Onward they trekked, heading west along a gravelly trail. Every so often, they ran into a skeleton of some poor animal picked clean of flesh, marrow sucked from the bones. At first the macabre tableaus were a chilling reminder that the Skulls still lurked in the woods somewhere. But after a while, repetition made the sight routine. A man could see only so many skeletons before he got bored.
It wasn’t until a Skull shrieked nearby that the icy fingers of fear stabbed deep into Shepherd’s bones again. Unlike the howls and wails they had heard before, this one sounded close. Very close.
Sticks and leaves cracked. Something huffed; it reminded Shepherd of a tiger or some other beast sniffing the air for signs of prey. He didn’t think the Skulls’ sense of smell was any better than a human’s. But what did he know? When the outbreak happened, he hadn’t expected there to be Droolers or Goliaths or Titans either.
Good God, what fresh hell have we walked into?
The Portuguese soldiers looked about nervously. Tension hung in the air thicker than the fog.
“Keep moving,” Shepherd whispered. Stopping here would do no good. If the Skulls were trying to surround them, it would be suicide to stand here and let it happen.
Shepherd wished he had a pair of infrareds right now to pierce the fog shrouding this damned forest. But wishes wouldn’t save lives. Wishes wouldn’t get Matsumoto to Kinsey or ensure the Phoenix Compound seed samples made it where they needed to go.
Only Shepherd and these soldiers could make that happen.
Something hit the ground behind him. He spun, bringing his pistol to bear.
Navid looked up from the ground. He rubbed his ankle and then picked up his end of Terrence’s stretcher. “Sorry, I slipped.”
The young scientist’s normally healthy brown skin looked a shade paler.
“You okay?” Shepherd asked.
Navid nodded. Of course the young man wasn’t okay. He wasn’t a trained soldier, he was burdened by a battlefield casualty, and he was in the middle of enemy territory after a traumatic plane wreck.
More heavy breathing sounded behind the group. Maybe it was a pack of dogs or wolves.
Shepherd glanced around at the soldiers. Sweat dripped down their foreheads, and they held their weapons in white-knuckled hands. The few who had been injured in the plane crash but hadn’t been scratched or bitten by Skulls struggled to keep up. One man was already lagging. His makeshift tree-branch crutch did little to aid his walking.
“Costas,” Shepherd said, “don’t let those people fall behind.”
Costas blinked, shaking himself out of some post-traumatic trance. He moved toward the man with the crutch.
A shriek tore out of the darkness, followed by a jagged white shape.
“Skull!” Shepherd bellowed.
The monster rammed into the man Costas had intended to help. Its skinny, clawed arms impaled his abdomen. The man let out a horrifying wail. Blood splashed across dried leaves, and the Skull claimed its prize. Skull and man disappeared back into the woods.
One of the Portuguese people immediately rushed after his injured comrade. As the man entered the fog, white claws tore into his fatigues and dragged him away. His kicking legs vanished into the undergrowth, and his pained voice soon gave way to the gurgle of spilling blood.
“Foda-se!” one of the soldiers cursed.
“Stay back!” Shepherd said. “They’re gone. We’ve got to keep moving. Costas, get two new men on rear guard. Move, move, move!”
The group accelerated to a brisk pace. Those that weren’t injured helped the others limp along. Despite their grimaces of pain, no one complained. They knew what was at stake. Walking on a sprain, even a broken ankle, was nothing compared to being eviscerated.
Howls exploded all around. Shepherd broke into a run, and no one else needed a command to follow suit. Heart pounding, he led them onward toward what he hoped would be salvation. His palms grew sweaty, but he swore to himself he wouldn’t let Matsumoto go. Not after having come this far.
One of the beasts darted in from Shepherd’s flank. Holding onto Matsumoto’s stretcher with one hand, Shepherd aimed his pistol with the other. Running and one-handed firing resulted in a mess of potshots that did more damage to the nearby trees than anything else. But enough bullets slammed into the overgrown ribs and bony mask of the Skull to knock the thing down.
He wasn’t sure if he’d killed it or not. He didn’t care. He just needed to move.
