Followed East

by Andre Gonzalez

  The Exall was nowhere to be seen. Kyle jumped to his feet, whipping his head around in every direction, expecting the gray bastard to jump out and try to take him away.

  “Where did he go?” Kyle gasped. His rifle lay on the ground several feet away, out of immediate reach.

  The soldier paid him no attention as he tended to Colonel Griffins, unstrapping the duct tape. Kyle kept rotating in place, craning his neck for a view around the tank, but unwilling to move himself, terrified of what might wait on the other side. It turned into a fucked up version of hide-and-seek.

  “Wells,” Colonel Griffins grumbled, his voice hoarse, throat obviously full of mucus. “Are you okay?”

  A grenade just blew up in front of him—he had been the closest at the time—and he had yet to check himself for any injuries. The flow of adrenaline would have immediately numbed any pain, but he looked up and down his body to see no more than a few shards of metal wedged into his protective vest. His hands had small cuts, but nothing that required immediate attention.

  “I’m fine. Where did he go?”

  “I told you they can do this,” Griffins said. “Some of them just vanish.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Nothing we can do about it. Just have to stay prepared. How do you both feel mentally?”

  “I’m okay, Colonel,” the soldier said.

  “I’m fine,” Kyle replied.

  “Okay, good. If either of you feel like you’re losing control of your mind at any point, you need to tell me immediately. We can’t take any chances and have a repeat of the Browne incident.”

  Colonel Griffins retrieved his phone and placed a call for assistance in cleaning up the freeway. The few hundred feet beyond the tanks looked like a war zone, blood and bodies peppered across the pavement as far as they could see.

  “We have a long road ahead of us,” Colonel Griffins said after he hung up the phone. “Today was a goddamn disaster.” He shuffled his boots away from the tanks, toward the battlefield that was I-95. His fingers balled into a fist over his lips as he studied the canvas of death on the road, shaking his head.

  In all, more than 500 corpses lay strewn on the ground. They waited for twenty minutes for a fresh crew to arrive to clean up the scene. No one said a word, the other soldier wandering off to a nearby gathering spot where the few surviving soldiers grouped to mourn the loss of their Crew mates.

  Kyle had the fortune of not yet growing close to anyone within The Crew, with the exception of Colonel Griffins. The dead bodies might have been familiar faces, but none he could even place a name to. Aside, of course, from his best friend, Brian Carsner.

  When the next collection of trucks and SUVs arrived, the tanks left with a handful of the other vehicles that had arrived earlier. The dozen or so remaining soldiers piled into three different vehicles, Colonel Griffins and Kyle included. They drove away, leaving the cleaning crew alone for what would surely be the next several hours.

  Kyle gazed out the window, grateful to still be breathing, praying for those souls lost, and wondering what lay ahead for the Crew and the rest of the country.

  34

  Chapter 34

  They were back at the Pentagon within a half hour. Colonel Griffins had apologized to the truck full of six soldiers. He spoke softly, disappointment dripping from each word, an obvious disgust clinging to each sentence. Despite the hundreds of moving parts within the Crew, many dedicated to recognizing a pending attack by the Exalls, Griffins assumed full responsibility. He admitted they took too long to react, and that meeting the Exalls in the woods would have been a better plan instead of letting it approach the bustling city. A main interstate was closed, and they had to lie to the public about the reason why.

  “Sir, we have a problem,” the driver called from the front, stopping the van at the armed gate to enter the parking garage. Griffins craned his neck to see out the front windshield, eyes bulging as he whispered, “Jesus Christ.”

  Everyone was fighting for a view, seeing the solider who had been manning the entry all morning face down on the pavement, blood caked around his head.

  “It was a decoy,” Griffins cried. “Jesus Christ, we’ve had no control over this because the goddamn trackers don’t work. Fuck! Get us inside right now. We have to see how much damage is done.”

