Fallout (Tales of the Other Universe Book 2) Page 9

  Adam’s working theory was that the Oracle agents had come from the dungeon and by now were spread out throughout the palace. He and Dee would have to go room by room across each floor, moving downward until they had neutralized all of the gunmen before securing the dungeon. Between Adam and Dee, most of the second floor had already been cleared, but gunshots could still be heard on both levels. Adam knew that the civilian mob had most likely crossed paths with the Oracle agents by now and with only crude weapons to defend themselves would end up victims as well. That was all the more reason to take out the gunmen and clear out the palace before civilian casualties got even worse. As it stood, this was already the bloodiest day in Magid’s history since the final days of the Liberation.

  Approaching the sound of gunfire, Dee raised her wand. As she rounded the corner she pointed the wand forward and exclaimed, “Orbis luminarium!” Light sparkled at the tip of the wand and gathered into a circular wall of glowing light like a window that separated her and Adam from the gunmen ahead. Their enemies saw the wall go up and opened fire, but the bullets stopped short of Dee and were trapped in the light barrier. Before they even stopped shooting, Adam pushed the wall forward down the hall until it collided with the gunmen and knocked them back to the opposite end of the hallway. As they struggled against the barrier, the stone from the wall behind them began to grow and encircled them, holding them covered in place from their noses to their ankles. Adam lowered his hand as Dee looked on amazed.

  “You can control my spells, too?” Dee asked.

  “It looks like I can,” said Adam. “Your spell generates corporeal light. My powers allow me to generate and control all light, whether it’s natural or magic it seems.”

  “Good to know,” said Dee, charmed by the synergy that the two were capable of creating in combat. Aside from the typical assortment of spells that mages of her type learned, Dee also focused on elemental spells incorporating fire and light. Though Adam was capable of creating these elements all on his own thanks to the powers of Magid he possessed, Dee hoped that her own spells that harnessed those elements could be of help to him.

  The floor shook beneath them as another explosion went off somewhere in the palace. Adam and Dee grabbed the wall to keep from falling over. The blast was close by but far enough not to damage the floor beneath them. Adam figured it must have come from somewhere in the sub-levels of the palace. At this rate, they were going to bring the whole building down. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. The Oracle group had to know that Adam was a Legend and that they couldn’t kill him with bombs or bullets. The next best thing they could do would be to bury him under hundreds of tons of stone. If that were the case, he would need to stop the bombings before the palace collapsed and all those still alive inside were trapped.

  “Let’s start moving down,” Adam called to Dee as she got her bearings back.

  “What about the attendants still up here?” she asked him.

  “We’ve got to stop the bombers and gunmen before they destroy the whole palace,” said Adam. “Otherwise everyone still inside is going to be killed.” Adam recalled how he had been painted as heartless not long ago for abandoning the victims still trapped in the banking headquarters, but then as now, he had to consider what was best for everyone in the building, and that was to stop Oracle.

  “The Creator must still be in the palace somewhere,” Dee said. “He wouldn’t allow that to happen.”

  Adam sighed. “Dee, don’t you think if he was really concerned with these people’s lives that he wouldn’t have allowed any harm to come to them at all today?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I don’t intend to rely on him to be saving anyone here,” Adam said. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re on our own.” He started walking down the hall to where the two gunmen were trapped in the wall. “Are you coming?”

  “Yeah,” Dee said. She wouldn’t say it, but she was starting to agree with Adam. Dee recalled the Creator’s remarks just before the attack on the palace had started. It seemed so cruel not to get involved when he had all the power to stop it and save peoples’ lives. The Creator was intent on letting things go as they would, and it was far from Dee as a lowly mortal to question his judgment, even when she could not fathom how there was any benevolence to be found in it.

  Dee put the thought out of her mind and hustled to catch up to Adam further down the hall. She found him paused around the corner where he was observing the path in front of them, or what was left of it. One of the earlier bombs had ripped through the floor, leaving a gaping hole twenty feet wide across the hall. Adam peered down into the wreckage: the stone base of the floor was broken into ragged chunks and the carpet that lay over it was singed black and smelled of burned fibers. The walls above and below were crusted with black soot from the blast. Beneath the sizable gap to the floor below, jagged stone bricks and white dust littered the carpet that had always been so well maintained. Adam spotted two bodies in the rubble, probably some unfortunate attendants who had been crossing through the hallway just as the bomb went off below. The dust had settled now and there was no immediate danger left, but there was still the issue of how to proceed from there.

  “I don’t suppose you have a levitation spell that could get us down there?” Adam asked.

  “Not exactly,” said Dee. “Just one that would stop us right before we hit the ground.”

  He frowned. “No offense, Dee, but I’d rather not take the risk of something going wrong with that one.” Instead, Adam went over to the wall and put his hand against it. Dee watched as alternating stone bricks shuffled a few inches out of the wall from where Adam’s hand rested to the floor below them. It wasn’t as nice as the grand staircase, but it would do the job of getting them down.

