LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 31: I Shot The Sheriff
===[Chapter 31: I Shot The Sheriff]===
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Daybreak over the Nexus. Eli didn’t sleep. At least it wasn’t enough. What little sleep he did get was shallow, dreamless. He was awake long enough to spot the searchlights being turned off, replaced by the golden rays of the sun rising in the morning light. But his eyes were trained on the bunk above him. They were tired, staring at nothing. It was Dutch’s bed.
He listened to the rest of his squad groggily waking up before the guards inevitably forced them to. He listened to the conversation and banter that they shared with each other. Yet he remained silent. Only listening.
Morning roll call. The squads lined up outside of their barracks. Their presence marked by the security units who patrolled past their ranks, “Misfit?” asked a guard.
“Here!”
“Tally?”
“Six!”
The guard cleared his throat, reading over the checklist, “Misfit, you’ve got special orders. You will stay behind for the morning. Further orders will be given out later. Standby.”
Eli turned back to the rest of the team. They had no clue either. With a raised eyebrow, they remained behind while the other prisoners were taken to the factories, mines, and construction duties across the Nexus.
Guards surrounded the squad, taking headcounts, checking their monitors for schedules, and preparing them for a meeting with someone, “What’s going on?” Eli asked a guard who apprehended him, taking his arms and pushing them behind his back in order to slap handcuffs around his wrists, “Hey! What are you-"
“Be quiet!” The Guard barked. But still Eli struggled. In vain. He was jabbed in the ribs with a guard’s stun baton to enforce compliance. The surging wave of electrical pain immediately crippled him, bringing him to his knees as hot tears boiled in his eyes. He could hear Misfit right behind yelling at the guards, and struggling with them. Immediately, he turned back to them.
The guards had their batons out, threatening to strike them all down. Yet they continued to put up a resistance. Yelling, trying to shove the guards off of them, “Guys! Guys! Stop!” Eli shouted. If they tried to fight back now, they’d lose without a doubt. Misfit turned to him, “I’m fine! I’m fine…” He lied. A guard grabbed his arm, lifting him up to his feet.
For now, Misfit backed off. But he could still feel their resentment toward the guards. The protectiveness of each other was something that they shared. They wouldn’t allow what happened at the solitary cells to happen again…
They were brought into the offices of the commanders. Solid steel walls from the outside rose several stories high. The whole building a wing to the larger administrative complex nestled deep inside of the Nexus, far away from the prisoner’s cells. The tower, which Dutch jokingly called “The Eye of Sauron”. Looking up at it, the tower resembled something more akin to an oversized air-traffic control, it wasn’t hard to see why. The sunlight reflected off of the glass windows in the center of its head, creating a bright golden glare that shone as far as one could see. An omnipresent vibrant light reminding everyone inside that they were being watched; that they were being ruled; and most importantly – that resistance was futile.
They were brought inside of the offices to little fanfare. Guards inside merely checked them in, scanned their monitors, and sat them down with only one order. To wait.
Eventually, a door was opened, and the guards pointed towards Eli. They wanted the squad leader. Cautiously, he stood up. It looked as if Misfit would start a protest again, but Eli whispered to them, “I’ll be fine. I’ll be alright.”
They watched as he disappeared behind the two solid doors.
“Eli…Freeman,” Captain Juma watched as he was led into her office. The room was small. A one-way window placed behind her gave a fairly abundant view of the outside world. A fairly large potted plant had been placed in the corner, stuffed in a crevice where the filing cabinets and her own desk couldn’t reach. If anything it was quite cozy. Especially with the way her lights dimmed through lampshades. Not to mention, the room was airconditioned. It felt… safe. At least for her.
Eli was still handcuffed as he walked in, and though the guards allowed him autonomy to move about at his pleasure, they would ensure that he could not act out of line, “You’re a lucky man. You know that, Freeman?”
Eli nervously looked around the room, wondering how the guards would react to him speaking up, “Well, with all due respect I don’t feel lucky.”
Juma chuckled, “Funny how that goes. I saw you in New Cairo, again during the initial invasion, that colossal shitshow out in the jungle where I had to rescue you, and now here you are again. Tell me, are you a glass half-empty or half-full person?”
“What?” Eli asked, not fully registering the question.
“Nevermind.”
Feeling a sense of weakness in his knees, Eli decided to take a seat in the available chair while she reached for a stack of papers. But once his ass plopped down in the seat, she seemed displeased, “Did I say that you could sit?”
“Uh, no ma’am. But you seem like the type who wouldn’t want to waste a chair. Can I ask, why we’re here?”
“Like I said, you’re a lucky one. The powers that be thought they’d just throw you and Misfit away to the factory floor to get you out of their hair. But lucky for you, there’s an opening out on the battlefield.”
