by SD Tanner
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: I spy (Lexie)
The boys, as she thought of them, had elected to bring three pickups, a cube van, the five Navigators in Leon’s squad, plus eight drivers. They’d planned their trip down to how far they would travel each day, what roads they would take, and optional routes in case some were blocked. Given Ark had told her they would react to whatever they found, she couldn’t see why they’d bothered to plan in such tedious detail. Based on her experience with the squad, they would throw their plans in the trash as soon as anything happened.
Inside the cube van she was riding on, were a myriad of supplies from generators, to food, ammo, spare Navigator gear, and additional weapons. Knowing the critters didn’t usually attack moving vehicles, they intended to drive almost continuously at thirty miles per hour for the entire trip. It meant they’d only stop for gas and comfort breaks, and she’d have to sleep in her gear. According to Ark, they would drive secondary roads to bypass the heavily populated areas around Modesto, Redding, Roseburg and Chehalis. They’d decided they weren’t ready for a full engagement with the critters, but in her opinion that had always been true, and yet they’d been happy to go to the nest and to Albuquerque. She didn’t really understand how they set their rules and priorities, only that they seemed to change their minds whenever it suited them.
In voices filled with horror, sighted people had given her detailed descriptions of what the critters really looked like, but without a frame of reference, they remained shapeless green blobs to her. She was also getting used to being part of Leon’s squad. With Tank and Ark on the team, it didn’t seem much different from before. Her teachers had described her as a drifter, and her parents had never pushed her to do much, so she was used to following other people’s plans. Being born blind had made it difficult for her to socialize, and it was important to her to be part of something. Traipsing around the country doing as she was ordered suited her well enough for now. She’d never been alone in the world, and had breathed a sigh of relief when Ark, Tank and Donna had absorbed her into their world at CaliTech. Now her little family had expanded and she welcomed her new siblings.
Trying to compensate for the boredom of watching the passing trees and land on either side of her, she tuned into the chatter on the Navigator grid.
“No, no, no,” Bill was objecting. “You can’t take all of the navs into the city. Who’ll watch out for the trucks?”
“You can wear a visor, and Ark will let you know what’s happening around you,” Leon replied pragmatically.
“But you’re taking a truck with you and leaving three other vehicles at risk. You need the gear we’re carrying, Leon, so you can’t afford to lose us.”
“But Seattle will be crawling with critters and I can’t afford for us to get overwhelmed either.”
They were arguing again. The young buck and the old warhorse just couldn’t see eye to eye about anything, and she knew Ark would interrupt them shortly and find the middle ground. In her humble opinion, they were both right. Bill wanted to mount a main attack on the critters, and Leon was focused on getting the Navigator squad operational. They needed one another to achieve the same end, but they couldn’t stop fighting each other every step of the way.
Just as she expected, Ark’s steady voice came through her headset. “Leon, you have three mids in the squad, so you can afford to leave one with the trucks. Bill, you should visor up anyway, you need to get a better understanding of how the gear works.”
There was a pause in the communications, and then Leon said grudgingly, “Yeah, alright.”
She heard Bill sigh. “Okay, let’s talk distances. If Seattle’s been nuked it’ll still be hot, so how far back should we keep the trucks?”
“You have Geiger counters with you, so you can start checking once you’re twenty miles out from the center of the city,” Ark replied.
“Are you sure the nav suits are radiation proofed?” Dayton asked.
Before leaving, Bill and Leon had a huge argument about whether the doctor should travel with them. Leon had wanted the medical support, but Bill had said he was integral to the analysis they were doing on the critters. The medical team at CaliTech were smart scientists, but terrible doctors and human beings. Arrogant, uninformative and cold was how she would have described them and she appreciated Bill’s concerns. Without Dayton’s guidance, she suspected they would become caught up in some irrelevant detail and nothing useful would be done. In the end, Ark had suggested they send an intern and promised Dayton would be on the grid whenever he was needed. Another point both won and lost between Bill and Leon.
“I checked with Dunk three times and he said it was part of the specification, however it was never fully tested,” Bill replied.
“Aww, great,” Tuck chimed in sarcastically. “Are my balls gonna fall off?”
“You’re not using them anyway,” Trigger replied amiably.
“You don’t know that.”
“Hey, we can see through walls so don’t be so sure.”
“Cut the chatter,” Leon said sharply. “Don’t clog the grid with your crap.”
Leon could be very serious which appealed to her. Although he appeared as directionless as she did, he liked to set small plans along the way. It allowed her to follow his lead knowing she hadn’t made a significant commitment. Bill on the other hand struck her as being very grown up. He wanted to destroy the nest and take back control of the cities. It was outlandish to think such a small group of barely trained Navigators could mount any sort of attack to save even a small part of their country. Bill was ambitious and she thought his plans were unrealistic, but when she spoke to Ark about it, he’d told her big things were only achieved through big thinking. Ark had said even though they were likely to fail they’d get part of the way, which would give them more than they had now.
“Lexie, zoom in a mile to your left,” Ark ordered.
“Why? What am I looking at?”
