Timothy didn’t exactly agree but nodded anyway.
“I want to hear you say, ‘I will follow your orders, Sergeant,’” Ruckley said.
Timothy thought again about what his dad would have done.
“You listening to me?” Ruckley said.
“Yes.”
“If you’re with me, you follow my orders,” she said. “Those gunshots probably attracted more of the beasts.”
“Okay,” Timothy said.
“Let’s go,” Neeland said.
Ruckley turned and started walking.
“Where are we going?” Timothy asked.
“Outpost Boston, unless we find a radio and or a ride before that,” she said without turning.
Timothy followed her, relieved she hadn’t made him promise to follow her orders. If she turned her back on defenseless people again or didn’t go after the collaborators, then he would again do what he’d just done.
She had a mission and so did he. Hopefully they would both end with the same result—the annihilation of evil men like Nick and Pete.
***
The tunnels sweated with humidity. Water coursed over the webbing and the brick walls like tears. Beckham wished he could wipe the perspiration rolling down his nose under his full-face respirator mask.
It was a good twenty degrees higher than topside, and the mugginess made it almost unbearable. The plastic splash suit he wore was like walking around in a portable sauna. At least the mask protected him from the odor of death, trash, and waste this place must be filled with.
Three outpost soldiers and two soldiers from Command stood guard with him in the tunnel. A heavy-set corporal named Cotter looked like he was about to pass out, his face under the mask blanched.
“I’m sweating like a pig’s nutsack in the summer,” Cotter had protested.
“Suck it up, man,” Beckham had replied. “You’re not the only one hurtin’.”
He couldn’t wait to peel off this mask and suit.
Horn would have hated it down here. The big guy could deal with pretty much anything, but he despised humidity.
Then again, the retired operator probably didn’t like playing babysitter, either. He had been filling that role quite a bit lately. Beckham thought of Javier, Tasha, Jenny, and the dogs back in the command bunker. All cooped up with the president, her staff, military officers, and soldiers.
It beat being down here, but Beckham still worried about them. No place in the Allied States was safe now. At this point, he wasn’t even reassured although Horn, Ringgold, and the kids had a veritable army protecting them.
The enemy had a bigger one.
“You hear that?” asked Cotter.
“What?” replied another corporal named Daniels.
Beckham held up a hand to silence them. He listened for whatever Cotter thought he had heard. But the only sound was a distant dripping.
Cotter shrugged. “Guess it was nothin’.”
“Maybe it was your stomach growling,” Daniels said.
“Shut up,” Beckham said. He raised his rifle and directed his beam down the passage.
A faint moaning sounded.
The men backed up behind Beckham as he took a few steps ahead.
“Variant?” Cotter asked.
Beckham shook his head. “Sounds like another survivor.”
“God,” Daniels said. “Let me guess. We’re going to go rescue them.”
“Not yet. Stay here, and stay frosty,” Beckham said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where you going?” Cotter blurted.
“Before we do anything, I need to check on the science team,” Beckham said.
Beckham set off for Kate and her staff. They were located in a tunnel around the next corner, about a quarter mile from the entrance to the construction site.
The glow from the construction floodlights guided him, and he shut off his tactical light. The generators powering those lights thrummed as he rounded the corner.
Kate, Sammy, Ron, and Leslie hunched behind the laptops they had set up on a folding table like those the military used in their mobile outposts. It wasn’t an impressive mobile lab station, but it was all they had to work with.
“You guys making progress?” Beckham asked.
Sammy shrugged. “This isn’t as easy as I’d hoped.”
“I thought you had this all figured out.”
“In the lab, we did,” Kate said. “But this isn’t the lab.”
“We’re having trouble integrating the signals over the longer networks,” Sammy said. “The signal doesn’t amplify like I’d predicted. Worse, the signals we’re receiving are coming in at frequencies we didn’t experience with the mastermind.”
“What’s that mean?” he asked.
“It means, if we don’t get the frequencies just right and our first attempt to communicate with the Variants goes wrong, they’ll be able to find us,” Kate said.
That didn’t exactly inspire confidence, but Beckham trusted his wife.
“I have faith you’ll crack this,” he said. “But in the meantime, I’ve got to take a few men farther down the tunnel. Might be more survivors.”
She paused. “You…”
“I’ll be careful, don’t worry.”
Kate shot him a worried look, and he gave her a reassuring nod.
He returned to the soldiers and motioned for Cotter and Daniels to follow.
“Rest of you stay here and hold sentry,” Beckham instructed.
Their three beams penetrated the steamy darkness as they advanced into the subterranean labyrinth. Sweat bled down his forehead and stung one of his eyes. He blinked it away.
The moaning they had heard earlier seemed to have stopped. He kept walking, just in case they were still alive. His prosthetic blade clanked on the concrete floor as he scanned the tunnel with his light to make sure no threats hid in the shadows.
In the next passage, he cleared the way to another tunnel.
