73 - Bug Out One

The klaxon stilled, though a surf roar began in Nadumon the city, outside this square, somehow launching screaming chaos, without it being the war that they'd been trying to avoid. What is going on here?

Once the birds were subdued, no one moved.  Everyone’s hand was on their hilts, knuckles white, eyes wide. The Amir was the first to shout… ‘stand-down!’ in Lainz and Milari.  “Hold your hands or I’ll have you beaked out of the feather-spitters for treason so fast your ass will leave soot marks on the sand.”

Another gravel-voiced bellow… this time from the Nadumon side.  It wasn’t proper Nadu, so Kyrus only caught a word or two and he was certain what he didn’t understand was probably obscene. He desperately wanted to run in to his father… to his family, Werfas had a hand on his elbow… when had he grabbed?  “I’m not going to do anything stupid,” he hissed to his wing-brother.

The door of the council chamber burst open, everyone lurched forward a step.  The Head of the Nadumon leaned on da… Ilax staggered behind, carrying another of the council, the rest of them trailing behind them. The Head had a bloody handkerchief pressed to her face and her guard lunged to help her, stopped in their tracks by her upraised hand, even though she was barely able to stand. She waved her stone tablet at everybody and hurled it to crack on the stone at her feet.

“What did that mean?” Wer asked.  The Amir glanced at him as a wave of consternation roared through the crowd. Suddenly their hands were in the air… hands empty of their tiny knives.  People shouted, there was a roar of demand for answers.  The Guard wheeled around and pulled out their shields… mirrors that they shone around the circle, until people dropped their hands to shield their eyes, quieting.

The Guardian became herald because the Head spoke to him and he relayed what she was too weak to bellow to the crowd.  “We have been denied access.  Our mandate is not recognized and our research is now our own!”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh… oh no,” the Amir said quietly, as the Guardian blinded everyone around him to silence again.

“What are you idiots doing standing here? You've an hour to clear this area… two if we're lucky,” the Guardian bellowed out.  “Everyone… BUG-OUT!”

“What? What?”  People scattered as if they were an ants nest kicked.  Someone screamed orders in the distance… Ilax put the council member on his own bird, mounted behind.  Ky’s dad helped the Head onto his own bird.”

“Everyone mounted get a Nadumon to ride double NOW!” The Amir bellowed loud enough to be heard in the chaos. “Follow His Radiance’s bird! Ride… ride… ride!  If you stay you’ll die. Everyone get on a bird and RIDE!”

Kyrus found the young Nadumon man, who had spoken to them, and even his stupid fluffy crammed onto the foresaddle of his bird, laced arms around the young man’s waist as he fumbled his off-side knee under the strap, yanked the hood wide open and his warbird leaped into a run, joining the suddenly running flock.

“Where are we going?” He managed to shout over the thunder of a thousand clawed feet and warbird squeals and people shouting orders. “You’re leaving everything behind?”

The young man in front of him trembled.  “We’ve… we never thought we’d bug-out. We never thought we’d have to.  We never thought…”

“What's ‘bug-out’?” They crouched as the street narrowed and the warbird, rather than slow down, leaped onto an outside staircase to the roof and scrambled to bounce from roof to roof. “OW OW! Ow! Don’t slow down!”

**

They ran the birds to exhaustion and beyond; a limping, stumbling half-crippled stagger, people catching up then clumping together, pushing as hard as they could.  The Head directed the flock and all of the city that had apparently dropped their whole lives and run for it, with Ilax and Kyrus and her Guardian all acting as if they were allies instead of near enemies.

“Canyon… bolt-holes…” the boy said, when he could speak, when the bird slowed down enough that the words weren’t ripped out of his mouth by the wind.  “Bug-out… just in case.”  Kyrus wasn’t sure but he thought the young man might be weeping.

Werfas had an older woman on his bird and she kept calling ‘Faster!  Faster young man I have no mind to die here!”

“What are we running from?”

The front of the flock, still moving at a walk, began disappearing… “Hey!”

“The doors to Bug-Out One are there.  We might just make it.”

They were in the canyon now, the walls higher than the birds’ heads and he could see metal doors wide enough for a dozen birds abreast to enter.  “We might just be in ti—“

A thunderclap from above and Kyrus looked up to see what looked like a ball of fire with a tail streaking across the sky over their heads, toward the abandoned Nadumon capitol.  The boom of explosion was enough to make the exhausted birds drop where they stood or bolt in a last panic for the underground shelter before them.  A wind like a massive fist in his back almost took Kyrus off his bird… which was still on its feet.  “MOVE MOVE MOVE.”

A second thunderclap followed the first.  And a third… and as Ky made it inside; a woman on the ground hooked his bird’s beak and dragged them out of the way fast… he heard a fourth.  Then he lost count.

People left the birds that refused to move and ran, carrying only the children, leaving anything else behind, the massive doors beginning to move pushed by hundreds of frantic hands.  The noise and white hot wind now ripped at the metal, even as the two sides closed with a crash that seemed insubstantial in the face of what sounded like the sky tearing. The air seemed to bulge and then get sucked away, then was still.

They dropped their hands from their ears, some bloodied, and the silence inside was deafening, even as the rock all around them shook as though a giant with a hammer pounded Nadumon the city into fused sand.

 “Ninety minutes,” said a voice in the dark.  “He only gave us ninety minutes.”