Phoenix Rising (Book Two of The Icarus Trilogy) (13 page)

“I give up, Jenkins, you fucker.  You win.  Can we just go kill people, now?”  He certainly wasn’t the same person he used to be, but Abrams could see that Jenkins belonged here.  She might not, but she couldn’t fault the boy for making the best of things.  The soldier shrugged before turning on his heel.

“I don’t see why not.  I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some close nearby.  You don’t suppose that there are any swordsmen like Feldman on the Bulls, do you?” he asked after turning his head slightly.  She was following behind with a loose grip on her revolver.  He was glad that she was more at ease; it would make the rest of this battle so much lighter on his spirit.

“Nah, don’t think so.  At least, I hope not.  I think there are only two or three teams other than us that even have them, but Feldman’s a bit of a special case.”  Jenkins looked back over his shoulder and furrowed his brow.

“Why’s he so special?”  Abrams looked at the young soldier and couldn’t believe that he’d asked such a question.  Jenkins had known the man better than anyone, but even with Abrams’ limited understanding she knew the kind of monster Feldman could be.  She felt stupid as she realized that this Jenkins probably didn’t know anything about the man.  Then she wondered if he even remembered what she’d told him about her past.  Abrams pushed that thought from her mind and told herself that it didn’t really matter.

“Well, he’s Feldman.  Those black assholes might know how to kill, but he knows how to fight.  That big brain of his helps out,” Abrams said.  There was much more to the giant, but she didn’t need to get into that.  She suddenly felt very sad about the whole situation.  The two men had been such good friends before the suicide.  Abrams looked at the artificial soldier and wondered if Feldman could even stand to be beside the man.

“Never would have expected that.  I was paired with him a couple days ago and he didn’t say a thing,” Jenkins said while looking forward along the ground.  That same pressure from his conversation with Goldstein was coming from the back of his head.  Jenkins felt like he wasn’t remembering something that was important.  He looked away from the broken path in front of him and to the woman beside him.  The pressure only came on stronger.

They walked in silence for the next five minutes.  They rounded bends in the pathway and climbed over bits of steel plating and concrete along the crests.  It was odd that they hadn’t run into any soldiers yet.  The game areas were usually several square kilometers wide and held almost fifty soldiers.  Jenkins could even hear the gunfire from altercations elsewhere on the battlefield, but he and Abrams might as well have been alone.

Abrams looked at the soldier to her side and thought about asking a number of stupid questions.  She knew that he wasn’t exactly the same person, but some part of him had to remember that past life of his.  It hurt her to think that he might not remember a thing from her confession.  Goldstein knew only because he had looked into her file, but she had
told
Jenkins.

She cleared her throat and looked at the young soldier as he turned to face her.  Abrams suddenly felt anxious and uneasy.  She didn’t like that they hadn’t fought any soldiers, yet, but while they were alone out here it would be the best time to talk about it.  She looked at the man and resolved herself to her actions; she had to know.

“Jenkins, do you remember anything I told you?”  The soldier looked at her and she could tell that there was a puzzled face behind the mask.  She let the question stand and waited for his answer. 

“About the Bulls?”  Abrams sighed and wondered why she thought this was a good idea, but she had to continue.  She had to know if he remembered even a little bit.

“No, Jenkins.  Do you remember anything I told you that day in your room?”  He had to remember or she didn’t know what she was going to do.  Abrams watched as he tilted his head and then scratched the back of his neck through the mesh of the power armor.

“When were you ever in my room?” Jenkins asked, suddenly feeling more and more pressure at the back of his head.  He had put up his hand to try to massage the area, but he quickly realized that it wasn’t going to do anything.  There was something there, hidden in the back.  Suddenly he realized that it must have something to do with Abrams.  There was something that he couldn’t remember, but maybe he could work at it; maybe he could do something and take back the memory.  It was suddenly the most important thing in Jenkins’ world.  Ryan wanted to reverse it.  He wanted to know his old self; he wanted this barrier gone.  Jenkins could see the woman look down at her feet.

“It’s just…well, nevermind.  Let’s keep going,” Abrams said as she got closer to the crest in the pathway.  She would just have to push past this; he obviously didn’t remember.  She was in the middle of giving up hope when she felt the hand on her shoulder.  Abrams turned slowly to see Jenkins looking down at her from too close of a distance.  She felt uncomfortable and wanted to strike at the man for invading her personal space, but for some reason she couldn’t will herself to do it.