“And I’m lucky for that because…?”
“Perspective. It’s all a matter of perspective. Overwatch Command has drafted new plans, there’s going to be an invasion of Helena – capital of the River Republic. If we take their capital, Overwatch hopes that they can force a surrender and end the war so they can free their hands to start moving the rest of the plan into motion.”
“You want Misfit to spearhead an attack into enemy territory?”
Juma sighed, “Not exactly spearheading, you'll be doing a different job in the city proper. I was hoping you’d get excited for the opportunity. But you’re going whether you like it or not-“
“Woah woah wait, you want us? Why? We’re not PCTs. We’re Penal unit.”
“I’m aware, Freeman. But you aren’t ordinary Penal-Unit. You’ve established contact with the native elves, correct? Your little escapade into the unknown, as stupid and misguided as it was, proved beneficial to us. We’ve made contact with the Warrior Elves, and they hold you in high regards for defending their home. If it was our call, you’d still be in solitary confinement. But it was your elf friends who stepped in.”
The word sent shivers down Eli’s spine as he heard it, ‘Never again’ he thought.
“They requested you join them. You’ll be accompanying a warrior elf duo into Helena to meet contacts there known as the ULA. They're rebels working against the Avonians themselves. All you have to do is follow instructions and I see no reason for your lucky streak to run dry.”
Panic. It flowed through Eli’s blood stream like a disease. Like a rot that couldn’t be cleansed. Everything that Misfit had worked hard to create, their sense of unity, threatened to be destroyed by this one act. At least on the factory floor, while they might be slaves stuck in the never-ending monotony and never-ending surveillance, they were safe from any direct danger. Out there, in the jungle, with the Avonian machines… there would be another Cato. What if it was more than one? Would it just be a constant slaughter of Misfit, one-by-one until nobody was left? Would it be him?
“No, no you can’t do this-“
“I have no choice, Freeman. And you don’t either,” Juma said to him.
“You’re putting Misfit in the danger zone! Invading Helena? For the love of god, we barely got out of Raritan alive! And you want us to go back?” As Eli’s voice raised in temperature, the guards around him put their hands on their stun sticks. Taking a threatening step closer. Yet it was – surprisingly enough – Juma who kept them at bay with a dismissive gesture from her hand.
“You don’t understand, Freeman. It’s not my call to make. I don’t make these decisions.”
“You’re the Captain! If it isn’t you who’s making these decisions, then who?”
“It doesn’t matter! Misfit came up on the list. Overwatch wants you there. Like it or not, you’re going. I’d suggest, for your sake, that you adjust your mindset. I don’t do this to hurt you. You know, I’m a Phantom too.”
Eli narrowed his face, “Okay… so what does that mean? We’re supposed to be friends now or something?”
“It means that I know a lot about you and where you come from. I understand a lot more about you than you might think.”
“You don’t understand me,” Eli spat out, “You don’t. You sit here in a airconditioned office, threatening us at gunpoint to do what you say. We are not the same. You’re not a Phantom, you’re a collaborator!”
“I think you misunderstand me. I was born in the Congo. As far as I remember the country was in the middle of a civil war, but when I was thirteen Rebels came from the east. They torched my home to the ground. My parents knew what was coming and moved us to the East African Federation, but they didn’t want refugees coming in. We always had to live out in the mandated refugee zones that used to move whenever a new corporation demanded they give up the land for development. Eventually I got tired of running, I joined the Federation as a mercenary when I was eighteen, fought against the Egyptians during the Nile War, watched as my family was killed during a POA raid in the 2040s.”
“So?”
“So, I know a lot about what it means to be a Phantom. Left behind by the world. Just disregarded. You lost your home to a typhoon when you were nine, spent your childhood drifting from one refugee center to another as an orphan. Alone. Vulnerable. Wishing someone would take you home, but they never came because there never was a home for you. Not until the government started taking Phantoms to fight in Korea. Except, the difference between you and me is that you ran while I collaborated.”
“Ran? That’s what you call it? Running away? You weren’t there in the tunnels of Seoul. You couldn’t see the sun for weeks at a time. Days and weeks blended into each other. Every moment you had to wear a gas mask and it suffocated you. I watched my best friends die there! And I had to abandon more to get out! You don’t think that hurt me? You call that… running away? You weren’t there. Anybody would’ve done what I did.”
Juma pursed her lips, shaking her head from side to side, “I’m afraid not. It’s one thing to desert, abandoning your team when they needed you. It’s another thing to kill your own Staff Sergeant in cold blood.”
It hit him. Like a pang of sudden realization. He was dragged back into the tunnels. The underground. The darkness of the metro. The odor of the dead. The screams of the decaying. Gunfire panged in the background. His eyes staring through darkness. He was starving. His hands cold, desperate.
