Paint was much less traumatic than bullets, but paint was only the beginning. Soon the drones would descend like vultures on the doomed. Bruce fired off another short burst. Another one down. He had seen eight people in the last five minutes, falling to their knees splashed with paint. A few had run down the canals to die in peace.
Bruce tried not to be sick. If he could just get around the four people on the other side of the great central monolith, he could get out of this death trap and toward the middle of the maze. At the middle, he could make it out. If he won, if he stayed alive—maybe they would even take the treasonous thoughts off his record.
"What are you in for?"
The presence Bruce had noticed was a young man, hardly eighteen, built like a football player. He held his gun with a death grip of inexperience but hardly flinched when the drones swooped down. Bruce had seen him before but he had never spoken to him. Not many spoke out here, down the dried concrete riverbed. Survival was a much higher priority.
Bruce laughed. A paintball splattered against the overhang right over his head. "Not much. I said something aloud when I should have written it down."
The young man laughed. "Same story, different day."
"You? You blow a kiss to a picture of your girlfriend?"
"I assumed my web browser was protected." The young man grimaced, raised his weapon jerkily to his shoulder, and sent a burst into the chest of a young woman who was getting too close.
Bruce didn't ask any more questions. He wanted to get out, if he could.
The opening had gone silent. Quietly, the two men crept out of their hiding place. Amidst garish puddles of dripping paint, a handful of people lay flat on their faces. A couple more knelt in the middle of massive smears. Still others stood staring at the sky. All were tagged with the telltale deadly yellow paint.
"Are we the only ones left?" the other man asked.
Bruce stopped at the edge of a large puddle of yellow liquid. "Why aren't they—"
Next thing he knew, the breath exploded out of his body with the impact of a paintball directly beneath his ribs.