“Tell me again, Abrams.  Seriously.  I want to remember,” he said in front of her.  She could sense the weight of his words but she shook her head anyway.  There was no way she was going to tell this version of Jenkins.  Abrams was about to turn away but then she felt his hands stop her shoulders.  Her brow furrowed under her helmet and she contemplated shoving her knee into his gut, but she found that she couldn’t bring her knee upwards.

“Look, it’s not that...” Abrams started before Jenkins shook her slightly.  She could tell that he wasn’t going to let this go.

“You don’t understand.  It’s there, Abrams.  It’s right there in the back of my mind but whatever...” he said before pausing and taking a breath.  He backed up a few feet and breathed in deeply.  The increase of space helped make Abrams feel more comfortable, but this new situation was slightly jarring.  Jessica looked at the man as he unclasped his helmet and looked at her.  There was a grim resolve there.  It was distracting enough that she didn’t even think about reprimanding him for taking off his helmet on the battlefield.

“Whatever they did to me, whatever Hawkins did to me locked everything away.  Goldstein told me the truth a few nights ago.  He told me that I’m … I’m not the real Jenkins,” he said as tears filled his eyes.  Abrams couldn’t help but stare at the man.  She had never expected the boy to find out the truth; especially from Goldstein.

“I don’t know if you knew already, but it’s true.  I can’t remember so much of what has happened to me and the memories I do have don’t have me in them.  Everything is vague; nothing I have in my mind is me before a couple weeks ago.  It has to be true.  I….I want to know who I was, even if I can’t be him anymore.  I don’t want you guys to see me as this ….freak.  I want to remember, even if they’re not my memories.  I want to know the man you all knew.  And there’s this thing in the back of my mind that lets me know that something happened between us,” he said as he stared at the ground at his feet.  At the end of the last statement his eyes snapped up in a panic and he shook his head slightly.

“I didn’t mean like we had sex or anything.  Did we?  No, we couldn’t have.  But, something happened, didn’t it?”  Abrams looked at the confused man and knew that she couldn’t ignore him anymore.  She couldn’t just play the games with him day after day and not tell him the truth.  Jessica looked at the man’s worried face, and although he wasn’t the same man, she knew she could trust him with her story.  He had just trusted her with everything.  She held her right elbow against her body with her left hand.  Like this she didn’t feel like a woman who had killed hundreds of men on the battlefield.

“I told you about why I was here.  I told you about my sister’s disease.  And I told you about how I came to the games to pay for her treatment.  Then I told you I was going to get out and you tried to tell me I was fooling myself,” Abrams said as she recalled the memory.  She thought about everything that had happened since then.  She thought about all the games she had fought since she had arrived on Eris.  Jessica thought about all of the times she had died and obliterated her earnings.  When Abrams looked at the poor boy in front of her she finally saw what he had meant just a few weeks ago.  This place wasn’t meant for hope. 

As she finished her statement and started to sink into despair she watched the artificial man.  He seemed so desperate to remember.  He was closing his eyes and his face was all lines and wrinkles as he tried to concentrate.  He just wanted something to be there.  Abrams snapped out of her own feelings as he yelled skyward.

“God DAMNIT!  I know it’s there, I can feel it, but I can’t get to it.  It’s like I’m hearing it for the first time.  What the hell is wrong with me, Abrams?  It’s like I’m not even real!  This is someone else’s body,” he said as he looked at the floor.  She could see the pain on his face; she could see what this asteroid had done to him and what it had done to all of the other soldiers that had fought on its surface.  Abrams thought about how she had been wrong all these years.  She wasn’t getting out.  They were both stuck here.

Jessica was almost too absorbed into her misery to notice the man on the ridge.  She looked over through eyes bordered by tears and saw the silhouette of a soldier.  The sun was framed right behind the man.  The warrior woman didn’t comprehend what was happening for a moment, but soon enough she was able to jolt herself back into the present.  They were in the middle of a battlefield, after all, and their enemy had found them.

