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"People like us, we've gotta stick together;

Keep your head up, nothing lasts forever!

Here's to the damned, to the lost and forgotten -

It's hard to get high when you're living on the bottom!"

~Kelly Clarkson, "People Like Us"

Chapter Forty-four: Walk in Hell

"You doing alright back there?"

"Hm?" Cameron Rogers looked up from the pile of Advent corpses stinking up the transport. He'd grown resigned to the reek, if not inured to it, but the motion was all that he needed to remind himself that the lemon-scent in the air didn't come from cleaning products. "Oh, yeah. I'll live."

"Good." Da-Xia Liang gave him a little smile in the rear mirror, though her eyes didn't leave the desiccated and dust-worn streets of what had once been a city in Northern Virginia for long. "I'd hate to have saved your ass for nothing."

"I'll try not to disappoint you." Cameron reached up to touch his face, and his collections of bruises and cuts. He'd found a first aid kit in the APC on the ride up what had been I-95, and he'd done what he could with it. Still, he hurt, and still he knew he would be lucky to even be admitted to any beauty contests. He spared his rescuer another glance a moment later. "How'd you know it was me they were moving?"

"Well..." Liang shrugged. "A little patience, a little logic, and a little good old-fashioned luck. That much security? It was either you or our target, and I'm sure she could have pointed me in your direction."

"Probably." Cameron sighed. He looked down between his feet. "Thank you, Sergeant."

"It's not worth a fuss, Moose." He had to strain to make her words out over the low hum of the engine. "No man gets left behind. It's the job."

"Still-"

"And!" She sounded a lot brighter now, as if getting off the seriousness of her own actions was a good thing. "I think we've moved past corporal and sergeant, don't you...Cameron?"

"I suppose..." He coughed a moment later. "Okay, real talk: is Xia like your middle name, and Da is your first name, or do I say both at once-"

"We've got a problem." No four words could derail Cameron as conclusively as those. He rose, taking the overhead grips in his heavily bandaged hands to keep his balance as he made his way to the driver's seat.

"What problem?" he demanded. His eyes flicked to the instrument panel, and he frowned at the gauges for a moment before he found one he recognized. "Oh. We're just about out of-"

The engine sputtered. Cameron seized one of the overhead grips to keep his balance as the APC's drive became simple momentum, keyed in with the dying death rattle of the engine. Over the course of the next few hundred yards, the vehicle ground to a slow but inevitable stop, nosing over cracked and broken streets before coming to rest beside an ambulance with stiff, frozen corpses arranged around a gurney.

"Lovely." Liang rose, then pulled a handheld drill from her coat. She clambered up the latter to the gunport, throwing it open without a care. Cameron shivered at the acrid taste of the air, and his first good look at the cloudy, almost yellow sky. Liang fished in her coat again. "Here."

"What?" Cameron jumped then, because she dropped something he had to fumble to catch. "That's my sidearm-"

"Sure is. There wasn't any way for me to bring your rifle across between cars, so I destroyed it." She was very matter-of-fact about these things. She quickly set to work on the mag-cannon, unscrewing the bolts with harsh whirrs from her tool. "We're a good five, almost six clicks from the rendezvous point. We'll have to hoof it the rest of the way."

"Right." Cameron opened the main door, wincing at the whine and shriek of rolling metal. He examined the old buildings with their crumbling stone for a long minute. "What's the plan, Sarge?"

"I said we were past rank." But Liang still clambered out onto the roof as soon as she'd freed up the cannon. Despite its size and her lack of such, she handled it as if it were made of paper. "I'll take point. You're hurt." She dropped down by the ambulance, and Cameron took up position at her side. She blew air through her teeth. "Stay close and cover the rear."

"Yeah." Cameron gave the ruins another glance. "This place just looks like a Lost nest."

"Menace, we have lost the Assassin's signature." Bradford's voice was harsh. "Either she's retreated or she's gone fully undercover."

"I understand." Pratal Mox paused to slip a new magazine into his bullpup, then brought it up, laying down a heavy burst of fire from atop his tower. He stitched patterns across the chestpieces of a trio of Advent soldiers and their officer all in a heartbeat. "We are making a heavy dent in their forces."