Gunshots and yells rang out into the night. Skulls wailed. Another soldier was picked off. An injured woman went down, dragged along the gravel road by two Skulls. The monsters buried their faces into her stomach, jostling with each other for the choicest organs as they devoured her alive.
Connor screamed, and for a moment Shepherd thought the Skulls had taken the child. He looked back to see his mother scoop the boy up, just ahead of a lunging Skull.
Shepherd tasted copper on his tongue. His lungs were on fire, and his heart felt as if it would burst.
Then there was a new sound. One he hadn’t expected.
A hiss, like white noise. Static? The radio?
Shepherd glanced at Costas. The radio still hung across his back, silent.
But as they ran, the sound grew louder.
It wasn’t his imagination at all. Shepherd smelled something other than the rot of stalking Skulls: the saltiness of a seaborne breeze. The trees soon gave way to pavement. A cool wind twisted over the open expanse of a parking lot. It beat back the fog from the forest, providing Shepherd with a clear view. Buildings dotted the landscape below them. There were no lights, no makeshift barricades on the roads as he had seen in other places. Likely, the town had fallen to the Skulls too rapidly for the survivors to organize a defense.
In their current state, Shepherd wasn’t sure they’d make it down the hillside. He wanted to hide in one of those buildings, to find shelter for long enough to rest. Maybe they should try for it. Then he spotted movement in the streets.
At first he thought they were survivors. But as the shapes flitted up the hill toward him in a stooped run, his stomach dropped. More goddamn Skulls.
“What are we going to do?” Divya asked, panting. “We can’t keep running.”
Shepherd knew she was right. His own body was giving out. The only thing they could do was turn and fight. But the chorus of hellish voices on all sides told him all he needed to know. They were desperately outnumbered. His eyes searched the coast. Maybe there was a boat they could use.
His eyes grew wide, and his heart leapt in his chest. There was something better than a boat. Just as it had once guided sailors to safety, it stood now as a beacon of hope.
“The lighthouse!” Shepherd yelled. It was much closer than the town. Close enough that if they ran for it, they might just reach it before the Skulls reached them.
Sergeant Costas sprinted ahead and barged through the wooden door at the bottom of the tower. He ushered his people into the shelter of the stone building. Their boots clanged on the iron spiral staircase as they rushed to the top. Shepherd let one of the soldiers take Matsumoto, and he shifted his rifle off his back, waiting to guard their retreat until everyone was safely inside.
Shortly after, the first Skull showed its face. Stubby horns crowned its head, and its jaw wrenched open to reveal teeth cracked and broken from all the bones it had chewed. It let out an earsplitting wail, and its spikes bristled.
Shepherd plugged the bastard with multiple rounds. It went down screaming, still trying to reach him even as its brethren trampled it. The beasts surged into the bottom of the lighthouse, flooding the bottom floor. They shoved and impaled each other, desperate to be the first one to the top.
Costas and a few others stopped on the steps, sending salvo after salvo into the Skulls. The floor was clotted with bodies, yet still the Skulls continued. They wormed their way through the piles of corpses at the lighthouse’s entrance. They would not be stopped until every last one of them was dead. Through sheer
numbers, they drove Shepherd and the soldiers back up the stairs.
“We will not die today!” Costas yelled.
Shepherd wanted to share the enthusiasm ringing in Costas’s voice. Maybe they did stand a chance. The Skulls were still pouring in but at a slower rate. Perhaps the tide of the battle had turned in their favor for once.
A roar unlike any of the other Skulls blasted from outside the tower. It was answered by another that shook the dust from the lighthouse’s rafters. All hope of safety was instantly destroyed.
“What in God’s name was that?” Costas asked.
Shepherd swallowed hard. “Goliaths.”
-33-
Nausea wrapped its slimy fingers around Dom’s stomach. He had seen death. He had seen Skulls. He had seen people devoured alive.
But he had never seen anything like this.
“What...what are they?” Jenna asked.
“This ain’t good, bro,” Spencer said. “This ain’t good.”
“Chao,” Dom said through the comm link. “You getting this?”
