Rising by Patrick Sean Lee (sneezy the snowman read aloud .txt) 📖

raises the gun and points in at the guard’s chest.

“Hi.”

 

SIXTEEN

 

The guard stumbles backward in total shock. He isn’t your typical Polit bully. His dress shirt is hanging out at the waist. No cap. No black jacket. He looks to be a hundred or two hundred pounds overweight. Maybe that’s why his superiors stuck him here. As far as I know, Polit doesn’t do away with their own. Maybe in this case they should have.

Sant darts into view, grabs Logash and shoves him beside Mondra into the interior. He smashes into the guard’s chest, whimpering that we made him do it. Mondra follows him, raising the gun to the guard’s head.

“That’s an old one, buddy. Surprised you fell for it. We’ve come to your little horror house to pay a visit to some of your friends,” she berates him.

Sant wastes no time. He moves quickly, raises Logash up from his sagging position at Fatboy’s feet, and then rams the kid into the wall.

“Don’t move.”

I look beyond the horrified guard down a long hallway of three story-tall racks packed with crate upon crate of stuff. High up at the ceiling I see girders with huge lights spaced between each aisle. If this is all food, there must be enough to feed starving Blacks for ten years!

“Do you know where we are, Mondra?” I ask, looking around in amazed disbelief at the sheer size of this warehouse.

“No. They didn’t take me on any tours when I was visiting. This guy does, I’m willing to bet,” she says stepping forward and planting the barrel of the gun beneath the guard’s flabby chin.

He points over his shoulder, down the wide hallway. “Don’t shoot me, girl, please. I jus’ work here…do what they tell me, that’s all!”

His voice sounded more human through the speaker outside.

“Well, you’ll lead the way to wherever your buddies hang out,” Mondra snarls.

“No he won’t,” I say walking past him, looking up and down the aisles. “Bring them along until I find...” I let my voice trail off. They must have some rope among all these crates. Something. We’re not dragging two pieces of deadweight anchor along behind us. Not a chance.

“Let me shoot him, then,” Mondra says.

“No! Please! I swear, I don’t have nuthin’ to do with the prisoners…not even the other…”

“Shut up,” I hear Sant snap at him.

There! Two tiers up. A box with the end of a thick piece of rope hanging out, halfway down this aisle. I dash forward and begin to scale the rack to get at it. Without a knife, though, it will be impossible to cut four lengths to tie them up with.

One problem at a time. I crawl behind the crate and use my feet to push it over the edge. It lands with a crash.

“Sant, find something to cut the stuff with.”

 

Five minutes later. I’m standing in front of the petrified guard and Logash. Mondra is finishing up the job of lashing both of them to one of the legs of the racks. It isn’t good enough that their arms are tied up with knots I’ve never even dreamed of, she cuts another two lengths and wraps the first around the guard’s throat, yanking his head into the leg of the rack. I hear the loud knock, and hear him groan in pain. I’m pretty sure she wants him to choke to death.

Using the small knife Sant dug up, I cut two pieces of Fatboy’s sweaty-looking shirt. Shove one into his gagging mouth until his cheeks bulge bigger than they already are, the other piece into Logash’s.

“Never mind tying his head to the rack, Mondra," I say nodding at the kid. "He won’t call out. Let’s move.”

I don’t want her to kill him. I don’t care about the guard so much, but even though I know he’d scream bloody murder if he could…Logash is too young to die. Strange. Either one could do us serious harm by crying out. They’re equally dangerous…

Maybe it’s the gluttonous appearance of the older guard.

“Can you believe this place,” Mondra half-whispers when we have passed the tenth aisle and approach the door into…what? Who will we find behind it?

“We survived on some pretty pasty tasting junk…and not much of that! Why so many crates?”

Guns? Torture devices?

I glance up, my right hand holding Sant’s left tightly. My heart sinks. There, a foot above the door, one of the watcher devices. The tiny dot of light on the surface of it is blinking green. Unless the rest of the guards are sleeping, they have to know we’re here. I let loose of Sant’s hand and prepare myself to send the first of them up in flames after we open the door.

“See it?” I say to Sant.

“See what?”

“The watcher. Right up there over the door.”

“Yes,” he says looking up at the little metal ball stuck on the wall. “So what?”

Someone has to be watching us, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to ring the bell and introduce ourselves when whoever is on the other side opens it. There is no window in this door, it’s just a steel behemoth, that from the look of it an armored battle vehicle couldn’t knock down. Mondra is standing in front of the impregnable opening, testing the knob when I make the comment to Sant. She raises the butt-end of the gun and starts ramming it into the bottom of the watcher. The noise echoes back from the ceiling and hall behind us, but finally the case breaks loose and goes crashing to the floor. The little green eye is dead.

