forces were just as vulnerable when it came to headshots, so it was critical that they make short work of the women across from them so that they could move on. Losing soldiers was a part of any attack, but there was no way in hell Rain was going to let the Mothers take one of these three away from her. She aimed at another Mother, and that one went down, too.
After the first two volleys, the Mothers were all down. Rain had felt a few bullets bounce off of her uniform, but none hit her in any vulnerable place. She looked at her friends and saw that they were all fine as well. “Let’s go,” Mist said, and they took off again.
The group of Mothers they’d just shot down were lying haphazardly on top of one another in a wiggling pile of arms and legs. They’d have to get over them to go the way they needed to. As they approached, Mist lowered her rifle and blasted a few more shots into the Mothers’ heads so that they went still. She looked up and caught Rain’s eyes.
Rain felt a wave of disgust and panic roll through her, even though she’d just shot two of the women in the head herself. “It’s more merciful this way,” Mist said.
Rain only nodded. She wasn’t about to argue with her friend at the moment. Maybe she was right, and Mist really was putting them out of their misery. Regardless, it was all over now, and they could cross through the group without having to worry about the wounded taking them by surprise, either shooting at them or grabbing their ankles and bringing them down.
“Do you think that was the group whoever is watching us deployed to stop us from reaching the stairwell?” Adam asked no one in particular as they jogged down the hallway.
“I hope so, but I don’t know,” Mist said. “You’d think they’d send more than just eight, but then, who knows how many they have left. They have to be getting low on troops. They’ve been sending them out every time we send more in, but we grossly outnumber them. It’s just a matter of time. They have to know that, especially the ones sitting in the center of the building with no way out.”
Her friend had a great point, but ultimately, Rain’s primary concern was the safety of the people with her right now. If they won the fight by pushing through with sheer numbers but lost hundreds of soldiers in the process, and that number included any of these three, or Seth, for that matter, the victory would be bittersweet to say the least.
The sound of boots approaching from the hallway ahead of them had her heart skipping a beat again. More Mothers were coming; she could tell by the cadence of their boot falls hitting the floor. “This way,” Walt said, grabbing Mist by the arm and pulling her down a side hallway. The others changed course as well.
They didn’t go far before they turned and took up a position near the entryway. The hope was that any Mothers watching them on camera wouldn’t have a chance to warn the advancing troops that they’d ducked into this opening.
Her heart hammering in her head, Rain kneeled in front of Adam, her gun pointed, listening to the approach of the soldiers coming from her left. They couldn’t hesitate at all. They had to shoot as soon as the Mothers came into view, and they had to aim to kill.
Out of the corner of her eye, Rain saw a flicker of black and knew it was the group of Mothers coming into range. In their training, they had learned how to attack in situations like this so that everyone was firing at a different enemy soldier. It was the best way to take out as many of them as possible at once and not waste the precious seconds they had available to them shooting the same person over and over again.
She knew that she’d be responsible for the first Mother who appeared on the right, assuming they were walking shoulder to shoulder. Adam would aim for the one on the left. Mist, who was on her knee like Rain, would aim for the second Mother on the right, Walt taking the second one on the left, and so on and so forth. Rain didn’t think there were that many Mothers in this group, though. They didn’t sound loud at all.
The flicker of black came into focus, and Rain saw her target. She started tracking the woman but only long enough to get her aim right. The four of them fired almost at the same time.
Blood splattered against the far wall like red paint splashed from an open can. The Mothers had no idea that their enemy was lying in wait. There were six of them, so Rain took out the one she was supposed to in front and then turned her attention to the two in the back. The two women in the back screamed. It was very un-Mother-like. More like small children who had no idea that what they were doing was dangerous, potentially deadly. As they turned to look at their assailants, bullets flew again, hitting them both in the forehead and driving them back. Again, there was that splatter of blood and the sickening thunk of bodies hitting the floor.
With no time to think about what they’d done, the four of them quickly checked the hall and stepped over the twisted, tangled corpses in front of them.
It didn’t take long for them to reach the doorway they were looking for once they got passed the Mothers’ most recent attempt to stop them. With Walt in front, they headed through the doors that said they led to the stairs that went down.
As Rain’s boots hit the steps going down, her hand sliding along the railing, she prayed that they were headed the right direction. They had to find Lightning and see if she could break into the Mothers’ computer system so that they could get the proof they needed to show the world that the Mothers were using fossil fuels.
But in addition to that, Rain needed to know if there were records on her. The thought was ever present in the back of her mind.
The stairs seemed to go down much further than Rain expected. She thought about that horrible trap she’d been in not all that long ago. If they were headed back to a similar place, she’d just as soon go back up now and face the rest of the Military Mothers head-on.
“All right, here we are,” Walt said as they finally reached a door at the bottom of the stairs. They’d gone down at least four sets of about twenty steps to get here, so it felt like they were much lower than ground level, but Rain had no idea if there were other levels of basement here that were only accessible through other stairwells or what the situation was. All she knew was that she was ready to get through that door.
It was locked.
That wasn’t a surprise. Without a keypad next to it, they didn’t have a lot of choices. They could blast through the glastic at the top of the door or they could try to blow the lock.
“What do you think we should do?” Rain asked, looking Walt, Mist, and Adam in the eyes in turn.
The answer came from Mist. “Stand back.”