Chapter 8: One for All

McConnel

It’s been a while since Riley had heard anything other than the silence of the night. Most of the fighting that took place in the city happened on the first few days, and by now everyone who wanted to fight back other than Riley was either dead, missing, or was apparently undercover if Cipher was to be believed. Today was the eighth day of the takeover and Riley expected things to maybe heat up a bit after his run-in with Agent Cipher and that APC.

What he didn’t expect was to hear, and then witness a stealth plane being shot out from the sky and crash down in the commercial district with paratroopers jumping out from it on the way down.

While he was spitting his lungs out from all the running, Riley couldn’t decide which was stranger. The fact that a stealth plane flew over Blackfortress, or that the “stealth” plane was spotted by the anti-air guns and got shot down. If the cavalry was going to arrive with guns blazing then why didn’t they bring in heavy armor, or at least land outside the range of the SAM sites? And if they weren’t planning on getting spotted then why didn’t they make a nautical approach to Paks? Their northern coastal guns haven’t been working for months now…

The truth was, however, that Riley was just trying to keep his brain occupied with something to keep his excitement in check. It was quite possible that the plane was either empty or everyone inside got burned to a crisp, but if they weren’t, then Riley finally had the help he needed so badly. And if there were indeed no survivors, then at least he could fix up its radio and try to reach somebody outside of Paks.

Either way, he had to make it to that crash site, preferably in one piece.

Or maybe in two. He always wanted to have one of those arm-cannons that comic book superheroes had.

Once he finally managed to fill himself up with enough air, Riley continued going up the six floored concrete parking lot with all his strength. The enemy soldiers were going to be here any minute now, and Riley didn’t want to confront them with just the pistol he picked up earlier.

Another reason to reach that military plane.

He was only one floor below the top when Riley caught the glimpse of a few lights moving through the night sky. He stared at the sky for a while to find the lights again, but after a while, he shook his head and continued running towards the top.

About another minute of painful and exhausting running later Riley finally crawled his way up to the roof of the parking lot. A couple of cars were still sitting in their spaces, just as they did for the past week. Halfway between the broken and the mostly undamaged edge of the building was the crashed glider.

The area behind and around the plane was littered with metal and plastic debris, along with a few shiny objects which all looked quite similar to Riley’s bathroom mirror. He wasn’t sure why a military plane was loaded with mirrors, but he had seen weirder things in his life before. His caffeine-drained brain theorized that maybe they were for a long-range laser cannon, but his thoughts were interrupted when something moved inside the cockpit.

For a second Riley saw a glimpse of a bloodied arm moving in the darkness, which was enough incentive for him to run to the plane and open the cockpit’s door on the right side. It was stuck, but McConnel still had enough strength in himself to attempt to pry it open.

As the hatch finally broke off, a blonde-haired, light brown-eyed Aftonian soldier fell out right away. His vest had numerous dents and scratches on it and the man’s arm was bleeding, but the surprised look on his face confirmed that by some out-of-this-world luck, he was alive.

The two stared at each other for a few awkward seconds before blonde-hair spoke up.

“Hi.”

Riley blinked. “Umm, hello.”

The “conversation” came to an end when Riley heard shouting coming from the floor below him. He turned around to see if they were at the stairs yet, and then back to the Aftonian. “Do you have a spare chute?”

It was blonde’s turn to blink confusedly. “Uh, no? Why?”

“Oh gee, I don’t know, maybe because we’re about to be attacked by a group of armed soldiers and all I have is a pistol that I don’t even know how to use!”

The Aftonian shook his head quickly and hopped up to his feet. He then ran to the back of the plane while waving at Riley to follow him. Blonde ducked inside, and when he came back out, he had an AAS-3 shotgun in one hand, and two handguns in the other. He extended his shotgun arm towards Riley.

“Well do you know how to use this?” he asked hastily.

Riley never fired a shotgun in his life. The biggest weapon he used so far was his old revolver, and even with that he never actually killed anybody even while he was part of a Sapphirian military operation.

“Not at all! Maybe that handgun, but––”

Riley heard the sounds of running from the ramp behind him, and when he turned, he saw a large group of people running up to their roof. Noticing his surprise, Nick turned around and tossed the shotgun to Riley who almost dropped it. The Aftonian gripped both of his handguns and immediately opened fire at the ramp-people, while McConnel took cover behind one the wings of the plane. He aimed his shotgun at the enemies who were still standing and then pulled the gun’s trigger.

Nothing happened.

He tried pulling it again and was about to ask for assistance when a bullet flew by his head. Riley hunkered down and curled up as much as he could. He was fiddling around with the gun trying to figure out how it worked while the Aftonian was shooting down people left and right. When he finally found out that he had to pull the weapon’s pump first, Riley gripped the gun in his sudden sense of success, and right after he blasted another hole in the plane. The Aftonian jumped up from the surprise and stared at Riley with wide eyes.

“Sorry!” shouted Riley as he pumped it again and turned back towards the enemy. He took a deep breath.

