Captives (46 page)

"This is insane," Don said. "There's what, sixty of them and fifteen of us? What's Raina thinking?"

"That we are warriors who walk beneath the eye of the just moon. Now
move
."

Henna cut south at a fast jog. Don bristled but fell in behind her. By the time they reached the wide street the horsemen were using to return to the action, they could already hear the hooves. The warriors dispersed into the houses on both sides of the street. Mia nestled into a ground-floor window. To the west, the road ran uphill, divided by a median clogged with yellow grass and sickly shrubs. Two riders trotted into view, dappled by the shadows of the trees along the sidewalks. On horseback in their white cloaks, they looked like lost members of the Klan.

The two scouts advanced. Three blocks away, one of them came to an abrupt halt, gesturing to the other. He lifted a pair of binoculars and seemed to look straight at Mia. He turned his horse and backtracked up the street.

As soon as the two men were hidden by the trees, Henna ran outside and up the sidewalk. Moments later, she sprinted back into the street.

"Outside!" she yelled. "They saw us. They're circling further south. On me!"

She took off before Mia was outside. They sprinted three blocks south, tearing past yellow lawns and busted bungalows. As they entered the intersection, a shot roared from uphill. Henna threw herself into a bush. Mia ran to the corner of the house. Rifles fired back and forth. Hooves smacked the street. Don ran across it, looking to vault over the stone wall enclosing the house on the other side. A gun went off and he collapsed, crunching into the asphalt.

Mia peeked around the corner. A hundred feet away, forty of the riders were dismounting to take cover behind stoops, fences, and cars, sniping down at Henna's warriors. Another thirty were still on horseback, galloping south, perpendicular to the firefight.

"They're going to pincer us!" Mia pointed. Three rounds smashed into the side of the house, driving her behind it.

"Move back through the yards," Henna said. "Do not disengage. If we're to meet death, then we'll make that death last long enough to buy Raina time."

A strange mixture of emotions ran down Mia's nerves. The most obvious of them was fear: like everyone, she had felt it a hundred thousand times before, and could recognize its tingling touch in her sleep. The second feeling was not so common, but she had felt it enough over the last few weeks that it was nearly as familiar: bloodlust, battle-joy, whatever you wanted to call it. The angry, happy promise of violence and revenge.

The third emotion was brand new to her, but she recognized it on the spot: readiness. Finality. She wasn't certain that her life of late had amounted to anything, nor that this act would be anything more than a footnote in the last day of a lost cause. Yet nothing had felt more right since the quiet days when she and Raymond had lived together in their little house and had gone to bed side by side to the rustle of traffic and surf from beyond the back windows.

She threw herself prone and edged past the corner of the house, sniping at a woman as she advanced from a porch to a neighboring fence. Other members of the Sworn moved from cover to cover. Too many to stop, particularly once the other half of the riders came in behind the warriors' position. But Mia did not intend to retreat another inch.

A man shouted behind her. Mia didn't turn. A soft whirr hissed beneath the uneven gunfire. Nonsensically, someone laughed. At Mia's left, a woman on a bicycle burst into the intersection. Without so much as turning her head, the cyclist sprayed submachine gun fire up the street at the advancing Sworn.

Five more warriors on bikes stopped at the corner, then ten, dismounting and sprinting to firing positions. Up the street, the Stars' advance stopped cold. Rifle fire erupted a few blocks away—the cyclists had intercepted the other half of the horsemen, too.

As the reinforcements advanced to the next house, one dropped on the lawn, writhing in pain. But the others pressed on, moving forward in leapfrogging waves. Mia joined them. After they'd pushed the Sworn back by three houses, a woman shouted orders and the enemy began a general retreat. Mia held position, making each shot of her dwindling ammunition count. As she pulled up to reload, Mauser biked up the sidewalk and braked beside her.

"Hope you don't mind the intrusion," he said. "But it looked like you were about to get your ass kicked."

"We were." Mia slid the magazine in with a click. "Because
you
were taking forever to find a few bikes."

