Even Jeremy in his own way, grumbling, “Fine, but I’mscared.”
“We have the bands and the bricks. We’ll be fine,” Damien assuredhim.
Take us into the war zone? It was against everything I’d ever been taught. But Damien was right—we could save dozens of lives tonight, maybehundreds.
“All right.” I tightened my fingers around the plasma brick Iheld.
As I closed my eyes, I thought of every horrible and scary memory I had of the Dream Wars. Human beings eaten alive right before my eyes, babies crying while lying on the ground with no mother, death, destruction,murder.
My body drifted off to sleep with all of those horrible thoughts in my head, and then I felt the pull of the Dream Wars. Nausea rolled into me as a painful splitting sensation rocked my body. Coming in this close to the war was always more painful and sickening than the times I fell asleep with peaceful thoughts. I took comfort in the thought that my fingers were wrapped around the plasma brick, loaded with my DNA so the ghouls would copy it and bring it in as well. The cuff was secured tightly to myarm.
Please God, if you exist, let this work. Havemercy.
You bet your ass I was gonna start going to church. I’d made a promise and I was gonna keepit.
My feet slammed onto the ground and pain laced up my ankle. When my eyes opened, I was assaulted with sounds and visuals that were horrifying. I’d landed in a ghoul kill town, filled with hundreds of civilians and just as many ghouls. It was a feeding frenzy. The smells were just as horrifying—blood, burning flesh, gunpowder, and that cloying ghoulscent.
My team dropped in around me, first Ronnie and then the rest. We were all so exhausted that even Maxine had instantly fallen asleep. A sentry had spotted us and was running at his creepy hyper speed towardus.
Pleasework.
I stuck my arm out and held my position. When the sentry was four feet from me, he leapt, mouth stretching open and ready to take my head off. What was I thinking? I was putting a lot of faith into thiscuff.
Just when I thought he was going to hit me and I needed to fire my gun and fall back, the cuff clicked and a plasma shield shot out, knocking the big brute back. The force rocked against my arm, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. It felt like the shield had absorbed the worst ofit.
He flew backward, falling on his ass and lying there stunned. His body was twitching as if in pain, and he glared at me with murderous eyes. He took a deep breath and let out a truly horrifying scream. Every single ghoul in the area stopped what they were doing and looked atme.
“Oh shit.” His scream was some kind of “Kill Kit” hive mindcall.
“Let’s lay out the bricks!” Damien said quickly, and I dropped my brick on the ground as the group set theirs up in a circle with about five feet between each brick. It gave us a large enough space to work with while also being protected—hopefully.
“Humans!” Damien roared. “Come inside this circle forprotection.”
The people were stunned. Some had already fled when the ghouls stopped to look at us. Some were too injured, near dead, to move. But most started running toward us; they didn’t need to be told twice. We were heavily outfitted with weapons, and my black suit was military issued. I’d run toward metoo.
Nox, Brisk, and Maxine ran at the approaching ghouls, arm cuffs out to push them back while the humans ran into our circle. Once we turned the bricks on, it was theoretically going to hold a plasma-like dome in place, and anything that attempted to cross would be denied entry—including humans. We needed everyone inside before we fired themup.
Ronnie ran to help a woman who’d lost her leg. She was bleeding everywhere, a belt tied off as a tourniquet. Damien and I stood directly in front of the brick circle, shooting down any ghouls that got past Maxine, Brisk, and Nox while still allowing the humans to trickle through. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was working. There was a tree pod forest at our back, and I just hoped nothing was lying in wait backthere.
“What’s the plan here?” I shouted over thegunfire.
I’d relegated Damien to being in charge of this mission since he seemed to have the most knowledge of what the bricks and cuffs were capableof.
“I’m kind of winging it,” he admitted, then tossed a sticky bomb at the sentry that had just broken pastMaxine.
The bomb stuck like glue to his armor and then exploded. Hot air and sentry guts flew outward, bits of shrapnel also blowing away. Sticky bombs were great because the explosion was contained to only a few feet, unlike a grenade, but boy, were they stillmessy.
“Winging it is my least favorite thing!” I shouted, as the last line of humans trickled through. Maxine, Nox, and Brisk backed up slowly, coming towardus.
I took a half second to peek over my shoulder to see that Jeremy was sitting with his headphones on but was no longer bound to Josephine. She’d instead handcuffed him to Mr. Hansen, who was explaining the bricks to the humans who sat inside of our circle. Josephine was walking stealthily toward me with a twenty-inch hunting blade in one hand, her eyes on something behind me. I turned around just in time to see her attention was on Ronnie, who was still dragging that injured woman past one of the buildings. Ronnie was just passing an open doorway, where it was pitch dark inside. When I saw the slightest glint of metallic sentry armor, Iscreamed.
“Ronnie, look out!” I shrieked as Josephine blasted past me in a blur. She was fast, faster than me in my broken-ankle state. I started to half hobble, half run, but I was going to be too late. Ronnie froze, crouched over the woman underneath her, holding her cuff over her head in the hopes it would save her as she tried to shield the woman. Even confronted with death, Ronnie sacrificed herself for another. It was one of her most amazing qualities. She was a true healer, loyal to theliving.
But the cuff would not saveher.
The sentry had a huge broken-off metal pipe, the end like a spear, and he was ready to launch it right at Ronnie. The sentries were the smartest of all the three ghoul types. They’d obviously realized our cuff did something when they got close, so he was trying to take her out from afar. Ronnie assumed he was going to try to get close to her and that the plasma cuff would work in shielding her, too busy trying to protect her patient to even see what he wasdoing.
He stepped out into the green hazy light and tossed the spear. Josephine leapt into the air in that exact moment and kicked it out of the way with her black boot. The moment she landed, shereacted.