At the next intersection, he signaled for Cotter and Daniels to take the right side while he checked the left. When he looked back to the right, he found both soldiers angling their lights at the center of the floor where a volcano of webbing grew through the bricks.
“What in the hell,” Beckham whispered.
The tunnel below the sewer must have been dug by the Variants, which meant there could be other passages right below his boots.
Another long moan sounded, this time much louder. It sounded more like the hiss of air escaping a leaking tire. Beckham walked past the other two soldiers.
He flicked his beam over the walls until he saw the source.
On the ceiling above the broken floor, his light captured a human face. Bloodshot eyeballs protruded from their sockets. He ran the light down the webbing, expecting to see the rest of the body covered in a cocoon of webbing.
But there was nothing under the neck.
No chest, torso, hips…
Not even any bones.
“Holy…” Beckham whispered.
“What is it?” Cotter muttered.
Daniels took another step forward, then started to wretch. He pulled up his mask and vomited.
Beckham froze, his brain unable to comprehend what his eyes were seeing.
Of all the horrors over the years, this took the prize.
He finally managed to break from the shock. The vines had somehow become part of the head, feeding it like blood vessels nourishing an organ.
How in the hell was this possible?
The eyes seemed to watch him, and the lips moved. Air pushed out of the mouth, making that horrible hissing sound. Beckham wondered if the person was asking to die.
Cotter raised his rifle, looking as if he would grant that wish.
The lips opened wider to reveal a jaw rimmed with jagged, broken teeth. The head pushed forward, propelled by some of the vines, almost as if it was lunging at the soldiers.
Before Beckham could say anything, Cotter squeezed his trigger. A suppressed gunshot rang out. The rav
aged face burst. Flecks of gore and bone painting the soldiers.
“God dammit,” Beckham grumbled.
Cotter lowered his rifle.
“You stupid asshole,” Beckham said.
“Dude, that was—”
A vine suddenly wrapped around his ankle and pulled his leg out from under him. Cotter screamed and dropped his gun. Flailing his arms for help.
Beckham pulled out his blade to free him, but crimson tendrils wrapped around his limbs too, yanking him against the wall.
Daniels was suddenly lifted to the ceiling by a rope of webbing that curled around his neck and arms. He also dropped his rifle, kicking as the webbing choked him.
It happened so fast, Beckham didn’t even have time to save himself. The vines wrapped around him, pressing him harder against the wall. Webbing around their necks tightened, silencing any calls for help.
Beckham wiggled a hand free and reached for his radio. The vine around his arm squeezed, and he dropped it.
A draft of warm wind burst through the tunnel as he fought to free himself.
As the webbing tightened over their bodies, the carpet of vines coursed over the tactical lights on their rifles.
Darkness flooded the tunnels.
Something rumbled beneath them.
Paralyzed by the strength of the webbing, Beckham could only think about Kate. He had no way of warning her… Something was coming.
— 7 —
Kate took a seat next to Sammy at one of the tables. Sweat trickled down the back of her neck. She suppressed the urge to scratch it. The combination of the splash suits, respirator masks, and intense humidity and heat of the old sewers made their work nearly unbearable.
Thoughts of her family helped her persevere. The future of this country relied on the scientific experiments they carried out down here. Temporary discomfort was nothing compared to what was at stake.
Even more distracting than the heat was knowing Beckham was somewhere deep in the tunnels searching for more survivors. He hadn’t been gone long, but she had started to worry. And while she admired his bravery and would never fault his courage, sometimes she wished he would play it safer.
But without courage like his—or really anyone’s who was in the tunnels today—the Allied States would have perished long ago. All it took was for brave men and women to falter in the face of fear, and evil would triumph.
And that means you, too, Kate, she thought.
She snapped out of her thoughts and focused on the lines of text scrolling across Sammy’s computer screen. Ron and Leslie crouched nearby, monitoring the microelectric array connections between the laptop and an organic cable of webbing.
Kate wasn’t a programmer like Sammy, but she was beginning to learn how to interpret the various signals they received from watching the laptop’s screen.
“How’s it coming?” Kate asked.
“I think I’m ready to interact locally with the webbing,” Sammy said. “Ron, check that laptop over there.”
Sammy pointed to a computer on a different table thirty yards away.
“That means our signals are completely separate from the main network, right?” Kate asked. She worried an errant signal might put Beckham at risk.
“Whatever I send through this webbing won’t pass beyond the network Ron and Leslie isolated,” Sammy said. “We’ve got physical microelectric arrays that we can control in position to gate the communications.”
Kate nodded.
“If we do our job right, no one but us will know we’re interacting with the network,” Leslie said.
Ron bent over the laptop. “My computer’s ready.”
“I’ll send a test phrase,” Sammy said. She typed the command.
“Got it, but…” He leaned closer to his screen. “I’m seeing something else, too.”
“What?” Sammy asked.
Kate went for a look.
“I don’t know…” Ron said. “External communications, I think.”
“What are they saying?” Kate asked.
Leslie joined Ron, looking over his shoulder. “Looks like some of the signals are coming in clear,” she said.
