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Marathon

After long minutes of scrapping through the darkened halls of government, burning through feeble match after feeble match, Amanda finally found what she was looking for. And she nearly burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all. There it stood, a yawning portal to the vaults below left open in its place, exactly the way some idiotic non-thinking politician had left it. The concrete steps, painted in the fickle oranges and yellows of feeble match-light, lead downwards like so many more before them. With a quick breath inwards, she began the descent, shoes clicking and clacking against the solid stairs The steps ended fairly quickly, culminating in a small space before a large door, a small key pad for entering the door's password directly beside it and stained with red blood. Despite the gruesome scene, blood trailing down the wall to a mutilated body, she had to fight to hold back another fit of laughter. It was all becoming quite too much, too overwhelming to fully comprehend. That, and she knew the door lock was highly outdated. She moved over to the key pad and swiftly cut two of the red wires behind the panel with her combat knife, sending a few sad sparks sprinkling to the floor. 

The massive metal hydraulics moaned like a beast in pain, stretching tired muscles inwards and allowing access to a long white room. Inside, lines of bloodied and bandaged DMP officers formed hurriedly into a ragged line, their numbers insufficient to fully block the room and their rifles raised in weary resignation. The middle officer, armor stained in dried reds and left arm held in a similarly bloodied sling, called out to the dark from where he stood. "Go on! If you're here to kill us, do it! Denton is lost, you hear that? Your people killed it! The DMP is dead, politics are done, Prime Minister Reverie is missing, and people are falling and dying left and right! And you're still coming here to kill us? Your protectors? What did we do to deserve any of this nightmare, any of that!?" Dust fell from the ceiling, a particularly concussive blast accentuating the man's point, "We're doomed anyway you look at it, the city is doomed! Freedom either shackled to the chains of an empire, or crushed under the fierce rain of bombs. And what if either side considers the city a lost cause, huh? They both have nuclear arms, and I don't think either of them care about the repercussions! Whichever way you look at it, we're all dead men walking! So I say, bring it on! Come on, kill us you idiots! Do what you've been wanting to ever since that broadcast! Come on, come at us!" A pained cheer rang out from the line of hopeless men and women, but slowly faded as they laid eyes upon not a mob, but the form of Amanda Mason.

 One of the officers rushed forwards, a small case of medicine in hand, and lead her through the line and into the room as another man rushed up to close the door. The speaker mumbled a quiet apology to no one in particular, possibly to Amanda, his soldier, or simply the world at large. At the end of the room a group of injured civilians and government employees sat and stood in coughing clumps of despair, talking of nothing. The only other exit to the room was a blast door at the very back, currently held tightly shut. She was distracted from the scene by the medic bandaging a large gash she hadn't known she had receive. It didn't start paining her until after it was sewn and bandaged shut. As she stood, quietly waiting for the angry sting of the red mouth in her arm to subside, she stopped to ask the others why they weren't fleeing, weren't evacuating through the escape tunnel. Surely that was the plan? 

A collective sigh informed her otherwise: The Manyvale forces had set up a barricade around the tunnel exit, supposedly a trap for fleeing Denton government officials and most likely an attempt to capture the Prime Minister himself, Jackson Reverie.  An advance squad of officers had told them the news via radio, in the midst of a raging firefight with said forces. As far as anyone knew, that squad had been killed shortly thereafter. So the plan, if one could call it that, was to sit and wait until it was all over, no matter what that entailed. The seconds ticked by as minutes, the minutes as hours, and the hours (did any hours even pass?) like days. Everything blended together into grey monotony and drab tedium, every cough the same cough, every pained noise indistinguishable from the last, every bloodied and weeping wound on the same body. Amanda simply sat against the wall, crouched with her head resting in her hands as she traced out the patterns of memory behind her eyes. Too much had happened to fully remember, to fully realize. When had she been taken from her home? How long was she in the mine? Would she survive this? Would anyone survive this?