Extinction Survival Series | Book 4 | Warrior's Fate

by Browning, Walt

  The first two precautions made sense, but the limitation on altitude was a source of humor for both pilots. They knew that a catastrophic failure at a thousand feet was just as bad as a mile up. The joke around camp was the only reason to stay so low was to facilitate the recovery of the pilots’ bodies.

  Everly checked his weapon system once more. A full rack of cannon rounds, along with their last six Hellfire missiles, registered on the computer screen.

  “Heading up the main drag,” Carver said over the radio. “Red One, out.”

  “Good luck, John,” Everly whispered without transmitting.

  Since the viral outbreak, Pendleton had been a no-go zone. Thousands of Marines and their families had been infected in the first days of the apocalypse, and the camp had more than its share of buildings for the Variants to nest in.

  Carver’s mission was to see how many were left. The last time anyone had been close to the Marine Corps base was years ago when the scientists from Palomar had been evacuated. Even then, it was the flotilla from Catalina Island, and not anyone on shore, who had witnessed the titanic battle between the Variant armies.

  Everly began running a slow racetrack pattern over Camp Pendleton. The military installation was over nine thousand square miles, and, with such a large area to watch, the pilot was soon lost in his assignment.

  Carver was literally on his own. He was the only one inside the Stryker as it rumbled up the main drive of the camp. Being bait was a very lonely job.

  Most people think of a military base as a collection of old Quonset huts and concrete block buildings. That may have been the case fifty years ago, but not today. Parts of Pendleton were indistinguishable from a modern American housing subdivision, with elementary schools, recreation areas, and a few of its own McDonalds.

  The outbound lanes were a disaster, forcing Carver to use the crowded other entrance. Four guard shacks on the inbound side of the gate stood sentinel at the main gate. Two of the lanes were blocked by abandoned vehicles, all lined up as they had tried to get into the facility. A third shed had been destroyed by a pickup truck that had somehow jumped the concrete Jersey barrier that protected it. The truck was balanced on top of the waist-high wall with its rear wheels in the air and its front engine lodged in the one-man shelter.

  Carver kept his vehicle up to speed and shot through the remaining open lane. He veered around several accidents and turned right, up the ramp to Wire Mountain Road, then made a left. The four-lane street would take him into the heart of the base’s housing section. His route had been pre-planned, using the drone’s overflight data.

  The base hospital came up on the left, and Carver steered the eight-wheeled armored vehicle onto Mercy Drive. This was where his new stereo system would come into play.

  The Stryker is remarkably quiet for a forty-thousand-pound truck. Even with its headlights on, there was a concern that it wouldn’t attract enough attention for any creatures that were inside the large buildings.

  The solution was a salvaged KICKER car stereo system that had been mounted on the outside of the ICV (Infantry Carrier Vehicle). Controls for the sound system had been run up to the driver’s compartment, which was at the front left side of the armored truck’s hull. Carver had an iPod Touch attached to one of the turret control boxes. It was wired to the speakers, which included a subwoofer that Gavin Gringleman had promised would shake a building to the ground. Carver was about to find out if that was true.

  He pulled into the medical center’s public parking lot and oriented himself. The overhead pictures he had of the hospital were not the best quality, given that they were faxes of printed digital images taken by the drone. He held up his mission binder and turned to the appropriate page. He confirmed that the grainy image matched what he was looking at.

  Once satisfied, he turned on the iPod. He opened the music app, revealing only one playlist. It was titled, appropriately enough, Hell.

  “Here we go,” Carver mumbled as he touched the play button. A moment of silence ensued before AC/DC blared from the machine. The screams of the audience and piercing chords of an electric guitar blasted out of the speakers, echoing off the multistory hospital.

  Carver was seated in a steel cupola with a bulletproof glass windshield. He sat almost eight feet above the ground on the driver’s side of the Stryker, giving him a wide field of view.

