by SD Tanner
Reaching the trucks, Jenna already had them facing away from the city. Leaping at the roof of the armored vehicle, his hydraulics gave him the lift he needed to land squarely on top. Without waiting for his orders, the trucks began to move. Lexie was lying flat on her back and shooting above them at the swooping critters. Tank, Tuck and Trigger were firing at the critters on their six, and when he looked forward, the road was clear.
As the trucks gathered speed, the critters behind them became smaller and the ones in the sky thinned until there were none following them.
In almost every engagement, the critters had them on the back foot, and he muttered angrily, “I’m fuckin’ sick of this shit.”
“I hear that,” Tuck replied dourly.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Clouded minds (Ark)
“He’s doing well.”
Nodding at Bill, he returned to studying the screens. They’d agreed he would act as the battle commander during combat, and Bill and Dunk had quietly observed the engagement. Leon and his newly-formed Navigator squad had impressed him with their almost casual adaptation to their new circumstances and equipment. Perhaps shock would unravel them later, but he thought they were dealing with each crisis in a steady and even-tempered way.
Convincing Lexie to join them was a smart move, and between the five of them, they had all the capabilities Dunk had envisioned for a Navigator squad when he’d designed the gear. This was his vision coming to life, and Dunk had turned into a proud father, keen to develop whatever weapons he and Bill wanted. The new and improved Dunk didn’t deserve the nickname Skunk, but he appeared to carry the title with good humor.
“What did you make of that?” Bill asked.
Still flicking through the screens, he was trying every spectrum they had to analyze the data he’d collected through the squad’s visors. The appearance of the mounds was worrying, but worse still was their inability to see where the critters were underground. In their previous recon of the site, the critters were only six to ten feet below the surface. Since that time, it appeared they’d made themselves quite at home in the earth beneath the desert, and had buried themselves deeper still. What concerned him the most was, why?
“Do you think they’ve learned since our last recon?”
Surrounded by screens, Bill was sitting on one of the wide and well-padded shadow nav chairs. He didn’t know how to use the screens, but Amber had left once the squad were secure again, and there weren’t any other spare seats in the cramped room.
Staring blankly at the displays in front of him, Bill asked, “What do you mean?”
“Last time we saw them there they were only six to ten feet underground, but now they’re down too deep for the sensors to detect them. Did they learn to do that or is it just what they do?”
Leaning against the rail leading into the small bunker area, Dunk replied flatly, “We don’t have the information to answer that. All we know is we can’t see them.”
Looking across at Dunk, Bill asked, “Can you fix that?”
Dunk shook his head. “It’s a size, weight and power problem. We can scan pretty deeply, but we’d need bigger scanners using a higher intensity, and all that takes more juice than a nav can carry. The best we could do is wheel in a larger scanner by truck and film what it sees.”
He glanced at Dunk. “What about the drones?”
“If the critters are learning as you suspect they are then we’d only get to use them once. After that, they’ll know to bring them down.”
Bill looked confused. “You have drones?”
Shaking his head, Dunk replied, “No, not really. They were a stage three proposal. We’ve been working on aerial units that can transport the navs. We call it ‘hot dropping’. Fly the drone in, drop the nav, and collect them later. Of course, it’s easy to drop them, but having a nav catch a drone, not so much.”
“Do the drones work?”
He and Dunk shared a knowing look. “Yeah, I guess so, but we’ve only got three prototypes. We had them ready to demo to the army, but none of the navs know how to use them, not even Lexie.”
“Can you build more?”
Dunk shook his head decisively. “Nope. We don’t hold a full inventory of components for them, and all the suppliers we used just went out of business, if you know what I mean.”
Sighing with disappointment, Bill asked, “What about the sound weapons?”
“Not in production yet either,” he replied.
“And still under development,” Dunk added.
“If you can get them working, could you manufacture more?”
With a snort, he replied, “You mean, could we hand assemble more? None of this kit is made in a factory. The gear is still under development, so we hand build everything.” He gave Dunk a quizzical look. “If we get the sound weapons working, could we make more than a few of them?”
With a shrug, Dunk said, “We’d have to analyze what other materials we could repurpose, but its straight-forward engineering to build those weapons, so possibly.”
While Bill and Dunk continued to discuss the logistics of designing and producing alternate weapons, he studied the screens closely. If he zoomed in, the large pyramid structure was still there, only now it was surrounded by hundreds of smaller mounds. It was definitely the focal point of their city, and he wondered what could possibly be inside it. He didn’t think the critters were stupid, and there had to be a reason why they were protecting the pyramid.
Pointing at the pyramid on his screen, he asked, “What do you think is inside that thing?”
Bill leaned closer to the image. “What makes you think there’s anything inside it?”
“It stands to reason. They’re defending it, so it’s gotta be important.”
Narrowing his eyes, Bill replied, “One-of-One told Dayton she thinks the critters don’t have much grey matter.”
“They’re not dumb.”
“That’s my point. If they don’t have much of a brain, but they’re smart, then maybe their brain is somewhere else.”
That would mean the critters were telepathic, and he asked, “What? Do you think they’re communicating telepathically?”