Her visor screen had been showing the outskirts of Redding on her left, and it had the usual collection of green and pinkish blobs she knew to be critters and people. Zooming a mile away, there were outlines of the mounds similar to the ones surrounding the nest in Pueblo Pintado, only these were much taller and fatter. They were roughly a hundred yards apart and appeared to be part of a much larger ring.
“Damn,” Ark cursed. “Leon, you need to halt the convoy and take the nav squad forward.”
“Why?”
“I think there’s critter mounds surrounding the city.”
“What? Are they’re guarding them?”
“It’s more likely they’re holding people prisoner.”
“Why would they do that?” She asked.
“To let the people move around,” Bill replied grimly. “They can’t keep them holed up in rooms and buildings. They’ll starve.”
“Does that mean they don’t want them to die?” She asked.
“Guess not,” Bill replied.
“According to our files there were ninety thousand people in that city,” Ark said. “Assuming half of them turned and a quarter of them died, then there’s still around twenty thousand people left.”
Twenty thousand people trapped inside a city and they had no idea why. Ark said he thought they planned to use them as food, and if that were true then the human race had just become cattle. She’d never seen a cow, but her parents had taken her to a petting zoo when she was a child. The thickset creature had a hide covered in bristly hairs, and while listening to it chewing contentedly, she’d stroked its rough fur. Trying to see people as cows wasn’t working for her. People were noisy and demanding, and she didn’t think they’d sit docilely in a pen waiting to be eaten.
She jumped down from the truck to join the Navigator squad getting ready to move out. “That’ll never work.”
“What do you mean?” Ark asked.
“People aren’t going to sit around in pens like cows. They’ll fight back.”
“Only if they can, Lexie,” A
rk replied somberly.
Running in formation, it only took a few minutes to be less than thirty yards from the closest mound. A sprawl of suburban houses sat behind the wall of critter homes and people were moving on the streets. Clearly, they’d been allowed out of their houses so perhaps Bill was right. Having severely culled the population, the critters were now prepared to widen their prison from a room to a city. Intermingled with the pinkish blobs were green ones, but each were keeping their distance, and she assumed the people were no longer under attack.
Agreeing with her unspoken assessment, Ark said, “The critters are acting like an occupation force.”
She looked down at the ground, ordering her computer to scan beneath it. There was nothing other than solid dirt underneath her. These mounds were not the same as those around the nest. Those ones drilled deep into the ground, and there were clearly a network of tunnels reaching far beyond where her visor could see. Moving forward again, she scanned the area between the mounds, finding tunnels no more than a few feet below the surface. Between the mounds and the tunnels, it was a fence of sorts, and green blobs were scurrying hurriedly underground. While she continued scanning the city in front of her, Ark described what he was seeing to everyone on the grid.
“This is not good,” Leon said worriedly. “It means they think they’ve won the war and they only need to hold the territory.”
“Well, they’re wrong,” Bill declared decisively. “Maybe it’s taking us a little while to mount an effective defense, but this is far from over.”
“Too fuckin’ right,” Leon agreed.
Bill and Leon might argue about every little thing, but neither were willing to accept they’d lost to the critters. The two men had finally managed to agree on something.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Future imperfect (Leon)
It was a good thing they’d planned alternate routes around Rosewood and Chehalis. Every major center was now circled by a ring of critter mounds connected by underground tunnels. No one who tried to escape would be able to clear the largely invisible fence. When Lexie scanned the area around Chehalis, it became clear they were extending their tunnels to spread across the surrounding land. Their country was becoming a minefield of critters, and very soon travelling anywhere would become impossible without the Navigator’s ability to see underground. With their shallow tunnels, they could leap from the earth just as they had done in Pueblo Pintado, and attack anyone who dared to walk on what was now their land.
He didn’t believe the creatures had stacked up their defenses so well by chance. The flying critters owned the skies, making air travel impossible, and the ground was being mined by using tunnels with critters hiding inside. If they didn’t know where the critters were then they wouldn’t know how to attack them. If NORAD were no longer operational then they couldn’t use the satellites to find them either. All of this made it impossible to estimate their strength. Not only were the critters proving hard to kill, they also seemed to have an excellent grasp of military tactics.
Bill had wanted to go to NORAD as a priority and he was finally starting to understand why. After breaking their defenses, the critters had broken the people, and now they were establishing their control. It had only been six weeks since their country had fallen, and they had already lost over half of their people, with the rest being held prisoner or in hiding.
Leaving Trigger with Bill and Jenna’s squad, they were driving along the I-5 to the edges of Seattle where he and Amelia had lived. He’d rented a small one-bedroom apartment in a converted house in Tacoma. To say he lived in Seattle wasn’t entirely true, and he hadn’t gone into the city very often. It was on one of his rare trips into Seattle that he’d met Amelia. Finding her in a nightclub, he’d had far too much to drink, and one thing had led to another. With her getting pregnant in the first week they’d been together it hadn’t been the best start, but they’d both been determined to see it through and had gotten married straight away.
