One Last Dance

The mahogany dance floor still shone under the flickering electric lights, save for the dark, worn streaks and marks which bore witness to its history and overuse - the memory of hundreds of songs and thousands of dances etched into it like laughter lines on an ancient face. The gramophone in the corner was outdated years before it had been installed, but it added character and a legacy to the strange dance hall in the vault. The thick steel door was sealed shut now, and its hinges wouldn’t be moving again. 

                James stood tall, proud and handsome in his freshly tailored green suit. He had been waiting patiently but anxiously for Sophia, eager to see her, but nothing could prepare him for how elegantly she swept into the room and onto the dance floor in her flowing, newly crafted dress. It cascaded onto the floor, gliding behind her as she moved gracefully towards her partner, with an uncharacteristically shy smile as she quietly worried that a dress made from military fatigues might look silly.
                James thought she looked anything but silly, but he knew that underneath her expertly sewn hem lurked a pair of combat boots, and it made him grin from ear to ear. She had done a superlative job in making them something to wear in such a short time, and with so few resources; the seamstress-turned-soldier was full of surprises, even now. Some of them were things he knew, or at least, things he had known once, so maybe they shouldn’t have been surprises after all, but it all felt like knowledge from a lifetime ago. Everything was coming back to him now though, and pushing all of the darkness of the war out of his head. The sight of her cleared even the deepest recesses of his thoughts with the incandescence of her love, like a sunrise spilling through the window in a cluttered attic. She was the centrepiece of his mind, the only thing in the room that he saw, and certainly the only thing left in the world that mattered.

                As she crossed the floor towards him, they were a world away from the pair of hunted, terrified soldiers who’d run underground into what they thought was a bunker or safe haven. Bloodied and weary, they'd slammed the door shut, locked it behind them, and collapsed for rest. The operation had gone so far to hell so quickly.

                Lucas had been stopped by one of the military police inside the Unseen’s compound and panicked; he’d killed the man where he stood and stuffed the body into a supply crate. It was sloppy work, putting them on a timer, an ultimatum to complete their objective before anyone noticed the guard’s absence. By the time they'd reached the command centre there was already an alarm sounding, and they'd had to fight their way inside. That was when Dolly died, her head ripped apart by automatic fire. The rest of them sprinted into the target zone, upending tables as they went, and threw the explosives into place; a block in each corner of the conference room on the ground floor, directly underneath the commander’s office.

                Sophia took James’ hands and stepped close to him, wrapping her arms around his neck and looking up at his face. The lights reflected in his eyes and even the vault door shone like a steel sunrise behind him. James placed a hand on her waist and they began to move together, as the gramophone in the corner scratched out its song and filled the room with music one last time.

                They were surrounded in the conference room. A door on either side rendered cover scarce, and what little that could find was flimsy. They managed to cut down the first few guards to enter with sharp, accurate fire, but the advantage wouldn’t last any longer than that. The four guerrillas, James, Sophia, Lucas and Amy, all reloaded and looked to one another. A few deft hand signals gave the order to prepare to run. Silently, James counted to three with his fingers, and they leapt over the tops of the upturned tables.

                A deep rumble sounded from the surface above the dancers, but neither of them noticed the sounds of the war anymore; they were wrapped up in the dance and lost in the almost-forgotten comfort of each other. He span her round and she laughed the carefree and irresistible laugh he'd fallen in love with years before. It was like the war had been a fluid filling her lungs and driving the ‘Sophia’ out of herself, but she could breathe easy now. So could he, seeing that not even that un-waking nightmare could extinguish her happiness completely. Smiling, he lifted her, spinning circles while holding her slender, scarred body above his head.

                They burst out of the rear door of the conference room as a group of soldiers in black armour were taking up positions outside. Two of them fell immediately as James’ team ran outside guns blazing, and the rest ducked into whatever cover they could before shooting a deafening storm in return. The four guerrillas weaved, ran from cover to cover, and made as difficult moving targets of themselves as possible, but a few rounds still managed to graze past them. Burns and superficial cuts began to sting around their bodies and the familiar panic of impending death swirled in their stomachs as they sprinted to the garages. Sophia hurriedly tore the detonator out of her pocket and clicked the red button on top.

                It swelled Sophia’s heart to see him relax again; she didn’t think it had happened for years. She giggled as she whirled in the air, looking down at his smile. He barely tore his gaze away from hers – not to check the perimeter or keep one eye on a likely route of enemy approach. Not even a glance over one shoulder to double, triple, quadruple check that they weren’t being followed. His attention was all on her.

