Meanwhile

The airplane door opened. A stretcher was immediately loaded into the aircraft and fastened securely to its holding place. A medic worked calmly to replace the bag of blood that was attached to the IV line in Michael's arm. The plane began takeoff procedures, the pilots finished their conversations with the tower and prepared to taxi to the runway.

In the meantime,

Tom nodded as he listened to the words spoken to him through the phone. “I understand,” he said softly, “that’s unfortunate but we’ll need Lani to authorize it, she’s the only one who has a power of attorney on him.”

“Lani didn’t come back,” Alice said on the phone from another line in the conference call, “she told the spetsy guys that everyone would die and walked off.”

“Well,” Tom said with no ideas left, “This is to save his life, limbs and eyesight right?”

“Yes sir,” a doctor said from within the phone, “the limbs and partial eyesight are lost, but this procedure can restore those things to his normal elevated capacity, maybe even further.”

“And you say you’ve done this before?” Tom asked as he tapped his fingers on his desk.

“Well, yes and no,” the doctor said nervously, “yes we’ve saved legs and limbs, yes we’ve uncrushed organs and yes we’ve replaced eyes. This will be the first time we’ve done these things simultaneously.”

“I don’t think he’ll mind being put back together,” Alice said trying to assert herself as a participant in the conversation, “but I feel like you’re about to do more than just restore what’s broken.”

“And that’s what we need Lani to sign off on,” Tom said slowly and calmly, as if trying to get an ignored point across to the doctor.

Back in Pripyat,

Lani moved to the top of a motel building and lay flat on the roof. She powered her satellite phone on and waited for it to grab a signal. Once it did, she dialed a number and waited for an answer. A few seconds of ringing went by when it finally reached.

Tom spoke from the other end of the connection. “Lani, I recognize the number,” he said with noticeable relief in his voice, “we actually needed to hear from you.”

“I’m sure,” she said as she held back tears, “Did Michael make it out yet?”

“His plane just left,” Tom replied, “they’ve got him stabilized but as his only power of attorney there are some things that you have to-”

“He needs to live and be duty capable,” Lani interrupted, “If there’s one thing that’ll set him off, it’s being a vegetable or a cripple.”

“Actually,” Tom said slowly, “they’re gonna restore him to possibly better condition than before his injuries.”

Lani was silent for a moment. When she took a breath, she spoke softly into the phone. “Alive and able to perform his duties,” she took another breath, “his violent field duties, not desk shit.”

“I’m in a conference call with the doctors in Germany where he’s heading,” Tom said with relief that he had the authorization that the doctors needed to go ahead with treatment, “Alice is on the line too.”

“Perfect,” Lani said with a small bit of energy left, “I’m about to go underground and fuck some hidden labratory up. There’s something going on at the reactor place too.”

“I’ll let her know,” Tom said with relief.

“I gotta go,” Lani said in a whisper, “someone just walked into my location.” She ended the call and powered down the phone.

Meanwhile,

Alice threw a cup against the wall. She became noticeably infuriated. “Tom,” she shouted into her phone, “my first operation is going to shit because some girl is losing her shit?”

“That girl is senior to you,” Tom said sternly through the line, “she got intel on what’s going on and she’s going to take action. It’s what they do.”

“Then why am I here?” Alice said frantically as she yanked her hair scrunch out of her hair.

“To speak with local forces and keep a legitimate face on our operation,” Tom explained, “there are two operations taking place, Michael and Lani are one of those operations. The local force there is another. We are simply feeding them intel and supporting them as a ‘thank you’ for letting us operate in their country.”

“But what about Lani,” Alice asked, “what do I do about her?”

“What you’re told,” Tom answered with irritation in his voice as if he was tired of repeating himself. Before Alice could grab something else to throw, the phone rang. After letting it ring for a moment, she answered it. “Hello?”

“Did Tom tell you?” Lani asked softly over the line.

“Lani!” Alice exclaimed with bitterness in her voice, “what the fuck are you doing?”

“My job,” Lani said calmly, “there’s a seven story square shaped building about a kilometer or something from the apartment buildings I just cleared. I know these soldiers wanna be involved, so I cleared a building that they can put snipers in.”

“Really?” Alice asked, “that’s nice of you considering a few hours ago you told their special forces that you were gonna kill everyone.”

“And I did,” Lani said with a now less patient voice, “one rocket killed their vehicle and a bunch of their men while it took dropping a wall and a floor on my brother to get him medevaced out of here completely.”

“Lani,” Alice tried interjecting, “these soldiers apparently have it personal already with these assholes. I guess when they stormed the place they had already killed quite a few soldiers. They want blood as much as you do.”

Lani giggled a little. “I can get them their blood a little more effectively without their help,” she said with noticeable anger in her voice, “but if they have their shit together I can arrange it so that they get their fair share.”

As Lani spoke, Alice’s PDA lit up with coordinates. “What’s this you just sent me,” Alice asked with slight confusion.

“Send them to this building. I’ll wait.” Lani disconnected the call and shuddered. I feel like the dick on her breath stenched my phone. As she set her phone back in her ruck, she turned to a man who sat ziptied on the floor, groaning in pain. “I got questions for you,” she said to him as she grabbed him up and set him on a window sill.

“Please,” the man said nervously, “I know you’ll hurt me but I’m too useless to know anything.”