“There you go,” she says with a small, triumphant laugh.

I don’t feel any less watched somehow.

Mondra uses her free hand to rattle the lock again, and I know she’s thinking seriously about giving up on that; raising the gun and shooting it.

“You two stand back,” I say. “Get over there behind that rack.”

Mondra gets it immediately. “I so hope there’s someone right on the other side.”

She and Sant rush to the nearest rack a dozen feet away. I back up, and when they’re safe, raise my hands. We’ll see just how strong this Polit barrier really is.

I feel the electric buzz, the rush that starts in my feet and roars upward. A heavy tingling as my head spins for a second, and then in less than an instant, the louder than loud BOOM! when the force I unleashed hits the metal. For a second I’m deaf. There is only a painful ringing in both ears. I kind of hear Mondra screaming with delight, saying something, but it’s as though she’s speaking a hundred miles an hour through a hundred blankets.

I look at the spot where the heavy steel door used to be. There is a whirlwind of dust and smoke. A large jagged line of concrete with tangled spears of metal reinforcement bars bent inward. The once-door is ten or fifteen feet farther in, lying atop rubble, the center of it a bowlish shape. A leg, or part of one, is poking out from beneath it on the right side. There you go, Mondra. Wish granted.

Through the smoke and dust, farther into the wide hallway, a group of Polit guards are jumping around like bugs in a frying pan. A few of them have already regained their senses. They’ve trained their weapons on me—or us—and they're preparing to unload. Once again I let loose, and in a flash, the only thing left of them is dazzling balls of flame.

I can hear again. Alarms. Like hundreds of them. Gunfire, because Mondra is standing beside me shooting wildly into the haze of the hall through the opening. I give us maybe thirty seconds until every guard and Polit soldier in the place comes racing from both directions. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Maybe that wasn’t such a great move to blow the door down?

The dust begins to settle, and Mondra is off in a flash amid the blaring alarm before I can take a step forward. A single uniform far at the end catches my eye—an unsure movement on his part that costs him his life when my sister stops, takes aim, and fires. He lurches backward when the bullet strikes. His weapon rockets out of his hands and lands with a clatter that adds a weird few notes to the alarm blare.

“Where to, Mondra?” I yell.

The hallway we have entered is short in comparison to the cavernish warehouse hall behind us. Twenty-five or thirty feet long, maybe, with a line of doorways on either side. There are windows in most of the doors leading into the various rooms, and a few of them are lit up. Sant hurries forward, bends down and picks up the pistol the dead guard under the door lost when he got himself smashed, and then he goes to the first lit up door and peeks through the bottom of the window.

“Leave it!” Mondra calls back to him. “We have to get out of this hall!” He looks quickly over at me, and then leaves the door and whatever is inside to catch up to Mondra. He joins her at the end of the hall at the T, and I know she’s trying to decide which way to go. She scowls just as I catch up to them, and then raises the gun and fires at what at first I think is another of the watcher devices, but is, instead, one of the horns making the hideous racket. We might still be the star attraction on some master screen deep, deep in the interior of the prison, but at least we can talk in something like normal voices. Figure out in which direction we want to go to our deaths.

“Soooo? Where are the cells?” I ask, heaving in a deep breath of gunpowder-thick air, expecting one of the doors behind us to rip open, and a bunch of screaming, shooting guards to come flying out. Mondra looks left, then right, biting her lip, and then raises the gun again and blasts another watcher device leering down on us with its blinking green light.

“This way,” she says after it bounces in a hundred pieces onto the floor ten feet away. "I think."

Or the other way. Thank the gods there are only two exits. We have a fifty-fifty chance of choosing the right one. That’s some consolation, I suppose. Even so; even if this door is the right one, we’ve been spotted, and the gods only know how many Polit goons are on the other side. The alarms going off a few minutes ago surprised them, surely. The next time they’ll be ready, and the second the door swings in, they’ll start shooting. Can the force I unleash stop a hail of bullets, even if I react quickly enough?

But, we have to move forward. Or backward. Someplace other than where we stand. I’m thinking, now that we’re in the pot and the fire has been set beneath it…the plan to destroy the prison wasn’t a plan. Simply a reaction to all the events that unfolded, like an explosion that sent us in every which-way direction. Black and everyone left after we escaped. Probably all smashed to bits. React. Hatred for Polit and everything and everyone connected to it. Destroy.

Hah!