The Extinction Switch: Book three of the Kato's War series (9 page)

“Shhh!” David said. Everyone was poised to strike. Silence from outside. The knock came one more time. Then there was a word that nobody could make out, followed by an almighty, ear-splitting crash. The door buckled inwards and was torn from its frame as the business end of a black battering ram appeared. The tabletop split in half. The two legs on which it leaned broke, and the pieces fell to the floor. Strips of metal from the door frame flew inward. Two soldiers, dressed in black, and wearing helmets with face visors could be seen. They brandished a clear riot shield in their left hands, and an automatic weapon in the right. Several rounds flashed from their muzzles and smashed into the ceiling of the hall. Exploding plaster and dust fell on the occupants. Vivianne screamed and dove into Etienne’s bedroom. Annabelle, Kassandra and Antonio dove into the living room for cover.

Only David stood firm, knife in hand. “This is my house! You have no right to take it!”

The nearest soldier, grim-faced, stepped over the smashed door, and knocked David flying backwards with a blow from his shield. David dropped the knife as he landed on his back with a nasty thud, his head almost in the kitchen. The soldier stood over the prone man, put his left boot on David’s chest, and pressed the muzzle of his gun against David’s forehead. “You now have five minutes.” Without moving the gun barrel, he looked back outside to his colleague. He flicked his head to the left. The other soldier nodded and proceeded to the next apartment. Vivianne peeked out from Etienne’s room and screamed on seeing the scene in the hallway.

“Get stuff!” David yelled, from the floor. “Get everything you can carry!”

“Umm… right. Guys!” Vivianne yelled, searching the hall for other faces.

“We’re here!” Annabelle shouted from opposite doorway.

“Get everything you can! Food, clothes, pots and pans… anything! I’ll get Etienne’s things. There are plastic bags in the right hand cupboard.”

“We only have five minutes!” David reiterated.

“Come with me,” Annabelle said urgently to Kassandra. She turned to Antonio. “Get our stuff from in here. Make
sure
you get all our clothes. We don’t know how long they’ll have to last us. C’mon, Kassie.” The two girls pushed their way gingerly around the trooper, who still had his gun to David’s head, and into the kitchen. “Food!” Annabelle said. “Doesn’t matter what it is. Get it all, including the boxes of NBH.”

“What’s that?”

“Over there.” Annabelle pointed to a stack of gray containers, each about the size of two shoe boxes, in the corner of the kitchen. She then began to raid the cupboards for anything useful.

“Can I please get up?” David implored to the seemingly giant man standing over him. “I won’t try anything. We just need to get our stuff.” Thirty tense seconds passed, during which the trooper fixed David with a steely, unblinking stare. Then, the gun barrel and boot were removed. David sprang up. “I’ll get our stuff, Viv. Or as much as I can anyway,” he shouted. He darted into their bedroom, and pulled the contents of clothing drawers feverishly into travel bags. After a trip to the kitchen to grab plastic bags, he went back and rifled through the closet to try and grab personal effects. He paused at one item: a Hasselblad camera. After examining it for a few seconds, it too was tossed into a bag.

“The cat!” Vivianne shouted from the next room.

“Oh crap! Where’s the cat carrier?”

“I don’t know!”

“Time’s up,” came the trooper’s emotionless voice. David took one last around the room, and dashed out, laden with bags. He set them down on the street, then spun around and dashed back in, almost knocking over Annabelle, who was exiting with full bags.

