by P. T. Hylton
Garrett pushed the thoughts of Alex and the GMT out of his mind. Not only did he not deserve to feel guilty, but he didn’t have time. There was too much to be done.
He watched through the window as a group of Resettlers filed into the admin building, carrying a crate of weapons. The admin building would serve as the hub and storage facility for the bulk of food and weapons.
Garrett smiled up at Shirley and picked up the microphone sitting on his desk. “What do you say we try out this PA system?”
“Absolutely, sir,” she said with a grin.
He took a deep breath and pressed the button on the microphone. "This is Captain Eldred. Tonight, we will make history and give hope to humanity. I know most of you haven’t been to the surface before today, so I wanted to take a moment to ease your minds. The lights in this base have kept vamps out for a week, and they’ll do the same tonight. They will keep us safe. But you have something even more important than that. Look at the men and women around you. These are our best assets. You are all part of the most important moment for humanity since the final wave. You will be remembered as heroes and legends. Each of you has a legacy that will ring through the generations, and that starts tonight. I need all of you to remain calm and focused. Our lives on the surface have begun. It’s time to start living them."
He set the microphone down and looked at Shirley.
“How was that for a first speech?”
She smiled at him, tears standing in her eyes. “It was wonderful, Captain.”
28
Driving the rover through the streets of Denver was like trying to get to the bar at Tankards on a crowded Friday night: slow going. From abandoned cars to barricades to rubble from decaying buildings, it made for slow travel. The rover could go over almost anything, but with the trailer, it took a little more finesse.
Alex, Owl, Wesley, and Chuck rode up front, with Ed and Patrick sitting over the batteries on the trailer. The rover was loud as it made its way over the obstacles in its way, and they had to keep a constant grip on the roll bars, or risk being bounced from the vehicle.
It was slow going, but it wasn’t until they’d been traveling for over an hour that they came to their first truly daunting obstacle.
“Huh,” Wesley said when they saw it. “Owl, that twelve-and-a-half--miles-an-hour estimate accounted for giant piles of cars in the road, right?”
“It did not,” Owl said hollowly.
The road ahead of them was blocked by a massive pile of vehicles five cars tall and ten cars long. What it was doing there, Alex did not know. Perhaps the cars had been stacked there in an attempt to blockade the vampires. Whenever the original reason, it sure was a pain in the ass now.
“Can we get over it?” Alex asked.
“Yeah,” Owl said, the forced confidence clear in her voice. “We can get over it.”
The rover slowly began to roll up the pile, and the passengers held on for dear life. It was bad up front, but Alex could only imagine how bumpy the ride was for Patrick and Ed on the trailer.
The rover was almost to the top of the pile, crunching its way over car after car, when they heard a howl from directly beneath them. Then another and third.
“Holy shit,” Chuck whispered. “This is a nest.”
Alex’s pulse quickened as she realized he was right. “Owl, get us off this pile.”
Owl’s voice was strained when she answered. “Doing my best, Captain. But unless you want me to flip this thing, we have to take it slow.”
Everyone held their weapons at the ready as Owl kept them moving forward. No one spoke.
Alex heard a strange creaking noise coming from a car to her left. “Nine o’clock,” she shouted to the team.
A vampire burst up through a gap between cars, its teeth bared.
Before anyone could fire, the creature burst into flames. It started wriggling back down between the cars, screaming in pain, but Alex put a bullet through its head before it could.
The cries of the burning vampire were answered by howls from beneath their feet. The stack of cars shifted as the vampires moved around below them.
“Hang on!” Owl called. She turned hard to the left, setting the front wheels on a more stable car. The trailer twisted behind them and almost tipped, but Patrick and Ed quickly moved their weight to the right, steadying it.
The rover continued rolling forward, on the downward angle now, and soon they were back on solid ground.
“Let’s not do that again, ever,” Ed called from the trailer.
The howls continued coming from the pile. Alex looked back and saw eyes staring out from the darkness underneath the cars.
“You know what?” Patrick said. “Screw them.”
With that, he tossed a grenade onto the stack.
“What are you doing?” Alex shouted.
The grenade exploded, send the husks of several ruined cars jumping into the air. The howls of hunger turned to howls of rage and pain.
Ed laughed and high-fived his brother.
“You morons!” Alex yelled. “We can’t afford to waste grenades like that.”
The howls were coming from the buildings all around them now. Every vampire in that part of the city knew they were there.
They drove on in silence for a while. The roads were becoming clearer as they went further from the center of the city, but they still had to work their way through, around, or over the occasional obstacle. And they were way behind Owl’s original estimated schedule.
“What should we do to Fleming when we get back to New Haven?” Patrick asked.
His brother was the first to answer. “I hear boiling in oil is painful.”
“That could work,” Owl said. “What about throwing him out the hangar door? That way he’d have some time to think about what he’d done on the way down.”
“Nah,” Patrick said. “I say we make him spar with the captain. She can put the hurt on him more effectively than any of that other stuff. I speak from personal experience.”
They all laughed at that.
