Chapter 3: Go Time
The grey-yellow seam on the horizon bled upwards, diluting the night. In their shallow scoop of rock, the air grew taut with a silent, communal dread. Reese watched it happen, the way the soldier’s shoulders tightened, the minute flex in Roman’s jaw as he turned from the dawn.
“Try the comms again,” Roman said, his voice low. “Low burst. Prioritize signal clarity over encryption.”
The soldier, Lira, nodded. She unclipped a slim unit from her belt, its screen casting a sickly green glow on her face. Her fingers moved, typing in codes. She held the unit up, adjusting the antenna. A soft, pulsing whine emitted from the device. They waited. The whine cycled, repeated. No answering chime. No static acknowledgement. Just empty air.
“Nothing, Executor,” Lira said, her voice flat. “The mountain ridge is blocking everything. Or…”
“Or they are jamming the standard bands,” Roman finished. He didn’t sound surprised. “Conserve power. We’ll try again at the next high point.”
The light was advancing. It was a subtle change at first, a lifting of the absolute black from the canyon floor into tones of deep blue and charcoal. But to Reese, it was a rising thermostat in a locked room. A prickle began along his forearms, faint as static. He shifted, the pneumatic brace on his leg hissing softly.
Roman was already shrugging out of his long, fortified trench coat. Without a word, he moved behind Reese, draping the heavy material over his head and shoulders like a shroud. The inner lining was cool, smelling of ozone and graphite. It blocked the burgeoning light, casting him into a personal, fabric-walled darkness.
“Don’t get sentimental, Vale,” Reese muttered, his voice muffled by the coat.
“Sentiment is inefficient. You are an asset with a critical vulnerability. This mitigates it.” Roman’s reply was close, matter-of-fact. He settled against the rock beside him, his body a solid barrier between Reese and the mouth of the recess. “Try to sleep. We move at dusk.”
Sleep was impossible. The prickle became a warm itch. The itch became a slow, deep ache, as if his bones were being gently compressed. He’d been drained before, but this was different—a systemic weakening, like his very cells were forgetting how to hold together. He focused on the sounds: Lira’s controlled breathing, the scuff of her boot as she adjusted her position, the distant, lonely cry of a carrion bird. He fed on nothing. The well was dry.
Hours bled past, marked by the creeping line of sunlight that inched across the canyon floor below, never touching them but making its presence known. Roman didn’t move. Lira periodically checked the comms, each attempt met with the same hollow whine. The air grew warmer, thicker.
It was Lira who saw it first. A flicker of movement, a sun-glint off glass or metal, far down the canyon where the wreckage smoked.
“Contact,” she breathed, the word barely audible. “East canyon rim. Two scouts.”
Roman didn’t turn his head. “They’re sweeping. They’ve lost our trail and are triangulating. How much time?”
Lira peeked over the ledge. “At their pace? Fifteen, twenty minutes before they pass directly below or see the climb-up.”
“Options?” Roman’s question was for both of them.
“We’re in a bowl,” Reese said from under the coat, each word an effort. “They come up, we’re cornered. I’m currently about as useful as a soggy paperweight.”
Roman was silent for a long moment. The sunlight was now a palpable pressure, even through the coat. Reese could feel it seeping in, a slow poison. “We let them pass,” Roman decided. “If they find the climb, we engage with maximum speed. Silent take-downs. We need their gear, their comms.”
It was a frail plan, woven from desperation and the thinning thread of hope that the scouts would miss a barely-visible scramble of boot prints in the predawn gloom.
They didn’t.
The crunch of gravel underfoot was unmistakable, directly below their perch. A voice carried up, young, edged with nervous excitement. “...blood here. On the rock. They went up.”
“Hell of a climb with a busted leg,” a second, older voice replied. “Flush ’em out.”
A bolt-action rifle coughed. The round impacted the rock face a foot below Lira’s position, spitting stone chips. Ambush was no longer an option.
Roman moved. “Now.”
Lira rose, fired three rapid shots down into the canyon. A yelp of pain answered. Roman was already going over the ledge, not climbing down, but dropping, using the angled rock to control his fall. He landed in a roll amid the two scouts. Reese heard the sharp, wet crack of bone, a gurgled shout cut short.
He threw the coat off. The full, hammer-blow of daylight hit him. It was like being skinned alive. The world dissolved into a white-hot haze of agony. He couldn’t see, could only hear the scuffle below, Lira’s covering fire, Roman’s grunt of effort.
Then more voices. Echoing from the canyon mouth. The scouts hadn’t been alone. A main force, drawn by the gunfire.
“Roman!” Lira shouted, ducking as return fire peppered the ledge.
