Songs: Franz Ferdinand - Evil Eye; The Glitch Mob - A Dream Within A Dream
We were watching over the sawmill in shifts. Since we had regrouped there, we knew that we had to defend the mill sooner or later. It might take a while until the loyalists had started planning an assault and getting ready, but if they were at least a little smart, they'd do it as soon as possible.
If they were to assault us at any later point, we'd be better prepared, we'd probably have more people with us and it would also give us time to strike first. If they didn't attack today we'd be the ones attacking them. It was now early in the morning. Pavel had taken the hostages back to the village so someone could get a look at their injuries and so they could get a proper meal - whatever they needed to recover. He was also going to gather up more and more volunteers to defend the sawmill.
Anouk had been up all night, making plans and distributing weapons to the arriving volunteers and telling them about the strategy. I had no idea how she did it, after we had been cleaning and bandaging her wound only a few hours ago. At this rate she was going to fuck up her shoulder permanently. But of course she wouldn't listen to me when I said that to her.
I had only just woken up, after Mordecai and I had taken the first shift of keeping watch, right after we had come back to the sawmill. It felt good to have some uninterrupted sleep, even if it was just on the floor and under some makeshift blanket that wasn't really very warm. It was better than nothing.
I yawned and sat up, stretching a little. Anouk would probably give us some work to do soon. There were a whole lot of new ones here at the moment, it was almost as if Pavel had mobilized half the village. I looked over the people that were here to see if I could find him among them.
It didn't take me too long until I found him standing between Anouk and some other girl I hadn't seen before. They seemed to be disagreeing about something. Who was that other girl? She looked weak and like she had bruises, but she had a strangely determined look on her face.
I got up from where I was sleeping and walked over to the little group. Anouk was shaking her head while Pavel gave her an angry look. What the hell was this about? And at a time like this when the loyalists could be attacking any minute?
"Morning, everyone. What's going on?" I mumbled and yawned. All three of them gave me a somewhat uneasy look.
"Remember Pavel's sister? The one that got kidnapped?" Anouk asked me. I raised an eyebrow.
"Yeah, why?"
"Well, she's here. She just got out and she's here to fight."
I looked over at her. She looked like she was in pretty bad shape. Her face looked thin and malnourished, she had bruises all over, but there was something about her. It was the look in her eyes. That girl looked like her eyes were on fire. I just knew that if we told her no, she'd do something incredibly dumb.
"Cool, nice to meet you. I'm Nova." I said to her. She seemed a little insecure when I wasn't protesting her fighting.
"I uh... I'm Maria." she introduced herself.
"She's not in any shape to be fighting! Like, I appreciate the willingness to help, but she has just gotten out of imprisonment, basically. Sorry, Maria, but I just don't think it's a good idea. For your own safety." Anouk replied.
"She knows herself. If she says, she can fight, she can fight. I know my sister and I know she's a strong girl." Pavel just said, shaking his head.
"Well, it's nice you all got so many opinions on that, but why don't you let her decide if she wants to risk it or not? Like, it's kinda up to her, don't you think?" I answered and looked at Maria.
She definitely looked like she wasn't expecting that and now there were three pairs of eyes on her. Personally, I thought she should stay back and try helping out in other ways, if she wanted, but honestly, if she wanted to fight, there wasn't much we could do about it. Telling her no would make her do something dumb. I knew the look in her face. I did a lot of dumb things, because people told me no.
"I... well, I wanna fight." she finally answered.
"And why exactly do you wanna fight?" I wanted to know.
"To give those bastards what they deserve!"
"I see. How are you feeling? How badly are you hurt? Are you tired? Do you feel like you can actually physically do this?"
"Well... yeah... I think. I've got no broken bones, just bruises mostly. I think something messed up my leg, but I should be able to pull through." Maria told me. Alright, she could do something. Maybe we shouldn't be putting her directly on the front lines, but she could help out.
Why the hell was everyone fighting over something so trivial? Like, this was really not the hardest problem to solve. Maybe it was just easier for me, because I had gotten some proper sleep. Who knew.
"I don't know why you're all making such a big deal of this. Girl wants to fight, let her fight." I said and shrugged.
"Nova, she'll get killed." Anouk told me. I shook my head.