  There were several cameras that he could have used in lieu of headlights. A thermal camera view was displayed on his main screen. The heat from any Variants would stand out in this black-and-white image, giving him a better idea of their strength. That was great when you wanted to be stealthy and navigate with the lights off, but the objective that evening was just the opposite.

  “This is Red One actual,” he said over the radio. “Initiating Operation Thunderstruck.”

  Carver’s headlights beamed, and the iPod blasted its rock song. He put the Stryker back in gear and pressed the accelerator. He would quickly find out whether the Variants had abandoned the base or were still hiding within.

  Carver drove at a steady pace along the road that circled the large hospital, circumnavigating it twice without getting a response. He tried to pull up to the emergency room entrance, but the circular drive was jammed with abandoned cars and emergency vehicles. His headlights illuminated enough of the entryway to see that the automatic sliding glass doors had been shattered.

  He continued at a slower pace and saw that the front of the building also had multiple broken windows. Whatever might have been inside had already found a way out. The place was empty.

  He drove back onto Wire Mountain Road and rolled into the residential housing section. Modern, stucco homes were clustered in zero-lot-line plots. Debris and abandoned cars were scattered all along the route.

  Carver turned onto a street lined with duplexes. The drone had previously identified a clear pathway among the cars and pickup trucks that sat empty on the subdivision’s circular street.

  Weaving the big armored truck around the clutter, he observed opened garage doors and homes left in various states of abandonment. Some had cars backed up to them with trunks still open. Other garages were empty, the occupants having managed to get out of their homes before the virus took over.

  There were no bodies; the decay of time had lain waste to any organic remnants of the residents who once lived here. Occasionally, Carver would run across skeletal remains, but their bleached and mottled appearance confirmed that they had been lying in place for a very long time.

  The rest of the drive through the military housing complex was no different. The only living things he saw occasionally dashing in front of his headlights were desert animals as they began to reclaim the land. As far as Variants or people were concerned, there seemed to be no one home.

  Having been to Pendleton many times before the infection, Carver had one more stop in mind. He turned onto Vandegrift Road, toward the camp’s air station and ran the Stryker up to the complex. The small airport was dedicated to rotor aircraft only. The tarmac lay directly ahead. He swept out onto the concrete pad at its western edge and turned east. Besides being rather quiet, the Stryker was remarkably fast. He pressed the accelerator and quickly found himself rocketing up the giant pad at over a hundred kilometers per hour. He hit the brakes and drifted to a stop at the far end of the runway. He then swung around and aimed back down the concrete.

  “Oh, my,” Carver muttered when he saw the helicopters still sitting where they had been left over five years before.

  As he drove back, he counted the line of SuperCobras that sat waiting for their human keepers to return. Nylon tape still fluttered from some of their weapons bays. Other than the grime of desert that caked their windscreens, they looked ready for battle.

  Carver drove by seven lines of the Marine Corps’ flying tanks and counted twenty-six that were still sitting on the air station’s pad. Beyond the helicopters were hangars, where maintenance bays held SuperCobras in various states of disassembly.

&
nbsp; Just beyond the hangars was a laydown yard with dozens of forty-foot, white storage containers. They were lined up, side-by-side, likely filled with supplies and equipment.

  Carver searched the skies to the west, looking for Everly’s running lights.

  “Viper One. This is Red One actual. Do you copy? Over.”

  “This is Viper One. Send your traffic. Over.”

  “I’m at the air station. You need to swing on by. Over.”

  “Already did a fly-over. I got to tell you, John, I got a little hard when I saw all those beautiful birds waiting for us.”

  Carver cracked a smile. Everly was a cocky SOB. That was to be expected from a Marine pilot. They tended to think of themselves as the best of the best. They were correct on that assumption more often than not.

  “Well, there doesn’t seem to be anyone left on the ground. Did you see anything? Over.”

  Everly had a bird’s eye view of the remainder of the camp, which was mostly isolated buildings and a lot of desert land. “I got nothing. It’s clear as far as I can see. Over.”