“Dayton says they don’t have to. They could be sending electrical impulses through the air, much like a cell phone does.”
Still doubtful, he asked skeptically, “Do you really think there’s a big brain underneath that pyramid?”
Bill shrugged. “I don’t know.”
With an audible sigh, Dunk said, “Just because their brains are small doesn’t mean they’re being controlled by something else. The medical team are just making stuff up. It’s very unscientific of them.”
With his engineering expertise, Dunk was a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy, and he knew the inconclusive waffling’s of the medical team annoyed him. Whenever something didn’t work as they expected, they would shrug and tell them that the human body wasn’t a machine. It wasn’t an answer he or Dunk could work with and he also found them irritating.
Clearly sensing their frustration, Bill said decisively, “Okay, let’s deal with what we know.”
“And what exactly do we know?” He asked. “We don’t know how many cities were affected, or even if this was a global phenomenon. We don’t know whether they’re guarding that pyramid, or they just like hanging out together. We don’t even know what they want, other than they like to eat dead people, but that doesn’t explain why they’re keeping people prisoner in the cities. In fact, do we even know that’s what they’re doing? Are they holding them prisoner, or have they just not got around to killing them yet?”
Fixing him with a steady and unblinking stare, Bill nodded. “Not having answers to those questions means we know what we have to do next.”
“How do you figure that?”
“It’s math. To find out how far-reaching this is, we need to go to where the answers are, so that’s our mission.”
“You mean we need to go to NORAD.” When Bill nodded, he shook his head. “How are you go
nna get into NORAD? It’s possibly the most secure facility in the world.”
Bill smirked. “They didn’t build only the one door, Ark. How stupid would that have been?” When he raised his scarred and stiffened eyebrows at him, Bill continued, “There’s multiple entrances into NORAD through a system of tunnels.”
“How do you know that?”
“I was the military liaison for the bunkers in Albuquerque.”
“What’s that got to do with NORAD?”
With a slight smirk, Bill replied, “Nothing, but I knew people and you know how they like to talk.”
“That’s pretty crappy security.”
Bill gave a slight shrug. “The perception of security is always an illusion. Nothing is ever secret. The best you can do is grey the truth, but you can never hide it.”
That certainly matched his own understanding of how the military worked. The truth became glaringly obvious through what wasn’t said. If the brass wouldn’t talk about an impending war, you could be rest assured that one was coming.
“What if you get into NORAD and there are no answers?”
Shrugging again, Bill replied, “Then we’ll use the next easiest tactic to get the answers.”
“And what’s that?”
“We’ll cross that bridge if and when we get to it. In the worst case scenario, we’ll have to send the squad to the other cities.” Giving him a determined look, he added, “And it doesn’t matter if they don’t have the answers, we still need to tell NORAD to ceasefire. They have to stop bombing the cities.”
He hadn’t seen any evidence of the missiles flying for several weeks, and he wasn’t sure NORAD was still operational. The satellites would erode without continual corrections to their orbit, but until they did, they would keep filming whatever they passed over. For all he knew, NORAD was down and the satellite orbits were already degrading. Unless NORAD was bombing them, it was almost impossible to know whether they were operational or not.
Bill struck him as a solid senior officer, but he wasn’t confident he was thinking broadly enough. Dayton might be analyzing the composition of the critters, and it needed to be done, but he was more concerned about their capabilities. So far, the critters had shown an alarming ability to adapt to their conditions and situation. When the critter in the training hangar exploded into thirty smaller ones, it was almost a perfect defense. Had it not been for the Navigators, the tiny spiders could have destroyed CaliTech. Now they’d buried themselves deeper inside the earth, making it impossible for them to know where they were. It was another smart adaptation.
As for the sticky goo they spat, he still didn’t know what that was for, but he was convinced it was a weapon of some sort. The critters were single-minded and he’d yet to see them do anything that didn’t add to their abilities. The goo wasn’t just their way of dribbling, it had a purpose, and he was sure it was dangerous even if it was made of plastic. The critters appeared to be analyzing any resistance they found to their control, and were adapting their tactics to defeat it.
He did agree with Bill that they needed more Navigators, but thought he was only seeing it as a logistics problem. Having worked with all of the Navigators, he knew that not just any warm body would do. Sally had tried to explain the psychological demands, but like Dunk, Bill had glossed over her warnings. If they trained the wrong people then they’d fail, and that would waste the precious gear they had in stock.
Then there was the cell structure Bill wanted to put in place. He couldn’t see how they could turn civilians into a fighting force. They wouldn’t have the discipline, and even if they did, why would they listen to anyone from CaliTech?
Turning away from both men, he resumed studying the screens, hoping to uncover answers to the questions that continued to spin around in his mind.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Waking Knights (Jonesy)
“She’s dead?”
“No, sweetheart, she changed.”
“Mum became one those things?”
He wondered how many times he was going to have to keep repeating himself before Miranda would grasp that her mother was as good as dead.
Clearly sensing his dismay, Jas looked at Miranda in the rear vision mirror. “I was there and she wasn’t your Mum anymore. I’m sorry, but your mother is gone.”
