Survival by Daniel Powell Read Free Book Online

were moving again. Adrenaline coursing through
his veins, Bryan fell in behind Fausto at the rear of the line, the muzzle of
his weapon angled toward the ground.
    Their objective awaited them at
the eastern boundary of the brewery, an ivy-strewn building that was slowly
melting into the reaches of the forest. Bryan swallowed heavily. His eyes
watered.
    Before them was a shimmering
field of energy. It looked like black water, but he knew it was electric
current—a mirage of deadly technology. On the far side of the illusion, at
least thirty or forty soldiers milled about campfires. A line of bulls stood,
still as topiary, on the edge of the camp, their eyes trained on the forest.
    Here it was. Here it all was,
Bryan thought. It was the place where his story would be written—one way or the
other. The emotion seemed misplaced, he knew, but he felt calm—satisfied that
things would be resolved one way or the other very soon.
    From the corner of his eye, he
saw a cloud of energy moving toward the moat. It was Stump, crouched beneath a
night cloak, two soldiers flanking him with weapons at the ready. Brazenly,
they made their way to the edge of the digital obstacle, where Stump fell to
his knees. He opened his briefcase, plugged a cord into a box in the ground and
began to tap the keyboard of his computer.
    Bryan watched all of this, breath
frozen in his chest. He let it go in a torrent when Fausto lightly tapped his
right shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Bryan. We’ll make it. When that digital
obstacle is gone, we run. We do it for our families—for our children.”
    Norton nodded. “Thank you,
Fausto. I…I owe you my life. I’m here because of you.”
    Fausto smiled in return. “I look
forward to meeting Maggie when this is all done. We’ll be ok, kid.”
    Just as he said it, the digital
obstacle disappeared, triggering an alarm. Warbling sirens polluted the air
with their cries of calamity; Verlander growled the men forward and their
forces sprang into action.
    Bryan felt a cry bubble from his
lungs, and then he was sprinting toward the camp, bullets snapping from the
muzzle of his rifle. The powerful spray went wild at first, but he soon
controlled it, feeling a sick elation as he watched his ammunition plow into a
group of men sitting around a fire.
    The bulls shrieked in surprise.
Their cries surprised him and made him feel sick—they were the high and
perfectly startled cries of ambushed men.
    As the bulls returned fire, he
became aware of his comrades falling away. All around him they fell, torn asunder
by violence. Bullets whipped past him like buzzing hornets. Fausto took a round
in the shoulder and fell to the ground with a sharp cry.
    Bryan stopped to help, just as a
round caught him in the thigh, passing through his leg and punching out the other
side of his blue jeans. He shrieked in pain and disbelief, and then there were
hands on them both, half-dragging and half-shoving them toward a little dip in
the turf. They fell into the hole as a fresh wave of gunfire perforated the air
above them.
    “Fausto!” Bryan shouted.
“Fausto!”
    “I’m here! Aw…shit! I’m ok, I’m
ok!”
    The man who had rescued them, one
of the bulls who had chosen to stand with them, angled up and snapped off a
volley of gunfire. He put his back to the ground as bullets chewed the terrain
above them. “Three doors on the east side of the brewery,” he panted. “We go in
at the corner. There’s more cover there. Can you two keep going?”
    Bryan clutched at his leg. The
wound seeped blood—thankfully, it wasn’t arterial. There was a groove in his
flesh. He pressed down on it, agony flaring through him. “I think so.”
    “I’m good,” Fausto said.
    “Ok, then stay low. We crawl.
Follow my lead.”
    They did, and they moved like a
trio of phantoms across the scarred ground. Bryan tasted dirt; he felt stones and
sticks and grime grinding into his belly. Fausto’s boot inadvertently slapped
his cheek more than once as