“Please… just a couple more things…” David said. The soldier made no move to stop him. “Vlad...? Dammit!” A meow was heard from the far corner of the kitchen. David squeezed around the trooper into the kitchen, scooped up the cat, whose fur was standing on end, then headed into the bedroom and grabbed blankets. Fully laden, David pulled up abruptly behind Antonio, who was making his way out the door with armfuls of clothes. The others were already outside. The two men made their way out into a sea of sobbing, wailing, stunned people. Troops with shields, guns, and batons were directing them to move on. Vivianne was a mess of tears. Annabelle cried onto Kassandra’s shoulder. Etienne clung to Vivianne’s leg, whimpering. “One second,” Kassandra said to Annabelle. Parting contact with her, she picked up Etienne. “Shhh.” Antonio just stared catatonically at the ground. David gaped, his eyes unfocused, his mouth opening and closing slowly. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. Then his focus returned. He reached into a plastic bag at his feet and pulled out the Hasselblad camera. He quickly zoomed in, composed, and snapped many subjects: the crying girls, an armored personnel carrier, clothes, blankets and toys strewn across the street, a trooper’s blank face with a mass of people reflected in his visor, a barefoot little girl in a nightshirt, a white sheet covering a body, a group of people praying, and a soldier with his baton raised at an old man who refused to stand up.

“Move on! Move on!” the trooper shouted. “This way!” He pointed down the street to Rue Borchal. “Come on! Move!” Etienne, still in Kassandra’s arms, reached for her mother. Kassandra handed her over to Vivianne.

“Get as much as you can carry,” David said, pocketing the camera. “Here, let’s use the blankets as bags.” Food, clothing and other items were put into the makeshift sacks. “I’ll be right back.” David darted through the harried crowd, and returned a minute later with an empty shopping cart. “Throw stuff in here too.” Vivianne sighed, and put the teary-eyed Etienne into the cart’s child seat, just in front of the handle, facing backwards. Kassandra caught the terrified Vlad as he cowered from all the noise and put him on top of the stuff in the cart.

CHAPTER NINE

Exile

“Let’s go, then, I guess,” Vivianne said, with a last look into the hallway of their apartment. The group shuffled off slowly, joining the stream of refugees heading down to the intersection with Rue Borchal. Once at that road, a group of soldiers directed them to turn left. The wide thoroughfare, with its harsh overhead lights, was already packed. Two armored personnel carriers blocked any vehicular traffic from coming through.

“I guess we’re going west, then, away from downtown,” David said, as they joined the river of lost souls.

“Where to?” Vivianne cried.

“I don’t know. But, we can’t stop. We’ll be trampled.” A boy to their right tripped over a plastic tub and skinned his knee. His father promptly picked him up and slung him over his shoulder. David whipped his hand into his pocket and withdrew the camera. He had missed that moment, but began simultaneously video recording and snapping around him: tear-streaked faces, a small girl on her father’s shoulders, bobbing up and down with the man’s steps, some troopers standing against the opposite (right hand) side of the road, keeping the crowd moving. A brawl that broke out behind them. Vivianne and Etienne walked on David’s right, and the others to his left. They were near the left side of the road.

“You must go faster!” an old man to their half-right said to his wife, who walked with a cane.

“Oh, why did it come to this?” she sobbed.

“I don’t know,
cherie
, but we must make the best of it.”

David then turned the camera on himself, half-yelling to be heard above the din. “This is happening, right around me, right now, unbelievable though it is. We’re part of an exodus. If we don’t survive, let this be a record.” He then turned the lens toward Etienne, who was looking up at Vivianne’s face as she pushed the shopping cart. “And if you make it out of this and I don’t, just know, baby, that I love you so very, very much.”

----

After three kilometers, the group came upon two more armored personnel carriers, and two tanks, complete with a few dozen soldiers standing around. A sign was projected on a midair display: OCCUPIED ZONE ENDS HERE. NO READMITTANCE.

David raised his eyebrows. “Oh… I guess that means we can go where we want after here then?”

“Except back home,” Vivianne said bitterly. “Oh baby…” she let go of the cart, stopped, and grabbed a hold of David, crying on his shoulder. The group huddled in to keep from hindering those behind. A soldier took a few steps towards them, and gestured with his gun barrel to keep moving.

David sighed. “There’ll be time for this later. We’ve got to go.” Once they had passed the army encampment, the sidewalks were lined once again with homeless camps. The air was rank with the smell of human waste. “Move! Get out of the way!” some travelers shouted, as they stumbled around the camps. The crowd still spread right across the asphalt from one side to the other. There was no traffic. As they plodded on, some people began to leave Rue Borchal, heading onto side streets. Antonio stayed sulky and quiet.

