Early Byrd (9 page)

The anteroom—the above-ground part of the
complex which was all that showed from the outside—still housed two
armed guards, and I gulped. They weren't the same two we'd seen
earlier, so therefore I was forced to raise our enemy count to at
least seven. Seven was a
lot
more than five, in practical
terms at least. But what could we do? Rapput and Li had to be
sinking every hour.

"Call of nature, gentlemen," Yukon explained
to the guards. Then he pointed to Tim. "Plus this one isn't feeling
well. We could be out a little longer than normal."

"Right, boss," the larger of the two agreed
with a slight nod. His face was mostly covered by both a shaggy red
beard. "Standard password?"

"Yes," Yukon agreed with a final nod. Then
he leaned on the door. It swung open . . .

. . . and the prettiest, most inviting beam
of sunlight I'd ever seen came pouring in through. A bird was
singing, and the nearby river burbled and gurgled mere yards away.
The cabin would've been a really nice place to relax and hunt or
fish from under other circumstances.

Yukon nudged me forward. "Follow the
path."

I nodded and went first, even though where I
really wanted to be was behind him. "Wow!" I said, looking around.
"Where are all the animals?"

"Oh," Yukon replied with a smile. "They're
around. It's not like you see on the cartoons, though, where they
just walk up to you and act cute. In real life they hide as much as
they can from humans and aren't usually nice at all." He hefted the
super-short pump-action shotgun he kept eternally slung on his left
shoulder. "Bears can especially be a problem up here. That's why
you should never visit the latrine without a guard carrying one of
these."

"I can shoot!" I countered. "I have a BB
gun!"

"Heh!" he replied. "Well, that's a
start!"

The outhouse was a two-holer, and Tim was
still gagging and choking as Yukon opened the door for him. So I
stepped closer and examined Yukon's weapon more carefully. "Is that
a rifle?" I asked at last. "Or a machine-gun?"

"Not exactly," he began. "In fact..."

I was still listening to the technical
details with wide-eyed attention when Tim screamed like a little
girl. "Eeeee! Help meI Please, someone!"

Yukon
sprang
forward, or he would've if I hadn't grabbed his ankle
and tripped him flat. Then, before I could regain my feet to help,
Tim had slammed him in the back of the head with a rock. Hard.

He didn't move after that. I figured he was
dead. Tim and I were both pretty strong for our age, and my brother
had held nothing back.

"Jeez," I muttered. "I didn't want to . . .
I mean . . ."

"You'd rather I'd just hit him hard enough
to piss him off?" my brother asked. "Then where would Li and Rapput
be?" He scowled then tossed the bloody stone into the woods. "Give
me the shotgun."

I felt my face go hard. "It's my turn to
take the next shot."

Tim shook his head. "As I said, the deer ran
off. So that one doesn't count. And as for this time—" He waved his
hand at Yukon. "—we both pretty much hit him at once. So, it's
my
turn. For real."

I frowned—he could easily have bagged the
doe if he hadn't dragged things out so long. But now wasn't the
time to argue about it, so instead I unslung the gun the rest of
the way from Yukon's inert shoulder and handed it to Tim. "Dad says
you can like shooting and killing things
too
much," I reminded him, "and
it's a really bad thing when that happens. Pretty awful, even."

He shrugged. "What do you think the Artemu
intend to teach us to do? Sew fancy lace dresses and dance around
Maypoles?" He worked the weapon's action and a fat, bright-red
shell dropped to the ground.

I picked it up. "Wow! It's double-ought
buckshot. A magnum load." Then I handed it to Tim, who effortlessly
returned it to the magazine.

"It's liable to break my shoulder," Tim
complained as he raised the too-large and too-heavy weapon and
sighted down the barrel.

"Or make you feel like it did," I replied.
Then I frowned. "You won't be able to make a quick second shot, for
sure. Maybe not at all. So we can't count on it."

"No," he agreed, clearly hating to admit to
any limitation regarding his shooting abilities. Then he sighed and
slung the weapon from his own shoulder, just as Yukon had. It
looked ridiculously oversized there, but it was what we had. "No
second shot. So we'll have to make do with one quick one." He
smiled. "They'll be checking on us soon. How do we make this
work?"