  “Wait here while I make sure the coast is clear,” Adam said. He took hold of the top bricks and began his descent down the makeshift ladder. Beneath the level above him, Adam got a better view of the destruction on the first floor. It looked like most of the bombs had been triggered on or just below the first floor as the damage there was much worse than above. Adam remembered how the first explosion he witnessed in the foyer had come from beneath the grand staircase. If Oracle had in fact entered from the dungeons, it would make sense that the bombs had been planted there.

  He heard the sound of footsteps moving through the piled up debris on the floor behind him. Adam turned in time to see a trio of armored gunmen standing at the end of the corridor, guns aimed right at him. He dropped the rest of the distance to the floor and landed hard as a volley of bullets struck the wall where he had just been hanging. The sting in his shins from the drop stunned Adam and slowed his response, giving the gunmen time to refocus their shots straight ahead of them.

  “Orbis luminarium!”

  A wall of light encircled Adam from all sides, once again catching the bullets before they could hit Adam. He looked up and saw Dee watching over him, thankful that they had not separated from each other. Safe from the attack, he stabbed his sword into the floor and a group of rock spikes shot out from beneath the shooters. Their body armor was no match for the force of the sharp stones piercing through them and the gunmen dropped their weapons as they slouched over dead. Adam stepped out from the protective enclosure of light and looked ahead to make sure that the threat was gone.

  “It’s alright now,” he called up to Dee. Adam turned his head back up, but he saw that Dee was already near the bottom of the steps. He gave her a sour look.

  “I told you to wait until it was safe,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, but who just saved whom?” Dee smiled and stuck out her tongue at Adam, and he conceded her the victory.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Thank you, Dee.”

  “Think nothing of it,” she said. “So where do we go from here?”

  “Let’s move to the courtside entrance,” he said. “We can make sure there’s a clear exit so the survivors can get out of the building. From there we s
hould look into the lower layer of the palace. If they really did enter from there, they’re bound to be keeping at least a few people in reserve there.”

  “Alright.” She followed close behind Adam as they started walking towards the courtyard side of the palace. Passing through the crumbled walls and dead bodies of the people she had gotten to know over the last nine months, a horrible uneasiness gripped Dee. “Greg?”

  “What is it?”

  “How are you going to recover from all of this?”

  Adam stopped walking and Dee almost ran into him. He didn’t know how to answer her. All the while that things were going wrong from the moment the day started, he had been thinking about how he was going to make everything right again. Now, for the first time, he realized that things were getting to the point where he had absolutely no idea how to fix them. Tribal fighting could be negotiated. A down economy could be improved through control of spending and proper investing. But now his government was on the verge of collapse, and his capital was in ruins. If by some miracle he was able to hold on after the end of the day, he would have to start from scratch in order to rebuild.

  “Let’s focus on stopping this madness first,” he answered her. “When all is said and done, and the halls are silent and still once more, when we don’t have to worry about immediate destruction, then our recovery can begin.” Dee could do nothing but accept the answer and move on. Where she in his shoes, she doubted that she would have said anything different.

  They arrived at the east wing of the palace in the midst of a great commotion. The glass walls which gave a view of the courtyard gardens were all shattered, whether by the explosions or the angry crowd it was not certain. All through the courtyard and in the corridor, the mob was taking out months worth of aggression on whatever they could find. Men wielding axes hacked through walls and furniture, and outside the trees were being set ablaze while the crowd surrounded and beat the guards who were attempting to keep order. It was an ugly sight to Adam and Dee, the embodiment of the frustration the country had felt taking form and wreaking havoc.

  Adam held Dee back from entering the corridor. As soon as they had appeared, the crowd took notice that the man they had come to dethrone was standing before them. With an even greater clamor, the mob began filing towards Adam and Dee with their weapons held high in defiance. Dee extended her wand and cast her circle of protective light around her and Adam, causing the crowd to slow their advance and stare in awe of the magical performance. Adam needed to take the opportunity to give the speech he had not been able to make before the violence in the palace broke out.

  “Everyone, please! Listen to me!” he shouted through the soft hum of the light wall. “I understand the reasons you have for being upset with me, with the government, but you have to put an end to this senseless destruction! If the government were to fall now, you’d be left in anarchy. Who will you look to for leadership in these troubled times? Certainly not the Western Liberty Movement. They have done nothing but cast blame and point fingers at everything that I have done wrong, but they have done nothing to improve the country. That is because they have no real desire to! They would be fine with letting Magid drown in a sea of problems just so long as it meant that I was gone.

  “Is that really what you want? The kind of problems we have to deal with can’t be solved overnight, and it would only be a tremendous leap backward to dismantle my government now. Please, listen to reason! We must cooperate in order to rebuild, so please lay down your weapons. Go back to your families, help the wounded and displaced from the attacks, and have faith that we will restore the greatness we once had.”

  “What reason have we to cooperate with you?” someone in the crowd shouted. “You’ve been useless at fixing the problems we already had, and things are just getting worse!”

  “Are they any worse than when you were all oppressed under the rule of a dictator?” Adam asked.

