I cranked out a few more words, moved the game on a bit. This section is from Chapter 2, and it finds Brandon back at home...
Two armed guards marched me down the hall to our shower complex. We passed the bunkers that looked like smashed furniture, the murder holes only visible if one knew where to look, arranged by design to funnel an intruder to the center, making the only option for that bastard death by ballistic metal. I could tell by the slight shuffling of the massive guard to my left that it was my cousin Robert- he had injured his leg in a motocross race when he was younger, and his gait made him a liability in the field. The slender guard to my right strode confidently, footfalls ringing throughout the house. That would be my sister Sheilah's friend, Grace. No matter how many times I tried to tell her that she wouldn't be ready to go on external missions until she no longer walked like she was angry at the ground, she stubbornly kept to her masculine stride.
Without consciously meaning to, I thought about how I would escape if I found cause. Dad was always telling us to analyze the situation we were in, understand what we needed to do to save ourselves. Robert was set up on my left, and that was stupid, his bad leg was nearest to me. I'd fake a stumble, falling off balance and forward, that'd do the trick. When Robbie stepped forward to steady me, I'd strike the side of knee, felling him as surely as a lumberjack felled a tree with his last axe strike. That was part one.
For all her lack of tactical silence, Grace was a fucking technician with a rifle, and had incredibly fast and lethal reflexes. I'd dive behind Rob, let him absorb the rounds in that fleshy, Kevlar vested body of his, and take Grace out with his assault rifle. I estimated I would have 10 seconds maximum from the time Grace's gun went off to the moment guards would displace from their murder holes, move to the scene of the crime, and cut me down. That was enough time to clear the house, I knew its hallways and portals intimately, but what to do when I made it outside? The wall surrounding our house was ten feet tall and mortared brick, with a generator providing a high-amp charge on the wire ringing the top. There was a five second lag from the time someone threw the switch to the point when some dumbass like yours truly trying to get in or make good his escape became a crispy critter. I could set up a defensive position, but the guards were drilled incessantly in tactically responding to a crisis situation, and I knew they would quickly seize the advantage. And then there was the whole moral problem of killing my family, which anyway I sliced it, was a deplorable idea. We had plenty of enemies trying to kill us: Beloved, Leaders, and Bandits. Jesus, the Bandits. I had been so focused on escaping from the Beloved I had forgotten about those assholes. As bad as the Beloved and the insidiously ruthless Leaders were, the Bandits were perhaps even worse.
What a fucked up world we lived in.
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