The Apaches turned toward the city and flew over Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. Most of the massive towers here had sustained damage from rockets that had blown out the upper floors. The walls of the bottom floors were blackened from the firebombs that had almost killed Beckham in Operation Liberty.
“There it is,” said a pilot over the headset. “The 9/11 memorial is our LZ.”
The memorial was walled off along the streets from the debris of destroyed buildings.
As the chopper did a quick flyby, it became apparent the outpost survivors of the prior night’s battle had retreated block by block to a smaller, more defensible area. The smoke drifted from the east, rising from holes in the ground.
The outpost must have detonated bombs in the sewers and subways.
The Black Hawk descended toward the memorial. Two M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, both rare sights, were positioned at gates in the walls surrounding the site. Soldiers patrolled the platforms built behind the razor wire.
When the Black Hawk touched down, a crew chief opened the door. Beckham helped Kate out and away from the bird. Fischer almost lost his cowboy hat, but Tran snatched it and handed it back.
Three soldiers flanking a middle-aged woman with gray-streaked red hair waited across the lawn, their clothes whipping in the rotor wash.
The Apaches set down on rooftops nearby. The pilots climbed down from the cockpits and vanished from view as soldiers on the roofs stood guard around the precious birds.
“This way!” shouted the woman ahead. She led them through a maze of trees and past the dry memorial pools where they stopped.
The woman held out a hand and smiled, wrinkles forming next to her mouth that evidenced a lifetime of smoking. “Welcome to Outpost Lower Manhattan. I’m Commander Amber Massey.”
“Captain Reed Beckham.”
He shook her hand. He wasn’t surprised when he received a firm grip. Anyone who had held a place like this, in a city that had never been cleared of the monsters, was going to be strong.
“I’m Doctor Kate Lovato,” Kate said, introducing herself next. “My team is still in a classified location, but we’re here to do an advance inspection. We’ll need access to the closest tunnel with Variant webbing.”
Massey cracked a sly grin. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, Commander,” Kate replied. “My team is working on—”
Massey’s grin faded to a frown. “When I was told we were getting new people, I thought Command meant special forces and reinforcements, not a science team and…” Massey’s eyes flitted to Beckham and his prosthetic leg and arm.
“Captain Reed Beckham is special forces,” Kate said.
“I didn’t mean to offend anyone, but we were hit hard last night. Lost a lot of good men and women defending these walls.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Fischer said, tipping his hat.
“Um, who are you?” Massey asked.
“S.M. Fischer with Fischer Fields,” he said. “All due respect, but we’re here on orders from the president, and we’re one of the best things that could have happened for this outpost.”
Before Massey could respond, voices called out.
“Open the gates!” yelled a guard on one of the walls.
A barred gate rose. The two Humvees and the UPS truck Beckham had seen from the sky drove in from Greenwich Street. The vehicles stopped in the parking lot nearby. Soldiers hopped out and went to the back of the UPS truck to open the door. Then they helped civilians down, one by one.
Kids, women, and a few men. All of them wearing the same expressions of terror. One of the men still had red webbing attached to his arms and legs.
“My God,” Kate said. “They must have been pulled from the tunnels.”
“Those are the last of the survivors from an area outside the outpost,” Massey interrupted. “I thought there would be more…”
“This won’t happen again, ma’am,” Fischer said. “We’re here to protect them now. My engineers are on their way with equipment that will identify the Variant tunnels before they attack.”
“Well, that’s good news,” Massey said. “I’m sorry if I came off a little harsh before. My people are hurting and dying.”
“How many people are here?” Beckham asked.
Massey looked over her shoulder at a few of the buildings. “Five thousand. Maybe. We lost an entire building with five hundred people last night.”
“Weren’t there originally twenty thousand people here?” Kate asked.
“Yes,” Massey said coldly. “Like I said, we’ve been hit hard. We had to pull nearly everyone back behind these walls.”
