by Jon S. Lewis
Jonas closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked at Colt. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “Let me go there and verify the data. If their readings match the report, then I’ll make the call myself.”
“And what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Sit around and wait?” Oz said. “What if the Thule open the gateway before you get there?”
“For all we know, the data could be off,” Jonas said, his chin up and shoulders back as he stood in front of Oz. “Someone . . . well, something could have infiltrated the Tesla Society and planted false data.”
“Why would they do that?” Oz said.
“To divert us from the real gateway,” Danielle said.
“Wait, you’re on his side?”
“It makes sense,” Danielle said. “If we call it in and we’re wrong, they’ll never believe us again.”
“They don’t believe you now.” Oz turned to Colt. “It’s your call, but if you ask me, we should call it in.”
“Please,” Jonas said. “Give me twenty-four hours. That’s all I’m asking.”
: :
CHAPTER 31 : :
What about our patrol, Squad Leader Colt McAlister?” Glyph said. “We’re supposed to be in Strasburg at precisely 1930, and if I get court-martialed for defying orders, my parents will send me to the work camps on the third moon of—”
“Relax,” Colt said. “We’ll stop in Strasburg, and if we find anything, Bravo Team can stay behind while we head to Sanctuary.”
“I could go by myself,” Jonas said.
“No way,” Oz said. “Too dangerous.”
“He’s hiding something,” Pierce said. “Why else would he want to sneak away?”
“Leave him alone,” Danielle said.
“Look at the way he’s sweating,” Pierce said. “It’s obvious. He’s totally hiding something.”
“Did you ever think he might be sweating because we’re staring at him?”
“It’s more than that, isn’t it, Hickman?” Pierce glared at Jonas, who turned away without saying a word. “That’s what I thought.”
As much as he hated to admit it, Colt had a feeling that Pierce was right. Jonas was hiding something. But if Jonas and Danielle had pinpointed the coordinates for the Thule gateway, then there was a chance they could shut it down before the Thule launched their full-scale invasion.
“I’m not trying to sneak away,” Jonas said, his shoulders slumped as he stared at the ground. “It’s just that . . .”
“What?” Colt asked.
“Nothing,” Jonas said, though he was clearly frustrated. “Can we at least take a van instead of the Humvees? I don’t want the people of Sanctuary to think they’re under attack.”
They decided to stick to the back roads where they could avoid the tangled mess of freeways in and around Washington as tens of thousands fled the nation’s capital.
Even the small towns were deserted. Cars had been abandoned along the side of the road, and the lights were off in all the homes. They passed a pharmacy where a sign had been posted letting everyone know that the entire inventory had been donated to the Red Cross, and someone had spray-painted a skull and crossbones and the words Kill Them All across a school bus. The skull looked like an alien.
“Ignore it, Glyph,” Colt said. “They’re just scared, that’s all.”
They arrived at Strasburg twenty minutes early. Save for a few stubborn souls, the town was deserted like everywhere else. Colt offered to sweep through the surrounding area to make sure there weren’t any Thule, but the sheriff said that he had it covered, so they continued on to Sanctuary.
The drive took another four hours, leaving Colt ample time to come up with a good excuse as to why he had decided to stray from his orders. The only problem was that he couldn’t think of anything that sounded remotely believable.
“What if Glyph is right?” he said to Danielle. “What if they court-martial us?”
“For saving the world? I don’t think so,” she said. “Besides, you’re the new Phantom Flyer, remember? I doubt they’re going to court-martial the nation’s first official superhero.”
A couple of hours later they spotted a convenience store that was still open to the public, and even though they didn’t need to fill up with gas, Colt decided to pull over. It had been weeks since any of them had tasted soda, potato chips, or candy bars, and they loaded up to make up for lost time.
“This is truly fascinating,” Glyph said as he sniffed an open bottle of Orange Crush.
“Taste it,” Danielle said.
Glyph licked the rim and smacked his lips. “It’s quite sweet.”
“You have to chug it to get the whole effect,” Grey said.
“Yeah, like this,” Oz added before downing an entire bottle of Dr Pepper. When he was done, he smiled and released an outrageously loud belch as everyone laughed.