"The problem wasn't finding the bikes. The problem was inventing a brand new series of movements, formations, and signals for this nascent corps—and then training my people to use it." He folded his arms and smiled, surveying the retreating horsemen. "But now we're here. And no cavalry is safe against the Velocipedes of MORDOR."

"MORDOR?"

"Mauser's Order of Royal Dragoons, Okay, Raina?" He shifted his eyes. "It makes a little more sense when she's the one asking me what I'm talking about. What's the situation in the field?"

"Standoff," Mia said. "Lots of sniping. Raina was waiting on you and their infantry was waiting on the riders to flank us."

"If the riders are taken out of play, do you think you can make a push?"

"How should I know? I'm just a grunt, remember?"

He extended his finger and tapped it down on her shoulder. "Poof! You're a lieutenant. Now, Lt. Mia, if the riders are taken out of play—"

"Depends on how much ammo they've got for their automatics," she said. "From what they've shown us so far, I think we can force them back."

"Righto. Then I will be off harrying the Sworn about the countryside. I'll send word as soon as we've diverted them. Try not to get shot!"

He pedaled to join the advance. Mia ran to the next porch where Henna was plinking away at the Sworn, who had mounted up and begun to depart. Henna yelled to her people, regrouping at the corner where they'd mounted their original defense.

The encounter had been more about maneuvers than slaughtering each other wholesale. Henna's people had only suffered one dead, with another man shot through the shoulder. On their way back to Raina's defense, Henna sent the wounded man and a one-man escort to the medical tents waiting in the Seat.

At the site of the main battle, little had changed: the enemy foot soldiers remained ensconced at the Home Depot. A limb of their forces had advanced south to the strip mall across the street. In response, a column of defenders had set up in the packed parking lot of the DMV just two blocks away. Mia found Raina there hunched over a chess board, pieces arrayed in crude approximation of the field.

"Mauser's taking the Sworn on a wild goose chase," Mia said. "Once he sends word, he wants you to press the attack. Also, he promoted me to lieutenant."

"Mauser presumes much." Raina put her finger to a black pawn and pushed it up the board toward the white attackers. "But he's right. It's time to water our land with their blood. Cross to the park and see how close the enemy allows you to come."

Henna ordered her people back down the road. Once they reached the fortifications strung across the asphalt, they jogged to the other side, continuing eighty yards into the park before swinging north to come up on the infantry's flank. In the street, the two sides continued to exchange enough shots to keep each other honest.

Henna stopped behind a cinderblock bathroom and pointed ahead. Across fifty yards of open ground, a backstop was flanked by concession stands. These were nearly parallel to the Home Depot parking lot, allowing them to fire on the attackers' flanks. As soon as Henna poked her head around the corner, automatic fire rattled from the enemy, perforating the side of the bathroom. With the advance stalled, she ordered her people to find covered positions and do their best to serve as a distraction.

The cyclist came in from the south ten minutes later, heading right for Raina. He had barely said a word before she began yelling orders to her people. A column of men headed west, disappearing behind the shops. Raina's center flowed across the DMV parking lot. The enemy shifted forces to their west, anticipating the flank. The fire on the bathroom dwindled to almost nothing.

Henna drew her people to the building's corner. "Get ready. Don't stop until you hit cover." Over on the main fields, the gunfire abruptly quadrupled in volume. "
Go!
"

She burst from the corner and ran in a low crouch. Mia followed tight on her heels, the others pounding sod behind them. The machine gun roared to life. Bullets whined over their heads. Mia straightened and broke into a dead sprint. Behind her, a man screamed in pain. She slid into the safety of the concession stand.

She was the first one there. She took up against the corner and braced her rifle against her knee. In the Home Depot lot, the machine gunner stood behind a van, exposed to their angle. He tossed aside a spent magazine and clapped in a fresh one. Mia squeezed the trigger. The first shot went low. The second struck him square in the chest.

Pressed from both sides, the People of the Stars began an immediate withdrawal through the Home Depot; at the two entrances, men covered the retreat from behind the safety of bags of bark and rolled-up carpet samples. Henna ordered her people to hold position and ping away at the barricades. As they did so, she ran further east, meaning to get a look at what was happening behind the building.