Travelling the familiar roads towards his home, he noticed it was too quiet. They were driving through well-populated suburbs and the roads were usually a hub of activity. Aside from the broken windows in the houses, the area looked much the same as it always had, and there were no dead bodies anywhere.
They’d taken radiation readings for the area and without a doubt the city had been bombed. Although they assumed their Navigator suits would protect them from the fallout, Bill and the others needed to stay well clear of Seattle and its surrounding areas.
“Should we go into the city?” Tuck asked.
“I thought you were worried about your balls,” he replied dourly.
“I’m just saying we’ve come this far, so shouldn’t we take a look?”
If he found Amelia alive, he would need to leave with her immediately. If not, then maybe they could drive closer to the city. “We’ll wait until we know what we’re dealing with.”
Turning down the road he knew was his, Lexie brought the truck to a stop outside his home. It was a two-story house and his apartment was at the back on the second floor. The house was made of solid brick, with a front door in the middle that opened to a staircase leading to the top floor. The lawn didn’t look as if it had been mown in over a month and several of the front windows were broken. Surveying the other houses, he noticed all of them had broken windows, and some had curtains draping outside their frames. The street was eerily quiet and he doubted there were even any critters in the area.
“What do you see, Lexie?”
“Nothing much. There’s nobody here…or in the other houses.”
“Where did they go?” Tuck asked.
It was yet another question he couldn’t answer. “Can you see any bodies, Lexie?”
“Nope. There’s no one here, dead or alive.”
They’d either left or the critters had eaten them, but looking at the cars still parked on their driveways, he suspected few had managed to leave. After telling Tuck to stay with their vehicle, he jumped down from the roof of the truck. “Tank, open the front door.”
Walking inside he noticed the place was a mess. Furniture was overturned or smashed, and glass and decorations were lying across the floor. The curtains half hung from their rods, and there was a thick layer of undisturbed dust covering everything in the room. There were no corpses or bloodstains anywhere. The owners of the house had been meticulous housekeepers, and he wondered what could have torn the room apart.
“Lexie, are there any tunnels?”
“Nope.”
Turning away from the mess, he stomped upstairs and went to the left towards his apartment. The corridor wasn’t designed to fit two men wearing Navigator suits, and he moved out of the way to allow Tank to open the door in his usual style. The lock on the door splintered under the force of his blow, and awkwardly moving past Tank, he pushed the door fully open. His home was unrecognizable. All of his possessions were still in the apartment, only now they were worthless junk. Just like the rest of the house, everything had been broken and recklessly thrown around the room.
Amelia wasn’t in the apartment, but he’d known that before he’d walked in the house and he wasn’t sure what he was looking for. A sign or a message maybe, anything that would tell him whether she was dead or alive.
Stepping into the room, he crushed his own damaged property beneath his heavy boots as he turned a slow circle. The cabinet doors in the small kitchenette were either gone or hanging from their hinges. The once neat shelves were now a clutter of broken crockery and packets of abandoned food products. His sofa was tipped on its side, and the cushions were torn open as if there’d been a frenzied attack, but there were still no bloodstains.
Pushing the door to the bedroom open, he was confronted by another chaotic room. The wardrobe mirrors were smashed and clothes, barely on their hangers, hung limply inside. A lampshade that had once been over their bed was ripped in half and lying on the torn mattress. The curtains were still on their rails, but the hooks were mostly torn and they were
trailing on the floor. Bending over, he swept his hand along the cluttered floor, moving clothes, shoes, makeup and other broken pieces around.
“What are you looking for?” Lexie asked.
Continuing to push at the items, he replied vaguely, “I don’t know.”
“He’s looking for a message, Lexie,” Ark said.
As Ark spoke he found what he was looking for, and picking it up as he straightened, he looked at it blankly. It was even tinier in his armored hand than when he’d bought it at Tacoma Mall, and his mouth pulled into a grim line. Remembering his excitement when he’d given it to Amelia, he’d never imagined it would become a sad message.
Taking the tiny onesie from his hand, Lexie asked, “Is this the message?”
Nodding inside his helmet, he replied, “She wouldn’t have left it.”
When Lexie held the suit up, the message printed on it read, “Daddy’s Little Soldier”. Closing his eyes, he pictured Amelia when she’d opened the bag and pulled out the tiny suit. It had been one of those rare defining moments. Amelia had told him she was pregnant, and he’d made the life changing decision to accept the cards that life had dealt him with optimism. The suit had come to represent everything they’d hoped for, and they’d left it prominently displayed in their bedroom as a symbol of their commitment to making their future work.
Now he faced another defining moment. He could either give up or fight, and he found himself thinking about the first time a soldier had died on his watch. It wasn’t his fault. They’d been walking towards a village when a shot had come out of nowhere, and a bullet had cut through a young soldier’s neck. While he lay on the ground clutching the wound, blood had poured through his fingers like a geyser. It hadn’t take a genius to know that he had only moments to live. Part of him had wanted to run. It was a natural reaction to being in the line of fire, but in that split second of indecision, he’d allowed his training to rule and called his squad into action.