“I see one reporting ongoing Variant casualties,” Ron said.
“That definitely isn’t local,” Kate said. “There haven’t been any battles in Manhattan since last night. Can we determine where that signal originated?”
Sammy tapped on her keyboard and brought up the signals that Ron and Leslie were seeing. “You’re right. This is coming from further north. Let’s see if I can triangulate it.”
A second later, a map appeared on her screen. Her software gave them a rough estimate where the signal had originated.
“That’s near Outpost Manchester,” Kate said.
The others paused. The terror they had experienced there was still fresh on their minds, and while they had escaped, thousands of innocents had perished.
“Can you confirm that’s the right location?” Kate asked Sammy.
“Yes, the signal we’re getting about the casualties from Manchester is from a mastermind.”
“Then what are these other signals Ron and Leslie saw that we can’t understand?”
Sammy shook her head. “If we were only interested in mastermind communications, we would be good. But this noise is indecipherable.”
“Why?” Kate asked.
“We’ve tuned the software to listen into the voices of the masterminds, but not for other sources.”
“But these other signals aren’t directly from a mastermind?” Kate asked.
“No,” Sammy said. “They’re something else.”
“Not sure I follow.”
“The best way to describe this is that the masterminds’ are one frequency on the radio. We have the software to listen to that frequency, I think. But the other signals we can’t read are other radio channels. Maybe even AM instead of FM.”
“So how do we tap into those?” Kate asked.
“That’s the problem with working in the lab. We didn’t get to see what this looks like in real life before deploying it.”
Kate cursed. Not only could they not interpret all the signals, but her plan to send messages through the webbing and confuse the Variants had to be put on hold, too.
“How long before you can translate these other signals?” she asked.
“Hard to say,” Sammy said, looking down. “We’re starting at scratch for each unique messaging modality. I’ll probably need the next couple days to interpret them.”
“Massey won’t be happy, but she’ll have to understand,” Kate said. “We need to do this right.” She paused to think about something else bothering her. “Sammy, if the incoming messages we received aren’t localized like we thought, does that mean the output from our computers…”
She let the words trail off.
Sammy clutched her side where she’d been shot. “Oh, my god. I… I…the meds must’ve gotten to me. I wasn’t even thinking right…”
She sat straight again, her fingers working furiously across her keyboard.
“Sammy?” Kate said, fear rising in her own guts.
“Fuck.” Sammy froze, staring.
“What?” Kate asked.
“All our test signals leaked from the webbing we tried to localize,” Sammy said. “And every time we sent a signal, we got a bunch of responses. I missed them because we can’t understand them.”
“But that type of activity means they definitely received our test messages,” Kate said.
Sammy nodded slowly. “They’ve probably been sending signals asking what the hell our messages meant.”
“And when they couldn’t understand them…” Leslie started.
“They would’ve reacted,” Ron said. “Sensed danger.”
Kate grabbed a radio from the table. “Reed, this is Kate. Do you copy?”
No response.
“Reed, are you there?!”
It hadn’t been that long since he had departed. Maybe half an hour, bu
t with the network activity and Beckham’s silence, fear sent a chill through her body.
Something was wrong.
“I’ll be back,” she said to Sammy, starting to jog down the corridor.
“Wait!” Ron called out.
Kate ignored them and turned a corner, her boots slapping against a carpet of red webbing. The three soldiers guarding the area turned to her.
“Where’s Captain Beckham?” she asked.
“He took Cotters and Daniels to check out some noises,” one of the men said.
“And he hasn’t returned?”
The man shook his head. He was an outpost soldier. One Kate had been introduced to before.
She tried to recall his name. “You’re Parrish, right?”
The man nodded.
“Look, Parrish, Commander Massey told me I would have everything I needed for my mission here. That means you need to help me find Captain Beckham now!”
“He said to secure this area,” a soldier said. “We’re not—”
“I don’t care! Come with me right now!”
The three soldiers stood there for a few seconds, staring at each other.
“Fine,” Parrish finally said. “I’ll go with you.”
Kate looked at the other two men. “If you aren’t coming, then give me a rifle.”
“Hell no,” replied one of the guys.
“You want to go then?” she said.
The man huffed and handed his rifle over. “If Commander Massey hears—”
“Tell her,” Kate said. “I don’t care. This is more important.”
She set off, leading Parrish as fast as she could jog. Their flashlight beams guided them down the steamy tunnel.
They rounded a corner, and then another when she heard slurping and creaking. The sounds sent another chill through her limbs. Her grip tightened on the rifle as they advanced.
All the nightmarish things that could’ve happened to her husband flashed through her mind, and she struggled to dispel them.
Please be okay, Reed. Please.
They turned at another intersection, their meager lights piercing the dark. Rustling and snapping echoed down the passage. Then she heard something smack against the wall.
She sucked in a gasping breath when they neared the next corner, steeling herself for the sight of Variants tearing Beckham and the other men apart.
Extinction Cycle Dark Age (Book 3): Extinction Ashes Page 7