“What should we do?” Annabelle asked David, who was walking to her right, now pushing the shopping cart.

David shrugged. “Um… I really don’t know. I haven’t a clue.”

“Maybe there are refugee camps somewhere?” Kassandra offered.

“I’ll be buggered if I know where…”

“What if we knocked on doors, to see if someone can accommodate us?” Kassandra said.

Annabelle looked around. “The place is already saturated with refugees that started coming down before this even happened, and then there are more displaced people like us. I guess we just keep going for now…”

“Rue Borchal keeps going straight to the edge of the city,” David said. “I’d hazard a guess we’re in the Inner West Belt now. It’s a long way to the edge of underground Lyon.”

“We’ll have to stop and rest some time,” Vivianne said.

“Yeah.” David pulled out his camera and snapped pictures looking back at the army blockade, around at the wearying, desperate, refugees, Etienne asleep on his wife’s shoulder, and smashed, smoke-blackened storefronts. Their interiors were still being picked over. David pointed at one of them. “They’re getting bits of wood. I bet they’re going to use it for a fire,” he said to Antonio.

“Probably.”

“Uh oh!” Antonio said.

“What?”

“Tanks! Coming this way!”

“Crap! Everybody back against the wall! David yelled. He hit the curb with the shopping cart, got its wheels onto the sidewalk, and pushed it back to the wall. The group huddled between two tents, whose startled occupants looked on. Screaming and panic broke out among the crowd, as they scattered to make way. “One tank and two APCs,” David said, as he whipped out the camera and began to snap and film.

“Maybe it’s the real army, coming to take out the invaders,” Annabelle said, hopefully.

“They’re really moving,” Kassandra said. “Not slowing down for anybody or anything. There’s police behind them too.”

“If there’s going to be a battle, I’m glad we’re out of the way,” Vivianne said, as the huge machines whooshed past.

“Yeah. Let’s pick up the pace,” David said. They moved back onto the roadway and resumed walking. Muffled shouts from loud hailers echoed eerily down the road, from behind. The words were inaudible. Then came the unmistakable cracks of small arms fire. The crowd scrambled once again, a thundering herd, running straight ahead this time, away from the fighting.

“Oh crap!” Annabelle said.

“Move!” Kassandra implored, as they fled. More rat-tat-tat gunfire.

“We’re a good few hundred meters away, so we’ll likely be safe,” David panted, a little later, “but someone needs to tell this lot.” He jerked his left thumb at the herd. “It’s a bloody stampede!” Many of the sweaty, displaced horde ceased running and resumed walking. A heavily tattooed and pierced man and woman stopped abruptly in front of Vivianne and looked back, over her head, and then at each other. “Shall we wait and see what happens?” the man said. “Maybe they’ll take the city back and we can go home.”

“Not likely,” David muttered darkly to the others, in answer to inquiring looks. “Not until I know for sure that it’s safe.”

----

“I’m exhausted,” Vivianne said to David. “We’ve been walking for hours. We
have
to stop, preferably for the night. Etienne needs to sleep, too.”

“We can’t,” David said. “Don’t you see all these army vehicles? I bet they’re getting ready to take over this area too. Never mind we’re probably at least fifteen kilometers from downtown. It’s going to be a shitstorm here too, pretty soon.”

“They might be here to protect people. You don’t know if they’re good forces or bad.”

“No, I don’t. But I also don’t want to get threatened or shot in the head. It’s only about another fifteen K to the edge of the city.”

“David, I’m
not
walking any more, dammit. It’s got to be at least seven o’clock. We need to eat.”

“At least the homeless camps are fewer here,” Annabelle said. “Probably because it’s been a while since the last subway station. Even though the system’s been shut down all day.”

“Okay. I guess we’ll stop here,” David said. Kassandra wrapped a blanket around herself and sat down. The temperature was a pleasant seventeen degrees Celsius.

“We only have four blankets,” Annabelle said. “Can you share with me, Kassie?”