“You mean she’s dead.”
“No, she turned into a critter.”
“And you just left her in the apartment?”
Her accusatory tone made him flinch inwardly. Leaving Jenny in their apartment as a monster still filled him with guilt, and he clenched his fist tightly.
Sounding sharp, Jas said, “Like I told you, I was there and your father did everything right. She’s gone. Dead. Deceased. Bought the farm. Kicked the bucket. Roadkill. Take your pick, but get the freakin’ message.”
In response to Jas’s harsh words and tone, Miranda began to sob loudly. Part of him wanted to comfort his only and much loved daughter, but he was almost beyond his ability to cope. If his mind dwelt on what should have been he would break, so he turned to face the windscreen again with an empty expression.
While Miranda continued to cry, Jas said conversationally, “We need gas.”
Glancing at the fuel gauge, he nodded. “Wanna try Baker again?”
“Makes sense. We know it has fuel we can get to.”
They drove on in silence while Miranda wept quietly in the back of the cruiser. After Jas had driven them a safe distance from the house, she’d stopped so they could get inside the car. Miranda had told him that she and her husband, Chad, were safe in the house for several weeks. They’d drunk the water from the toilet and eaten their supplies from the kitchen. Eventually, deciding the neighborhood was safe, Chad had ventured out to find help, but he’d never returned. A few days after he’d disappeared, she’d woken to the sound of screeching critters and realized they were in the house. She’d been trapped in her lounge for four days, and had been on the verge of running out of food and water when he’d appeared.
Chad had protected her from the worst of the brutality, and Miranda seemed unaware just how desperate their situation was. He’d never met Chad, but deciding he sounded like a man of some substance he wished he had.
Arriving in Baker, the gas station looked the same as it did when they’d first seen it. Still quiet and desolate, he wondered if the preppers, Sean and Dean, would show up again. Like many, he’d always thought preppers were crazy people with an apocalypse wish, but it looked like they’d been on the right track.
Repeating the process they’d followed the day before, he got the gas moving in the hose, and Jas stood next the cruiser filling the tank. Miranda had climbed out of the car and was watching Jas, but she appeared to be dazed and detached. If he’d been in a better frame of mind he would have talked to her, but he couldn’t deal with her confusion right now. Turning away from the two young women, he stared across the desert and wondered what Jenny would do to help their daughter. Emotional stuff was really more her territory, and he concluded he had no idea what she would do, only that she would know how to make their daughter happy again.
While he contemplated how inadequate he was as a father, he heard a sharp crack from behind him. Whirling to check for the source of the noise, Miranda was holding the stock of his Remington shotgun, and Jas was lying sprawled on the concrete where gas was running from the hose next to her.
“What the hell…?”
At the sound of his voice, Miranda spun around and her eyes were a solid black. A cold spike of adrenalin ran down his body. Frozen in position, he didn’t even consider pulling his Desert Eagle. As he reached the limits of his ability to cope with his situation, his mind disintegrated into a collection of random and disconnected thoughts. A single gunshot could ignite the gas spreading across the concrete. He thought he could see brain tissue from Jas’s skull. Miranda was advancing towards him, and raising the gunstock to do to him what she’d just done to Jas. He should shoot her or run, but instead he stood stock still, st
aring at her in disbelief.
She was a yard from him with the gunstock raised high above her head and he couldn’t move. Her dark hair, that knew so well, was framing a face he could never harm. Her features were twisted into an angry grimace, and in his detached state of mind, he realized he’d never seen her look that way before. As if in slow motion, he watched her bring the blunt end of the gun down with a power he didn’t know she possessed.
He waited for the blow he knew would finally end his misery, but it never came. Miranda’s body began to jerk, and the movement matched the sound of rapid gunfire coming from his left. The impact of the bullets threw her off-balance and she staggered away from him.
Still unable to react, hands hauled him away from her, and a voice shouted in his ear, “Fuckin’ move! The station’s gonna blow!”
More hands grabbed at his body, and he was propelled towards the grassy edge of the concrete surrounding the gas station. Those same hands shoved him down a low incline and he lost his footing, rolling to the bottom. A loud noise, followed by a sharp gust of hot wind informed him that the gas station had exploded. All it meant to him was Miranda and his grandchild were dead, and his mind completely shut down.
“What’s wrong with him?” A voice asked anxiously. “Does he wanna fuckin’ die?”
His mind registered the question and his brain mulled it over. Did he want to die? Jenny had tried to kill him, and now his only child had tried to do the same. There was nothing left for him on earth and he might as well leave.
“I dunno. I think he’s in shock.”
“From what? I thought he said he was a cop.”
“It don’t matter what he was. If he hadn’t told us what’s goin’ on, we coulda all been killed by those fuckers.”
“Yeah, that’s true. We owe him one. We’ll take him back to the shelter.”
He didn’t remember how he got to the shelter, but safely underground and sitting on a low sofa, a woman had wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. While he continued to stare blankly, a leanly built man in his late forties sat on the coffee table and faced him.