“Everyone, I’d like to apologize,” Alex said, her voice serious. “It’s my fault we’re in this mess. Fleming wanted revenge on me for going against him. I’m sorry you got caught up in this.”
“Are you kidding?” Wesley said. "I'm not mad that your actions got us stranded on the surface. I just wish you’d brought us in on it sooner.”
“Agreed,” Chuck added. “You’re our captain. You’ve kept us alive and taught us how to survive on the surface. You showed us what the brotherhood of the GMT is all about. I think that I speak for everyone here when I say that we will back you over any politician. Right, team?"
“Hell, yeah,” the rest of them agreed.
As the rover continued down the street, the howls in the buildings around them started to be less frequent. Soon, they would be out of Denver and hopefully, they’d be able to keep moving at a faster clip.
“How we doing on time?” Alex asked.
Owl checked the monitor in front of her. “Not great. But if things are clear up ahead, we should still be able to make it to Agartha by sunset. It’ll be tight, but we can make it.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “Let’s make it happen.”
29
The GMT reached the edge of the city. There were a few more buildings cutting vertical lines in the horizon up ahead, but beyond that there was nothing but mountains and sky. The road beneath them was cracked and potted, and there were occasional gaps that Owl had to slow to traverse.
The team sat in silence, taking in the beauty of the world around them.
“You ever wished you’d lived down here back in the pre-infestation days?” Ed asked.
“Sure,” Chuck said. “All the time. Imagine being able to stretch out. Down here you could walk for miles and not see another human. Even back in the pre-infestation days, once you got out of the cities.”
“That would make it much easier to avoid my ex-girlfriend,” Wesley said.
�
��We still can live down here,” Patrick told them. “All we have to do is kill a couple hundred million vampires each, and we’re golden.”
“I could probably handle five million myself,” Ed announced, “but one hundred million might be pushing it. Patrick would probably kill about eight vampires. That leaves the rest for you guys.”
Alex chuckled. “Let’s worry about getting through the day before we worry about ridding the world of vampires.”
Though the trip so far had gone more slowly than they would have liked, everyone seemed to be in good spirits. Everyone except Owl. In fact, she looked like she was on the verge of vomiting all over the rover.
“You okay?” Alex asked her.
She answered in a quiet voice that still managed to carry to the whole team. “We’re not going to make it, Alex.”
There was a long silence.
“How close will we be by nightfall?” Alex asked.
“Close, but not there. Five miles from Agartha, maybe. Less if we’re lucky.”
Ed slammed his hand down on the metal door he was sitting on, and it clanged loudly. “So that’s it? We die on this stupid mountain? Fleming wins? This is total bullshit!”
Alex turned back to look at him, steel in her eyes. “Of course, that’s not it. Get a hold of yourself.” She looked each team member in the eye so that they could see her resolve. Her gaze settled on Ed. “I don’t know about you, but I’m still drawing breath, and until I’m not, this isn’t over. We can do five miles in the dark. Hell, we could do twenty if we had to. We’re the fiercest badasses on the ground or in the sky, and any vampire who tests us will learn a hard lesson about squaring off against the GMT.”
Her team stared back at her, probably aware that she was filled with false bravado. Five miles in the dark was insanity. They wouldn’t make it a quarter mile once the sun fell. But she also saw in their eyes that they’d follow her to the end. They’d keep fighting until the last drop of blood had drained from their bodies.
“Owl, push the rover to the max,” she continued. “The rest of you, look through your packs and make sure you’ve got your weapons in order. Sundown is in an hour, and I want us ready.”
A chorus of “Yes, Captain” split the air.
As the team began to dig through their packs, Alex did the same. She prepared her spare clips and made sure her grenades were easily accessible. Then she saw something that shouldn’t have been there.
“What the hell?” She pulled the object out of her pack. It was a radio.
She hadn’t put that in there. They traveled with their headset radios for communication between the team and the long-range radio on the away ship, but not these types of handheld units.
“Let me see that,” Owl said.
“Can we reach New Haven with this?” Alex asked.
Owl shook her head. “Not unless they’re really close. This thing’s got, I don’t know, maybe a twenty-mile range.”
“Huh.” As she considered how the radio had gotten there, she remembered something—Firefly standing awkwardly next to her pack for too long, then handing it to her.
Firefly had known they were being set up. He’d planted the radio to give them a chance at survival.
“We don’t need to reach New Haven,” Alex said. She played with the dial, selecting a channel she knew was monitored. “Agartha, this is the Ground Mission Team. We are headed to you, and we need assistance. Do you copy?”
There was no response.
She kept trying for the next thirty minutes, repeating the same message every few minutes on a number of different channels. Until sunset, the radio was the only weapon that had any chance of keeping her team alive, and she was going to use it.
When the team was five miles out and shadows around them were growing too long for the team’s comfort, they got their first response. “Who is this? No one is authorized to be outside this close to sunset.”
Alex’s eyes lit up. “Listen up, I need you to get George on this radio, and I need you to do it now.”
There was a long pause. “George?”
