Occupation: A Post-Apocalyptic Alien Invasion Thriller (Rise Book 1)

by Nathan Hystad

  He left the question to hang dry in his mouth as he joined her at the front of the trailer, far from the door. Back here, the skids were marked for Denver, and Alec let himself dream that they would indeed make it to McCook unscathed.

  Chapter 35

  Dex

  The commotion of the Overseer vessel departing had ended by the time Dex reached the security check gate. A handful of semi-trucks passed the other direction, and he nodded at one of the drivers before the guard stepped up to his window, hand on his belt. God, Dex hated these pretend police officers. They didn’t know their butts from their faces, and every single one of them was a cocky jerk. He knew the type; hell, he’d almost been one before the incursion.

  They were always bullies; guys who thought they could get friends by being tough, beating up the nerds, and intimidating anyone else. Now they had all gathered and formed a new club, which meant they worked for the Overseers, carried guns, and wore terrible blue uniforms.

  “A Hunter… what are you doing here, Mr. Hunter? Run out of toilet paper?” the man asked with a laugh that implied he’d told the world’s funniest joke.

  “Sure, kid. Whatever gets me through this gate sooner.” Dex knew he didn’t really answer to the punks, but he had to play by the rules.

  “I don’t like your attitude…”

  Dex cut him off. “Listen, kid. I’ve been up for two days, I killed three Roamers and still have their blood on my jacket, and I really need to use the bathroom. So if you wouldn’t mind letting me in while the blood’s still fresh, that would be fantastic.”

  The guard glanced at Dex’s black leather jacket, as if searching for signs of splatter. “Sure thing, sir.” The bar went up, and Dex drove through, wishing the guy had given him a little resistance. Just once he wanted to punch one of those guards.

  The warehouse was immense, and he could see at least ten trucks loading up goods. Trent James wasn’t kidding when he said supply chain and logistics was still a huge part of the world. He’d known about this kind of place but hadn’t given it a lot of thought before. Now his mind was reeling as he drove up to the parking lot. He’d contacted Cleveland through his tablet, and his boss told him to meet with a woman named Krista. She’d be able to help him with the footage.

  “You better be barking up the right tree, fella,” he told himself as he parked, rolling up his window and locking his doors. He didn’t trust these guards to leave his stuff alone.

  Dawn was close, and he saw the first hints of another day. Birds were already tweeting in the trees out front, and Dex trudged along, hoping Krista had a fresh cup of brew going. He needed the kick.

  The entrance to the building had two guards who scanned his ID without comment, motioning him inside, where he was forced to give up his Glock as he walked through a detector. Surprisingly, they handed it back to him as he entered the foyer and looked up at the thirty-foot ceilings. This was the kind of place the high-up humans might work. Trent James had been a supply-chain wizard, and even he had to answer to other people. The man threw it all away because his conscience had overpowered him, and Dex hated that the seed of doubt was now planted in his own head.

  A couple of weeks ago, he would have sauntered in here with all the arrogance in the world. Now he didn’t know his place in this world and wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  There was a desk where a doughy man sat staring at a tablet.

  “I’m here to see Krista. Surveillance,” he said.

  The man nodded, his jowls shaking with the movement. There was no way this guy was on a strict diet of gruel like the average worker. “I’ve notified her you’re here. Mr.…?”

  “It’s Dex. Just Dex.”

  The man didn’t appear to care, and he stayed silent.

  Dex paced the floor, finding a water dispenser where he filled a little disposable cup and drank three of them before crumpling it and tossing into a trash can. Being around so many people was always a strange feeling. There would be a few of the aliens around, there always were, but now that he thought about it, the fact that humans were doing all the Overseers’ dirty work without being held at gunpoint constantly blew his mind.

  “Dex?” a voice asked, and he turned to see a stunning brunette in a jumpsuit. She was dressed like the rest of the workers, and he found it off-putting. He struggled to find his voice. It wasn’t often he’d been lost for words.

  “That’s me. Sorry. Not used to having real conversations,” he said, glad to have finally replied. “Krista, I gather?” I gather? Who was he pretending to be? He suddenly felt self-conscious. His hair was out of control, his jacket probably did have blood on it, and he hadn’t brushed his teeth in a few days.

  “Right this way. Your Hunter Guild Captain contacted me and said you needed to view some footage of our facility for an urgent Roamer alert?” she asked with enough tact to keep her voice to a minimum as they passed a couple of other people.

  She led him along a corridor and into a compact room with ten screens. There was an older man half asleep at the desk. “Tony, you can take a break. Thank you,” she said with a smile, and the man vacated the room without so much as a glance at Dex.

  “What are you looking for exactly?” she asked. He thought about the Seeker data, and how hard it was to access the right details. He needed to pinpoint it. If the Roamers were here, they’d have to be on camera.

  “Can you tell me how many entry points there are to this building?” he asked, avoiding looking directly at her.

  “There’s the main doors, and that’s the sole entryway, with the exception of the bay doors,” she said.

  “There are no guards at the bay doors?” he asked.

  “There are, but not in the same way as you encountered when you arrived. They’re mobile, watching everything.” Her answer came quickly.