Reese crawled to the edge, blinking against the scorching blur. Four figures were advancing, using boulders for cover. One carried a heavy, drum-fed weapon. Roman was behind a slender rock column, pinned. One of the initial scouts lay still at his feet; the other was crawling away, clutching a ruined arm.
The math was final. They were out of time, out of cover, and out of daylight. The sun was a kiln, baking the weakness deep into his marrow. But the violence… the sharp, bright fear of the wounded scout, the focused, lethal intent from the advancing fighters… it was food. Thin, terrible, but present.
He had a choice: dissolve quietly in the sun, or burn up using what was left.
“Hey, assholes!” Reese yelled, his voice cracking. All movement seemed to pause for a fraction of a second. He pushed himself up onto his knees, a silhouetted target against the rock. “You looking for a party?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He reached down into the hollow, screaming place inside him and tore.
It wasn’t like drawing power. It was like igniting the fumes of an empty tank. A concussive wave of raw force rippled out from him, not a directed blast, but a hemisphere of punishing energy. It shredded the air, kicking up a storm of dust and pebbles. It hit the advancing group like a wall. The one with the heavy weapon stumbled, the gun firing wild into the sky. Two others were knocked flat.
But the cost was immediate and catastrophic. The sun’s influence rushed into the void he’d just created. He felt his skin tighten, parchment-dry, and a network of fine, black cracks webbed across the back of his hands. A visceral, hollowing ache emptied him from the inside out. He pitched forward, barely catching himself on his hands, vomiting nothing but thin, acidic bile.
The distraction was enough. Roman moved. A flash of steel, two precise, brutal shots from a sidearm. Lira took the opening to pick off the one struggling with the heavy weapon. In ten seconds of precise, sun-drenched chaos, it was over.
Silence returned, louder than the gunfire. The stink of cordite and blood mixed with the dust. Roman strode to the crawling scout, the one with the ruined arm, and ended him with a single, merciful shot. He didn’t look at Reese. He started looting bodies, collecting weapons, canteens, a handheld radio from the leader’s belt.
Lira climbed down, her face pale. She glanced at Reese, hunched over and trembling, the black cracks on his skin already fading to an ugly, deep bruise-purple as the sun’s direct assault was momentarily blocked by the canyon wall. She said nothing.
Roman finally approached. He stood over Reese, blocking the sun. His expression was unreadable. “Can you stand?”
“Was it good for you?” Reese rasped, trying for the old smile. It felt like a grimace.
Roman didn’t dignify it. He bent, hauled Reese’s arm over his shoulders again, and lifted. The world swam. They moved past the bodies, towards the canyon mouth where the attackers’ vehicle—a rugged, open-topped buggy with thick tires—was parked.
Getting into the passenger seat was a blackout event. He came to as Roman shoved a canteen into his hands. “Drink.”
The water was warm, metallic, perfect. Lira took the driver’s seat, firing up the buggy’s engine. It roared to life, a healthier, angrier sound than the transport’s had been.
Roman slid into the back, his eyes on the scanner from the looted radio. It buzzed with confused, angry transmissions seeking the lost patrol. “They’ll converge on the gunfire. Go. Due west. Stick to the hard plate when you can.”
Lira threw the buggy into gear. It lurched forward, spinning tires until they caught, then catapulting them onto the broader expanse of the ancient highway. The wind was a physical blow, hot and gritty, but it swept over Reese, cooling the fever in his skin.
He slumped in the seat, the world a blur of washed-out color and pain. In the rearview, he saw Roman watching the horizon behind them, the scanner held close, his face a monument of cold calculation. Ahead, the road stretched towards a line of distant, purple hills. Somewhere beyond them was the bunker. Safety. A locked door.
Reese let his head fall back against the seat. Every nerve was a live wire, every heartbeat a dull thud of exhaustion. But they were moving. The sun was at their backs, beginning its long fall.
He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to hide from the light, and from the knowledge of what that desperate burst had cost him. It wasn’t just energy he’d burned. It was something closer to the core. A piece of whatever precarious thing kept him from becoming just another bleached bone on the asphalt.
The buggy ate up the miles, the engine’s roar a steady promise. Roman’s voice cut through it, quiet, directed at Lira. “Increase speed. We’ll be in the shadow of the range soon.”
Reese kept his eyes shut, listening to the road, to the wind, to the silent, steady breathing of the predator at his back, and wondered what the price of sanctuary would be this time.
The buggy’s tires hummed over the cracked highway as the sun finally bled out behind the western hills. The relief was immediate, a cooling balm that seeped through Reese’s cracked skin and let him draw a full breath that didn’t scorch his lungs. He watched the landscape lose its harsh edges, shadows pooling in the ravines like ink. The headlights of their stolen vehicle cut a frail path through the gathering dark.
