A Guardian Angel (26 page)

“My name's
Homer,” the man replied, offering out his hand. “And I
want you to live.”

Andy didn't know
what to say at the time.

“Look man,
why don't we both get off of this roof,” Homer offered, “and
I'll get you a nice cup of cocoa. How's that sound?”

“A cup of
cocoa?” Andy repeated. His cheeks twitched to fight back tears.
“Why?”

“'Cause it
sounds like a nice thing to do tonight,” Homer answered. His
voice was warm and soothing. So kind and ungrudging. “Yeah?”

A single tear fell
out and streaked Andy's cheek. “Yeah,” he replied. The
homeless man smiled reassuringly as he turned the way Andy had come.
“Thank you.”

“You got it,
man,” Homer said.

Together they
climbed down the side of the building and came back in to the alley
where Andy's car was parked. Homer led him past it, down a sidewalk
for two blocks and down a little road that led under a bridge. There
were dozens of homeless people living together here, most of them
asleep. His host led Andy to the front of a boarded up real estate
office. The hitman took a seat on the stoop and looked around as
Homer fetched a thermos from under a crate. He offered it to Andy.

“Thank you,”
Andy said again. The container was still warm when he grabbed it. He
took a long sip from it and passed it back to Homer, who imitated the
action.

“You can talk
to me about what's wrong,” Homer said after a comfortable
moment of silence, “or we could just talk about something else.
My ear is yours, pal.”

Andy stared down at
the pavement. His eyes were hooked onto the edge of a paper bag that
had been run over and then blown back onto the sidewalk. He stared at
it for a moment as he thought. “Where would you go if there was
a zombie outbreak?” he asked.

“A zombie
outbreak?” Homer repeated with a grin. He hummed. “Well,
I think that I might go for a nice, secluded cabin in the woods.
Where would you go?”

“See, I don't
know,” Andy said. “If I could, I'd like to think I'd get
on a boat.”

“Ah, 'cause
they can't swim,” Homer commented.

Andy chuckled.
“Naturally,” he said. Another minute or so passed where
neither of them said anything. “I feel so guilty about
something bad that I've done,” he told Homer.

The homeless man
nodded in thought to the statement. “That's the natural
reaction,” he replied. “But tell me, or rather, tell
yourself where you're going to go from there. Feeling guilty's nice
and all but it's doing you no good.”

Another tear
dropped out of Andy's eye. He kept remarkable control over his voice,
never releasing a sob. Just a silent cry. “Where would you go
if you were stuck in the
city
during a zombie outbreak?”
he asked with a clear voice.

Again, Homer hummed
in thought. “I think that I'd go to the top of the tallest
tower,” he answered.

As soon as Andy
made it into New York he started beading his way to the towers that
loomed in the distance. He could see the Decree Tower from where he
drove. Its sleek design separated it from most of the other
skyscrapers.

Traffic forced him
to park several blocks away from the tower itself, so he grabbed his
three-eighty auto, hid it on his belt and then walked. As Andy
approached, the streets were cleared of vehicles and instead swarmed
with people. There were tents set up along the sidewalks with such
artifacts as a sign depicting Leroy Graves with devil horns set up
against them. The people themselves were dirty and unkempt. Fatigue
glimmered in their eyes as the mood turned from one of resistance to
one of rioting. Some people had found bats and rocks and batons and
began trying to smash down the glass windows that led into the Decree
Tower's lobby. They yelled. Andy caught a few curses at Graves. The
former assassin started to climb the steps of the building, into the
heart of the crowd, but a large announcement board caught his eye. It
was a familiar face that he had noticed so he stepped back to take a
clearer look.

The segment Andy
looked at was labeled “Wanted.” The face that he saw had
been Haley Flynn's. Andy laughed as he read the flier. It said that
she was to be charged with spearheading an insurrection and that she
was wanted alive. Her reward was fifty-thousand dollars. However, to
Andy's dismay, the words “captured” had been stamped over
her image in big red letters.

Andy then
recognized himself at the top of the board. It gave his full name and
what looked like an outright printout of his driver's license. His
reward was one hundred-thousand dollars. He was wanted either dead or
alive.

He glanced back
over at the mass of angry people who smashed on glass, banged on
metal and caused an angry racket. As if on cue, a couple vans pulled
up to the area. Andy could see a couple of the merc-cops peering out
at the mob from inside the tower. Mercenaries piled out of the
vehicles and circled around the herd of protestors.

“It's time to
go,” one called out.

Andy agreed. He
ducked his head as he slipped back down the street toward his rental
car. The merc-cops pulled out their mace and stun guns and went to
work containing the mob. The hitman turned away from the scene and
abandoned his through-the-front-door plan of attack. Live to fight
another day. Take Graves on when he can really take him on.

Without watching
where he walked, Andy stepped right into a third van that had stopped
up the street. A couple of men in the orange uniforms seized him. He
struggled but was caught so off guard that nothing could be done as
his wrists and ankles were bound with duct tape. A piece was slapped
over his mouth before he could cry out and then a black bag shut out
all the light for him.

They threw him in
the van and sped off from the cries of the people.

-Chapter Twenty-Six-

Knights
of the Proletariat

Everyone did what
they could to help each other in the larger communal cell that they
shared in the entry levels of the Lumnin Super-max Penitentiary. For
Haley Flynn, that meant keeping the flame of hope from being snuffed
out. A community effort was at play in the prison, each member of a
protest sympathetic to each other. These people weren't criminals.
The prison had been under Decree control since its construction.