  “What if there was a distraction, like… I don’t know… one of the alien ships rising into the air?”

  She didn’t reply. He was onto something, he knew it. If they arrived at the warehouse, that would have been the perfect disturbance.

  “I guess the guards’ attention might have been on other events at that time. What would you like to see?” she asked.

  “Can you show me all the feeds you have of the bay doors during the few minutes the Overseer vessel took off?” Dex was sure he was going to catch them sneaking in. He could feel it. It was like the best hunts, where he knew he would catch the Roamer before he had any real proof.

  “It’ll just take a moment,” she said, typing away at the desktop.

  “Krista?” he asked.

  “Yes, Dex?” Her big eyes stopped to look at him.

  “Is there any chance I can find a coffee somewhere?” He stood up straighter, and she laughed before tapping an icon and asking for two cups to be brought to the room.

  He settled in, and a few minutes later, the steaming coffee was delivered, even with cream. He blinked at the sight of the white liquid. “We seriously still have cream? Maybe the world hasn’t totally gone to hell,” he said, regretting his words immediately.

  She glanced at him. “I wouldn’t go that far,” she said through tight lips. “Here’s the footage. I’ll play each door at a time.”

  Dex watched as all nine monitors played a section of the feed, so together, they made one big screen. They watched each bay for a ten-minute span, and he saw nothing out of the ordinary. He had been so sure. They searched through footage of the last twelve hours, and drank a few cups of coffee each,.

  He checked the time and found he’d already been there for six hours when an idea crossed his mind. What if they hadn’t been trying to get in? What if they only wanted a way out?

  “Play the trucks loading up around that time. Twenty-minute time frame,” he said.

  She found four active bays, and they watched the recorded feeds at triple speed. He saw something out of the ordinary. “Can you play that again? In slow motion?” He leaned forward, and watched a female worker staring toward the truck they’d fin
ished loading. The camera angle was from above, but he could make out a surprised O shape of her mouth and a widening of her eyes.

  “What number is that?” he asked.

  She checked. “That’s bay twelve. Did you see anything?”

  He didn’t want to get the other people involved. It would only delay him. “No. Nothing.” He pretended to be disappointed.

  “Do you mind if I talk to the shift supervisor for a few minutes?” he asked, trying to remain calm.

  Krista blinked a few times and nodded. “No problem. Sorry we couldn’t be more help.”

  A few minutes later, he was shaking hands with a rail-thin man with a full head of gray hair. Dex didn’t catch his name and decided it wasn’t worth asking him to repeat it.

  He scanned, looking for the slight girl from the video, but didn’t see her. It wasn’t a big deal. He thought there was a good chance they’d been on that truck. Now he needed to know where it was heading.

  “Quite the facility you have here,” Dex said, pretending to admire the thousands of pallet rack spaces. Forklifts and pallet jacks were everywhere, beeping and dragging supplies around. More trucks were being filled through the bay doors, and Dex’s gaze lingered to number twelve. “How many points do you touch from here?”

  The man knew his stuff. “Sixty end destinations, with about three hundred in between.”

  “Interesting. What does a trip look like? Let’s say bay twelve here. You have a truck leave this morning?” he asked casually.

  “Sure. Every three days, we send something out that direction. That route ends in Denver.”

  Denver. “Does it make any stops?”

  “Just Omaha. Not much else between here and there.”

  The hair on the back of Dex’s neck stood up.

  Omaha. University of Nebraska. Science Hall. Locker Three One Alpha. 01-09-27 combination

  Could it be a coincidence? Were they going after the locker at the University?

  “How long does it take to get from here to Omaha?” he asked, knowing his own speed estimations. These trucks might be a little slower, depending on the road conditions.

  “’Bout ten hours, give or take,” he said.

  That meant they would hit Omaha in around two hours. Dex had to move.

  “Thanks.” He pulled out his tablet, pretending there was an urgent message on it. “I appreciate the tour. Have a good day.” Dex left the man standing there with a stunned look on his face and headed for the exit. He hopped down one of the bay doors, and heard some commotion as a trailer door from the next bay over was being opened. He glanced inside to see what the fuss was about and saw the dead body. It was a guard, splayed out in a pool of dried blood.

  Before anyone could see him standing there, he kept moving. There was no way he was going to stick around when the supervisor came. A Hunter beside a dead guard wouldn’t be a great sight, especially when he had somewhere to be. His legs hurried as he crossed the lot, locating his car.

  He drove slowly as if he was out for a Sunday afternoon cruise, and the guard at the front gate let him through with no talking this time. As soon as he passed the gate, the alarms began to blare out across the yard from the warehouse and Dex instinctively pushed the gas pedal racing toward Omaha. He only hoped he wasn’t too late.

  Chapter 36

  Sw-18

  For want of a more accurate term, SW-18 woke up.

  Its processor and data core, the Tracker artificial intelligence approximate equivalent of a consciousness and all of the memories accrued by it, had been fitted to a new chassis, which was not yet fully operational.