“Sorry to hear about your losses,” Beckham said. “It’s been a tough few days for everyone.”
“That’s putting it lightly.”
“Can you tell me what all the smoke was we saw on our way in?”
“My demolition teams blew up a few tunnels and collapsed a subway last night. We set mines around other areas we suspect the Variants might come through.”
A pickup truck pulled in from another gate, this one had more wounded people in the back. Medics gently removed two soldiers with long crimson gashes splitting their skin and red webbing tied around their limbs.
“Jesus,” Fischer said, taking off his cowboy hat again.
“Jesus has nothing to do with this place,” Massey said. “Now follow me.”
She led them through the park, navigating past more until they reached a construction site. Only this wasn’t just an old site that was never finished before the war.
Massey put her hands in her hips and stood next to Kate. “So, you want access to the webbing?”
“Yes,” Kate replied.
“This is the one tunnel we’ve kept open,” Massey said. She pointed down metal stairs that led to a hole with twisted rebar. Tendrils of webbing hung off the concrete and metal.
“Where does it lead?” Beckham asked.
“To the sewers where many of our people were taken,” Massey said. “It’s secure right now, but we were setting charges to destroy it so the Variants can’t use it again. How long do you need access to it?”
“Hard to say,” Kate said.
“Guess.”
“A few hours, maybe half a day.”
“How about until dusk?” Massey asked.
Beckham stepped up to the fencing, his hand on his M4 strapped over his chest. In the depths of the darkness, he saw more webbing stretching out like hundreds of snake tongues.
If there was a gate to hell on Earth, this was it. And he and Kate were about to descend into its depths.
— 4 —
Dohi was on point, leading Team Ghost and the surviving Wolfhounds through the wreckage of the National Accelerator Laboratory Campus. Dark pillars of smoke rose from craters around the buildings, scars left by the attacks from those mysterious helicopters.
Anxiety ate at Fitz as he waited for those thumping rotors again. Any moment, those bastards might come sweeping down.
He carried a pack full of scrapped computers and other devices they had scavenged from the warehouses. As bad as this broken tech looked, Fitz hoped the engineers and scientists could still do something useful with them.
“That’s what so many of my bros died for, huh?” said Martin. The sole Wolfhound who hadn’t been injured was walking close by and helping one of his comrades, a blond-haired man named Lawrence. Blood-soaked bandages were wrapped around Lawrence’s arm where the cannibals had sliced off a piece of muscle and skin, then singed the wound closed.
“It’s going to work,” Lawrence said, eyes bleary. He still seemed to be in shock. “These guys know what they’re doing.”
“That butchered arm of yours is screwing with your brain if you think they got a single damn idea of what’s going on.”
“Quiet,” Fitz said. “We’re going to get you guys out of here, but you have to cooperate.”
Fitz took a moment to scan the rest of them.<
br />
A big dark-skinned man named Jackson was on Rico’s back in a fireman’s carry. Both his legs had been chopped off by the cannibals. The cauterized stumps leaked yellow fluids into sodden bandages. His face had grown a shade paler since they had begun their hike away from the warehouses, and Fitz wasn’t sure if he was going to make it. He’d been unconscious nearly the entire time.
Ace had a man with a scraggly beard and olive-green eyes, Hopkins, in a similar carry. Every bump, every jostle sent the man groaning in pain. His right foot was missing below the ankle.
Mendez was at least walking on his own, watching their backs on rear guard.
“Put me down,” Hopkins begged.
Fitz remembered the guy bravely working with them to infiltrate the cannibal’s base before, but all sense of bravery was gone.
“Put me down and leave me,” he mumbled.
For a second, Fitz thought that maybe they would be better off leaving the injured Wolfhounds behind and coming back for them. Team Ghost could make it to the C-130H faster without them. Secure it and then return…
He shook the thoughts from his head. That was just exhaustion speaking. The last dregs of adrenaline had burned off, and they were faced with a stark, demoralizing reality.