“I don’t understand,” Glyph said.
“Just drink it already,” Pierce said.
Glyph brought the bottle to his lips and tilted it back, downing the contents in three gulps. He blinked several times and then his eyes shot wide and he grabbed at his throat.
“What’s wrong with him?” Ethan said. “Is he dying or something?”
“Someone give him the Heimlich,” Grey said.
“Don’t look at me,” Pierce said and casually popped a Funyun into his mouth and licked his fingertips.
“Do something,” Danielle said as she grabbed Colt’s arm.
He was about to ask her what she wanted him to do when Glyph released the loudest and longest burp he had ever heard. When he was done, Glyph licked his lips and looked inside his empty bottle. “Do you think I could have another?”
It was closing in on ten o’clock by the time everyone loaded back into the van, and almost midnight when Colt saw the sign that welcomed them to Sanctuary, West Virginia, population 4,327.
“Pull over here,” Jonas said as they approached a billboard for the Blue Moon Diner, home of Ethel’s World-Famous Apple Cobbler.
“Where?” Colt asked.
“Anywhere. Just cut the lights so nobody sees us.”
Gravel crunched beneath the tires as Colt eased onto the shoulder and parked the van under the billboard. “Is this hidden enough, or should we cut down some branches and cover it up?”
“It won’t matter,” Jonas said as he slid the door open. “They already know we’re here.”
“How?” Pierce said. “Do they have a satellite pointed at us or something?”
“They just know.” Jonas climbed over a wooden fence and started walking across an empty field toward a line of trees.
“Where are you going?” Danielle asked, but he didn’t answer.
“I always wanted to live in the country. It’s so peaceful.” Stacy smiled as she looked up at the stars shining brightly in the sky overhead. It was the first clear night in weeks, and Colt watched as a cool breeze whipped through her ponytail.
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m following Hickman,” Pierce said as he shouldered his assault rifle and climbed the fence.
As they crossed the field, Colt picked up the scent of fear that Pierce kept masked under layers of arrogance and anger. It made him unstable. Unpredictable. Dangerous.
“Did you see that?” Ethan asked.
“See what?” Oz said.
“Up ahead in the tree.” Ethan stopped and lifted his assault rifle to his shoulder.
“Easy,” Oz said. “It’s probably Hickman.”
“There it is again, up in the branches!”
“Whatever you do, don’t—”
A loud bang echoed through the darkness as Ethan fired his weapon.
“What are you doing?” Oz ripped the rifle out of Ethan’s hand.
“Shooting an alien.”
“If they didn’t know we were here before, they do now,” Colt said.
They pressed forward, following Jonas into the trees as a gust of wind stirred up remnants of d
ead leaves left over from autumn. Colt stood with feet firmly planted, his eyes scanning the darkness as the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.
: :
CHAPTER 32 : :
They found Jonas in an open pasture with his eyes locked on the particle analyzer that looked a lot like a smartphone. Wind swirled, blowing a light dusting of snow around them.
“How long is this going to take?” Colt asked as he looked at the clock in his heads-up display. It was fast approaching one in the morning.
“Let me talk to him, okay?” Danielle said. She walked across the frozen grass with a slow, steady pace as though she were approaching someone with a hundred sticks of dynamite taped to his chest.
“I wondered if it was going to work in the cold,” Colt heard her say.
“It should work up to negative thirty-five centigrade,” Jonas said, though he didn’t bother to turn around and look at her.
“Wow. That’s amazing.”
“You don’t have to pretend you’re my friend,” he said. “Trust me, I’m used to it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know everyone thinks I’m a freak—that I have something to hide.”
“But I am your friend,” Danielle said. “We all are.” She hesitated, as though weighing her words before she spoke them. “Look, I’m not going to say that you haven’t been acting a little strange since you told us about Sanctuary—and yeah, I wish you would have told me about the new data. But that doesn’t mean I think you’re a freak. You’re just under a lot of stress.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“You could tell me,” she said.
Jonas turned and stared at her.
“I mean, only if you think it would help,” she said. “It’s no big deal.”