  “It looks like there’s a lot we can salvage here. I’ll radio back to Lost Valley and let them know. Red One, out.”

  Minutes later, Donaldson set her Osprey down on the pad near Carver’s Stryker. Two dozen soldiers jogged out of the back ramp and set up a perimeter. By dawn, the air station had been cleared. Its treasure of spare parts and equipment was a welcome find.

  Carver smiled as he watched Everly and Donaldson enthusiastically search each hangar. He felt hopeful for the first time in years. With the dearth of Variants in the once infested camp, he actually felt like the odds were finally turning in their favor.

  Tunnels Under Los Angeles

  Tommy “Tonto” Randall

  Tommy had never been accused of being smart. In fact, his lack of common sense often got him into trouble. When he was young, his Anglo classmates called him “bonehead” or other derogatory nicknames. He made no friends in high school and left when he turned seventeen. That’s when he started to sell drugs to the same people who used to disparage him. It was the turning point in his life.

  His supplier was the Mexican Mafia. Despite being from a white background, their leader took Tommy under his wing. Having an Anglo run drugs in the heavily Latino southeast San Diego area proved profitable since no one suspected the young man of colluding with the violent street gang.

  At first, he was ignored by the other gang members. The best he could hope for was being called “Pendejo,” a slang word for idiot. Others would just swear at him. Even so, Tommy felt accepted for the first time in his life, and he was fiercely loyal to his boss, Pascual “Loco” Escondo.

  Three months into his employment, a hit squad from the Aryan Nation ambushed Escondo and his entourage, killing two of his enforcers. Pascual was next when Tommy threw himself at the attackers. The Aryans were surprised, seeing a lily-white man coming at them. That gave Tommy an edge. He was able to kill all four attackers in their confusion.

  For his trouble, he got two gunshot wounds to the belly but managed to save the Mexican mafia leader. Tommy had fought with total abandon and looked so unhinged fighting the white supremist gang that his mafia buddies used the word for someone who does crazy things. They called him “Tonto.” Tommy liked it because it referenced the Lone Ranger. He thought of himself as Escondo’s right-hand man, even though he was just another pawn in the drug lord’s group.

  When he got out of the hospital, the gang treated him differently. He’d earned a place among them. Soon afterward, Escondo personally escorted him to a tattoo parlor, where he was inked twice. One was the gang’s moniker, a black hand. The other was the national symbol of Mexico—an eagle carrying a snake in its beak—surrounded by a flaming circle over crossed knives. He was officially Mexican Mafia.

  His life was good. He earned more money than he could have ever imagined, although it was essentially useless to him. Everything he needed was being provided by the gang. The money was just a symbol of his worth within their ranks.

  Then, the virus came.

  Tommy and several gang members were hiding in their crib when it all happened. The crowded community had no chance to avoid the infection. Entire neighborhoods went down in a matter of minutes.

  The worst part was when the virus took his boss. Tommy and three others were huddled in a room when Escondo broke down the door. He’d been infected. Tommy had never seen anything like it. The man had become the devil himself, with razor-sharp teeth and translucent skin that did a poor job hiding the black veins crisscrossing his body. His amber eyes burned with a fearsome intensity. Escondo screamed at the four men, his tongue snapping in and out of his mouth like a rabid snake.

  The other three gang members tried to take their former boss down. They failed and lay dead on the floor, their necks ripped open or heads removed. But even with all the genetic changes Escondo had gone through, Tommy didn’t attack.

  Escondo saw Tommy standing in the back of the room. The creature crept forward, its tongue snapping back and forth, spraying spittle thickened with a black, chunky contaminant.

  Tommy couldn’t bring himself to try to hurt his old boss. Regardless of his fate, he owed Escondo his life. Besides, his boss was a huge man, even larger with the mutation. His massive frame was over seven feet now, and his muscles rippled. He had gotten even more formidable with the contagion in his blood.

  “El Jefe!” Tommy said before kneeling and bowing his head.