Leaving any Wolfhound behind was condemning them to death. Either to their own wounds, starving Variants, or to the unknown enemies that had tried to cut them down from the choppers. He already felt responsible for the extreme loss of life.
Fitz motioned for the group to gather around the charred husk of a delivery truck. He looked around at the weary, ash-covered faces.
“We’re almost to the edge of the campus,” Fitz said. “From there we hike straight back to the C-130. If the choppers come back, split and run. Rendezvous is the LZ. Clear?”
Several nods.
“Seriously, just leave me,” Hopkins said, eyes bleary. “You guys would do better without us dragging you down. You still got a mission, and we’re holding you back.”
“We ain’t leavin’ nobody,” Mendez grunted.
“Keep quiet,” Fitz ordered. “There might still be cannibals or Variants out there.”
Dohi led them down the street toward the freeway. The odor of cooked flesh drifted through the air. Rubble lay at the feet of the buildings. Flames still licked piles of debris.
The team passed melted vehicles scattered along the cracked parking lot. A cluster of corpses were just ahead, skeletal remains frozen in agony where they had fallen to gunfire or flames.
Fitz passed a truck with a missing windshield. A cannibal gunner had been posted inside. His rifle lay outside the driver’s side window, and his skeletal hands were stretched out as if he had been trying to escape when the rockets hit.
Charred muscles had shrunken into ghastly cables over his long bones. Not much remained of his face except his open jaw from when the man had let out a permanent, silent scream.
Fitz felt a hint of sympathy. The cannibals had been cruel, twisted human beings, but seeing even them slaughtered like this was hard to stomach.
That feeling quickly evaporated when they passed over the highway. He took the team past the location where Lieutenant Singh and the other Wolfhounds had been positioned.
“Oh, God, no,” Martin choked.
Lawrence leaned on him, face frozen in shock.
“You still think these assholes know what they’re doing?” Martin asked.
Lawrence didn’t answer this time.
At the edge of the woods, mangled body parts surrounded bloodied craters. Bullet holes perforated tree trunks. Other trunks had been turned into splinters by rockets.
“This is all your goddamn fault,” Martin mumbled.
Fitz heard it but ignored the man. He went to Mendez and glassed the freeway to make sure they weren’t being followed.
“We have to bury them,” Martin said.
Fitz turned to see him picking up an arm and a leg. That’s when he knew Martin had lost it.
“Come on, man,” Lawrence said, holding his wounded arm. “You need to trust them. We got to keep going. Got to get to that C-130.”
“He’s right,” Fitz said.
Martin glared at him, but then nodded, pulling himself together.
Rico lugged Jackson over.
“We got a problem,” she said.
“What’s up?”
“He’s burning up from an infection, and it’s bad. The antibiotics we gave him from the field kit aren’t doing anything.”
“We’ve got more on the plane,” Fitz said. “Come on, let’s move out.”
Rico took in a deep breath and then kept walking with Jackson on her back.
An hour of slow moving took them around the booby traps in the forest. When Fitz heard the popping of joints, he signaled the team to halt.
It sounded like it was coming from one of the pits.
He crept to the edge and peered over the side of it. A Variant writhed on a stake piercing its abdomen. Bloodshot, reptilian eyes locked onto his as its long tongue lashed the air.
He made sure the others saw it before moving on.
The message was clear: Variants were still prowling these woods to find scraps from the battle.
The team trudged onward as the early morning hours turned to noon. The sun hung high overhead. Eventually, they reached the beginning of the cliffside trail that would take them down to the beach-turned-landing strip. Fitz wanted to sprint ahead and search for the Wolfhounds defending the C-130.
“Hold up,” Rico said.
She gently laid Jackson on the ground. Fitz joined her after signaling to Dohi, Ace, and Mendez to hold security.
Rico knelt beside Jackson, her fingers against his wrist. His dark skin was covered in beads of sweat, and his lips were dry and cracked.
