GRIDER

 

Wednesday January 15 - 0210 PST

Twenty minutes until Turbocharger activates

 

"Jay!" Adam shouted over the din of battle. "Can you give me a grenade?"

Of all the things I didn't want to hear in the middle of a gun battle that one ranked up among the highest. Adam didn't need to be fumbling around with explosives while professional soldiers were trying to kill us.

"Why do you need a grenade?" Jay shouted back at him.

The doubt in Jay's voice echoed my own apprehension. Adam was doing just fine drilling our attackers with his hand held cannon. The big .50-cal rounds he was firing were punching through the concrete barricades the Praetorians were using. He must have taken down four or five of them that way and he should have kept doing that. I didn't get why he suddenly wanted a grenade.

"I'm out of ammo!" Adam shook his rifle in frustration. It's bolt locked back and open like a hungry mouth begging to be fed.

I freakin' knew it. Dimwit emptied his mag on the helicopter when he didn't have a chance in hell of hitting. Now we were paying for it.

Tracers that I could see—and the non-illuminated rounds I couldn't—buzzed through the air around me as the remaining Praetorians poured on the fire. They were suppressing us so some of them could come around and envelop us in flanking fire that we couldn't get away from. We were in a trap and about to wiped out by tactics taught to the most junior infantry private. The noose was tightening around our collective neck and the last thing I needed was Adam running dry on us.

Jay tossed him something that was distinctly not a frag grenade. Adam stared at it dumbly. "This is a flare. What am I supposed to do with it?"

Jay shrugged and went back to shooting into the darkness at our attackers.

Despite all the bullets buzzing and cracking through the air and the furious light show of tracers going both ways, I wasn't disturbed or unnerved by any of it. Now if I had been alone in the woods in silence you only find hundreds of miles away from civilization and a single bullet cracked past my head, yeah, I would be bothered. But when there's hundreds flying through the air I just tune it all out and focus on what I need to do next to survive. Funny how perspective changes everything.

And I saw something change on Adam's face as he studied his flare. It was that light-bulb-turning-on look of a crazy plan coming together. Then genius was up and running with a red flare burning brightly in his hands.

I tried shouting after him. "Get down you dumb moth—" but he was already halfway across the warehouse floor trailing red smoke and flame like it was the Olympic torch. He was putting on that amazing speed that normal humans can't do. I was surprised by it, but so were the Praetorians. Just about every stream of tracers in the store house followed after him, and they were all too slow. Like me they assumed they were shooting at a normal person and not a freak.

Adam shot across the open floor with the Fourth of July chasing after him. He barreled right into a steel fire door. I half expected him to bounce off of it with several fractured ribs and a broken nose. Again his freakish nature surprised me. The door buckled and was nearly taken off its hinges by Adam's bulk and speed.

Brilliant, white stadium lighting poured in through the open door turning my view through the NV goggles completely green. The gun fire stopped as everyone else's NVGs were overwhelmed. All I heard was the tinkling of spent brass rolling and bouncing across the hard concrete muffled by my headset. For a brief moment the store house was eerily quiet.

I wasn't sure what went through my mind. Maybe it was years of experience coming together to exploit the moment or maybe I'd been in this job too long and it finally took its toll on my sanity. But I was up and running across the open floor exposed to every shooter in the store house. A few people even took the opportunity to take some pot shots at me.

Yet somehow I made it to that open door without dying. And outside of it was the most massive pit I'd ever seen. It made sense now why they used stadium lighting. The place really was as big as a football stadium. Only instead of seating along the outer edges of the bowl there was scaffolding built up into decks that went down the interior like huge stairs. There were ladder wells going between the floors and I could see Adam running towards one.

He was intent on getting to the buildings in the center at the very bottom. There were a few of them down there but I was pretty sure I knew which one was of interest. It was obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes and a brain.

In the middle of them all was a dome made of huge glass sheets, each cut into the shape of a hexagon. And inside were four figures strapped down to contraptions that were halfway between a throne-like chair and an operating table. They were the Primes and something was happening to them.