  He waited for the blow that would decapitate him. If that was his fate, no better person to do it than Escondo. The way the world was going, it wouldn’t matter what infected creature did him in. At least this way, it would be a man he’d come to admire and love.

  He waited without fear.

  The blow never came.

  Escondo stood over him for what seemed like an eternity. They were so close, that Tommy felt the giant man’s body radiating heat. In normal times, Tommy would have recommended that he go see a doctor, he was so hot.

  Eventually, Escondo turned and walked to the caved-in door.

  “Come!” the massive creature said to Tommy.

  Tommy looked up and watched Escondo walk outside. He followed. Escondo moved through the crowd of infected, protecting Tommy as they went. He was a fearsome creature, commanding the loyalty of those around him.

  By the end of the night, Escondo had hundreds of followers. He’d quickly killed any of the infected that challenged him, his brute strength easily crushing his opponents. All the while, Tommy stood at his side.

  As the years went by, his boss’s clan grew, and Tommy became a collaborator. He’d search for human enclaves and point them out to the infected horde. For his loyalty, Tommy was once again, given a place of honor in the group.

  As the human population diminished, Tommy’s job became more and more difficult. He recruited other humans to help in the search for food. Even with an expanding army of collaborators, finding fresh, human meat became nearly impossible. Through it all, his boss never lost confidence in him.

  One day, Tommy was scurrying about in the sewers under Los Angeles. A small group of survivors had been found hiding in the rainwater runoff tunnels that fed into the Los Angeles River. Tommy decided that if there was one group of humans doing this, there might be more.

  Instead of finding more people during his search, he found another source of protein for the clan. Rats. Thousands of them had congregated in one of the drain’s collection rooms.

  The infected that were with him pounced on the rodents, eagerly ripping them apart or eating the smaller creatures with abandon. It gave him an idea.

  He returned to Escondo with several rat corpses and presented them to the giant. He sniffed them and ripped one apart. After consuming the top half of the rat, Tommy was given a nod of approval.

  Tommy “Tonto” Randall changed jobs that day. A man who had once been a drug runner and then a hunter of human meat, became a farmer. He gathered rodents and created
a massive stockade deep in the tunnels under Los Angeles. He raised hundreds of thousands of the rapidly reproducing rodents, which kept Escondo’s horde of Variants from starvation.

  For his efforts, three human females were kept alive and at his disposal. Salvaged cans from grocery stores and bottles of alcohol were his bounty as he gathered the food and rotting trash needed to keep his flock of rats alive.

  After everything that had happened to the world, Tommy still felt the same way about Escondo as he did before the virus. His boss was fair to Tommy and treated him well.

  In the new world, Tommy again had power and status, just like in the old days. About the only thing Tommy didn’t like was one of the changes in his boss’s appearance. Tommy didn’t mind the mutated mouth and eyes; they looked fearsome and cool. It didn’t even bother him that Escondo had such waxy, thin skin with distended, blackened veins. The only thing about his boss that bothered Tommy was the hair. How it became a flaming red color was beyond explanation. The fiery-orange hue looked too much like a punk rocker’s dyed mane.

  Other than that, Escondo was a god in Tommy’s eyes, and he’d do anything for him, including providing the means to keep his boss’s massive clan of Variants from starvation.

  U.S. Bank Tower

  Rooftop Landing Pad

  Downtown Los Angeles

  Midmorning

  Carver stared out at the passing city. The helicopter flew above Los Angeles, keeping high to minimize ground noise.

  Once they were over the heart of downtown, the bird began to drop. Carver looked over the edge of the side door and watched them sink toward a large pad with a giant number 12 painted on it. He smiled at the simplistic method used to alert the pilots what building they were landing on. The nearby Wells Fargo building had an 11 stenciled on its pad. Even with these numeric reminders, Carver wondered how many times a pilot had landed on the wrong rooftop.

  They dropped quickly before the pilot flared, landing them on the roof with the gentlest of bumps. Impressive given the craft’s vertical speed for most of the descent.