Fitz bent down.
“Pulse is weak,” Rico said. She tried to drip water from her hydration pack into his mouth. He choked on the dribble, erupting in a wracking cough.
“We’re almost there,” Fitz said. “Hang on, Jackson.”
A rotten odor drifted away from the bandages around his legs. No doubt from the festering infections.
Rico tried to give Jackson more water. A low noise gurgled at the back of his throat, like he was trying to talk. But then he went quiet, and his head tilted to the side.
“Almost there,” Fitz repeated to Rico, to reassure himself as much as her. “You need help?”
Rico shook her head, then loaded the man on her back again. “He’s not that heavy, to be honest.”
Dohi waited for Fitz’s signal before taking them to the edge of an abrupt cliff. The blue waves of the Pacific gleamed in the sunlight, and Fitz walked up to the edge.
Beneath them stretched the long, sandy beach where the C-130 and the Wolfhounds were supposed to be waiting.
A breath caught in his chest when he saw half-buried corpses and weapons scattered along the coast. The C-130 looked like a spent firecracker, half its fuselage torn open and leaking charcoaled supplies.
“Keep them away,” Fitz said to Ace. The Wolfhounds had been through enough, and he didn’t want them to lose hope. But Fitz felt defeated, like the eroding beach in front of them. Slammed over and over by waves.
Ace moved in front of Martin and Lawrence to keep them from looking.
“What?” Martin said. He had set his pack down again and was holding his gold necklace like it was the only thing keeping his mind in control. “What is it?”
Ace put a big hand in front of Martin’s chest. “Hold on, man. We’ve got to make sure things are clear.”
Fitz crouched next to Rico. She pointed to movement inside the cockpit.
He shouldered his rifle and peered through its optics, zooming in on the fractured plexiglass around the cockpit. Through one missing panel, he saw what had caught her attention.
A starving Variant tore at the neck of a dead pilot. Needle-sharp teeth came away from the flesh with strings of bloody sinew.
Fitz cursed th
eir luck.
Everything that could have gone wrong had.
That’s not exactly true, he thought.
His team was still alive.
Bringing up his rifle, Fitz waited for a good shot, but Dohi grabbed him by the shoulder.
“Boss, you need to see this,” he said quietly.
Fitz followed him to another vantage point.
“Ten o’clock,” Dohi whispered.
Fitz used his scope again but all he saw were seagulls swooping in to feast on the dead. Then he saw a camouflaged Zodiac on the shore.
Using his scope, he followed footprints in the sand from the small boat to the plane.
Dohi held up a pair of binoculars, indicating a spot further out over the ocean. He handed over the binos, and Fitz zoomed in on a ship just barely visible on the horizon. When he squinted, he thought he saw the shape of two choppers resting on its deck.
Now he knew where the hostiles had refueled their birds. But how in the hell did they get a ship and equipment like this?
He handed the binos back and aimed his rifle on the C-130 when Rico stumbled over. She crouched down, shaking her head incredulously.
“Fitz, you’re not going to believe this…” she said.
Dohi and Fitz both looked at her as they crouched.
“What?” Fitz said.
“It’s a Variant…but it’s also a man…” Rico shook her head again. “Just look at the damn plane again.”
Fitz and Dohi both got back up behind the rock cover and used their rifles to view the figures that had emerged outside the destroyed aircraft. Not one, but three men walked out of the wreckage, blood dripping down their chins.
A deep pang of terror shot through him when he saw their yellow, reptilian eyes and maws filled with jagged teeth.
These weren’t men.
At least, not entirely.
These were some sort of Variant-human crossbreeds. And they were carrying rifles.
“They’re like… Chimeras,” Rico said. “Half-Variant, half-human.”
“Chimeras,” Fitz repeated, thinking of the horrifying amalgam of creatures that comprised the legendary monster in Greek mythology.
Extinction Cycle Dark Age (Book 3): Extinction Ashes Page 4