"No, she'll be absolutely fine, as long as we don't put her on the front lines. There'll be enough to do and we'll need all the help we can get. There'll be people who are hurt, there'll be prisoners and someone needs to keep track of how our strategy is going, get some supplies to everyone on the frontlines, all that stuff." I said.
"But I wanna fight on the frontlines!" Maria protested.
"Oh, trust me, you don't. Not with a messed up leg. I know it sounds great and heroic, but it's not all fun and games. At all. It's messy and it feels like shit." I told her.
"Then why do you do it?" she wanted to know.
"At first I had no choice and by now I've done it long enough to not be bothered anymore. You'll see enough action on the sidelines, too, trust me."
"Everyone get to their positions, they're approaching. I repeat, the loyalists are approaching, everyone get on their positions." a tinny voice came from some loudspeakers. I heard Anouk swearing.
"Nova, you and Mordecai grab your rifles and get up on the roof, I'll be there once I've taken care of everything else. Sasha, get yourself some guns and meet with Nikita, he'll tell you where to go. Maria, you go and report to Anya, she'll be in charge of first aid. She'll give you a job or send you somewhere else if somewhere else needs more help." Anouk said quickly and grabbed her guns from the table.
"Got it!" I replied and quickly made my way over to Mordecai who had already gotten up and was stocking up on ammo.
"You ready, chica?" he asked, as I grabbed my rifle that was leaning against the wall. I gave him a wide smile.
"Ready to burn up some people, yeah." I answered. He raised an eyebrow and took a quick look at my rifle before giving me a smug grin.
"Fire, huh? Nice." he said and threw a pack of ammo over to me. I caught it and shoved it into one of my belt pouches.
"Well, I'm prepared. Human targets - fire, metal stuff - acid. You know the drill."
"Well, let's go then. It's been a while since I've properly done this. Kinda makes me miss the days when there were only some random bandit camps throughout Pandora. Those were fun days."
"Yeah, I still had my own fucking house back then. Shit, I miss that house." I mumbled. Mordecai shouldered his rifle and smiled at me.
"Well, let's get up onto the roof then. I doubt they'll be too tough, so we should be fine." he said, as he walked ahead of me. There were a bunch of fire escape stairs leading all the way up to the roof. The whole building was several stories high, so we had a lot of stairs to climb. On the one hand it was good, because it somewhat warmed up our bones, but on the other hand it felt like the most taxing thing I had done during the last 10 years. And I had done a shit load of taxing things.
Once we finally reached the top, we quickly felt that we were on a whole different planet than Pandora. It was freezing. There was snow covering the whole area that we were overlooking and it was COLD. I would have compared it to the Southern Shelf on Pandora, only that it felt much, much colder.
"I hope the next place we go to isn't going to be this fucking cold." Mordecai mumbled, once we had acclimatized a little.
"Yeah, same. What corner do you wanna take?" I asked him. Mordecai just shrugged. The building was a perfect spot for sniping, to be honest. The roof was flat, but there was a small barrier that you could hide behind. It was as if it was built for sniping people from the roof. I loved it.
"I don't really mind. Do you wanna take the left and I take the right?" he suggested. I nodded quickly.
"Sure thing. I'm actually looking forward to this." I answered and started walking towards the left corner of the building.
"Hey, querida." Mordecai called out. I turned around and gave him a questioning look. He smiled.
"Love you." was all he said. I laughed and smiled back at him.
"Love you, too." I replied. It made me feel weirdly grounded to hear him say that. It almost felt like things hadn't changed since the first time we met and hung out. Which wasn't true, because everything had changed A LOT. But it was almost like there was at least some constant in my life and that was Mordecai. And somehow that just gave me back all the hope and strength I needed.
I made my way over to the left corner of the building and got in position - lying on my stomach, the rifle against my shoulder and the barrel firmly planted against the concrete barrier of the roof.
I surveyed the area I could easily see from my spot and it was like I could see half the forest. The actual area of interest was more towards the front of the sawmill, though. That's where we were expecting most of the loyalists to attack. I doubted they actually had a whole lot of people out here that could attack, but you never knew. There was always a slight chance, they'd send off a small group to attack from the sides we were kinda neglecting and if that happened we would be fucked.
We had a backup plan for that and there were more people expected to come up onto the roof, but it would give us a big disadvantage if they decided to be smart about this. Right now we were really banking on them acting like the bandits on Pandora - unstrategically and, frankly, stupid.