“The director of engineering! Get him on the radio. Tell him it’s Captain Alex Goddard.”
There was a long silence on the other end.
“Man, Captain,” Patrick said, “you even bark at strangers over the radio. You were born to be an officer.”
A full two minutes passed, then George’s voice came through the radio. “Alex, what are you doing flying in so close to dark? We could have used a little warning. Where you landing?”
“George, we are not flying. We’re on a rover and we’re headed straight for you.”
Another pause. “Uh, what?”
Alex glanced west and saw the sun was touching the mountaintops. It wouldn’t be long before it disappeared. “There’s no time to explain. We are headed your way, but we’re not going to make it in time. We need some help from your end.”
“Our end? How far out are you?”
Alex looked at Owl.
“A little more than three miles,” Owl said.
“Three miles, George,” Alex repeated. “Listen, I need you to wake Jaden. Tell him if he really wants to save humanity, he can start with us.”
“Okay, Alex, keep heading our way as fast as you can. I’m on it.”
She let out a breath. “Thank you. Now quit talking to me and get us some help!”
30
Garett stood in the yard, his hands behind his back, staring at his three top lieutenants. “Are we ready?”
Henry nodded. “Yes, sir. Every light has been checked and switched on. The generators and batteries are all functional and ready. The railguns have been activated, and each gunner has a supply of six thousand rounds. Snipers and lookouts are in place atop each guard tower. Our patrol teams are already in motion in the yard, and everyone else is in their designated building, armed and ready to be called into action, if needed.”
“Excellent. Time?”
Mario checked his watch. “Sundown in five minutes, sir.”
“Then let’s get to our stations.”
Garrett climbed the stairs leading to the tower on top of the administration building, Shirley following close behind him. From this centralized location, he’d have a three-hundred-sixty-degree view over every external wall.
He took his station and surveyed Fort Stearns. The daylights lit an area sixty feet beyond the walls. Anything the lights didn’t kill, the railguns would.
He looked west and saw the faint glow of red sky over the mountains. That, too, would soon disappear.
Night had fallen on Fort Stearns.
Garrett drew a deep breath and felt a calm wash over him. All the hard work of the past month had led to this. Humanity was back on the surface, finally home.
Shirley pointed beyond the eastern wall. “We’ve got movement, sir.”
A vampire was rushing forward. Garrett raised his binoculars for a closer look and saw dozens of vampires sprinting from the same area, popping out of the ground like they were being propelled. He frowned. For the vampires he’d seen awake during the day, simply pulling themselves from the dirt had been an arduous process.
He focused in on one as it sprang from the soil, landed in a crouch, and sniffed the air. It immediately spun toward the prison and let out a terrible howl. It sounded different, more powerful than the howls he’d heard during the day. More feral. Answering cries came from outside every wall.
“Jesus,” Shirley whispered. “They’re everywhere.”
Garrett put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right. We knew the first couple nights would be rough. A lot of them are going to die tonight.”
A rush of vampires raced toward the prison, as if the howls had unleashed them. As the light touched them, smoke rose from their skin. They screamed, but the yells seemed to hold more fury than fear. Some turned back, but others kept pressing forward, until they eventually burst into flames.
“Dumb animals,” Garrett muttered.
The
snipers in the guard tower opened fire. The vamps standing just outside of the ring of light went down, one after another, as large-caliber rounds went through head after head.
Garrett put his radio to his lips. “Snipers, hold your fire for now. Let’s see how they react to the light.”
The line of vampires standing just outside the light was growing denser as more and more undead creatures on every side of Fort Stearns reached it. Some howled in rage. Others just glared up at the wall, teeth bared. More and more of them were coming out of the darkness.
How was it possible so many vampires were gathered outside? This place had been a small town. Maybe there was something to Alex’s theory that the scent of humans working here over the past few weeks had drawn them.
It didn’t matter. They could line up there all night for all Garrett cared. Or he could have the rail gunners take them out, and that would be that.
A vampire on the south side disappeared back into the darkness, then reappeared a moment later, sprinting toward the light. Just before it reached it, the vampire leapt, springing into the air with unbelievable force. It rose two hundred feet into the air, easily out of the range of the lights and well above the wall. As it fell, it stretched out its arms and its webbed wings caught the air. It glided swiftly toward the yard.
Shirley gripped Garrett’s arm as several more vampires followed the first’s example and leaped over the wall.
“Snipers, open fire!” Garrett called into the radio.
One by one, they picked off the airborne vampires. A few managed to land unscathed, but as soon as they entered the yard, they began to smoke and quickly burst into flames.
Garrett watched, his eyes widening as a vampire rushed toward the nearest Resettler, either unaware, or not caring that it was on fire. The flesh was melting off its bones, but still it tried to feed. The nearest patrol officer fired on the burning vampire, dropping it before it could reach any of them.
When all the vampires inside the wall were dead, Garrett looked around. The vampires were no longer leaping the wall. Maybe it was that psychic link Alex had talked about. Maybe they knew they would die if they went past the wall.