“So you don’t know how many people you came with?” Lani said as she leaned him back while holding him by his collar, “you don’t know if your people have armored vehicles? If what you’re doing in a destroyed powerplant has anything to do with the radioactive materials?”

“I’m just a bandit following people who like to kill people,” he said as he squeezed his eyes shut, trying to withhold his tears, “powerful people recruited us and offered us a place away from the law and I took it, if I knew it would involve fighting you I would have quit before I started,” he rambled on before starting to babble incoherently.

“So you don’t know that your super leaders are killing people?” Lani asked as she jerked him forward.

“I don’t wanna die,” the man said through his sobs.

“Neither did those soldiers,” Lani whispered in his ear before tying a cord around his neck and shoving him through the window. As the man reached the end of the rope, his six foot fall generated enough force to snap his neck sideways. Lani proceeded to other rooms, each one having a grievously wounded survivor tied to similar rope or cable configurations. In each room she went, she picked up the survivor and set them on the window sill. She had lost interest in hearing their excuses, their foul talk, their threats or their cries. She simply shoved them out of their windows and let them hang, most of them snapping their necks as they hit the tension point of the rope.

A short while later,

Dimitri and John rode in their Ukraine owned land cruisers, wearing their protective suits while keeping their masks in their stowage bags on their legs. Twelve soldiers were with them, between three vehicles. Most of them were equipped with machine guns or sniper rifles. They approached the building and immediately backed their trucks to the door. Men jumped out and started moving into the building.

Before soldiers could stack up on rooms and begin clearing them, Dimitri yelled out to them as he grabbed his equipment from the truck. “She already cleared it,” he said in Ukrainian, “just get positions.”

One group of men set up on the first and second floors, preparing to defend the building for the marksman team that began carrying their things to the top floor. John ran his way to the top, carrying his dual-rifle bag tied to the top of his ruck, his AK-74 slung across his chest. As he made it to the room where Lani stood looking out the window, he tried to walk through the doorway as he got himself hung up with his rifle case.

“There’s a reason we take our shit out of the case,” she said as she turned slowly and walked to him, pressing the release button on the buckle that held the bag in place. “Kinda cute watching you carry all this shit up here, guess I better leave something for you to shoot at down there.”

“Thanks,” John said as he walked the rest of the way into the room, taking his rifle bag and setting it against the wall. “I need a table or something to set up with.”

“They did away with a ton of that shit years ago,” Lani said shrugging, “you might have to just watch through the window with binoculars while standing. But if we look, we can find something that’ll work.”

“Hey,” John said as he took a breath and pushed through nervousness, “your boyfri-”

As he tried to push the word out, Lani glared him down with a look that pierced like a stake. “He isn’t my boyfriend,” she said through gritted teeth, “I do not fuck him, we are like siblings, we are crystal twins. That’s why we’re kept together all the time.”

John's eyes widened. “Then those people,” he tried to say, attempting to explain the comments he had heard before.

“Did bimbo bitch say we were a couple?” she asked with a sure voice.

“She isn’t the only one,” John said as he sulked his head, beginning to feel really bad for the pandoras box he felt he was starting to open. “People just make stupid comments about shit they don’t know and I shouldn’t have repeated it.”

“John,” she said softly, “I know the difference between a malicious rumor spreader and a hopelessly misinformed person.” she placed a hand gently on his shoulder. “I’m an unadopted orphan, a social freak and a cute yellow thing. The only people who would wanna fuck me are fetish seekers and dweeby little morons who think that I’m a trophy. But I don’t get out much so I kept my virginity quite successfully.”

John just stared in disbelief. “Unadopted,” he repeated back to her, “like, you turned 18 at the orphanage?”

Lani nodded. “I used to get knocked around by bigger girls,” she said with a small bit of sadness in her eyes, “even got my boobs grabbed by boys who hadn’t been taught not to touch girls and told by a staff member that when I leave that I could use my body to find a sugar dad to support me cuz I was so stupid.”

John shook his head. “They can’t talk to you like that,” he said with agitation in his voice, “I know that stuff happens but someone should have done something about it.”

“When I left,” she said softly as she walked into another room, tugging his sleeve to let him know to follow her, “I knew that I would prove them wrong in my own right. I had been zapped with a crystal a month before my 18th birthday and I could have crushed every motherfucker there.” She paused as she found a table and chair, handing him the chair and picking up the table with ease as she carried it back to the shooting position.

“But what about the boys who grabbed you?” John asked.

“Boys were boys,” she said mockingly, “so I decided to be a girl and I had thrown hot chocolate in his face before he punched me in mine. But that was before I got super strong and fast.”

“Must have been a really shitty orphanage,” John said as he set the chair down and started opening his bag to pull out a modernized SVD-S that had been customized with a precision barrel, an aftermarket sight mount and a commercial market optic. “Does killing people help ease that pain?”

Lani giggled in a way that made John nervous. “Killing people is just necessary,” she said as she set the table by the window, “and I have a bunch more to do here, enjoy your table. I gotta go.” She set her rucks next to John's bags and began walking away, having set her AK and its magazines down and taking her VSS with as much ammo as she could stash on herself.

Meanwhile,

Michael opened his eye slowly, breathing was difficult, and he couldn't move. A heart monitor started beeping rapidly as he tried to open his mouth to say something. A flight medic immediately ran over and injected a sedative into his IV line. “Sorry bud,” he said calmly, “you’re too fucked up to be awake right now.”

He was forced back into his own head, a place he didn’t like being.