In one second, he was garrisoned behind a wall of sandbags with his squad. His body shaking in fear. The others next to him were awake. They knew what Eli was about to do. And silently, they condoned it. They had planned it. His staff sergeant, the very thing keeping them in the tunnels was afar off. Pouring over a map of the tunnels. It had been his enforcement that kept the conscripts in line. Those who disobeyed, even those who went along, beaten. Hazed to enforce compliance.
His heart raced. Eli couldn’t bare it anymore. None of them could. They couldn’t be compliant.
In the next second, he held a pistol in his hands. Clasped around the holster. He felt the iron grip. His hands sensitive to all its features. His hands shook as they held the gun.
He stood up, slowly. Knees shaking as he did so. He felt the eyes of his squadmates on his back. The memory of their dead friends, the families they left behind, the homes they had been dragged away from, Eli could sense it all through the air. They knew he would do it. He was a Phantom. A refugee.
He didn’t have anything to lose, and they wouldn’t stop him.
Another second, he was standing next to Brooks. In the shadows. Watching. He could’ve gone back. He knew he should. But he couldn’t. His mind raced through his options. But he found himself raising the gun.
His squadmates closed their eyes, pretending to be asleep.
There were two gun shots. He dropped the gun and fled. Running for his life through the dark tunnels. Past the searchlights that were switched on. Away from the shouts of the officers and other soldiers who had been alerted. He sprinted away. As fast as he could. If he stopped, he’d be killed. Or worse. He had to get out. He didn’t know what happened to his squadmates. He only knew of one goal.
To survive.
As Eli sat in Juma’s chair he recollected his memories of what happened and what transpired afterwards. Alone. Baring the brunt of a cold winter with tattered uniform keeping him alive. And then, the memory of a mushroom cloud rising over Seoul. His eyes watered. Juma smiled in satisfaction.
“That’s what makes us different,” She said, “I’m guessing you didn’t tell Misfit about that part? Kept the fact you murdered your staff sergeant in cold blood a secret. If you want to keep them alive, they’ll find out sooner or later. Whether you want them to or not.”
“Why… why are you telling me this?”
“Because, believe it or not, I want to see you succeed. Maybe there’s some good part inside me that wants to be assured. Despite the fact you fragged your squad leader, I sort of get it. I’d like to see a Phantom have a happy ending for once. If what I’ve seen is anything to go by, Phantoms don’t have a hopeful future. But maybe you can give me that hope. That us Phantoms aren’t all doomed. But to do that, you’ll have to keep Misfit together. You can’t survive without them.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So, do you accept? The mission that is? You’ll go either way, but are you ready?”
Eli remembered the days spent wandering along the snow blown and abandoned streets of South Korea. By himself. Alone. Reduced to a state of survival. Ice sticking to his clothes. How he made it out alive was a miracle even now. Tears grew in his eyes when he thought of how different it could’ve been.
He couldn’t just look out for himself. He had to look after Misfit, and with any luck, they’d look after him. But that would mean agreeing with Rafael. There wasn’t a scenario in which Misfit could possibly both remain together – as a whole – and comply with Kovic. They would die here if they did. The only reasonable option, it would seem, would be to fight back. To resist. To die with fighting, like Cato believed. Yet, unlike Cato – Rafael had hope. Nihilism hadn’t crept in. There was a point to life. To be free. And that they could do it. If only they had each other.
But it was a terrifying thought. Just like he told Cato, rebellion was risky. That’s how he ended up in the Penal Unit in the first place. He wasn’t quite ready to accept the idea that it was all hopeless. His sentence had been extended, and now they were being sent out on what looked like a suicide job. Hopeless it seemed. But there had to be some way to hold out. That maybe it could get better? Maybe…
Eli looked up to Juma, who was leaned forward in her seat, “I eagerly await your choice. Freeman.”
And Eli gave her his answer.
Another sleepless night. Eli stared at the bottom of Dutch’s bed throughout the night. His hands shaking. He had told them all of what was going to happen. They were terrified. He could see it as the color of their faces drained. As their eye glazed over. As their expressions became grim.
He tried to soften the blow. But no matter how he put it, they’d know. Penal-unit soldiers sent out at the head of an invasion into the unknown. Practically a death sentence in all but name. Was it Overwatch’s way of getting rid of them? Eli thought that was what the factory floor was for. Perhaps they couldn’t be trusted there? Sent to work in the endless dance of machines as the life drained from their decaying souls. It wasn’t like their sentences would end any time soon. Freedom more an abstract idea than a concrete goal. By all accounts, Misfit was done for. No longer an issue. Yet, here they were being sent out to deal a strike into the unknown. Against the Avonians.
