CHAPTER 64: THE QUARANTINE ZONE [3]

’What the hell?!’

It was not just Ethan’s teeth that ached, the Crawler’s plates quivered, and that... bought an opening where the Carapace Crawler was vulnerable.

The resonance chant didn’t just make the Crawler’s plates quiver, for a moment, the Carapace Crawler seemed to lose control over its own body!

And as the squad hit the deck, the chant pulled the Crawler’s head up, plates flaring open involuntarily. In the gap, a turret lowered from a raised observation post like a guillotine finding a neck.

Then...

BOOM!

The shot wasn’t a bullet, it was a rod, a thick spear of alloy screaming on a tether of light through the night.

It punched through the crawler’s mouth and out the back of its head!

It jerked once and then sagged, plates collapsing like roof tiles. It was dead.

The advance squad finally rolled to their feet and hauled the wounded back by their harnesses. The gate yawned open, and they vanished through it.

It quickly shut itself back, and locked.

Travis let out a breath like he’d been drowning. "Holy...!"

The siren whooped again, three short blasts this time, and the floodlights dimmed a fraction as power was diverted. The turrets slowed, and the wall’s breathe changed tempo.

"A cycle shift," Holt said. "They’re rotating."

As if responding to an unseen baton, the monsters faltered.

Without their leaders, the fringe packs lost cohesion. Soon the horde became a smear, then a ragged trickle, then a scatter of stubborn shapes that snapped a few more times for form’s sake before loping back into the dark.

Charmoths retreated in a fluttering cloud. The Slab Ogre had not risen; its glass veins winked out, one by one, like a dying city seen from orbit.

Silence never fell at the wall, but the pitch dropped.

The music of war slid from a shout into a hoarse whisper.

The floodlights held as the turrets droned to a stop. Shapes moved along the parapets, trading places, making room for those who slumped where they stood and drank from canteens with shaking hands.

Ethan’s fingers had gone numb without his noticing. He flexed them and felt pins and needles run home, he could still feel slight goosebumps on his skin.

"We’re not sprinting tonight," Reid said.

It wasn’t a suggestion.

"No," Ethan agreed, eyes on the pattern of the wall’s breathe. "But we watch, we learn the windows."

"The what?" Travis asked.

Kara answered without looking away from the fortress. "If I were them, I’d push hard on those intervals when they retreat to clear lanes, then I’ll call survivors in while the guns are hottest".

"Twenty minutes," Holt said, as if recalling a rumor. "It’s long enough to dash from near cover, and also short enough to recover between pushes."

Jonas’s mouth twisted. "And if you miss your window?"

"You die on the road," Reid said. "Or you wait, and then you still die."

Mira hugged her elbows.

The wind coming from the plains stroked the grass into waves that glittered with ash. "We’ll make ours," she muttered almost like a prayer and a plea at the same time.

Ethan watched the towers.

He watched as movement rippled; orderly, exhausted, but relentless. Somewhere behind those walls, in pre-Rift bunkers welded to post-Rift metal, people told themselves this was civilization.

Maybe they were right.

Maybe civilization was just a gun that woke up and didn’t sleep long enough to let you in.

He swallowed. The Wheel flickered, catching the last afterimages of lightning and flame. He let it file them away.

And then, on the parapet, a loudspeaker suddenly sounded. It squashed a feedback shriek, and then a voice rolled across the plains... flat, amplified, and ironed smooth by discipline.

"Attention survivors beyond the Hollow Plains, this is Fort Aegis Quarantine".

"Entry requires adherence to approach protocol. Approach windows open at dawn, midday, and dusk, twenty minutes each".

"Stay off the Kill Road outside windows. Do not draw the horde, do not stop. Awakened cohorts take point. If you are alive, we will see you."

The speaker clicked off, and the wall carried on breathing.

Travis cleared his throat. "Well, that’s... welcoming."

"No promises," Reid said, but there was a steadiness in him that hadn’t been there an hour ago. A plan, even if it was only one word long... dawn it was.

"Sleep in shifts," Reid said. "Eat and drink. We’ll move at first light."

They slid back from the ridge to a pocket of scrub where the wall’s lights couldn’t silhouette them against the sky.

Kara picked a place with a view of the approaches.

Holt marked arcs of fire in the dirt with a stick, while Jonas lay down and closed his eyes like a man punching out.

Mira made the air in their hollow circulate, pushing dust aside and cooling the sweat that chilled under their shirts.

As for Travis, he produced something that used to be beans and now impersonated soup with heroic determination.

Ethan nursed a mouthful, not tasting it, too tense to care.

He watched the wall, the lights, and the slow rotation of the watch. He watched how the monsters hovered just beyond reach like moths refusing to admit the flame burned.

He reached for the gauntlet and didn’t summon it. He reached for sleep and caught only fragments.

When he did drift, it was to the rhythm of turrets and chants and the wind’s thin fingers combing ash.

Before dawn, the loudspeaker coughed once more to life. The voice returned, steady, impersonal, and unyielding.

"Approach window opens in thirty minutes".

"Mark your cohorts. Move on the horn. Clear lanes will be maintained. If you can hear us, we can see you."

Ethan rose, joints protesting, and looked east.

Pale gray bled into the horizon. The wall’s lights brightened a fraction, and on the parapets, shadows leaned forward like sprinters.

He tightened the straps on his pack, then glanced at the people who had followed him across cities and nightmares and felt the same old mix of fear, resolve, doubt and something like joy that they were still yet to feel any of.

"Dawn," he said.

"Dawn," Reid echoed.

The wall inhaled.

The Hollow Plains held its breath.