- Advance Wars: Days of Ruin

-- Centrifugal Death

-- Chapter 1: Tabitha Caulder

I crawled out from under the collapsed wall that had nearly crushed me. My ears were ringing, and I could feel blood trickling down my neck. I was on my knees as I reached up to find my ear had been cut, but luckily it was not serious. My helmet was gone and I could not find my assault rifle. My dusty blue uniform and long coat had come out untouched more or less, and I had not been hit or impaled by debris. I felt my pounding head. The bun I put my brown hair in was still intact, and I couldn't feel any gashes or bleeding. I thought I was fine as I tried to stand up, but ended up wobbling around until falling back down to my knees. My body ached, and I remembered what had happened. My unit and I… we had been fired on by… something. I had never seen anything like it. The sky lit up with a flash followed by a sound that I could think of only one thing: buzz saw. It was exactly like a spinning blade in my father's saw mill, only accompanied with the sound of a million guns going off at once. The block we were defending was completely destroyed. Anything that had not been leveled by the strange weapon was covered in holes. It looked like the cheese that had been shot several times. Rubes called it Swiss cheese.

When my ears stopped ringing, there was a short silence before I picked up on the gunfire and explosions in the distance. I stood up and was relieved to find I still had my pistol. I didn't know how useful it was going to be; before the strange weapon fired on us our unit was cornered. From across the street, from windows, from alleyways- everywhere I looked men and women in black took aim at us. We were close enough so that I could make out the emblem of an owl in flight on the shoulders of their uniforms. Then they retreated… and the flash came. Now there was nothing left of the block. Every building around us had collapsed at once with no crater to suggest a bombing and no fire to suggest an artillery barrage. I started to climb over the pile of bricks and twisted metal beams to find anyone from my unit. There had to be other survivors like me, and I tried not to imagine them trapped or flattened under rubble. The first thing that jumped out at me was the RPG that belonged to our unit leader, Empric. We weren't a mechanized division, but Empric had salvaged an RPG long ago and no one was foolish enough to ask him to drop it. It was sticking out of a mess of debris.

"Empric? Empric!" I called out.

I flipped what used to be piece of roof and immediately regretted it.

There was so little of Empric left that I let everything fall back to the ground. I didn't know how to describe it. He… he was everywhere. I froze after spinning away and started to feel nauseous. Luckily my attention caught on to someone groaning in pain and I stumbled down another pile of bricks to find Raleigh slumped up against what had to be the most resistant brick wall ever made by mankind. The noise had shattered his glasses and he was bleeding horribly.

"Kalina," Raleigh coughed, seeing me approach. "I saw it… I saw it move…"

I kneeled down next to him. I had no medical training… but even if I did I knew all the bandages and band aids in the world weren't going to help Raleigh now.

"The cylinder part… it began to spin… it used centrifugal force… to open up like an umbrella. It was like…"

His head bobbed as he tried to find the right words. I couldn't think of anything to say.

"Like… a carousel... at a carnival…"

Then his head bobbed off for the last time. I was about to move on, but I couldn't as much as turn my head before I heard guns cocking.

"Drop your weapon or you will be shot!" Someone behind me ordered.

Very slowly I dropped my pistol to the ground. Now the only thing I had to defend myself was a knife hidden up my sleeve. It was different from my combat knife, which I had lost months ago.

"Hands up, turn around!"

I turned around to find the soldiers we had been fighting earlier. They stood on top of rubble and crouched behind anything that would shield them as they trained their weapons on me. I remained still as one of them retrieved my pistol then put the barrel of their gun to my back. We started to move up over the rubble and away from it. Soon I was being paraded down the street along with Jones and Marki, two others from my unit. Marki limped along, looking more or less healthy. He still had his helmet, and the way his black hair crept out from under it… he always looked a little crazy even though he was anything but. As for Jones, he was a large man, blessed with the genes as my mother would say. He wore a heavy coat several sizes too small and he always looked like he was going to pop out of it. We only exchanged tired glances as we were moved down the street. It was not far until we reached the parking lot of a derelict gas station. There were tanks parked along the road, and an APC in the gas station lot. Standing in front of the APC was someone… strange…

"Sir, we've located all the survivors we could find."

Amongst all the men and women in black uniforms, including us in our blue Lazurian uniforms, there was a girl. An older girl if I was going to be generous. She couldn't have been more than a couple years out of her teens. Her fancy white dress was surreal for the city we had spent an entire day fighting in. She wore heeled shoes, which was color coordinated with her lavender gloves and the ribbons keeping her hair in two pigtails. And her hair… her hair was an unusual white color. She was too young for hair that color. It only got worse when she turned around. The way she looked at us… we must have been hideous. Her expression was locked in a snarl and her yellow eyes did nothing to help that. I didn't know what to say, the soldiers with their guns on us had addressed her as a superior officer but she was younger than all of us. I looked to Jones and Marki with a sick feeling growing in my stomach.

"Do you know who I am?" The girl asked, hands on her hips.

"No." Marki answered.

His honesty was rewarded with a football kick to the crotch. It was not the kind of football Rubes play either. The girl hit him so hard he fell to his knees and let his face hit the ground. He couldn't catch himself because he was cradling his wounded manhood. Then he rolled onto his side and looked like he was trying to resist curling up into the fetal position. My mouth dropped slightly as I noticed he was crying. This girl hit him so hard he was crying! I started to think about my knife. The girl was pacing back and forth, she was almost within arms distance. If she was just a little closer…

"My name is Tabitha Caulder. If you have brains in any of your skulls you'll never forget it."

Her tone was ferocious. Even when my mother and father were at their angriest, they never sounded this menacing.

"I am the daughter of the esteemed Dr. Caulder, head of Intelligent Defense Systems."