Eli flipped over in his hard bed for what must’ve been the millionth time. The war machines of the Avonians terrified him in a way he hadn’t yet realized until now, days after they had encountered them. The mechanical behemoths of the Avonian war machine were impossible to fully wrap his mind around. Although taking a sentry down felt somewhat liberating, it was hardly a easy task. It took the work of dozens, and even then it was off the backs of several dead – Cato included – in order to take just one Sentry down. And then what of their other machines of death? What of the Behemoths, the towering beasts straight out of a alien invasion? Their spotlights which illuminated all? Saw all? Destroyed all? What of the dragons, their metal augments, their fiery breath? What of the soldiers who had become machines in their cruel army? More machine than man. More metal than flesh.
Repeatedly in his mind, he saw the machines move. He could picture them tower over him. He could picture prisoners to his left and right being disintegrated by their weapons. There in one second and gone in the next. He imagined Misfit there too. Horrible fates for each of them, including himself. Bloody goo, split in half, crushed, shot, disintegrated, each ending that played in Eli’s mind was only more horrifying than the last. He wanted to stop imagining it, to stop thinking. And yet he couldn’t.
Moonlight crept in from his window. The night was still young. It wasn’t too late to go to bed. But he was afraid. If he closed his eyes he might have dreams. Nightmares. A childish fear that brought him back to his old home. His real home. In his room as a child, afraid of closing his eyes for fear of the nightmares he’d have. Yet, all of his nightmares paled in comparison to reality. He could wake up from a nightmare. He could escape from a bad dream. But he couldn’t escape from reality. There was no waking up from that. Even out here in a land of Elves and dragons and magic and giant robots and whimsical creatures of make-believe and fantasy and wonder. Even in a new world, reality encompassed all. The one he could not escape from.
Every morning when he woke up, he expected to do so back on Earth. Where everything – terrible as it was – was at least normal. Where all the fantastical and monstrous things he saw on Planet Narva remained in the world of fantasy and legends. And yet, every morning he was disappointed.
He closed his eyes, preferring the nightmares. The last thing he saw was the moon. The singular thing that kept him tethered back to Earth. Other than Misfit, the only sense of familiarity in a alien world. Other than Misfit, the only sense of hope. Other than Misfit.
He went to bed with his pillow wet with tears and saliva, silently weeping himself to sleep as he crept further into the dark embrace of sleep. The one reprieve. Tomorrow will be a new dawn. With hope, he’d wake from this long nightmare. With hope, he’d come back home.
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==[A RAY OF HOPE]==
With much of the world embroiled in conflict and shortages over critical resources, one of the most important zones in the fight for Planet Earth's future has been the continent of Africa. The East African Federation and The United States of The Gulf of Guinea, have emerged as the two most prevalent rising powers on the continent, fighting to shape Africa's - and by extension Planet Earth's - future. Through the economic catastrophes of the 2030s and conflicts of the 2040s, the two powers have grown to fill the vacuum left by larger powers as the stains of European imperialism fade underneath the rising seas. The success of East African democracy in particular has inspired hope across the continent in democratic government and unity through diplomacy and not via violence. But the light of The Federation's democracy does not burn pure, and despite the major achievements made in uniting the bickering powers, threats remain all around them.
To the north, Egypt has been embroiled in proxy conflict between the POA and Coalition as they battle not only for control of the Suez Canal, but also of the precious Nile River who's waters provide sustenance for half of the continent's population. The Egyptian invasion of Sudan and outbreak of war against Ethiopia - where the Nile originates - will determine whose hands the precious water lies under the control of, and East Africa has involved itself in this fight heavily. Often aligning with The Global Strategic Coalition to wrestle back control over its own home. Meanwhile, the refugee phantoms of war and catastrophe across the continent are being expelled to Federation borders, where the panicking government has opted to house them in shelters that have been described as "Little better than internment camps". Resource strained, and under increasing pressure to isolate itself from the rest of the continent's affairs, East Africa is descending into its own twilight known as "The Crisis of Democracy".
And on the opposing side of the continent is the United Gulf of Guinea, whose rise to power has seen it become heavily militarized at the expense of its own democracy. Government corruption stemming from the oil companies in control of some of the last reserves on planet Earth have turned the United Gulf from a beacon of rising global powers, into a pariah state. A bloated military fights endlessly against its neighbors to keep the nation secure, but the conflicts that the nation stokes only grow worse and with more serious repercussions. Soliciting support from the POA has placed them in direct conflict with the interests of The Coalition and quite often has placed them as direct rivals with The East Africans. Despite the crisis and chaos, the USGG remains as the most militarily powerful of the two powers, even as The Federation holds significant economic leverage. As the two rising powers clash against the continent, their successes and failures will determine the fate for millions living in the original lands of mankind.
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>>>[A RAY OF HOPE]
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