ALICE

Chapter 78: STAND

 Chapter 78: STAND

 Alice listened to the mechanical groan of the hangar doors opening, and looked up. She realized now that this underground bunker hid behind a huge trap-door, covered with the same pebbles that the rest of the Plains were. Alice knew that every aircraft would have to mobilize quickly, before the Hangar became a kill-box.

 Alice, gun in hand, walked into the Black Smith. The propellers took a few moments to warm up, but soon they were spinning at almost the same pace as the other helicopters.

 Alice looked to Redd, who was lying on the stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face. Alice could hear his laboured, shaky breaths, and the knife jutting abruptly out of his chest was as distressing as ever. Alice put her hand on his, but she knew that he didn’t even have the strength to squeeze. The palm was clammy and cold, and his fingers were like ice. Alice gave the hand a brief hold, then let go to look at Angel. He gave Alice a solemn nod, and as the ramp on the back of the helicopter slowly closed, Alice heard the screeches of the jets as they shot off the runway, into the skies.

 Soon, Alice felt a small jolt, and the helicopter was in the air. The Black Smith’s near invulnerability came at the expense of windows, but Alice quickly found the controls for one of the two guns, with cameras attached. Alice looked through the lens, disappointed it was just a simple video-camera. She watched as the beast of an aircraft rose out of the hangar, along with the other helicopters. When the Black Smith was clear of the underground cave, Alice saw the battlefield that had already begun to develop in the skies. The jets were doing well, with neither one smoking, indicating they hadn’t been hit, and several destroyed jets between them.

 Alice panned across the dogfights, and saw a helicopter with an open side dashing across open air. Alice aimed at the chopper, and pressed down on the button that fired the weapon. The floor vibrated as the gun made the buzzing sound of firing. When the aircraft was hurtling down towards the earth, Alice let go of the button.

 Alice looked at the stretchers strapped to the floor of the chopper, constantly being monitored by Romeo, who Alice only now noticed had slipped on just as the ramp was closing.

 “This isn’t as crowded as I thought it would be.” Angel said.

 Romeo nodded in agreement. Alice thought, as she had seen before, that the helicopter would be shot out of the sky, interrupting Angel’s reassuring sentence, but it stayed quiet.

 Alice looked back into the lens of the camera, but, perhaps in the most spectacular example of Murphy’s law ever known, as soon as her eyes hit the camera, a massive explosion deafened Alice.

 Alice tried to pull herself away from the camera, to see what had just happened, but the two-eyed rubber lens had crumpled around her head. After some adrenaline-fueled feats of strength, she finally managed to pry her head from the camera. She turned around, her hearing still muffled, and saw the damage that a missile had done to the Black Smith.

 The gaping hole was, first and foremost, massive. It was taller than Alice and was as wide as nearly the whole side of the helicopter. She saw that scraps of the armour had embedded themselves in many of the wounded, killing them very quickly. Alice could feel the adrenaline in the pit of her stoumach as the chopper began a descent. Alice made an executive decision, knowing weight had to be lost. She looked to Angel, who miraculously, was still in the craft, and then to Romeo, who almost had been lost but had recovered nicely. Without saying a word, they began to check for pulses on the six wounded, taking about three second pauses with a finger on the neck each time.

 Alice came to the conclusion that four were dead, and the fifth was on the way. Luckily, Redd was the only one who wasn’t harmed. Alice began to unstrap the dead, the huge pieces of metal shrapnel sticking out of their bodies. Alice felt her eyes water as she kicked a body out of the hole.

 After three bodies were out of the helicopter, the Black Smith’s descent slowed. They got out the last definite dead man, and then paused at the one who was almost dead.

 “He’s gonna die anyway.” Romeo said.

 The wounded man’s eyes flickered.

 “But he isn’t dead yet. We’d be killing our own man.” Alice said. “I can’t throw a living Resistance out of a helicopter.”

 Angel gritted his teeth, pulled a .45 out of his vest and aimed it at the man.

 “N…” A whimper came from the man who’s name Alice didn’t know.

 Angel’s lip stiffened, and then twitched. The hand that held the gun began to shake, and after a moment, he pulled it back. He turned around, and yelled to the pilots behind him.

 “Can you still control her?”

 “Yeah. It’ll be hard but I think we can get her out.”

 Angel nodded.

 “Fly!”

(BREAK)

 Spencer was operating the chain gun on the helicopter. He wasn’t a good shot, but with the fire rate he got on it, you didn’t have to be. The armoured helicopter was weaving through other pilots’ dogfights, taking down the occasional Resistance jet or chopper.

 Behind the thick armour of the aircraft, ZERO and Malone sat on the simple benches in silence. ZERO felt a phantom pain in her arm, a symptom the doctors assured her was normal. She hated it, not being able to fire rifles, or to easily operate her favoured handgun, the truly massive Desert Eagle. She wanted her arm back, but that was impossible. WillyWack didn’t have prosthetics. What she could get, was revenge, and she intended to have it, wiping The Resistance out completely.

 ZERO thought about when she came here, the name she had before she discovered Landerwon, the German parents she had loved. ZERO remembered life before it was revealed as a lie. She knew that Landerwon was the real place, that this was where she belonged.