Built on Blood
an excerpt

One year later.

On the morning of November the fifth, Russell was watching the first light of dawn rise from the windows of the Regime's offices. The sight was more spectacular inside the building than out; the faintest pink light bounced through the halls of white marble and seemed to hover everywhere. But it was still dark enough that everything was blurry.

This early morning hour found him walking the same outer hallway of the building for nearly half an hour without cease. People had been running everywhere, in and out of doors, calling to others, sometimes to him, and he would turn and respond to them, but he couldn't recall anything he'd said. He walked through the hall casually, as if he were walking down the seashore. He stepped around bodies as if they were washed-up logs.

Beautiful, he thought dimly. The perfect time of day.

A group of several men and women rushed out of a door down the hall, whooping in delight. Most of them were carrying boxes, some with open bottles in their other hands, and they were spilling the contents all over themselves taking over-enthusiastic swigs. They spotted Russ and went wild.

“They've got champagne!” one of them shouted. “In the basement!”

A woman from the group ran at Russ, who had stopped, and nearly tackled him to the ground. Expensive wine splashed everywhere. She smacked their lips into a painful kiss, embraced him, then shoved him away and pressed her bottle into his hands, and ran down the hall with the others in feral laughter.

Russell took a gulp of the wine and continued to shuffle down the hall as if nothing had happened, but now with a grin on his face. The group that had found the wine cellar was similarly pressing bottles of wine and champagne into the hands of everyone they met down the hall. It was like a party, he thought, with another swig of wine. Like a party of teenagers who had picked the lock on their parents' liquor cabinet for the first time.

“Russell! Russ!”

He turned and saw Celine standing in the stairwell. She wasn't laughing, or crying. There were dark bags under her eyes, but she didn't really look tired. If anything, she was looking more relieved and determined to his eyes than she had in years. There were small splatters of blood on her clothes.