  “At least under Klauss we had bread in our baskets and were secure in our homes!” The mob rallied behind the dissenter. “Our homes burned during the Liberation, but that was during a time of war. This should be peacetime, yet people are dying in the streets! Some are being killed by your own hands!”

  A loud cry followed, but Adam denounced them. “I never killed any of Magid’s citizens! The testimony you heard on the emergency broadcast was a lie meant to slander me!”

  “Who would expect you to admit to such a horrible crime? We trust the words of the survivors and the police who saw what you did!”

  It was no good trying to argue the point with them. There was no convincing evidence to show that Adam was innocent; it was his word against the false witness and the mob was not about to side with Adam. He tried to keep reasoning with them when a large chunk of debris flew from the crowd and struck the light barrier in front of him.

  “You’re nothing but a liar and a holder of false promises!” someone called out. “You don’t deserve to be our king anymore! The people have spoken, and we want you gone!”

  A rallying cry rose up from the mob as they hurled more rocks and pieces of debris at Adam. As they bounced off the wall, the crowd decided that they would need to be more forceful and began to advance on Adam and Dee. Behind Adam, Dee kept her wand out at the ready with great apprehension.

  “How can they be so eager to turn their backs on you? This isn’t going to help them at all.”

  “Don’t fault them, Dee,” said Adam. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “What should we do?” she asked. Adam gripped the hilt of his sword and cursed. The members of the mob were not wicked people, they were just upset with how Adam had been ruling them. In many ways he had failed them, and they had every right to rise up. Killing or even restraining them would not help his cause. To continue fighting against the obvious will of the people would make him no better than the dictator that he had succeeded. He had no choice.

  “We need to leave,” he said to Dee, turning and hurrying away as the first wave of the mob reached the light barrier.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, keeping an eye on the wall as the crowd began to strike it with their weapons and bare hands.

  “Out of the palace, somewhere, anywhere else,” Adam said. “There’s no more good we can do here.”

  “We can’t just abandon it!” Dee asked. “If we run now, Oracle wins.”

  “Look around, Dee,” Adam said. “They’ve already won.”

  He charged away from the east wing, Dee following reluctantly while the light barrier held on a while longer against the onslaught of the crowd. Adam pressed on, his head hanging low. Never once had he turned and ran during a battle, but the situation that he found himself in was more than just a battle now. He wasn’t just fighting against Oracle; he was fighting against the people of Magid. That was a fight he could not bring himself to finish. What’s more, with the ire of the mob as it was, more people would get hurt in the struggle than him. He knew Dee to be confident in her abilities, but it would only be a matter of time before she was injured or killed. Adam wouldn’t risk her life for the shattered remains of his palace, not for anything.

  He led her to the makeshift stone ladder that would take them back up to the second floor and started to climb. From below, Dee peered up at him.

  “Where are you going?” she asked. “I thought we were going to leave the palace?”

  “The hidden tunnel has most likely been compromised,” he explained. “The mob will never let us pass through the front gate. The only way out is with the portal system on the second floor, assuming it hasn’t been destroyed. We need to get to my chamber.”

  Dee gripped the stone bricks jutting from the wall and climbed up after Adam. He extended his hand to help her over the gap in the floor. She waited for him to lead her to his chambers, but instead he stood in the hallway and looked her in the eyes.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  She was shocked that he had asked such a question and was about to
answer him when she realized why he had posed the question at all. Ever since she had spotted him in the hallway after the explosions started, Dee had thought of nothing but staying with Adam and going wherever he went to help him. Though the Creator’s safety came to mind, she had forgotten all about her pledge to go with him. Now he was still nowhere to be found and Dee found herself with two options. Despite that fact, it was clear that she had made her decision before she even realized she would have to.

  “I want to go with you,” she said. “Wherever you go, you’re going to need some help, and maybe a bit of company. If you’ll have me, that is.”

  For the first time all day, he smiled through his exhaustion. “I’d like that a lot.” He turned and started off towards his room. “We’ll have to hurry. It won’t be long before the mob makes their way to the second floor.”

  “What are we going to do about the gunmen still walking around, and all of the palace attendants?”

  “There’s not much we can do,” Adam said. “As much as I hate it, we have to accept this as a loss and recognize the casualties of war. Once I’m gone, the mob will disperse and hopefully things will start to die down.”

  Dee didn’t like the thought of leaving everyone behind, and she knew that Adam didn’t either. It was unfortunate, but Adam was right. She could only hope that the surviving friends she had in the palace would be able to make it out safely. Rounding the corner, she saw that for at least one of them that would not be a problem.

  Adam stopped in front of her as the two of them looked ahead and saw Miko standing in front of the door to Adam’s bedchamber, and she wasn’t alone. Behind her stood a grizzled man with a fur-lined vest that lay over his muscular frame. One of his eyes seemed permanently closed, sealed by a scar, but his other beady eye caught sight of Adam and he grinned. He raised the submachine gun he was holding at his side and opened fire towards Adam and Dee, only to be blocked at the last second as Adam forced the walls around him into their path. With another forceful push of his hand, the walls fragmented and launched towards the shooter, knocking him back to the floor.