"Someone has to get in there and lay the charges," Meysam chimed in. His sniper rifle barked from somewhere over to the left. "I've got Nui and Kang as a screen but they're taking a lot of fire. Where the hell are Outrider and Lieutenant Quinn?"

"Ow..."

"Aileen!" Mox didn't bother with much in the way of ceremony, not when he wasn't any better informed than the squaddie. "We need your support from the flank!"

"Where's...where's..." The Irishwoman paused. "Wait! I think-"

Mox never found out what she thought. He stopped listening when he heard the roar that could shake the world, the one that made the entire tower vibrate and nearly threw him from his feet.

"That is not optimal," he declared, as the Berserker Queen burst from the darkness and right for him. Mox brought his gun up and held the trigger down, grunting as the weapon tried to kick free from his grasp. He controlled his stream of fire well, and he saw blood fly...but it wasn't enough. The beast was angry, and it wouldn't be stopped by something so trivial as magnetic fire delivered at full auto.

"Mox!" Gallant cried, as the Queen hit his perch like a battering ram. The tower shook, and Mox had to grab for purchase on one of the support beams lacing the window gap. Gallant let out a hissing growl when the Queen began ripping at the tower's base in a manic frenzy. "Get out of there, Mox!"

"Deploying grapple!" Saying it kept him from panicking. Mox aimed his wrist at the facility's roof, judging the shot angle on the fly. With a bang, the line went out-

Boom! The tower finally gave, and Mox cried out when the shift under his feet threw off his trajectory. The line hissed into space, seizing on nothing, and Mox himself crashed onto his back when his entire perch keeled over, metal groaning and snapping and shearing apart with shrieks of torture-

Wham! The impact when the tower came down was almost as intense as the reverberations from the blast that had nearly killed him in Korea. Mox covered his head as rubble fell, great pieces of alloy the size of his head nearly spearing through his reinforced helmet and into his ritual scars. By some miracle, they all missed, and Mox managed to scramble to his hands and knees, bullpup hanging from his shoulder strap, before the bulk of the far wall that was now the ceiling could start to give. His eyes flicked left, then right-

There! He saw open air through a hole ripped open in the chaos. Mox scrambled for it as quickly as he could, fishing out a fresh bullpup clip on the way. He didn't bother reloading yet; the wreckage above him groaned dishearteningly. It could cave at any moment and give him a hard metal burial, and Mox had far too much to do yet to allow himself to suffer such a fate.

He threw himself out of the gap in the nick of time, rolling on his shoulder to get away from the tumble of support beams and the scattered spray of broken glass. Dust flew up all around him, which gave him a moment to discard his empty magazine and slide the new one in place.

"This is Mox." He was grateful for his helmet: not only did it house his com where it couldn't absently slip out for a drink, it kept the muck out of his eyes and mouth. He could breathe without coughing up a storm, and he did just that as he started off, feeling his way toward the sound of the action as best he could. "I have not yielded, and as you can tell, I am not dead."

More's the pity. He waited for the contralto declaration, probably accompanied by a harsh temnotic rifle shot over his shoulder in the smog. Mox found himself frowning when it didn't come.

Perhaps she is otherwise occupied. That sent a flush of worry running down to his fingers and toes. It wasn't that he was concerned - she could handle herself as well as he - but there were always...chances that were taken in action. The idea of one of those inevitable luck-based events not panning out in her favor was...concerning.

His feet moved from dusty ground to permacrete. He readied his ripjack, noting how low the visibility was. He heard the Queen roaring and felt the ground shake under her feet, but she was somewhere else, chasing Saleh or one of his friends. Mox hoped they had the skill to fend her off.

He hit a wall. It took him a minute to place it - it was a full wall, not just the waist-high divides that marked the yard in sections. Mox frowned.

"Oh. This must be the facility itself." With a fifty-fifty chance, he went left along the wall rather than right, and nearly smiled when that brought him almost instantly to a blown-out window. He used his ripjack to slash what glass was left out of the danger zone. "It seems fate has a smile for me today."

His boots came down on fragments of the window's main occupation. It crushed and cracked under his stride as he made his way in, bypassing secondary supports and focusing his efforts on the main column. No one appeared to challenge him, by which he inferred the garrison was fully occupied outside. Certainly Saleh and his friends - to say nothing of Aileen and Dragunova - could hold them for a few minutes more.