16

At first we didn't have any ideas at all. If we
hadn't been twin brothers we'd probably have given up and simply
run downstream until the forces of the Rocky Mountain Free State
caught up with us and did whatever it was they did with such
ungrateful
rescuees
. But
because we
were
twins, we had an entire lifetime of shared
mischief and adventures to call on.

"You're right," Tim agreed. "That won't work
either." My brother had just proposed I run back and forth outside
the cabin screaming for help. When a guard came to my aid, we'd
then have
two
guns.
But
even with a weapon apiece we'd never get back inside,
which was where we needed to be. I frowned and dug the toe of my
sneaker into the ground, trying to figure out a way they'd let us
back in while carrying Yukon's shotgun.

"Remember when we snuck all that extra candy
from the theater into our rooms last year?" I finally asked, after
three or four other bad ideas had been considered and rejected.

"How could I forget?" Tim asked, rolling his
eyes. "I was sick for a week!"

"Yeah," I agreed. He'd pigged out something
awful. "We didn't have any way to hide it—we were wearing t-shirts
and shorts, just like now."

His eyes narrowed. "Yeah. So we used someone
else's stuff." He reached out palm-first with his right hand. I
slapped it with my own, and we both grinned.

"Hello!" I said as I knocked on the freedom
fighters’ front door a few moments later. "Can you let us in,
please? We're all done now!"

A peephole slid open, and Red Beard's eyes
swept back and forth. "Where's the boss?"

"He's . . . a bit indisposed," I replied.
"Old man troubles, he called it. Said he'd be along in a few
minutes."

Tim bounced up and down on his toes. "I want
to come inside!"

"What's the password?" Red Beard
demanded.

I let my mouth fall open. "I . . . He didn't
tell us!"

"I still don't feel good!" Tim complained.
"I need to lie down some more."

"Me too," I replied. "Can we come in and lay
down? Please?"

Red Beard rolled his eyes and muttered
something about how no one ever took security seriously. We heard
the door unlatch. Before he could change his mind we were racing
through.

"Wait a minute!" the other guard said from
his seat on the couch—he'd never even bothered to get up. "What are
you doing with Yukon's jacket?"

I smiled and stepped out of Tim's line of
fire; under the jacket, I knew, the shotgun was cocked and ready.
But if my brother had to pull the trigger, we were totally lost.
"It's nice and warm out," I explained. This part was actually true.
"So he asked us to bring it in for him and leave it in the
kitchen." My smile widened as virtual fingers crossed themselves
behind my back; during the movie-candy caper, we'd used Mom's
oversized purse. In that case, she'd even done the carrying for
us.

"Oh," he replied, disinterested. So I
bounced happily and we boys ran giggling down the tunnel to our
room. From this point on we had maybe five minutes, tops. Linda and
Sam smiled at us from the kitchen, and neither noticed when we
dodged down the "wrong" tunnel instead of the one that led to our
bedrooms.

Yukon hadn't exaggerated a bit when he
described the rest of the complex as not being nearly as nice our
room. The place smelled a lot like the outhouse we'd just visited,
the floor was slimy mud, and the cold was even wetter and
danker.

"Halt!" an adult male voice declared, and
Tim and I came skidding to a halt. Then a flashlight shone directly
in our eyes. "What in the world?"

"We got lost," Tim declared, stepping
forward and shifting his grip on the jacket-draped shotgun.

"Uh-huh!" I agreed, moving to one side like
we did when trying to persuade wild game to move in the direction
we wanted it to go. Besides, this way he couldn't blind both of us
at once. "What's down here?"

"None of your business!" the man shouted.
"Go back the way you came, this minute!"

"Robert?" a voice asked; it was Li's, though
his voice was little more than a croak. "Timothy? You listen to the
man and be good!"

"Mr. Li?" Tim asked, taking two more steps
forward. Forward, forward, always forward or else to the sides,
spreading wider apart. That was how to drive game!

"Damn it!" the man roared, his flashlight
darting back and forth. He'd probably never been trained in how to
handle unruly children misbehaving in secure areas.