Riley leaned out of cover and fired his weapon. He pulled the pump back and fired again, pretty much deafening himself while doing so. Another pump later he fired a shot once more, and he proceeded to repeat the process over and over while shouting from the sudden feeling of power, adrenaline, and dread.

He only stopped after his weapon clicked. He was about to ask for more ammo when Riley finally realized that the Aftonian stopped firing, along with the enemy. In fact, nobody, other than himself, was doing anything. When the ringing in his ear subsided a bit Riley finally lowered his weapon. As he looked around the battlefield, he felt something disappear inside himself.

Between all the blood, empty bullet casings and concrete pieces were the bodies of around a dozen people. A dozen people, who were all alive ten minutes ago. People, with plans and goals for their futures, with possibly families back home, were all lying on the dirty floor of the parking lot with destroyed torsos, limbs, or even heads.

Not one of those people were alive now, and none of their plans or goals were ever going to be accomplished. And the only one to blame for that was the person who was still holding the murder weapon.

Riley slowly looked at the shotgun in his shaking hands, and then dropped it to the floor. He felt light-headed, and if it wasn’t for the Aftonian soldier catching him he would have probably collapsed. Instead, he sat down to the concrete floor next to the plane and buried his face in his hands.

“Fuck…” he muttered.

The Aftonian crouched down next to him and grabbed Riley’s shoulders. “Hey, look at me!”

Riley didn’t want to look at anybody, but the soldier grabbed his chin and turned his head upwards. He looked straight into his eyes, and while it might have been some sort of hallucination, Riley could see both understanding and confidence in the Aftonian’s eyes.

“They were…”

“Listen, those people are dead, there’s no going around that. But if we hadn’t fought them off, we would be the ones lying there right now!” he explained, while pointing at the graveyard behind himself. “…and if you don’t want to go through this again, then we need to get moving as soon as we can!”

Riley shook his head. This wasn’t the first time he witnessed death and killing first-hand, but before today he was never the one who pulled the trigger on the enemy.

No, not the enemy. On other people.

Humans, just like himself.

Riley would have stayed there forever if the noise of a distant explosion didn’t shake his thoughts away. He turned his head towards the source, and then slowly remembered where he was.

“That…” he started after wiping a tear off from his left eye “…that didn’t sound like a simple grenade to me.”

The soldier looked into the distance as well to try to find the source of the sound. Neither one of them were lucky enough to find it in the darkness of the night.

“I seriously hope that wasn’t our other plane,” muttered the soldier.

Riley raised his head as he was finally stable enough to recall why he came here in the first place. “Plane, right. Do you happen to have a long-range radio in this one?”

“Yes but it won’t do us any good,” he replied. “During my… landing, it turned off out of nowhere. I’m not sure if it’s dead or if the signal is wrong, or…”

Another explosion sounded off. This one was much closer. Riley quickly walked past the soldier and crawled inside the plane’s cockpit. Once he found the radio among the wreckage of the control panel, he yanked it out as hard as he could and then turned towards the soldier. “I’ll take this back to my place and try to repair it. If you want to regroup with your unit, I suggest––”

“Wait, you will take it back to your place?”

Riley blinked. He grabbed onto the radio a bit more firmly. “I don’t suppose you have any experience with repairing and operating radios, right? Well I do, so unless you––”

“No that’s not what I mean,” interrupted the Aftonian again. “Why do you want to do it on your own in the first place?”

Riley lowered his eyebrows a bit. “Listen, I––”

“No, you listen! Right now, I have no clue if anyone else is still alive from my team, or from the residents for that matter, which means that you and I may be the only good guys left on this rotten island. You don’t know me, but as a trooper of the AMC I made an oath to protect our citizens and that is precisely what I’m going to do until we figure out a better plan.”

Riley’s first instinct was to punch the man in the face, but just as he gripped the radio even harder the words reached his brain.

Cipher was still out there, but Riley didn’t see any sign of the agent since they met, whereas this Aftonian soldier was asking to follow and help Riley. For once McConnel felt that the universe had listened to him and just conjured this soldier out of thin air. The truth was most likely far from that, but the fact remained that he could hardly ask for a better teammate.

He nodded, partly to himself and partly to the soldier, and then offered his hand.

“Alright, you’ve got yourself a reporter. Name’s Riley McConnel”

The Aftonian smiled and took Riley’s hand. “Private First-Class Nick Becket, from the AMC.”

After they shook hands, Riley put away the radio into his backpack while Nick picked up his shotgun. He looked at it, then turned towards Riley, who in turn shook his head.

“Don’t. You’ll get more use out of it than I do probably.”

“Prefer fighting with words?” Nick asked, probably as a joke.

“Instead of killing? Certainly!”

“Well, you should still take one of my handguns at least,” he said while shrugging “…better to have one and not use it, then to not have one when you do need it, right?”

Riley looked at the handgun Nick was holding in his other hand. It was a somewhat compact AAP model, with a magazine that was in front of the trigger guard. It was the standard-issue sidearm of the AMC as far as he knew, and Nick had a pretty good point. The Gredrurgian pistol he picked up looked and worked so much differently than this one, but the Aftonian one seemed… simpler.