"Vox tala for Ten." Mox scoffed a moment later, as he stuck an X4 charge to the column, then hurried a few paces over to the first rack of combustibles he could find. "Farewell, house of kracsad." He keyed his com, nodding as he admired his handiwork. "This is Mox. Charges set."

"Well, hot damn." Gallant's on-and-off lack of military punctilio amused Mox to no end, given how obsessive Bradford remained about it. "Roger that, Mox. I'm calling Firebrand. Saleh, light the blue flare. All call signs, check in and fall back to Waypoint Nine for EVAC."

"Quinn copies."

"Saleh copies." Kang and Nui announced their acknowledgement a moment later.

"Mox copies." Mox hurried for the window. He covered himself as he moved, wary of the potential of ambush. Perhaps the Assassin lurked in these corners, or stun lancers, or even a lowly soldier with more tactical sense than most. Mox did not care to have his burgeoning...whatever it was with Elena ripped away at the behest of one moment's inattention at the wrong-

His foot hit something that wasn't glass. Mox's eyes turned down.

"Outrider?" Bradford called. "Outrider, check in."

Mox knelt. He ignored the XO and Gallant alike, as the latter joined the effort. His ripjack teased the offending object, pushing it just a hair...just enough to assure Mox it was indeed real. He prodded it again in search of a trap and, finding none, finally risked sweeping it up.

Once, in another life, Pratal Mox had served as an officer in Advent's world-spanning army. He had fought against every force the false gods' puppet government considered their foe: the rebels across the world, XCOM's forerunners, the Templars and the Reapers...it was a long list. But that last band was the most important, because not only had Mox served as an officer alone, but he had served under the leadership of the Chosen on more than one occasion.

He remembered crushed masks just like this one, and he knew exactly what it meant.

"Outrider?" Bradford's voice finally registered to him again. "Outrider, we're pulling back-"

"Save your breath, Central." Mox heard the chill in his tone, coming right from the depth of his tingling bones. "She's gone."

"Gone? You mean, she's-"

Mox threw the remains of the mask with a snarling cry. It made sparks when it hit the main support column, and it left harsh white lines behind as it scraped its way down into the midst of the X4-infused munitions display. His grip tightened on his bullpup until he had to pull back, worried he would damage the equipment.

"Vox tala for Ten." Mox barely heard his own voice. "It seems I have a debt to repay."

"I don't like this place." Cameron held his pistol two-handed, muzzle down. He did his best to keep his stride light and quiet: there was no telling what lurked in the yellowed ruins on all sides. "Where are we, anyway?"

"Fredericksburg, I think it was called." Liang was quieter walking with a heavy mag-cannon than Cameron could have been with felt slippers and no gear at all. He suspected she was scowling under her bandana. "Damn it, I need a smoke."

"You and me both." Cameron felt around in his breast pocket. "Oh, shit. Hold up." He triumphantly pulled out a half-empty pack. "No light, unfortunately, but they didn't take those when they threw me in jail."

"Wonder why. Did they not want them?" Liang took one, then sighed and relented when Cameron insisted she keep another for a spare. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it." He put the pack away after claiming one for himself, somehow unsurprised when Liang turned out to have an orange lighter. She pulled down her scarf to insert and light hers, then his.

"That hits the spot." Cameron blew a cloud of smoke. "Tell you what, after all the shit we went through-"

"Tell me about it." Liang resumed her forward march. "Wasn't easy for me with you under lockdown. Everyone was looking for me."

Cameron stumbled. "For...for you?"

"Yeah, for me." Liang glared at him out of the corner of her eye. "You could have kept quiet for a little longer, Moose."

"I..." Cameron's brow creased. "I didn't tell anyone anything, I swear. Especially not that I wasn't alone."

Liang's turn to frown. "Then...they had my picture. My poster up everywhere. I had to put on enough makeup that a dozen men and a couple women thought I was a whore, and I changed all my clothes, and..."

"It wasn't me." Cameron shook his head imploringly. "I swear to God, Liang: I didn't tell them a thing."

"Well, then." Her frown deepened. "If you didn't, then-"

Her hand shot out and seized the front of Cameron's shirt. He yelped when she hauled him forward, hard enough he almost went down on his hands and knees. Somehow, he stayed on his feet.

His blood ran cold when red tracers went through the air where his head had been.