"IDS?" Jones said like a reflex action.

Tabitha drew a small semi-automatic pistol and shot Jones in the foot without so much as aiming. He let out a howl of pain and fell to the ground. Then he started to whimper, trying desperately not to make any more noise for fear of being shot again. Tabitha moved closer and stood over him and for a moment, I thought she was going to stomp him into the ground.

"Did I say you could speak, rat!?"

I made my move. I reached up my sleeve and pulled my knife out, ready to gut her from neck to waist. But I didn't even get to swing. Tabitha was… blindingly fast. She pistol whipped me in the face with enough force to knock me back several steps. And I would have, except she then grabbed my arm with the knife and threw me in a self-defense move I had only seen on bad Rubinelle TV shows. I hit the ground so hard that my entire body went limp, a tingling feeling rushed from my neck down and I thought I heard something snap. For all I knew at that moment, I could have been paralyzed, my arm could have been broken and for the longest time I did not move. I probably could have looked dead to Jones or Marki if they were watching. And then almost as suddenly as it happened, the feeling rushed back into my body and I yelled in pain, coughing and rolling onto my side. For the trouble I must have put Tabitha through, she started to stomp her spiny heel onto my face. The motion reminded me of my grandmother trying to kill cockroaches in the kitchen.

"Stupid and weak. That's what you are. Rats."

Tabitha… she was a monster. And to prove that she was beyond the level of human, she took my knife and broke it into two with her bare hands. I felt the two pieces hit me as she tossed them. Now the three of us were on the ground, moaning and flopping around like dying fish on land. I hated her. There was no way I could express my anger, and I could do nothing.

"My father and I, we control the world whether it has ended or not. Would you like to know why? Because the world is filled with stupid and weak people like yourselves. When the meteors fell, they did a good job of killing many of you off, but there are still FAR too many left crawling around. I am here to fix that."

I tried to stand up, even after the beating I received. I wanted to spite her. She kicked me in the stomach with the kind of force that made Marki cry. I almost cried myself, but I was too angry at… too many things.

"Did I say you could stand up? If you have any ounce of common sense, you'll stay on the ground!"

"Bitch." I muttered, too low for anyone to hear. If she did hear me, I probably would have been killed right there.

"I'm surprised any of you survived the Talon Gun, but at the same time I'm glad I can provide father with at least some feedback. So how was it?"

The way she said 'so how was it' was filled with all the sarcasm and hate you could possibly fit into spoken word. Sometimes when my father was angry he would use a tamer version of it, but either way, it was not something you answered.

"Silence? That's answer enough. You don't know what to say do you?"

I thought about trying to get back up, but the pain my stomach kept me from doing so. All I could do was lie on my side and stare angrily at Tabitha, who had not lost her snarl for a second since she began talking to us.

"Let me be the one to tell you, that all of you rats? Consider yourselves test subjects! You're too stupid and weak to control your own lives. And if you cross me? Well, I'll crush you. I'll crush you like the flies you are."

One of her soldiers came over and handed her an RPG. She put it on her shoulder and looked through the scope. It could have been one of ours; it might have even been Empric's they salvaged from the place where we had been hit with… what Tabitha called the Talon Gun. At least she had given me a name to the strange device that had almost wiped our entire unit out.

"So, how many of you are on the other side of the mountain, rats? How many vermin am I going to have to exterminate? How many flies am I going to have to crush? How many of the stupid and weak are going to get what they so richly deserve?"

We said nothing. I don't know about Marki and Jones, but I was still in pain. And I hated her, more than I've hated anyone since the meteors had fallen. Commander Tasha had almost been driven mad with rage after the meteors fell, and while I've always followed her no matter what, I was beginning to understand what that would be like. It gives you purpose, focus. You know who the enemy is, you know what you have to do to stop them, and every moment they spend without punishment… it only makes you angrier. Everything about Tabitha was horrible, not once had her expression changed from her disgusted look as if we offended her. We continued to say nothing, which made her take a few steps back. She started to take aim at us on the ground with the RPG, moving from each one of us in turn. Firing an RPG at that distance was suicidal, but if there was anyone going to convince me that they were reckless enough, Tabitha had crossed that line long ago.

"No… please!"

I turned to see Jones holding one of his hands up as if they would save him from a rocket propelled grenade. He broke. He told her our numbers, gave her a rough estimate. Jones was always bad with numbers… but amazingly Tabitha had scared him into being more accurate than I had ever seen him before.

"I'm sorry," Jones stuttered. "I'm sorry."

I could have yelled at him, and then I realized how scared I was too. I remembered when I found Empric. I would do anything to escape that fate. Tabitha raised her head away from the scope of the RPG. She had a new expression. Now she was clearly under whelmed.

"That's it? That's all there is? Are you lying to me, rat!?"

"No! No!" Jones cried.

"Pitiful! That's insulting! This is hardly worth my time! But what father says must be done."

If I was not in so much pain, I would have jumped up and attacked her, even after how easily she dealt with me before. I looked to Marki and Jones and only got angrier. Tabitha acted like taking other people's lives was a terribly boring chore forced on her like doing the dishes or taking out the trash. Like a spoiled child. But at the same time, there was obviously something not right about her. She was stronger than any one of us, with inhuman reflexes. I didn't know if her arrogance was just her behavior, or the fact she let these talents go to her head. I knew getting rid of her wasn't a job the three of us could do on our own.

"Sir, what should we do with the three Lazurians?" One of Tabitha's soldiers gestured to us on the ground.

"I haven't decided yet."

Tabitha still had the RPG. She tapped her fingers along the barrel and actually smiled. I don't know why I was surprised, but her smile didn't make her look happy, it only made her look crueler. And now, she was smiling at us…

- Next Chapter: The Bunker Man