“Two klicks out,” Lira said, her voice tight. She hadn’t spoken much since the canyon.
Roman, in the back, was a statue of concentration, his eyes on the darkened scanner. The enemy chatter had faded to static an hour ago. “Slow approach. Lights off at the one-klick marker. We’ll walk the ridge.”
The bunker wasn’t marked. To anyone else, it was just another scarred hillside of scree and stubborn brush. But Reese knew the shape of it, the specific way three rocks lay against a rusted sheet of pre-Collapse siding. It was home, or the closest thing he had to one. A place with a locked door.
Lira killed the lights and the engine a thousand meters out. The silence that followed was profound, broken only by the ticking of cooling metal. No night insects sang here. The air felt still, waiting.
“See anything?” Reese whispered, his own senses stretching out, tasting the air. He got nothing. No fear, no desire, no watchful tension. Just a hollow, wind-swept emptiness.
“No sentry heat signatures,” Lira murmured, peering through a compact scope. “No perimeter drone ping-back. That’s… not procedure.”
Roman was already moving, slipping from the buggy without a sound. “Procedure is dead if they’re jamming the broad spectrum. Follow. Quietly.”
The climb up the ridge was a fresh torment for Reese’s leg, but the night fed him just enough to mute the worst of the pain into a manageable throb. He focused on placing his feet, on the grit of the stone under his palms. They crested the rise and looked down into the small, natural bowl that hid the bunker’s entrance.
The massive, reinforced blast doors, meant to withstand a direct hit from a hell-cannon, stood slightly ajar. One was bent inward at a drunken angle, its locking mechanism a bloom of torn metal. Dark stains, black in the moonlight, spattered the concrete apron.
“Fuck,” Lira breathed, the word dropping like a stone.
Roman didn’t hesitate. He descended the slope with controlled, rapid strides, pistol drawn. Reese hobbled after him, a cold knot forming in his gut that had nothing to do with hunger. The silence was wrong. A bunker was never silent. You always heard the hum of filters, the faint echo of voices, the clang of someone on duty in the machine shop.
This was a tomb’s silence.
They flanked the ruined doorway. Roman went low and through. Reese followed, his eyes adjusting to the deeper dark of the entry corridor. The emergency strips along the floor were dead. The only light came from Roman’s weapon-mounted torch, cutting a stark beam through swirling dust.
The beam found the first body ten feet in. It was Miller, from logistics, sprawled on his back. His sidearm was still in its holster. He’d been shot twice in the face at close range. The concrete around his head was a Rorschach test in brown.
“Clear,” Lira whispered from the other side of the passage, her torch beam trembling slightly as it swept over another shape slumped against the wall.
They advanced in a grim procession. The evidence was everywhere, and it spoke of a swift, merciless internal purge. Not an assault from outside. An infection from within. Bodies lay where they’d fallen—in doorways, beside consoles, one still clutching a mug of cold recaf. The air stank of copper, voided bowels, and the bitter tang of spent energy weapons.
The command center was a charnel house. Screens were shattered. Consoles smoked. Commander Hale was pinned to her chair by a monofilament blade through her throat, her mouth open in a final, silent order. Roman’s torch beam moved over her, over her dead tactical team, his face a carven mask. Only a tiny muscle jumping in his jaw betrayed him.
A scuff of boot on glass.
Roman spun, firing twice into the darkness of a side corridor. A choked cry answered. A figure stumbled out, clutching a bleeding shoulder, a rifle clattering to the floor. It was a young man, his face pale under streaks of grime and blood. He wore a bunker maintenance uniform, now filthy.
“Don’t!” the kid gasped, sinking to his knees. “Please.”
Roman closed the distance, his boot coming down on the dropped rifle. “Who.”
“They… they just came in. Knew all the codes. The doors just opened.” The kid was shaking, his eyes wide with a terror so bright and fresh Reese could almost touch it. “They had inside schematics. Went right for comms and command. It was over in minutes.”
“Who.” Roman repeated, the word leaving no room for anything but an answer.
“I didn’t see faces! They wore neutral masks. But their gear… it was nice. Factory-fresh. Not scavenged.” The kid coughed, blood on his lips. “One of them… he gave orders. Called the other one ‘Executor’.”
The word hung in the fouled air. Roman went utterly still.
“Vault Aurelius,” Reese said, the pieces snapping together with a sickening clarity. “Another enclave. A rival.”
“Impossible,” Roman said, but the word lacked his usual absolute conviction. It was flat, testing the idea.
“They cleaned out the armory and the high-value supply lockers,” the kid whimpered. “Took the data drives. Left the food and water. They were… efficient.”
Roman’s pistol rose an inch. “How are you alive?”