"Pursuit team!" Liang cried, as an officer and a soldier burst from a side alley. They dove for cover, but not fast enough to keep her from unleashing a stream of fire on them. It punched right through the overturned rubbish bin one attempted to hunker behind, and the soldier flopped lifelessly to the sidewalk a moment later.

Bang! Bang! Cameron fired two-handed for the first shots, snarling with joy when the officer cried out and clutched her leg. He grabbed Liang's shoulder as soon as they had the opening.

"Come on!" Cameron ordered. He nearly shoved her down their next alleyway, firing one-handed almost over his shoulder to keep the Adventer's head down. As quickly as possible, the pair tore down the alley, bearing right wherever possible as they ran for the EVAC point.

"What do we do if we get there and Firebrand isn't on standby?" Cameron demanded.

"She'll be there!" Liang might as well have admitted they would die and that was all there was to it. Cameron almost called her on that.

Almost, because when they punched out the other end of the alley, they came out right in the mist of about a hundred-

"Oh, fuck!" Cameron's breath caught as desiccated heads turned their way. "Lost!"

"And..." Bradford let out a breath. "Mox is in. Sir, Menace is aboard the Skyranger."

"Minus one." Gallant jabbed his cane into the deck hard enough it produced a gunshot-echo of ringing metal. "Response from Outrider's tracker?"

"Nonresponsive, sir." Jiaying grimaced. "Either it's out of range or she deactivated it."

"Firebrand is in motion," Tygan reported. "She's clearing the safe distance."

"Copy." Bradford reached for his com. "Quinn, this is Central. Detonate charges."

"A waste." Gallant seethed, boiling from the inside out as he watched the holodisplay erupt into flames. His grip on his cane went in and out, pulsing along with the thunderous beat of fury deep inside him. He watched towers fall and rubble fly, while dust and dirt scattered and Advent units scrambled for safety. "A fucking waste."

"That's one Avatar Project facility down for the count." No mirth absently leaked into Jiaying's tone, and her eyes were nothing but cold. "That's a stinging blow to the Elders."

Gallant nearly spat. "Someone get me Volk. I want him informed as quickly as possible." He glared at the blue pulsing dot of Firebrand, zipping away from the continued secondary explosions as the facility's underground portions cooked off. "Fuck that: I want Volk here on my ship, within the week. I want Betos with him."

"Yes, sir." Bradford might not agree with those priorities, but he wasn't arguing. "We'll find her, Commander."

"Damn straight we will. Or-" Gallant choked that one off. Somehow, he didn't think his crew would find or her broken corpse, at least to be very inspiring. The image of Command weighed heavily on him.

Sometimes, Edward, being in command just means you get to choose who dies.

What if someone bought the farm hunting Dragunova down? What if in her rescue, Kelly or Mox or both took plasma to the face? What was the price of one soldier? By pushing the Reaper's recovery, was Gallant choosing others who would die in her stead?

The longer he served, the more he wondered if his old man mightn't have been right after all.

"Out of the frying pan, into the fucking fire!" Liang opened up with a heavy burst that tore through a dozen Lost in a flash. "Break left!"

"But the EVAC point!" Cameron snapped his gun up. Without the Grenadier's volume of fire, he had to pick and choose his snappy little headshots, hitting the weaker and runtier ones as quickly as he could between the eyes or at the base of the throat. He considered himself pretty fair on the range, but there was the range and then there was...this. Range targets wouldn't kill him if he didn't hit them, even if Bradford might.

"We can't get to the EVAC point if we die!" Liang vaulted atop an overturned car, and she cut loose on full auto, chewing up the onrushing tide of screeching dead. "Move it, Moose!"

Cameron moved it. He ejected his clip the instant it went empty, reloading on the fly as he bolted past Liang's impromptu firebase. He ducked as a Lost tried to grab his head, and on reflex he swept out its knees. When the thing went down, its arms snapped off its body with a crunch and a spray of green pus.

"Donut!" screamed a voice. Cameron turned...and winced as the officer came limping after them, gun upraised. He ground to a halt when the Lost turned on him, too.

"Run!" Liang reminded, while the officer's gun roared. Cameron swore, but he did as he was bid, bolting for freedom in the Grenadier's wake. For a moment, the Lost had another target, but soon enough there would be more of them. Liang waved, nearly skidding around a corner. "This way! Move!"