                James’ team reached the garage, shrouded in the smoke blowing over from the command centre, but found it being stormed by a group of shock troops; the cover for the escape team had been blown early. Silently, the four of them wrapped around the black-clad attackers, taking them in the back in the hope of saving whoever was still fighting inside. After a few seconds of intense fire, the shock troops were killed, and James’ team were able to see the aftermath of the assault. The escape team’s kill zone was a wide fan of gore and fury. A dozen bodies lay dead on the floor, and sitting back against the wall was a broken green and crimson mess. A mess named Gus. He was barely breathing, and his head drooped down limply. His weapon was still in his hand, but his grip was loose and failing. From the first look at him, they knew that there was nothing they could do – he’d been hit so many times that it was a miracle he hadn’t stopped breathing already.
                Bloody smears on the ground told the story of how he'd pulled Ben and Katie’s bodies close to himself; if they absolutely had to go down, it could only be together.

                "Keys." He wheezed at Sophia as she came close, offering a bloody fist full of glinting steel from his pocket. His hands were shaking with the exertion of a dead man in motion.

                James put Sophia down again, and they danced intricate serpentine forms around one another. Their boots made heavy impacts on the wooden floor, and their feet didn’t glide as easily across the polished surface as they should have done, but it didn’t matter. In perfect synchronisation, like two halves of a beating heart, they moved and whirled. Despite the wounds, despite aching, exhausted muscles, and despite the hell-on-earth erupting around them, they danced. The war wouldn't take this from them. This was sacred.

                Sophia put a bullet in Gus’ head to spare him the injustice of a slow death or being captured. He deserved so much better than this, but it was all she could give him. They all watched what she had to do with a grimace, but she herself was spared the sight by the tears in her eyes.
                The four of them piled into the one jeep that the escape team had left functional – everything else had been sabotaged to at least delay any pursuit. James revved the engine hard, racing out of the garage and heading towards the exit of the compound under a hail of fire. Large calibre mounted guns pounded at them, punching holes in the jeep's thin armour plates as the surviving guerrillas accelerated straight through the chain-link fence.

                The song finished, and the dancers collapsed into one another's arms, exhausted but happy. Happier than they had been for longer than they could remember.
                Steel rang on steel and echoed around their dance hall, their false sanctuary, the site of their last adventure together. The sharp ringing of the percussive beating on the vault door snapped Sophia out of the trance for a moment and reminded her of where they were, what they were doing, what they were waiting for...

                The scratching sounds of a record spinning again caught her attention. James was smiling at her still, his love penetrating through the fear and futility and bitterness. His hand extended.  Although he didn’t utter a word, he eyes said everything he had to – We’ve given the war enough. If these are to be our last moments, then at least let them be ours.

                James slammed on the brakes, skidding the abused vehicle to a halt just inside a dense pocket of woodland, mud spraying in a bough wave in front of the tyres, and shouted to bail out. The jeep wouldn't keep running for much longer with all the damage from the guns, and even a delayed pursuit wouldn’t be far behind them, so they needed to use this moment of concealment as best they could. There was no motion from the back. Sophia screamed at them to get out, but it was futile to give orders to a pair of corpses. Lucas and Amy were riddled with wounds from the heavy guns and had died in silence in the back. James cursed and kicked the wheel arch of the jeep, but they couldn't waste much time. Grimly, they heaved the bodies into the front seats, set the engine running and tried to make the weight of the Lucas’ foot hold the throttle pedal down. The jeep screeched forwards along the road as James and Sophia ran into the woodland, hearing the sound of a crash soon after and hoping it was far enough away to confuse any pursuers and buy some time. Side by side, they sprinted through the raking, dead branches and tangled undergrowth for what felt like hours until they saw moss-covered concrete sinking into the earth.
                The thick steel door at the bottom of the damp, eroded staircase was a beacon of hope, something they might be able to hide behind for a few hours before sneaking out again. It was many hours before they noticed that the lock mechanism had worn and sheared, rendering it impossible to retract. 

                The realisation that they were trapped had been a hard one to swallow, a bitter pill at a time when nothing was sweet. At least, it had been at first. After the panic, the anger, and the fear of what was coming, there was a wave of relief. It spilled over them as an unexpected comfort, knowing that they could finally stop running. They could stop looking over their shoulders and plotting and planning and fighting. They could finally stop fighting. Their deaths had always felt inevitable in some way, but now that they could do nothing more it lifted the burden. Their fate was sealed, but this limbo, this meantime, was theirs to spend on themselves at last. For them, the war was over, and they could see out their retirement, brief as it would be, together – at least they had been granted that mercy. With the gramophone in the corner and the dancefloor beneath them, there was only one way for the situation to play out.

                Sophia and James lost themselves in one another’s eyes, and allowed everything except the music, the motion and each other to consume their consciousness. They were vaguely aware of the ’boom’ as the charges set around the door were detonated, and the vast chunk of steel slammed to the ground in a cloud of dust and smoke. Shock troops of the Unseen stormed through, clad head to toe in matte black, but all the couple saw was one another. As the gunfire opened up they clung to each other, they gently turned to the rhythm, and they stood tall, together.

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