Jump: The Fallen: Testament 1 Read Free

my heart, trying to rip its way out of my chest and— Boom!
    Bullets make a particular sound when they hit meat. No way to describe it unless you’ve heard it before. A sloppy “whump,” maybe. I heard it plenty of times deer hunting when I was a kid, not to mention the other places. But there is no more hunting now, so not many citizens know that. The guy that just took that round . . . he knows it. Only difference when you hit a man is the—
    And I hear him scream, and then there is yelling and shouting and bullets come flying up the center of the stairwell—undisciplined fire. It’s angry and there’s a lot of it. Now I know I hit him.
    Maybe you can lose them.
    Ten floors later, barely able to draw breath, dizzy from the lack of oxygen to my brain, and wincing from the burning acid melting into my thighs, losing them is a little girl’s dream.
    You’re gonna have to —
    I try not to think about it, and I drag myself, clawing at the railing with whatever I got left. It ain’t much.

    You got her there okay. Kelly . . . she’ll make it. That's what I tell myself. Or is it my annoying little voice again? It’s getting harder to tell the difference.
    Kelly. My only salvation in this fucked-up dream of life. She needed a head start—time to get clear of all this shit, clear of me. If I didn't give it to her, they would have her raped and tortured. I’m not letting that happen.
    Amy is ok.
    That is definitely not my annoying little voice, because Amy . . . my little angel . . . is gone. That was over a year ago? I wonder if the lack of oxygen is starting to make me hallucinate.

    I can’t let them take me—torture me into talking. Because the truth is, no one can outlast a Protection interrogation team. To them, torturing and raping a citizen is just a coffee break. Once the snatch and bag team. . . When Protection’s Citizen Compliance unit hands you over to interrogation, you’re talking, squawking like a chicken with its wings copped off, telling them anything they want to know. They would break me before I had a chance to piss myself. Whoever I used to be, I’m nobody on the wrong side of an interrogation room.
    Nobody. That’s who I turned myself into after I ran. That is, until two days ago. Then my name came up on Protection’s “list.” Couple of bad keywords later and the monster Protection data-farm in Utah, spit out my data on some cube-monkey's screen. Then he ran thirty-seven years’ worth of stored and indexed email, text and wave information and he found the word—“Guns.”
    Never mind that I buried all of mine three years ago. Any idiot could see that coming. But that’s what they want, the buried ones. Shit, there are no more guns above ground. Not enough that it would matter, anyway. You can’t get two citizens to agree on coffee, much less shoot a gun in the same direction. But that was Protection's plan—divide and crush. It’s easier to snatch and bag citizens when no one will help them. Too bad the old Mary Jane, Berkeley dumbasses couldn’t figure that out until it was too late.

— IV —

    “PRY IT FROM my cold dead fingers.” That was what my dad used to say when he was drinking the state swill. Nobody can afford the good stuff.
    I talked a lot of shit with him about something no one thought would ever happen. Most citizens wouldn’t know what to do even if something did. But we didn’t care because we figured it never could happen to us. Then . . . it did.
    Protection massacred all those grade schoolers—blamed it on some single-parent momma’s boy whose overindulgent mommy just happened to have an AR-17 assault rifle, lying around in her closet. So much for the nine-foot fences and armed Protection sentries, guarding every state conditioning campus in existence.
    Give me a break. I bet if you checked those agents’ weapons you could match up the bullets they pulled out of those kids pretty well. But Protection marched the parents out in front of the PIN