Kafari started to answer, intending to say, “Of course I came back for you” when sudden understanding flashed through her. He was speaking literally. He thought she’d come back from the dead. The amount of pain required to reduce Dinny Ghamal to such a state turned Kafari’s hatred into ice-filled rage.
“There’s an old saying,” Kafari told him, “that our ancestors brought out from Terra. There is nothing as dangerous as a strong man’s ghost.”
Dinny’s fingers tightened against hers as a rush of emotions — far too complex to take in while a battle raged around them — blazed in his eyes. Kafari pulled a backup gun from her gear and handed it to him. “Where’s your mother? And your wife?”
“Second floor. With the little ones.” He stood up straighter as he pointed the way to the nearest stairwell.
Kafari called for backup. “Alpha Team, form up and move out! Second floor! They’ve shifted the wounded and the kids!”
She was already running for the stairs, gun in hand. Red Wolf was right behind her. Dinny struggled along in her wake. Kafari took the steps two at a time, just ahead of Alpha Team’s front runners. When they reached the second floor landing, Kafari flattened herself against the wall while Red Wolf kicked the door in.
Nobody shot at them.
Red Wolf went through first, leaving Dinny and Kafari as rear guard. They’d emerged into a long corridor that paralleled the line of cell blocks one floor below. This floor clearly served as infirmary — but not for healing purposes. The beds and examination tables all had straps. Thick, unbreakable ones. Most had dark stains that no one had bothered to clean up.
She heard voices farther down the corridor, women’s voices, shrill with panic. By the time Kafari and Dinny reached the source of the screams, the noisemakers had fallen silent. Red Wolf stood guard over six women prisoners, two in P-Squad uniforms, the other four in white lab coats. Alpha Team was kicking down more doors. Prisoners were stumbling, even crawling, out of detention cells. Most of them bore the marks of torture, with physical injuries that made Dinny’s beating look mild. Kafari’s cold rage froze into jagged ice. Mere retribution didn’t come close to the hell she intended to inflict on those responsible for this.
There was a sudden explosion of curses farther down the corridor. Then one of her lieutenants came running. “Sir! Begging the commander’s presence, sir!”
Kafari exchanged glances with Dinny and Red Wolf, then headed down the long corridor. Dinny followed, leaving Red Wolf to stand guard over the prisoners. The sickening bloodstains on the floor grew worse with every step. Most of Alpha Team was already headed back, assisting badly injured men and women out of rooms Kafari couldn’t look at too closely, for fear of vomiting inside her helmet. When she reached the end of the corridor, the remainder of Alpha Team stepped aside.
She peered into a fairly large room. A single glance told Kafari that this chamber had once been used as a surgery. Her second glance faltered as the jumble of odd shapes piled along the floor took on a sudden, sickening pattern. Kafari couldn’t tell how many people had been jammed into this one charnel-house room. Her throat worked in convulsive reflex. She clamped her jaws together and held the nausea between her teeth. She forced herself to look, but couldn’t quite control the way her gaze skittered from one image to another. The floor was thick with dark, congealed blood. There was no sign of the Hancock family’s children in that pile. Kafari could see only adult-sized hands and feet sticking out like jackstraws. They had clearly been dead for hours. They’d died hard. Much too hard.
“What’s behind that?” Kafari choked out, pointing to a half-buried door on the far wall.
“We’ll find out, sir.”
The remainder of Alpha Team waded in, pulling corpses off the mound. Kafari’s gut kept clenching with dread. They were near the bottom when one of the bodies in the pile moaned and stirred. Kafari’s hair stood on end for a split second, then she and Dinny rushed forward, pulling the woman free of the corpses stacked on top of her. An agonized sound burst from Dinny’s throat. Aisha was still alive. But not for long. Kafari could see that, at first glance. Dinny dropped to his knees beside her, cradling her head and trying to lift her from the floor where they’d dumped her to die. “I’m here, Mama,” he told her, voice choked down to a raw whisper. “I’ve got you safe now.”
“Dinny?” she whispered. “You got away…”
“We’re going home, Mama,” he told her, voice breaking. “We’re taking you home.”
“Don’t need to go home, son,” she said, her voice shockingly fragile. “Just get me outside these walls, outside them fences. I want to die free.”
Anguish tore gashes into Dinny’s battered face. Then the fire team finally unblocked the door and pulled it open.
“We’ve got live kids in here!”
Kafari’s breath sobbed in her lungs with a single, heartfelt prayer of relief.
“Get ’em out! I want this building cleared in the next three minutes!”
Children started tumbling out of the room, tripping over bodies that had once been people they loved. Glass-pale, they greeted their rescuers with eyes like burnt cinders. They went where they were told to go. Older ones helped younger ones. Once-innocent faces were etched with the cruelty they had witnessed.
Kafari turned her attention back to Aisha. “Get her downstairs,” she told the remaining two members of Alpha Team. “Put her in my truck. Shove that bastard commandant into another one. I won’t have them in the same space. Tell Anish to interrogate the son-of-a-bitch.”
“Yes, sir!”
They lifted Aisha while Dinny braced her head, then maneuvered her to the stairs. Kafari turned on her heel and strode back to where Red Wolf was holding six butchers at gunpoint. Kafari stared at the six women for long moments. “How many of you are constitutional scholars?”
The prisoners glanced at one another.
“No one?” Kafari prompted. “All right. Let me acquaint you with the contents of clause twenty-three. ‘Each citizen has the legal duty and moral responsibility to protect Jefferson from all threats, foreign or domestic. Any government official acting in abrogation of this constitution represents a threat to Jefferson’s survival and must not be tolerated. If redress in the courts fails to curb usurpation of power, citizens are authorized and required to remove such officials from office.’ I think that just about says it all, don’t you?”
The six women who had participated in the torture and slaughter of innocent prisoners stared up at her. Realization dawned in their eyes. Kafari allowed them sufficient time to know terror.
“Consider yourselves officially removed.”
She left them sitting on the floor, meeting Red Wolf’s glance on her way past. Kafari was halfway down the stairs when the first shot ripped loose. Screams erupted, high and knife-edged, begging for the mercy they had failed to show their victims.
Five more rapid-fire shots silenced them.
Kafari strode toward her truck, barking out orders. “Do a final sweep and mount up. Give me a by-the-squad headcount in two minutes. I want everyone outside this base in three minutes. Move it!”
Squads reported in. The last members of Alpha and Beta’s fire teams emerged from a final, visual sweep, making sure they’d found all the prisoners. Two minutes and twelve seconds later, they were in their trucks, heading for the holes they’d made in Nineveh’s fences. Not one shot was fired at them. Nineveh’s survivors had no further stomach for it. Once clear, the trucks scattered into the predawn darkness, heading across the Adero floodplain for a host of hiding places she and Anish had worked out. Kafari drove only as far as the nearest Hellbore gunnery crew and halted. She left the engine idling and slid down to greet the crew.