  The tires squealed as the van blasted through the arm gate and bolted through the parking lot before entering the garage. Within two minutes, which consisted of everyone reloading their guns, they unloaded from the truck, an invisible sickness plaguing each soldier, like they had all just left a buffet and caught food poisoning. They had only left the Pentagon two hours earlier, and now they were back, the Exalls thought to be defeated, but a clear doubt hanging above them.

  No one was at the front desk to greet them, but Griffins didn’t hesitate to enter the sixth floor, walking in a daze. He pulled open the door into the main offices and froze. “Mother of God.”

  Kyle and the others followed, stopping at the sight of more dead bodies. The office was silent, not a living soul present. At least thirty Crew members had been slaughtered, facedown on their desks, precise bullet wounds in the back of their heads. Blood splattered the walls and computer screens like abstract art. The lights were off, and the strong stench of gunpowder suggested this massacre had taken place within the last hour.

  He kicked a small trash bin from the desk at his side, sending it sailing across the office as papers and a banana peel fell out. “We’re done for.”

  Griffins raised his pistol in front of him, giving a quick look over his shoulder to ensure the rest of the team was also prepared.

  “They’re still here. I know it,” Griffins said. Numerous guns clicked in a matter of seconds as they cocked them and prepared for the next battle in this never-ending nightmare. “This is our home. For some of us, literally. Shoot anything that moves.”

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier who had saved him said, pushing his way to the front of their group. Kyle had learned on the drive back that his name was Anderson Ortiz, a Crew veteran of fifteen years. Ortiz took a deep inhale before shouting across the room. “If you are a Crew member, reveal yourself right now. If you do not, you will be shot on sight.”

  He paused a moment, waiting for a response, receiving nothing but chilling silence. He looked back to Colonel Griffins who nodded in approval.

  “Let’s move,” Ortiz said, starting forward, the rest following behind.

  “Wells, stay back with me,” Griffins said as Kyle took a step to follow the soldiers. Kyle spun around, eyebrows raised.

  “Are you sure, sir?”

  “Yes. We can’t have you in the line of danger at the moment. Not after what you told me about Susan’s basement. I’ve had my suspicions about why she knew so much about the Exalls, and I think she passed it on to you. We’ll need to run a few tests.”

  “Tests? What is it you think she did?”

  A shot rang out and Kyle jolted his head up to look ahead. An Exall grinned from the opposite wall, just beside Griffins’s office door. He held a pistol and lowered it as the group of soldiers fired twelve rounds into him, sending him instantly to the ground.

  Kyle looked to Colonel Griffins and the world came to an immediate halt. A river of blood flowed from the colonel’s throat, a small hole just below his Adam’s apple, three inches above where his vest provided coverage.

  “Colonel,” Kyle gasped, stepping toward him with an arm extended. Griffins looked down to his blood-covered fingers that had patted the hole in his throat, looking from his hand to Kyle with his eyes popping out of their sockets. He fell to his knees with a hollow thud, and Kyle swooped behind to ease his collapse by grabbing him under the arms. “Someone help!” he screamed, but it didn’t matter. There was no saving Griffins, the blood making a dark stream down the colonel’s camouflage uniform.

  Kyle felt the last bit of fight within the colonel, his body shuddering as it clung to its final seconds. The tension gave way to a limp,
deadweight body, his head slung forward, and Kyle leaned him backwards so he wouldn’t have to lie face down in a pool of his own blood.

  “Oh my God,” Kyle cried, fresh tears rolling down his cheeks. He looked up through blurry vision as the soldiers who had shot the murderous Exall rushed across the office, their boots clapping and echoing in the silent, deserted building, the odor of gunpowder growing stronger with each passing second.

  “Colonel Griffins is down!” one soldier shouted into a radio. “I repeat, Colonel Griffins is down! Send help to the main office, sixth floor, right now!”

  They gathered around, one soldier throwing his jacket to the ground and removing his t-shirt, pressing it on the colonel’s throat wound. The shirt was gray, but darkened within seconds. The soldier pushed down on the colonel’s chest in an attempt to begin CPR, but when he pushed, more blood squirted, soaking through the shirt and pooling at the sides of his neck.