Riley sighed, and then took the pistol. He examined it for a bit before he tucked the gun away into the back of his cargo pants.

“Let’s get going before I actually have to use this…” said Riley as he put his backpack over his shoulders.

*

Getting away from the parking building turned out to be rather easy. Following the rooftop battle, Riley and Nick quickly descended from the parking lot using a rope that they found in the crashed glider. Since the plane didn’t have any sort of engines or fuel tanks, both Nick and the rope only had to survive the initial crash and they didn’t need to worry about being burned up afterwards. Riley tied the rope around a concrete pillar and the two descended from the roof in a matter of seconds, instead of minutes. From there the two made their way towards the closest manhole cover which then Riley opened right away.

The smell of the sewers hit both right away, and Nick immediately took a few steps backwards.

“Ugh, it smells like someone died down there!” remarked Nick while coughing.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if someone actually did,” replied Riley somewhat jokingly as he pulled his t-shirt over his nose “…but the sewers are still the fastest and safest route we have.”

Not only was the smell bad, but it was also pitch black. Riley asked Nick for a light source, and after he gave him a green glowstick, he climbed down the metal ladder into the city-wide sewer system.

Once both reached the bottom it didn’t take long for Riley and his new partner to make their way to a quieter part of the city. They even got used to the smell after a while.

About half an hour later they were sitting inside their barricaded hotel room. While Nick was trying to determine where the rest of his unit could have landed, Riley was recording his 14th audio log.

“…so, unless that explosion was indeed the second glider, there should be eighteen Aftonian and Sapphirian soldiers in Blackfortress, not counting the crew of the Skyraider,” explained Riley.

“Why do you even record these things?” Nick asked from the table he was sitting at in the back of the room.

“Insurance. In case I bite the dust,” answered Riley.

Nick turned around. “Oh come on, don’t be like that. You’ve been here for over a week now, right? If you survived this long––”

“That’s because I holed myself up all this time with nothing but canned food and crickets as company! Now that I'm out in the open it's gonna be a lot harder to stay alive.”

Nick opened his mouth to answer but, in the end, he did not say anything.

Riley turned back to his camera to continue his log. “So, as I was saying, there are 18 well-trained and well-equipped soldiers in the city. We’re still heavily outnumbered, but I think we have a chance now. A small one, but a chance, nonetheless. I’ll update as soon as we figured out our next move. This is Riley McConnel, ––”

“And Nick Becket. Don’t forget me!” exclaimed the soldier with a smile.

“…still reporting from Blackfortress.”

Riley turned the camera off, then let out a long sigh. He then turned towards Nick.

“Any luck?”

“Well…” he started. “…I’m pretty sure that everyone from the other plane is at the residential district. They were still in the air when Danny bailed, and if they managed to shoot down a few of the AA missiles they could have easily made it further into the city.”

“And what about your squad?”

Nick looked away from Riley. He gazed out the hotel room’s window for a while before replying. “I wish I knew…”

He wanted to say something encouraging to his ally, but frankly, he didn’t know what he could tell him. Even if all of Nick's squadmates had survived the descent they were likely scattered around the city, and it’s been almost an hour since the first glider was hit. They could have been anywhere now.

Riley walked over to Nick and tried his best to encourage him. “We could try to find them once we get this radio working.”

Nick sighed. “Yeah… we can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

He turned back around and leaned forward. “Well, firstly because we have no idea where they are, and secondly because even if we do find them, we won’t be in a much better position.”

“Uh, I may have watched too many movies, but I thought having more soldiers on your side usually makes things easier.”

Nick shook his head again. “Not in our case. We don’t have working long-range comms, we have no contact with our air-support, and the SAM sites that prevent any sort of airdrop from the Skyraider are still active. We need to remove these obstacles if we want to survive this. I think what we should do is…”

Riley scratched the back of his head as he was listening to Nick brainstorming different ways to get a few vehicles down to the ground from their dropship. Something didn’t add up. “Look,” he said while raising his right hand. “Not that I’m not a huge fan of your ‘charge the enemy with a tank’ idea, but wouldn’t it be much easier to just call for reinforcements and then hole ourselves up somewhere until they arrive?”

Nick’s smile disappeared, and he looked away from Riley for a split second. Whatever he was going to say next was going to be either a lie or something that was going to upset him.

“Yeah, the problem is… that we can’t.”

Riley slowly raised his right eyebrow. “And why is that?”

Nick took a deep breath before he spoke again. “Do you remember that shootout in Blegodon a few years ago at one of the warehouses?”

“The one with the spies that Gredrurg tried to cover up? I was the first reporter on the scene,” Riley replied proudly.

His partner’s eyebrows rocketed up. “Whoa, really? Well, the exact same thing is happening here.”

At first, he didn’t understand what Nick had meant by that statement. He was about to ask for clarification when it finally clicked.

“Hold on… are you saying that––”

“Riley,” Nick started as he stood up from his chair. “…nobody knows that Blackfortress is under attack, other than us and the General, and I bet that he plans to keep it that way.”

He slowly turned towards the window. “We’re on our own…”