"Mr Li?" I asked again, a quaver in my
voice. Now I was
forcing
the man back by wiggleworming my
way around his waist and even between his legs. If he didn't
continually give up space, I'd work past him entirely. "Are you all
right?"

"Damnit!" the guard shouted again. But this
time he did what he probably should've the instant he saw us. There
was a whistle hanging from a chain around his neck; he reached for
it . . .

. . . and I wrapped myself around his thigh
and let myself fall, putting all my weight on the back of his knee.
He folded even more quickly than Yukon had. Instead of using a
rock, Tim slammed the buttstock of his shotgun into his face one,
two, three times as quickly as he could. Then he lifted it for a
fourth blow . . .

. . . but it was obvious even in the dark
that the
guard
wouldn't
be getting back up any time soon.

If ever.

By now I was feeling pretty bad about what
we'd done to Yukon, and somehow this time was even worse. I think
Tim might've felt the same way, because he just stood and stared
down at the maybe-corpse for a long moment.

Li's voice broke the spell. "The keys!
They're in the second drawer of the desk."

This time I snapped out of it before Tim, so
that it was me who dashed a few feet further down the tunnel,
located the key-ring in question, then after three false tries
found the right one. He was being held in the same cage with
Rapput; apparently our captors only had the one cell. But to make
up for it both wore leg irons and handcuffs, even though Rapput's
were clearly twisting his shattered arm in a bad way. Rather to my
surprise, the big alien's eyes were open and shining in the
dark.

"Are you all right, sir?" I asked.

He looked first at me, then Tim. His jaw
worked for a moment before words came out. "My nephews make me
proud," he finally managed to say in his native tongue

"He's not always lucid," Li warned us. "Once
he attacked me. I fear I was forced to injure him further."

At first I thought Li was joking; Rapput
outweighed him by nearly a hundred pounds of claws, sinew, and
muscle. Then I remembered the silver medal and how apparently he
also knew something about the martial arts. So maybe, despite his
three doctorate degrees, the man might be a lot more dangerous than
he looked. I fumbled with his shackles and this time got lucky with
the correct key the first time.

Li stood and dusted himself off. "I'm proud
of you as well. Both of you."

Our most recent victim was armed with a
nasty-looking pistol-thingie with a huge clip. Li snatched it up
and checked the load as quickly and effortlessly as if he practiced
with it every Tuesday and Thursday at the University of Chicago's
faculty firing range. Then he looked at Tim's shotgun and grinned,
making no effort to take it away from him. That made Tim smile even
wider.

"It was Yukon's," I explained. "We got him
alone with us outside, and, well . . ."

Li nodded, his face grim. "Right. It was
necessary. Your parents would most definitely approve. So will
everyone else that matters." Then he looked up the tunnel toward
the main complex. "How many others?"

"Five that we know of." I counted them off
on my fingers. "Sam. Linda. Two at the front door—one of them has a
big red beard. And one more that was guarding the door when we got
here, but we don't know where he is right now."

Li nodded and hefted the pistol in his hand.
It looked like a toy to me, but our teacher seemed plenty happy
with it. He followed my glance and smiled. "We'll get you a weapon
of your own as soon as possible, Robert. Not only have you earned
it, but I could use the help."

I smiled back, feeling a lot better. Dad
claimed armed men were citizens, while unarmed ones were
subjects.

"Now," he said, "our main problem is how to
get out of here, Rapput and all." He frowned.

"I think . . ." I said slowly. "I mean . .
."

"Yeah," Tim agreed, picking up on my
meaning.

"Please," Li asked. "What are you saying to
each other?"

"That there's only one practical way to do
it," I answered. "Even if we don't want to. And that's—"

"—to kill them all without warning," Tim
finished for me, his eyes cold. "Just like we already did the
others. There's no other way. And every second we spend here
talking about it is going to work against us."

17

Despite everything, Li made us wait back in the
tunnel with Rapput while he "did what needed doing," in his own
words. "If I don't make it, they'll be back here in seconds to see
what went wrong. Should that happen, play innocent and then use the
shotgun. Heck, I don't need to explain it—you're already doing just
fine."