  “Gah!” the soldier gasped when he saw this unfold, giving up on the CPR and placing two fingers on Griffins’s jugular to check for a pulse. “C’mon, c’mon, don’t fucking die on us.”

  This moment lasted for about thirty seconds, but felt like five minutes as they all huddled around the soldier, waiting for him to look up and deliver the news.

  “He’s gone. That fucking Exall piece of shit!” The soldier jumped to his feet and sprinted across the office to where they had shot the Exall. Kyle couldn’t see the alien’s corpse, blocked from rows of desks where it lay on the ground. “Motherfucker!” the soldier shouted, pulling out a pistol, and firing six more rounds into the already dead Exall.

  The other soldier who had called on the radio continued calling, but received no response. “I think we’re alone, gentlemen. No one’s answering, and there is always someone manning the dispatch. Is anyone here?” He called out, his question echoing right back to the group of them standing around Colonel Griffins. “Where the hell is everyone?” His voice quivered in a way that suggested he knew the disturbing truth. They all did. Everyone on the main floor had been murdered, so it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to assume that everyone else in the building was dead. But to what extent? Did the Exalls only kill Crew members? There were other departments of the government that filled the Pentagon’s ground level floors and above. Those others had no idea of the existence of Exalls, let alone how to fight them in a battle. The Exalls might have eliminated the entire Department of Defense, leaving the country vulnerable to both alien and foreign attacks.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” another soldier said, raising his rifle into a shooting position, nodding ahead. “We have to sweep the building.”

  The soldiers nodded in agreement, Kyle wishing he could shrink into a fly on the wall and buzz his way out of the building. If they killed Colonel Griffins so easily, they’d have no issue wiping out a small group of Crew members. Hundreds already lay dead on the freeway thirty minutes west.

  “Goodbye, Colonel,” Kyle said, removing his helmet and nodding toward the stunned, ghastly face. The others followed suit, saluting the colonel as they took a step closer to him.

  “I think our best bet will be to move as a circle,” Ortiz said. “That way every angle is covered. Let’s start from the very bottom and move our way up.”

  He led the way toward the elevator across the office, not far from the colonel’s office. They formed a natural circle as they walked, Kyle thankful to be on the backside of it, sandwiched between two giants whose arms seemed bigger than his torso. He didn’t know if these soldiers would go as far to protect his life—they might not even know the value he had to offer The Crew—a value that he wasn’t quite sure of himself. But he trusted them just the same. Special or not, these men were potentially the last survivors of the D.C.-area Crew. The attack on Griffins caught them by surprise, but now they were ready for anything that might jump out from the shadows.

  They reached the elevator and Kyle caught a glance of the dead Exall. It lay flat on its back, arms splayed to the side like it was enjoying a comfortable sleep in a king-sized bed to itself. Its tarry blood oozed from the several bullet wounds, gray smoke steaming from them like a pot of boiling water.

  “He killed my two friends,” one of the soldiers next to Kyle said, holding up dog tags with the names of Dante Rivers and Ron Miley. “I’m sure you heard of the two Crew members we lost on a mission in Michigan not too long ago. Dante was my best friend.” He shook his head as the elevator chimed and the doors parted.

  “Yes, I remember,” Kyle said flatly, having partly forgotten, but now having his own best friend on his mind. Brian’s desperation for freedom had risen to the surface, his soul trying to leap out of his eyeballs in a final mad dash before the lights went out. Kyle would forever have the image burned into his memory: a gray version of Brian, lunging toward him, his own finger pulling the trigger, Brian’s head flinging back as black liquid splattered from his skull. Kyle had thought, in some distant part of his conscience, that he heard Brian calling out for help. Screaming and shouting from the depths of the spirit buried under the gray skin. Surely the screams he heard belonged to his conscience or imagination, and that was what he’d tell himself for the rest of his life.