  SW-18, if it could have felt anything, felt annoyed. It was irritated with the performance of the Seeker drones, marking out a number of possible programming improvements that it could field test when out of sight of the prying eyes of the Overseers. It was annoyed at the tenacity and resilience of the humans, the Vermin, the infestation that was keeping it from achieving the mission objective; the eradication of all non-controlled humans.

  It was infuriated at itself, at its personal performance, and annoyed that it had been-again for want of a better, more accurate term-killed.

  Being reinstalled into a new chassis was a tactical benefit, that much was undeniable after even a cursory check of the unit’s capabilities when equipped with a full load-out, but as the software began to integrate and link to the wireless system of the Overseers, it saw that a period of almost ten days had elapsed. Ten days to recover the old chassis or at least reactivate its processor and data core and plug it in to a new chassis at one of the coastal manufacturing plants.

  That was when the suspicion began in SW-18’s processor.

  How had the process taken so long? What had they done with the data core when its processor wasn’t connected to a power source? Had the Overseers or anyone else been accessing its memories while it was unconscious?

  SW-18 reviewed the most recent data files of the engagement where it had been damaged, checking that the careful falsifications had not been challenged and picked apart as it had corrupted the report in such a rush. The files seemed intact, which surely was a good sign that the personal vendetta it planned remained, as yet, undiscovered.

  Checking for orders, locked inside its own limited consciousness before the chassis came online fully and allowed articulation, SW-18 rolled along the factory conveyor belt and saw that it was allocated to standby status pending any detections of Vermin by the patrolling Seeker drones. All of the Trackers had access to this database, to the live report system, and SW-18 foresaw no issue with creating a deployment order for itself and two other Tracker drones; both as dumb as rocks as far as it was concerned, but that was irrelevant, as they were only there to do as they were instructed.

  As the conveyor belt reached a section where different units were filtered off in different directions, SW-18 felt the movement controls unlock on the chassis and prepared to shift under its own power. An order flashed into the processor, instructing a set sequence of deployment-readiness physical tests to be completed; effectively an obstacle course designed to fully test the functionality of the chassis. SW-18 considered the prospect of failing the tests, annoyed only that any such failure would mean a faulty chassis and further delays as it was re-installed into a new one and had to falsify more deployment orders with the automated system.

  The agility and targeting sections were dispatched with ruthless efficiency as only a machine could achieve, and the sensory tests were all fully successful. The order to proceed to deployment came shortly afterwards, and as SW-18 sat locked into the specific docking station, it scanned the area to assess the worthiness of the two Tracker drones either side of it. Hacking their command and control override systems wirelessly, something that the new chassis could do effortlessly in comparison to the older rig it had been shackled to, SW-18 felt the dull consciousness of both drones at the back of… of its mind? Was that the correct terminology?

  Satisfied, SW-18 endured the fast, bumpy hovercraft ride out to the dry expanse of northern New Mexico, where it planned to bring the two Vermin to heel personally.

  Chapter 37

  Cole

  Their detour took them in a sweeping loop to the east of the place she had spent a day trying to understand how it should sound.

  “Albuhkwer…? No. Albyukwurk…? Alberkerkee?”

  “I don’t know,” Cole replied, a little annoyed that she wouldn’t let it go.

  They moved at night, not wanting to change a system that had kept them out of trouble for several weeks. Each morning, they stopped at an abandoned building to set up camp, leaving all the edible parts of whatever they had caught the day before so that their companion, the coyote, wouldn’t go without.

  On the second day of their detour, as dawn threatened to break and they were looking for somewhere to rest, their tiredness caused a near fatal error.

  “You see that?” Lina asked, having stopped and raised a hand to point straight ahead. Cole peered into the glo
om and squinted.

  “Smoke,” she said, “I can see smoke.”

  “Probably an old brush fire,” he said dismissively. “Burned out the day before or something.”

  “So why didn’t we see it yesterday?” she asked. “Or smell it?” Cole hmmm’d in response, giving her nothing by way of an answer.

  “Come on,” she said, taking a step in the direction of the distant fire before Cole held an arm out to stop her.

  “No,” he said, “we go further around.” She turned to look at him questioningly. “It’s a choke point, you see? Anyone who goes towards that fire is trapped between those lines of buildings.” He pointed towards the smoke, moving his hand up and down either side to show her what he meant. It looked like the funnel traps she had played with as child, only instead of catching fish so small they invariably had to return them to the water, this one was designed to catch something altogether different.

  People.

  “Oh,” she said as it appeared to dawn on her, “You mean, people set that trap for us?”

  “I think so. Hopefully, not for us,” he replied. “But if they’re the kind of people who hunt other people, then we need to go the other way.”

  Lina began to protest, saying that after everything they’d been through, they couldn’t delay their journey towards the distant mountains covered in snow at the top.

  He’d been to a few of the places that were supposedly safe havens for all Freeborn and all of them, without fail, had been destroyed long before he arrived. He feared going backwards after killing the Tracker because he knew with absolute certainty that the chances of being caught and killed increased. Going ahead, he feared one of the humans who hunted their own kind was luring them towards the fire and the promise of help.