Myrmidon

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

He heard the whistling sound first, a noise he knew all too well. A mortar shell was aloft and coming right for him. Cursing under his breath, Chapel just had time to throw himself to one side as the shell hit the road ahead of him, blasting him with flying debris—chunks of concrete, clods of dirt. He heard the whistle again even as he jumped back up to his feet. The next round hit the building nearest to him, and its front wall exploded outward in a storm of broken window glass and pinwheeling boards. Something swiped across Chapel’s face, and he felt blood roll down his cheek to spatter on his shirt. The noise and force of the blast made his teeth ache and his head pound. He desperately wanted to just drop to the ground, roll up into a ball, and wait for it to stop.

But his only chance was if he kept moving. He tried to run in a broken pattern, zigzagging left and right, juking like a quarterback trying to reach the end zone as shell after shell came down all around him. One went off so close behind him, it knocked him forward and sent him sprawling, but he recovered before his face hit the road surface, stumbled upward, and kept moving.

Deafened by the noise, dazed by the constant waves of pressure, half-blinded by the flashes of light, Chapel kept moving, kept running. Up ahead, he could see where the administrative buildings ended and the wide area of empty ground opened up. Out there lay the igloos and Belcher. If he could just make it in time, if he could—

A fountain of dirt erupted right under his face. Bits of concrete, accelerated to near the speed of sound, cut into his legs and his chest, and as the blast turned his head to the side, he saw strips of silicone torn right off his artificial arm. The ground buckled underneath him, and Chapel couldn’t keep his footing, couldn’t take another step because there was no solid ground to stand on. He twisted to one side as he fell, throwing his good arm over his face just as another shell landed a few dozen feet away. A dozen pinpricks of agony lit up along his forearm as shrapnel dug through his skin. He could think just clearly enough to realize that if he’d kept running, if he’d stuck to his course, that second shell would have hit him square in the back.

He forced himself to move, to turn over, to get one knee underneath him. There was no way he was going to make it. They’d found his range, and the next shell was going to hit him, he knew that in the way he knew his multiplication tables—as a cold, rational fact. It didn’t scare him—everything was happening too fast for fear—but it couldn’t be denied, either.

He put one hand down on the ground. The shell didn’t hit in the time it took him to push upward, to get a foot squarely planted on solid earth. He started to extend his knee, thinking—this is it, this is the moment, the time of my death—

It didn’t come. The shell didn’t land, the ground beneath him didn’t explode. He pushed himself upright, tottering on his feet.

And still the shell didn’t come for him.

His ears were ringing so loudly he couldn’t comprehend at first how quiet the street had become. The silence that had descended.

Nothing was exploding. No peals of thunder shocked his senses, no blasts of earth and broken pavement thudded against his body.

For a second, he just stood there, because it was all he could do. He tilted his head backward a few degrees and looked up at the drones banking high overhead. Looked for the artillery shell that was going to come for him, that had to be coming.

Then, through the rush of blood in his head, he heard a new sound. A buzzing sound like a mosquito might make. Or four mosquitoes, to be exact.

A drone came buzzing up the street, headed in his direction. Chapel squinted at it, wondering what the hell was happening now. It wasn’t a Predator or a Global Hawk like the ones up in the sky. This was a little quadrotor, a spindly thing of plastic arms and four whirling helicopter blades that floated on the air like a plastic bag caught in an updraft. It had a single camera slung under its center of gravity but no weapons at all.

It drifted toward him, dancing on its four rotors. It stopped a few feet away, just hanging there in the air. And then it waggled back and forth, like a friendly robot trying to get his attention.

Chapel licked his lips. “Angel?” he asked.

The quadrotor waggled again, more excitedly this time.

He couldn’t believe it. She must have followed him, seen him running up the street, watched as the mortar shells burst around him. And somehow she had convinced the mortar crews to stop firing on him. For the hundredth or maybe the thousandth time, she had saved his life.

“Thanks,” he said, because he didn’t know any bigger words that made sense to use at that moment.

The drone waggled happily. Then it swiveled around him and headed off down the street, off toward the igloos.

He knew enough to follow it, as fast as he could.