  35

  Chapter 35

  The comprehensive sweep of the Pentagon included all of its private and public floors. They didn’t encounter much in terms of killing Exalls: only two, to be precise. The first was on sublevel six where they had started, found in an office humping the corpse of a male Crew soldier. He thrust his hips in an awkward, jerky motion, only grinning over his shoulder when the group of soldiers walked in before promptly firing nine rounds into his head and back. The second had been a crippled one on sublevel four, a quick shot to the chest to put it out of its misery.

  They didn’t find anything beyond dead bodies in every room. There wasn’t one survivor in their offices. As they passed through the abandoned halls, bloody footsteps following their every move, Kyle wondered what would become of The Crew now that it had no leader or any soldiers.

  There were plenty of other Crew members around the world, so it’s wasn’t like the entire department had been wiped off the map. They still had members who would surely relocate to Washington to help them rebuild. There had been plenty of instances in the past where a large amount of Crew members had their lives taken. Though none were as less positive as this incident, they always regrouped and came back stronger and smarter to counter their Exall foes.

  Even this group of twelve soldiers wasted no time in gathering their emotions and continuing on with their business. When dealing with Exalls, there was no real time off. A good Crew member understood they were on the clock for twenty-four hours each and every day. One second with your guard down—much like Colonel Griffins just experienced—could cost your life.

  Beside the images of Brian that plagued his mind, Kyle would be forever haunted by the scene of Colonel Griffins taking a slug to the throat and the resulting gurgling sound as he choked on his own blood. He had stood only two feet from the colonel and was lucky to be alive, wondering if the bullet was really meant for him. He fought off these thoughts as the team made its way through the building, praying he wouldn’t end up with a similar fate.

  When they completed their sweep of the fourth sublevel, they had to exit the office and walk across the parking garage to catch a different elevator to the rest of the building. Sublevels three through one were all parking lots, giving the appearance to those above that there was nothing further below. The tension within the group grew as it rode the elevator. A moment of truth awaited on the underground’s third level. They’d either find life continuing as normal for those who lived in oblivion to the Exalls, or find what could very well be the end of civilization in the United States. If the Exalls carried their attacks to this level, there was no saying the damage done to the entire nation.

  The elevator chimed as the doors parted. Everything in the garage appeared as normal: no dead bodies, no
blood spills, no gray people. They marched forward, boots clapping in near unison, rifles cradled, pistols drawn. They reached the elevator in seconds, riding it up to the ground level where more offices awaited.

  “Jesus Christ,” one of them groaned when the doors parted. They remained in their circular formation, so Kyle had to crane his neck to get a view inside the office. He couldn’t see much through the wavering soldiers, but caught glimpses of an already familiar scene of death and blood on the floor.

  They moved into the office, feet shuffling through a place they were not familiar with.

  “Is anyone in here alive?” Ortiz called out.

  They continued forward and Kyle saw a man sitting at a cubicle, face down on his desk, neck twisted so his glossy eyes stared at them in the hallway, his throat slit in the shape of a smiley face.

  “What department is on this floor?” one soldier asked.

  “The Missile Defense Agency,” Ortiz snapped back immediately.

  A phone rang somewhere in the office, prompting many of the soldiers to jump.

  “Is it safe to assume the entire building is like this?” the soldier next to Kyle asked.

  “I think it is, but we have to check to be sure. If there’s even one person who survived, we need to speak with them. ” Ortiz continued forward where another elevator waited to take them to the rest of the Pentagon.

  The same story unfolded on the Pentagon’s five floors above ground. Not a sole survivor revealed themselves as the remnants of The Crew worked their way through. Kyle figured if there was a survivor, they were too scared to show themselves to anyone passing through the doors. There surely had to be one person who made it out alive.

  The moment that had sent chills up Kyle’s back was when they completed the internal sweep and moved outside to the back entrance of the building. Dead soldiers lay on the ground, their firearms missing, guts spilled on the pavement.