“I hid in a coolant duct! I just… I hid.” The kid broke into sobs, his body folding in on itself.
Roman stared at him for three long heartbeats. Then he lowered his pistol. “Lira. Scavenge what they left. Medical, nutrient paste, water, any spare power cells. Five minutes.”
He didn’t look at the kid again. He turned and walked stiffly towards the shattered comms hub, stepping over the dead with a mechanical precision that was more disturbing than any outburst of rage could have been.
Reese leaned against a broken console, the hunger in him stirring not from the ambient fear, but from the cold, volcanic fury radiating off Roman. It was a dark, potent vintage. He let a trickle of it in, felt it fortify his limbs. “So. Not everyone back at the vault thinks you’re management material.”
“This wasn’t a critique of my leadership,” Roman said, his voice dangerously soft as he yanked a shattered drive from its housing. “This was an asset strip. And a message. They knew we were out, vulnerable. They timed it.”
Lira returned, her arms laden with packs. She’d changed into fresh tactical gear from a locker. “Got what we can carry. The buggy won’t hold much more.”
Roman tossed the useless drive aside. “Then we move. Now.”
“Where?” Lira asked, her eyes darting to the dead around them.
Reese pushed off the console. The memory surfaced, an old, faded pre-Collapse tourist flyer he’d seen pinned in someone’s bunk. “There’s a place. Up north, in the lake district. Remote. Probably picked clean ages ago, but the structures might be sound. Resort lodges, spaced out. Defensible, if we’re careful.”
Roman’s gaze sliced to him. “You’re sure?”
“Sure as I am about anything. Blue Water Point. Had a stupid smiling sun on the brochure.”
For a moment, Roman just stared, as if weighing the very concept of a brochure against the scent of blood in the air. Then he gave a single, sharp nod. “We’ll need to swap vehicles. Theirs will have trackers. Lira, check the motor pool.”
The motor pool was a graveyard of sabotaged vehicles. One rugged all-terrain truck, however, had only had its comms array ripped out. It had a full cell and a hardened chassis. They transferred their meager supplies in tense, silent minutes.
The kid from the ducts watched them from the command center doorway, silhouetted against the devastation. Roman stopped before leaving, looked back at him. “The water filters in sector four are intact. You have a week’s worth of paste in secondary storage. Good luck.”
They left him there, standing among the dead, and didn’t look back.
The truck’s engine sounded obscenely loud as they pulled away from the hillside, leaving the open maw of the bunker behind. Lira drove. Reese slumped in the passenger seat, watching the stars through the cracked windshield. Roman sat in the back, surrounded by their stolen supplies, the captured scanner in his hands.
He’d been silent for twenty miles. Now, his voice cut through the rumble of the tires, low and venomous.
“Executor Davorin. Of the Helios Wing. He’s always argued for a more… aggressive consolidation of surface assets.” Roman wasn’t talking to them. He was thinking aloud, connecting wires in a bomb. “He had access to the broader network schematics. Knew our protocols. His brother is on the Vault Aurelius security council.”
Reese watched the broken white line of the old highway flicker past. “So this was a boardroom coup with bullets. You get vanished out here, your bunker gets folded into his operations. Neat.”
“It’s not neat,” Roman snapped, the control fracturing for a second. “It’s a violation of the Accords. It risks open conflict between enclaves. It’s…”
“It’s what you would have done, if you thought you could get away with it,” Reese finished softly.
The silence that followed was thick, charged. Roman didn’t deny it. He leaned forward, his presence filling the space between the seats. “He miscalculated. I’m not dead. And he doesn’t have everything.”
“He has your bunker, your people, and your stuff,” Reese said.
“He doesn’t have you.” Roman said it without inflection, a simple recalibration of the ledger. “An asset with unique intelligence on demonic incursion patterns, and a walking breach of physical law. He wanted this place stripped. He’d have wanted you catalogued and contained.”
Reese let out a short, humorless laugh. “I feel so special.”
“This changes the calculus entirely.” Roman settled back, his mind already racing ahead, plotting vectors on a new, darker map. “Blue Water Point. How remote?”
“Middle of nowhere. Pretty lake, rotting cabins, probably a few hungry things in the woods. No strategic value. No reason for anyone from the vaults to ever go there.”
“Good.” Roman’s eyes were invisible in the dark behind him, but Reese could feel them, sharp and calculating. “Then that’s where we disappear. And we plan.”
The truck sped into the deep night, leaving the scent of ash and blood far behind, carrying them toward the imagined sanctuary of a forgotten lake. Inside the cab, the only sounds were the engine’s growl and the silent, furious turning of a man betrayed, beginning the meticulous work of designing a revenge that would burn an entire wing of his own world to the ground.