Cameron didn't dare glance over his shoulder, but he heard the officer shriek. A moment later, he stopped, and Cameron suppressed a shiver.

"How much further?" he demanded, sweat running down the back of his neck. He tried to peer around corners before he took them, but slowing down meant losing contact with Liang. Despite their height difference, he was struggling to keep up, and it wasn't all because he was injured.

"Not far!" She didn't elaborate, because they heard more hunting cries borne on the wind. "Dashers!"

"Shit!" Cameron heard more than the cries now: he heard feet and hands high above, bearing the fast-moving Lost variants ever closer with each bound. Dust rained from their footfalls, and Cameron spun and aimed up, hunting for moving shapes to-

Bang! He saw one, then another. Bang! Bang!

"Come on!" Cameron cried, when a body toppled from three stories above. It crashed through a fire escape and down to ground level in three or four parts, and he whooped wildly. "Next?"

"Moose, come on!" Liang had never stopped, and Cameron swore under his breath as he realized how much ground he had to make up now.

"Coming!" He bolted, heedless of the noise of dashers on their heels. He swore it sounded like some were vaulting down from above and coming in hard, spitting and snarling through red-lined dead faces-

"To the right! To the right!" Liang led unerringly, as if she had a GPS fixed in her skull. Cameron hoped she actually knew what she was about, as he struggled to keep up behind her. If she didn't know how to get to the EVAC point from here...

"Watch it!" he cried, when her turn led them into another pocket of Lost. His pistol and her cannon went off as one, and a half-dozen of the creatures collapsed. The remainder - at least ten - came on while the pair tried to reload.

"Don't stop moving!" Liang cried, before she kicked one in the knee. The joint shattered and the creature went down, still trying to grab at her ankles from the pavement. Cameron put a shot in the back of its head.

"Tell yourself that!" He jumped the body, firing on the move. "Last clip here, Liang-"

"We're almost there!" She sprinted past him, moving faster than the Lost could ever manage. "Just don't stop!"

"I'm not-" Cameron broke off as she tore on, heedless of his protest. He sucked in as great a gulp of air as he could, barely registering when his next step crunched right through the paperlike skin and fragile bones of a fallen Lost.

His lungs burned. His legs ached more and more with every yard he had to cover, and his feet throbbed. His knuckles, still battered from the fight aboard the APC, gave him no peace. He dreaded what would happen if the Lost got in close enough for him to have to defend himself directly. He couldn't seem to get enough air in to satisfy him, no matter how hard he gulped for it. Everything smelled like stale asbestos and sour milk.

"There!" Liang pointed, though it was a moment before Cameron could follow her around her corner and see what she did. He clutched his pistol, listening to the dashers on their tail.

"I hope to God you're right!" He stumbled up after her, even as she reached into her coat of tricks and pulled out the blue beacon of freedom. Liang tossed it into the first clear space she could, then turned about.

"Firebrand?" she called. "Firebrand, this is Wraith-one! We are compromised, repeat, compromised, with incoming-"

"Yeah, a metric fuckton of incoming!" Cameron called, as the dashers burst around the corner. They came in a tide, and he snapped his pistol up as fast as he could. It bucked and roared, spitting harsh mag-tracers into the throng. "Firebrand, do you copy?"

Nothing crackled in his ear. He ground his teeth, wincing when Liang's mag-cannon opened up. Lost bodies tumbled and collapsed, and the sheer weight of fire was enough to drive the swarm back on its heels.

"Ammo?" Liang demanded. Cameron swallowed as the second wave pushed past the first, thundering forward without a care.

"Half a clip!" He fired again, then again, thankfully claiming one per shot. "Quarter clip!"

Ratta-tatta-tatta! Liang's cannon lit up, almost drowning out her cry of "one third!" His own pistol's bang was almost drowned by the roar. For one glorious instant, their fire was enough. The Lost hesitated.

Then Cameron's pistol had nothing left, and Liang's cannon stuttered into silence.

"...empty." In the sudden silence, Cameron's ragged whisper echoed. He fancied in that one word, he heard his own death warrant signed and sealed. Reflexively, he squeezed the trigger again, as if hoping Jesus had come down and done unto the magazine what he had done for the loaves and fishes.

The Lost charged.