Jenkins was still wallowing in his despair when he heard the grinding of the chainsaws.  He looked over to his left and saw the soldier charging at him.  If it had been his first game, Jenkins might not have been able to react.  He might have just run from the soldier and been cut down as the Bull’s chainsaws found his back.  It was an intimidating sight and no one would blame him for running if he chose to.  The large man had two chainsaws strapped to the gauntlets on his wrists and with his enraged bellows he sounded like three kinds of hell.

But Ryan Jenkins wasn’t a normal man.  He wasn’t even a normal soldier anymore; he was a fake.  He was built for this.  Jenkins brought up his rifle where he stood and trained the scope onto the running figure.  The Bull was only ten meters away now and there wasn’t a very good chance that Jenkins would be able to stop him without finding a chainsaw buried in his chest; with the kinetic motivators in the man’s suit he was probably running at twenty klicks per hour, at the very least.  As he centered the crosshairs on the soldier he could see the impact of Abram’s first revolver round.  He smiled as he remembered that he had one of the best soldiers in the league by his side.

The man spun a bit from the impact but continued on his deadly path to the artificial soldier.  Jenkins was fine with that.  The Bull was merely delivering himself into the arms of death.  After his frustration and experiences in the last day the best medicine Jenkins could think of was a bit of mindless killing.  The rifleman let loose a round and saw it sink into the rushing man’s shoulder.  Jenkins smiled as the man’s arm dropped but did nothing to stop his berserker’s charge. 
A fine soldier
, Jenkins thought,
willing to die for just one more point on the score board
.

Jenkins didn’t have much time to think about it further and so he snapped his aim down to the soldier’s weakly-guarded knee.  He pulled the trigger and watched the man crumple down to the ground and fall onto the chainsaw strapped to his left arm.  Jenkins could see the blood and gore spraying out from underneath the man as his momentum carried him forward another three meters to Jenkins’ feet.  The chainsaws were still running, but the man was already dead. There was no way that there was any life left in the man face-down on the asteroid.

Abrams had to catch her breath.  After that first shot from the revolver she hadn’t been able to track the man.  The Bull had been going too fast and the two shells that she had fired had sailed past harmlessly.  She had fully expected Jenkins to be gored by the rampaging melee fighter, but he had taken his fate into his own hands.  Abrams could see his face; it was filled with complete satisfaction.  Ryan looked over at her and sighed.  She nodded; she knew exactly what Jenkins was thinking, even with his apparent moral vacuum.

“He can’t be alone.”

Two more melee fighters came running over the ridge at that moment followed by a rifleman.  The Crows were hopelessly outnumbered and in the worst position.  One of the melee fighters was wielding a giant hammer with spikes on it and ran from the crest in the pathway, just like the chainsaw maniac.  The rifleman supported him from the hillside nearby and was aiming towards Jenkins.  Ryan knew this wasn’t going to end well. 

Abrams only had half a moment before the other melee fighter had sprang from just behind the ridge to her right.  As he promised death from above Abrams could see the massive sword coming down in a vicious downward arc.  She did what she could to escape and jumped forward, but she felt the blade catch her just below her knees.  Abrams slammed against the ground and felt the sword relieve her of her lower legs.  It was pain she had never felt before.

Jessica fought through the pain and turned over to see her assailant.  She noticed that her right leg was still attached by a small piece of her skin, but she tried to ignore it.  Abrams was more interested in the large man still rushing at her.  She had hoped that there were no swordsmen on the Bulls, but it seems like she was wrong.  Unlike Feldman, this man held a large slab of steel.  It was inelegant but with that much weight and force it would still cut through a man with little problem.  She recalled Jenkins’ statement about her knife and almost laughed; it seems like he had been right.  Abrams tried to bring her revolver to bear but almost immediately the Bull kicked the weapon out of her hands.  As he rose his sword to shoulder height with the point pointed over her stomach, Abrams knew she was going to die.

But she didn’t.  Before he could bring the sword down onto her torso three shells struck him and ricocheted off.  Abrams was grateful that the sword had not cut its way through her prone body but she had to wonder at Jenkins’ logic.  She was already dead and he had two soldiers of his own to fight.  The enormous soldier above her ran past and towards the source of the bullets, leaving Abrams to turn and look at the scene unfolding on the pathway.