“Yes, Captain,” Chao said, sounding almost defeated. “We can see it all. Your helmet-cams are too good.”
Iron bars separated sections of the dark prison. The place smelled like sweat and feces and open sores left untended. Behind those bars were people, pressed into the cramped spaces tighter than cigarettes in a pack. A few wore the remnants of US Navy SEAL fatigues. Others appeared to be local civilians.
Many of them reached toward the Hunters, their hands raking the air and growls gurgling in their throats. They looked like emaciated zombies. Their skin was pulled tight over their faces, and their eyes were sunken. But the worst part wasn’t their state of near-starvation but the extreme lack of respect for human dignity shown by the FGL.
The American nearest Dom opened his mouth. His words were garbled at first. Then, more clearly, he said, “Help...us. Help, please.”
Dom wasn’t sure what he could do. The man reached out as if to grab his collar and pull him in close. Instead of human hands, he had claws like a Skull’s. Bony plates covered the man’s arm. Flesh still showed between the plates, oozing with pus and blood. His shoulder blades flared behind him, and his vertebrae stuck out like fins.
He looked like a Skull caught in mid-transition, neither fully human nor a mindless monster.
Every plate and bony appendage was perfectly oriented as if it had all been deliberately designed. If Dom squinted, he thought it was almost as if this man were wearing armor.
“Help,” the American said again. “It hurts...so...bad.”
“What the hell happened to you?” Dom asked.
“They...they did this to us,” another SEAL answered.
Dom struggled to look the man in the eye. He couldn’t fathom the unimaginable horrors these people had gone through. Behind him, Jenna quietly retched.
“They look like Skulls,” Glenn said slowly as if trying to figure it out as he spoke. “But they don’t act like Skulls. That’s...interesting.”
One of the Americans pawed at the bars. He still had a name badge secured to his torn fatigues. Reynolds. The man was as skinny as the others, as if he’d lived through a death camp. But there was fire in his eyes. “Interesting? They made us like those monsters, but we kept our brains.” The man’s voice was raspy, as if he was constantly on the verge of a death rattle. He shuddered, looking at the back of his hands as though he still couldn’t believe bone was growing out of them. “I can still feel it moving. Pushing out of my bones, through my muscles.”
“Good God,” Dom said. “We’ll fix this.”
Reynolds laughed. “Fix this? Look at us, brother. Do we look like we can be fixed? The only thing you can do to fix me is put a gun to my temple and pull the goddamned trigger.”
“Shit,” Miguel said, shaking his head. He spoke rapidly in Spanish, raking a gloved hand across his scalp.
Dom looked at Reynolds. The man met his gaze, steely as any SEAL Dom had ever had the pleasure of working with. He hated himself for the question he was about to ask, but he had no choice. “Is it safe to let you out?”
Reynolds, to his credit, didn’t look the least bit scornful. “Me and my boys, you can trust. Some of the others in those cages”—he nodded toward the prison cells deeper in the compound—“they were the first test subjects. I don’t think the experiments worked so well on them.”
Jenna approached the cells he’d indicated. Toward the end, the Skull-human hybrids reached out for her, not imploringly as the SEALs had, but hungrily.
“Eat...eat...eat,” one of the American Skull-men said.
Another muttered in Arabic, throwing his ragged body at the bars. Another—this one female—snarled and bashed her own head against the bars in a deranged frenzy. Blood trickled down her nose.
“Why would they do this?” Spencer asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Miguel asked. “It’s like the Titan project, only worse. These are the real super-soldiers, bro. This is what they wanted.”
Dom turned back to Reynolds. “We’ll get you out of here. We’ve got a ship, medical supplies. Talented doctors. We can get you back to the States.” He looked at the Moroccans. A few seemed to be listening. “We can get you all out of here.”
One of the civilians stumbled forward. His face twisted into a snarl like a rabid dog. At first Dom thought the man was going to lunge at him through those bars. “I do not want to live like this.” He held his hands up. They were more bone than flesh and blood. “The pain is too much. Like my body is on fire.”