Guards were ordered
to do what they could to harass and hamper the efforts of the
prisoners. For a little while they would only serve meals to select
people in the crowd, trying to turn them all against each other. They
were surprised to find that the compassionate human nature in all of
them allowed them to share and even sacrifice to support their
cellmates. They weren't like normal inmates. They hadn't earned their
stay here.

For the time being,
the lights in the cell block were left on to keep anyone from getting
a decent night of sleep. To combat this, the prisoners all gathered
their outer clothing and formed a sort of canopy, under which people
could sleep away from the stinging fluorescent lights that burned day
and night. Sometimes, when they came together with a solution like
this, the guards would be ordered to come in and take whatever they
had made down and confiscate it. They tried to see if they could
incite some sort of retaliation. There never was any. The people just
let the guards take what was theirs and then went along to construct
a plan B.

Haley's job was
promoting the pacifism that annoyed the guards so much. Maybe she
alone could see how necessary it was to make the men who kidnapped
and tormented them nervous. Hope was not lost. It was working.

They were left with
the bare bones minimum now. They had barely any clothes to speak of
anymore and food was rare and scarce. Haley continued to give little
speeches and forums to keep the spirits of her cellmates up. She
must. It was all she could do.

Everyone lumbered
toward the metal bars as sharp cracks could be heard down the halls.
Chatter arose, voices asked each other what was happening. No answers
could be given. Haley was frightened and she could feel that mutual
feeling emanating off of her peers. The gunshots continued, numerous
in their release. They got louder. Closer.

Without warning,
doors flew open as the battle outside reached its loudest volume.
Half a dozen armed combatants made their way into the cell block and
sealed the door behind them.

“Is she
here?” one of them asked the other.

The crowd continued
its astonished chatter. They kept a decent distance from the bars,
edging away from them. They tried to get as far from them as they
could but after a while there was nothing to do except wait to see
what these people would to do with them.

“We've got
contact,” one of the militants said to the others.

“How many?”

“Two.”

“Alright,
wait to engage,” one commanded to the rest of them. The group
raised their weapons and aimed toward the door. “Fire on
sight.”

The doors flew open
a second sudden time. Two Decree prison guards carrying submachine
guns rushed through the opening, only to get cut down by a barrage of
bullets that the first group released upon them. After a moment or
two of still motion while everyone waited to see if they had
survived, the militants started moving. Two of them sparked up
blowtorches and demanded people to step away from the bars.

“Haley
Flynn?” the commanding militant called out.

“Yes?”
was her soft reply.

The woman
addressing her took her helmet off. She and her group were all
dressed as Decree mercenaries, but when her covering came off, Haley
saw something different. The rest of the militants took off their
helmets, too, revealing matching brown bandanas with the emblem of an
Excalibur-like sword painted on.

They cut through
the bars and four of the soldiers pried them out of their place.
Inmates flowed out of the opening, encircling their rescuers. Haley
stepped up to the woman who had addressed her.

“Thank you,”
she said, somewhat at a loss for words. “These people have been
through a lot.”

“I'm sure
they have, but I'm here to get you,” the woman replied. “To
ask you to come speak with us at our home.”

“Who's 'us?'”
Haley asked her.

“We're the
Knights of the Proletariat,” she answered.

Private Slechta.
That's what it read on the chest of Barney's brand new uniform. He
didn't like the way he looked in orange fatigues but it didn't bother
him too much. He and his fellow merc-cops sat in silence as their van
bumped and skipped along the road. Barney looked down at his M4 like
a man looks at a rattlesnake. He hadn't used a weapon quite like this
before. Always domestic firearms, whatever you could hide in a suit.

“You
alright?” Paul asked.

Barney looked up at
the man who had introduced him to the idea of the Decree Nation. He
lied. “Fine.”

“We almost to
Denver?” Paul hollered up to the driver.

“Look out the
window, man,” the driver replied. “We're already here.
Just a few miles to the station.”

“Sweet shit,”
Paul said. He sat back and winked at Barney.

Light flooded back
into Andy's eyes, stinging them. He rested on his knees somewhere
underground. The lights were artificial, but dim. Andy adjusted after
a moment while someone cut the tape around his ankles and then helped
him stand on his feet. As they freed his hands, a woman approached
Andy. She was a young Latina woman with some sort of clever spark in
her eye. Her hair was long and curly but kept back in a neat
ponytail.

“Are you
Andrew Winter?” she asked him.

Andy groaned in
response, rubbing his joints. He cracked his neck. The woman's brow
furrowed in seriousness. “Sorry; sore,” Andy explained in
a voice that croaked. He cleared his throat. “Yes I am. Please,
who might you be?”

Her expression
softened up, a light smile. “I'm Rosa. I lead the Knights of
the Proletariat,” she introduced herself.

These protestors
were different than Barney had expected. He had seen photos on the
news programs and in some newspapers that would float around in
prison. The people in those images, at worst, could be described as
hippies. But they didn't look like these people.

The crowd was about
thirty people strong, all very serious looking. They seemed edgy,
their limbs danced about in hyper activity. Something excited them.
It was the large figure speaking to them from the stage that still
stood in place at Union Station. Blood from the Denver Massacre still
stained it. The man speaking was a statue of a man. Built like a
weapon himself, the man's many long black dreadlocks swirled around
his head as he screamed into a megaphone. His eyes were invisible
from behind thick black shades. His voice carried.