“There’s a reason Sanctuary has been a secret for so long,” Jonas said. “And trust me, if you guys knew the truth, you wouldn’t want to be my friends.”
“Whatever it is, I’m sure you didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I wish that were true.”
“Everything okay?” Colt asked as Oz loomed behind them with the .50-caliber machine gun resting across his shoulder.
Danielle nodded. “Yeah, we’re fine.”
“How much longer?”
She sighed and turned back to Jonas. “Well?”
“I’m done.”
“And?”
“They were right. This is where the gateway is going to open. Right here on my grandpa’s farm.”
“That’s great,” Danielle said as Jonas looked at her with disbelief. “I mean, not that it’s your grandpa’s property—but that we found the gateway.”
Jonas took a deep breath. “And now the whole world is going to know about Sanctuary, and it’s all my fault.”
She placed her hand on his shoulder. “Jonas, if we can find a way to stop it from opening up, you’re going to get a Nobel Peace Prize for not only saving this town but the whole world.”
He sighed. “I hope you’re right.”
There was a blur of motion as something dropped from a tree and landed on Ethan’s back. Another silhouette fell on Grey, pulling him to the ground, and yet another jumped on Stacy, who screamed as she fell.
Oz was the first to react, dropping his gun as he ran to help her. Two more figures leapt, each of them landing nimbly on its feet and grabbing one of Oz’s forearms. “Get off me!” he shouted, pulling them together so they smashed into one another.
“Thule!” Pierce yelled as more figures rushed out from the shadows. He opened fire, bursts of orange flaring from the muzzle of his assault rifle as bullets tore into tree trunks, dirt, and the figures that were attacking them.
“Watch it!” Oz yelled as a bullet ricocheted off his armor, but Pierce didn’t listen. He screamed as he continued to pull the trigger as dozens of six-armed aliens surrounded Phantom Squad.
“No,” Jonas said, shaking his head. “This can’t be happening.”
“Get your helmet on,” Danielle said as she pulled the handgun from her hip holster and took aim at the nearest Thule.
“Wait!” Jonas grabbed her wrists and the gun discharged, tearing into the frozen ground. “You don’t understand,” he said. “They’re just scared.”
“Who?”
Colt felt a dark voice calling from within as adrenaline raged in his body. His breathing was shallow, and his skin started to itch as madness raged around him. He watched as Oz used his machine gun as a club and Glyph simply sidestepped each attack, using each Thule’s momentum to misdirect it and send it to the ground. But something was off. These Thule weren’t like the others he had seen. They were smaller, and he could tell from the reflection of the moonlight that some of their scales were gold and others blue. What was going on?
“Look out!” Danielle shouted.
Time seemed to slow, and Colt watched as the bullet erupted from the barrel of her gun. He could see the revolutions as it spun through air mere inches from his helmet before it caught one of the Thule in the shoulder. He turned and saw the alien as it writhed on the ground, kicking and moaning.
“Where are these things coming from?” Oz shouted.
“Doesn’t matter, as long as we exterminate them,” Pierce said. “You know what they say—the only good alien is a dead alien.”
“I told you never to say that again,” Colt said, watching for Glyph’s reaction from the corner of his eye.
“Whatever.”
Please, tell them to stop shooting.
It was Jonas, and somehow he was using mindspeak. Are you a . . . Colt couldn’t even finish the sentence. Had Jonas been a Thule all this time, or had a shapeshifter killed the real Jonas and replaced him?
They aren’t the enemy, they’re just frightened, Jonas said.
A claw with razor talons raked across his mask, and Colt lashed out with the butt of his rifle, catching the alien on the side of the head. It fell in a motionless heap, green blood issuing from its earhole.
A swarm of Thule brought Glyph to the ground, and angry claws fought to remove his armor. One of the aliens grabbed Ethan’s assault rifle and snapped it in half. Stacy was backed against a tree as three Thule closed in, their mouths agape and forked tongues licking the air.
Pierce stood over one of the Thule, his boot on its neck and the barrel of his gun pointed at its head. “You’re even uglier up close than you are in pictures,” Pierce said as the alien writhed, all six hands lashing against his armor.
“No!” Colt shouted.