Another man was grinding his teeth, rocking back and forth and nodding as if to agree. “All I want is to die.”
A Moroccan had other plans. “Let us out. Let us attack the dogs who did this.” His eyes twitched as he spoke, vessels bulging in the flesh left on his forehead. “I would have as many die at my hands as I could before they killed me. It is what they deserve.”
“Let Allah judge their souls,” another said, standing tentatively, his voice hoarse and his accent harsh, “and let me send them to Him.”
Reynolds opened his mouth to speak. Then one of his hands shot to his stomach, and he doubled over. The man spoke through gritted teeth. “You cannot imagine what it feels like to have these bones piercing your insides. Every movement hurts. Like needles in my lungs and stomach.” His eyes flitted across the Moroccan’s face. “He is right, though. These bastards deserve to die. And I would be happy to make that happen.”
Dom hesitated. “I don’t know...”
Reynolds’s claws clicked together, grinding as his fingers curled into fists. “Please. It would be a mercy to die in a hail of bullets. And an even greater mercy to die after having taken them down with us.”
Dom considered the request for a moment. Maybe it was cowardly to let them sacrifice themselves rather than shooting them himself. But they wanted this. Dom couldn’t say he blamed them. If someone had done this to him...to Meredith. Dear God, to Kara or Sadie. He clenched his jaw, his fingers tightening around his rifle just thinking about it.
“Fine,” Dom said. “But you have to understand, we came here for a purpose. We need to stop the shipments they’re trying to send out of here.”
Reynolds looked at him through narrowed eyes. Dom thought Reynolds was angry, but as the man started to double over again, he realized it was the pain coursing through his deformed body. Once Reynolds recovered, he managed a nod.
“Understood,” Reynolds said, though he sounded considerably weaker than before. “What are these shipments?”
“We suspect it’s a new version of the Oni Agent—the biological weapon that caused this mess in the first place. They’ve altered it. Made it airborne.”
“Damn,” one of the Americans said, his hand on a bar to steady himself. “That...that’s not good.”
“No, it’s not,” Dom agreed.
“You think they’re...ugh.” Reynolds paused, winced, and then continued. “You think they’re loading the new Agent on s
hips?”
“Why do you ask?”
“No production facilities here.”
Dom’s surprise must’ve shown on his face.
“Look,” Reynolds said, “before we were caught, we scouted this whole place. The only labs are in here, across from our little prison. All they’ve been doing is processing Skulls in and out of there.”
Dom considered the implications. If they weren’t producing the Agent here, then what was on those ships?
***
The lone Skull stood in the doorway of the warehouse, moonlight bathing the bleached bone covering its limbs. It looked at Meredith with a calculating expression, and its mouth opened, revealing serrated teeth.
There was intelligence in those eyes. She had expected it to howl or shriek, to call all the Skulls in Tangier to join its hunt. Instead, it spoke.
In fact, it was yelling at them in Russian. And as it stepped into a pool of light, she saw the Skull held a rifle that it promptly brought to its shoulder and aimed at Meredith.
Meredith fired first. Bullets crashed into the Skull, punching into bone and flesh. Blood splattered out of exit wounds. The Skull staggered. It appeared surprised. An expression Meredith was wholly unused to seeing on these monsters. She stalked toward it, keeping her weapon aimed at it as the blood pooled around it.
Andris covered her. “It said ‘stop.’ It actually spoke. Meredith, what is happening?”
“Maybe it was a human in armor. Like the CDF.” Alizia and her militia had fashioned makeshift armor out of Skull parts. But as she drew near the figure lying prone on the floor, she could see that the bony plates were contoured exactly to the Skull’s body. And the face...it was unlike any Skull she had ever seen.
The creature’s face was completely human.
Except for the fangs, of course.
Then Meredith looked closer. She spotted the radio wire sticking from its ear. The pants it wore were standard-issue Russian infantryman fatigues. It had a holstered pistol that looked freshly oiled. It wore no boots. Instead, its feet were covered in bony claws. But the flesh beneath the monster’s plates wasn’t the sickly pale gray of Skulls.
The Tide_Dead Ashore Page 26
