Everyone Dies in the End #43

Cindy

It worked. Hack fiction writers/game designers tend to draw these things out, but the bottom line is that it worked. One second she was sitting in the back of the truck, sore butt and all, and the next she was in the Charlotte Best Buy. An intact Charlotte Best Buy, with a bloody and very dead black man in a chair, another at his feet, and several other equally dead soldiers scattered about the toppled VHS shelves and broken cassette tapes. Beside her was a still very much alive Zak Dixon, and to the front, no more than ten feet away, a Soviet soldier, finger on his assault rifle, barrel aimed at the ManPot.

Time travel is a funny thing. Yeah, it worked. Big time. Not only was she back in business—the business of saving Charlotte, but the anklet, the one that by now should have exploded, turning her lower leg into meat byproduct, was no longer there. Cool she thought. Not cool were her hands. They were empty.

The missing anklet was logical, it hadn’t been placed on her ankle till after this moment in time. But where was the shotgun that should have filled her hands? She knew the answer to that, but the answer didn’t help. The shotgun was in the front seat of the Army truck with Ramzke, two-hundred miles, and a couple of days into the future, distant. It didn’t make sense, but now wasn’t the time for sense making. Now was the time for acting.

Without a gun there was little she could do to the Soviet intent on detonating the ManPot, but there wasn’t much that she needed to do. Just disrupt his aim, prevent the bullets from blasting through the ManPot’s Kevlar. Zak only needs a couple of seconds to reload, she thought. And she knew just how to give those seconds it to him. She blinked, appearing just behind the Soviet, and tensed her legs to jump.

Anatol

Captain Anatol Vorishnov was dead, but still he saw the girl, saw her when others could not. Saw her lithe body move through the gray netherworld, his gray netherworld, and saw her materialize behind Nikoli Berliavskii, his friend. Anatol’s desire to help was strong, almost as strong as the profound sense of déjà-vu. Yet something inside Captain Anatol Vorishnov knew that it was more than déjà-vu, more, as Brad Delp might sing, than a feeling. He had been here before, felt the need to save his friend, had done so, and it had been wrong. Terribly wrong.

 A large voice echoed from within his soul. But these are your soldiers! This was your mission. This is your duty.

Yes, and all the men from all the countries that had accomplished missions, done their duty, killed their enemies, had brought mankind to this horrid existence. Anatol was a soldier, a good soldier. He knew he could dive into this girl and save Comrade Berliavskii, but at what price? All the lives in Charlotte?

Anatol was a good soldier, he needed only to stop the girl, but he was an even better human. Captain Anatol Vorishnov, Spetsnaz mission leader, stood still.

Cindy

Cindy didn’t. She threw herself into the Soviet rifleman, Anatol’s friend, as his finger squeezed the trigger. The AK-74’s 5.45mm bullets chewed the Best Buy’s linoleum floor,  but the impact jarred the soldier’s aim and as the bullets rose toward the ManPot they wandered, spraying wildly to the left, chewing the wall’s sheetrock cover, filling the air with the sheetrock’s chalk, but completely, totally, and blessedly missing the nuclear weapon.

The Soviet rifleman fell to his side. Cindy landed on top of him, frantically grabbing for the AK-74 assault rifle. In a story with a happy ending she would have wrested the gun free, shot the soldier, or at least knocked him unconscious with the rifle’s stock, but it was not to be.

The rifleman's training, size, and experience took over. Rolling against Cindy’s body, he struck her hard in the temple with his elbow. Cindy saw stars, and before they cleared, the Soviet struck her again. This time his other first pummeled her jaw. She fell to her back, and the soldier was on top, straddling her, the rifle pointed at her head, his finger on the trigger.

She looked at the soldier’s grim face, the sight blurred by her rapidly swelling cheek. She tasted pennies on her tongue and and felt blood in her throat. Sound was soft, fuzzy, muted. She couldn’t do this, couldn’t fight the rifleman. He was too big. At least she had tried, she consoled herself.

Through the fuzzy, muted sound she heard a voice. A shout.

“Cindy, move! Now!”

            She could do that. Cindy blinked, and a nanosecond later she was beside Zak as his reloaded M-16 went full-auto badass.