"Shit!" Cameron grabbed a fallen wooden beam. It was the best weapon he could find, and he threw himself between the horde and Liang. "Sergeant, run-"

"I'm not going anywhere!" She drew an orange-and-red charge from her coat. "Head down!"

"That'll draw more of them-"

"Long term problem!" She'd never hesitated, and her prized incendiary grenade flew out into the crowd sans its pin. Cameron had to avert his eyes as it cooked off with a titanic surge of light, scourging him with a wave of heat that washed over him from head to toe. For all the conflagration did to him, the consequences for the Lost were even worse: the flames set into their thin skin and ripped up to their eyes, boiling them from the inside out. Without any form of armor to protect them, their dead flesh and rotting bones were nothing but kindling. Cameron almost cheered.

Almost, because he heard the chorus of answering howls that followed the detonation.

"Here they come!" He had no more time to talk, instead using his weapon to bash in the head of the first dasher to tear his way. He clouted a second one a moment later, then had to duck as a third came for him from behind. Liang's fists flew, and she yelped as they bit her on the shoulders straight through her coat and her blouse. Cameron's back pressed into hers, and as the burning Lost surged in, he knew this had to be-

It was the strangest sensation he'd ever felt. One moment he was on his feet and fighting...and then there was purple, spiraling in like snakes on all sides. It rose up in a dome all about him, and his view of the outside world hazed over. His back still remained pressed to Liang's, and from her sudden gasp, she must have been fully inside just like him.

"What the hell," Cameron managed. He jumped as the dome hit the end of his wooden pole, and it snapped the weapon in two as if it were an overgrown twig.

Blam! Blam! Ratta-tatta-tatta!

"That's gunfire!" Liang crowed. Another noise filled the air: one more thunderous, one deeper, one unmistakable.

"Hello, Wraith-one." There was that angelic voice! "Your favorite nondescript beauty is back!"

"Firebrand!" Cameron pumped his fist in the air, watching the distorted display as tracers arced from the Skyranger's drop bay. He heard shard guns and a cannon going off, and suspected there had to be at least Jane and David, and either Julie or Sylvie to have covered Liang and Cameron so well. Maybe both.

"In the flight suit!" the pilot agreed. "You two just sit tight until the exterminators finish the job, and then we'll get you out of the fishbowl."

"Hot damn." Cameron reached for that pack of smokes again. "Did you lose that lighter?"

"Fuck no." Liang whipped it out as if challenged.

"Good, good." Cameron offered her a cigarette, not noticing for a moment she already had one up and ready. He blinked. "Where'd you get that?"

"You made me take two."

"Oh. Did I?" Cameron blinked slowly. "I guess I did." He laughed as she lit him up. "It's been a long day, hasn't it?"

"Damn straight." She puffed out a happy cloud of smoke. "But it's over now."

"It is." Cameron sank to a seat on a dead Lost. He sucked in a deep lungful of smoke. "The worst is behind us."

Author's Note 44: Ambush

Converting the format of a covert op in the game to a proper chapter was really annoying. I'm not happy with how it came out, but this is probably as good as I can get under the circumstances. I wonder how come your operatives have full kit and gear in the actual missions - wouldn't that kind of thing be hard to hide or muscle around? EW made more sense having the covert op carry only a pistol, because those are easy to conceal.

I'm touching on my note from 34 again real quick: I'm writing this two days after 34 posted(hello, readers in the FUTURE!), so I've still got that MS review in my inbox as of now. Odds are I'm going to need to pivot to working on that soon, so I can take full advantage of my temporary critique partner. After that, I have to do a final-pass edit on the next novel for my online serials, since it will start airing in mid-May and I have substantive changes I want to make. After that, I'll probably chain into working directly on the next serial project, which is currently sitting at 45% completion on my hard drive. EDIT: Closer to 75% as of the time of posting.

What that means is that after the next update - Chapter 45 - there will be a hiatus on Vigilo Confido. I don't know exactly how long it will be, but don't expect any updates for a week or two thereafter. Hopefully the break veers shorter, but that depends on if I can knock out my writing targets this month. I'll get back to work on that as soon as I finish this edit. Sorry for the break, but it took me a good bit of time to complete that MS review work(better to do it right than do it fast), and I'm making up for it now.

Until next time, Vigilo Confido.