ALICE

Chapter 85: SNAP

 Alice had faded not long after Angel had revived her. The last thing she remembered was sitting in the shade of something, Angel cradling her in his arms, alternating between pouring water into Alice’s mouth and drinking from the canteen himself.

 Her dreams were of home. Of cigarette smoke and cobblestone, of the snap of a mouthful of vodka, the adrenaline of sneaking home to her foster parents. The burgundy couch and the closing door, the familiar smell of her boyfriend, the unfamiliar feeling he brought with him.

 Dreams of moving back to the parents child services had worked so hard to get her away from, the feeling of being watched in the night. Water stained ceilings and dead eyes.

 Alice pushed herself to consciousness, no longer wishing for the nostalgia of what used to be home.

 She forced her eyes open, but the view didn’t change. She sat up and felt what she was lying on, feeling the taut webbing of a military cot. That didn’t tell her where she was.

 “Angel?” She said, quietly, looking around and trying to speed up the process of her eyes adjusting.

 A shuffle from behind her was enough to evoke a jump from Alice. She spun around, still sitting on the cot, and listened, and heard Angel’s voice,  quiet mumble; “Alice…”

 She felt safer, but stood up nonetheless, groping around in the dark until she felt a light-switch against the wall. She flicked it up, and realized she was in some sort of military quarters. The walls were made of smooth cement, and there were five cots and a foot locker at the end of each. Angel lied on a cot a few feet away from where Alice was, wrapped in wet, white bandages that had become translucent with the moisture of whatever lotion was on his burned skin. Alice looked to her arms, and realized she too had these bandages on her arms and back as well, the cold fabric both painful and soothing on her sunburned skin.

 She spotted the door and left the room, switching the light off again as she left. The room ahead was more brightly lit, cement everywhere again, but now with a Persian style floor rug crookedly placed on the concrete. Alice figured this must have been the base, and that this room was the operation planning zone. Pinned to the bulletin boards that hung from the walls were yellowed and torn maps, aerial images, mostly of rocky outcroppings that looked they were in the desert.

 On the wall to the left was a pyramid of large water-cooler style jugs of water. Each jug had a spigot on it, and a few canteens lay in a box beside the containers. The plastic jugs were dusty, but the water inside seemed pure. Alice gave the spigot on the top jug a brush off, and put a canteen under it, allowing the sound of water against steel to ring throughout the room. When the bottle was full, Alice shut of the tap and put the bottle to her lips and drank the entire bottle in about fifteen seconds. She filled it up again and closed the bottle, now ready to walk around and explore the base.

 It appeared this area hadn’t been used for several years. One wing of what Alice had discovered to be a fairly large area had collapsed. Alice looked in, hoping to see the sky, but could only see more sand. She reasoned that the base must have been buried by sandstorms.

 Alice walked through another hallway, passing by a cement wall with two red hand-prints painted on. One was smaller, with ‘Simon’ written in the same red paint under it, while the other was larger, and inscribed ‘Cole’. Alice put her bandaged hand against the handprint, realizing that the hand was a full knuckle length longer than Alice’s. She pushed against, putting all of her wait into it until her palm throbbed. She took a few deep breaths, and pushed off of the wall.

 She took a step away from the wall, and just forced herself to keep walking through the hallway. She stopped at a door with a crude sign written on the door in marker: Hardware.

 Alice opened the door, expecting a decent armoury, but was surprised to find that there was almost nothing of note in the room. Alice could count the amount of guns in the room on one hand, and the amount of bullets on two. This did not seem like a permanent solution to Alice.

 She left the room, closing the door quietly behind her. She padded further down the hallway, taking a right and finding herself back in the room with the water jugs. She took a few steps towards a bulletin board, scanning the pictures that hung there and seeing if any of it was useful, when she heard a shuffling sound from behind her.

 Alice spun around to see Romeo, covered in the same bandages as her. “Any intel in here is at least four years old. I doubt that rock formation is even on the surface anymore.”

 He smacked his lips, and turned around to fill a canteen with water as Alice had done before.

 Alice rubbed her eye of some sand that still remained in the corner, “Have you gone around the place yet?”

 Romeo took a long drink from the canteen, and inhaled loudly when the bottle left his lips, “A little. Did you see the armoury?” Alice nodded, “I think that’s how Angel managed to get into the Resistance.”

 Alice noted that he didn’t mention Redd, “What do you mean?”

 “As a bargaining chip, I guess like as good faith.”

 “So any guns that were here are probably still at the Resistance base.”

 The corners of Romeo’s  mouth pulled back for a moment as he sighed through his nose.

 “So…” Alice said, speaking before she had anything to say, “Where are we going to get weapons to take down ZERO?”

 “My best guess would be the natives of the desert,” Romeo said, picking at the bandages on his arms.

 “The natives? But…”

 “The only problem with that is that Angel was essentially an exterminator against them for six years.” He took another long pull from his water bottle. “So that might put a damper on things.”