By the time she got back, the few of the enemy holding the building broke and fled inside. Raina's people pursued. Bodies littered the parking lot; more had fallen in the last three minutes than in the preceding hour.

It was a good start, but the enemy had relocated across the street to the oil processing plant beyond. This was a mess of buildings, machinery, and industrial towers, providing ample cover and unobstructed firing lanes on the fields to the south and east. Just as Raina began to send one of her columns to the west for another flanking maneuver, the beat of hooves announced the return of the Sworn. They forced back Raina's troops before Mauser's bike-riding dragoons arrived to negate the horsemen's mobility.

The stalemate resumed, the two sides jockeying back and forth, trying to open a hole in each other's defenses. Mia went minutes at a time without firing her rifle. Anson flashed from behind the massive white holding tanks, bellowing orders, rallying his men to fill any holes that appeared in their zones of control. Mia had never been in a battle of anything on this scale, but she'd been a good student. The scenario was pure Civil War: too much firepower at play for either side to risk a full-scale charge.

But she had hope. They'd only had an hour of notice to prepare their defenses, and as the day stretched on, reinforcements trickled in, adding to Raina's ranks. A wagon replenished their ammunition. Runners brought food and water to the dispersed troops. A messenger came to Henna, redirecting them to the north to scout for any sign of an enemy supply line. If the fight turned into a siege, the People of the Stars were a long way from home.

Midway through the afternoon, with the fighting in a lull, they spotted a lone horseman riding hell bent for leather into the refinery. They hunkered down to watch from afar as he met with Anson. When the rider departed, Anson left with him, heading north at a full gallop. They waited until he was gone, then ran to tell Raina.

In his absence, the defenders began to make mistakes. Within twenty minutes, Mauser's dragoons penetrated the western edge of the refinery and met a sortie of the Sworn. By the time it was over, men in white cloaks scattered the grounds.

That was the turning point. The attackers never broke, but Raina's people forced them from the oil field and into the neighborhoods beyond, driving them back block by block. Now and then, Mia glimpsed Dreggers moving among his men, but given his results, he seemed to lack the spark Anson brought to the table. After an extended retreat, he dug his men in at the base of the hill where Western crossed PCH, installing his people inside the drug stores and fast food joints lining the strip.

After two probes were met with murderous resistance, Raina pulled her warriors back and set up on the high ground. A bike messenger came around to Henna's squad, straddling his Schwinn as he relayed orders.

"We're digging in," Henna said. "Good time for a nap, people."

"Digging in?" Jake glanced around the others. "We got them on the ropes, dude. Why stop here?"

"Because they're in buildings. And Raina just sent off for Molotovs."

Jake's annoyance was shoved aside by a toothy grin. "Bottles of boom? Say no more."

They holed up in a flower shop with a flat roof that had a view of one corner of the intersection. Mia thought Henna's suggestion had been a joke, but as soon as they'd been out of combat for five minutes, the afternoon sun made her incredibly drowsy. She sat against the back wall of the roof and leaned her head against its rough surface. The gunfire remained just erratic enough to jolt her from sleep whenever she got close.

She was somewhere between the two states when she first noticed the rumble. Her first thought was it must be more cavalry. Her eyes shot open. As the dose of adrenaline reached her brain, she realized the noise was all wrong for hooves, and calmed, thinking it must be the arrival of a wagon full of Molotovs. A moment later, as it grew loud enough to contend with the crack of the rifles, fresh doubt settled on her shoulders.

At the edge of the roof, Henna shouted and pointed. Mia lurched forward and skidded in beside her, peeping over the low wall. Way down Western, three vehicles rolled down the wide lanes on their own power. She recognized two at first glance—drab green trucks, notable only for the frighteningly large machine guns mounted in their middle—but the third seemed to be doing funny things to her eyes. Her memory, too. It was bigger than the trucks, hemispherical in shape.

"What the fuck is that?" Jake said. "A circus tent?"

"No," Mia murmured, and then the image came to her: the base of the hills of Palos Verdes, flames shooting forth to gobble up the houses and uproot the survivors. "It's a tank. An alien tank."