Beyond Armageddon: Book 01 - Disintegration

by Anthony DeCosmo

  The dogs swept in snarling and snapping. Redcoat armor provided some protection, but K9s managed to drag many to the ground, digging and ripping until finding tender alien flesh.

  They reached and gained control over the two anti-aircraft guns. Tolbert and Ames broke off toward the command post as the half-dressed Redcoat General emerged from his quarters. Ames hit the extraterrestrial square in the chest with a plasma blast.

  One of Whiskey's ping-pong grenades tore apart the aliens’ temporary headquarters and Tolbert sprayed fire from his flamethrower, setting alight several soldiers.

  Energy bolts whizzed near Jon's head from the surrounding shadows, cutting short any thoughts of a victory dance.

  Whiskey pulled a ping-pong grenade and cocked his arm. A blast smacked him and he fell to the pavement.

  Danny Washburn grabbed the grenade from the corpse’s hand and lobbed it into the shadows where it exploded far away from anything.

  Jon spotted a Redcoat firing line forming at the edge of the camp just beyond one of the four, parked flying machines. The enemy had regrouped quicker than expected and prepared to fire a volley.

  THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.

  The air shook. A wind gusted across the parking lot. A portable light pole tumbled and smashed. Something big hovered above.

  A hailstorm of bullets ripped in to the forming line of Redcoats, obliterating their armored bodies.

  "You guys need a little help down there?"

  Nina’s voice crackled from the rear seat of the Apache to Jon’s radio.

  "Damn straight, Ghost Rider. Tear em’ up!"

  Trevor sat in the forward seat controlling the gunship's armaments. Gunner and pilot both wore night vision goggles.

  Nina swerved the ship around searching for targets.

  "Hold."

  She responded to Trevor’s order and held the craft steady.

  The rapid-fire cannon whirled and bullets flew. Two enemy soldiers and the parked car they hid behind shredded to pieces.

  "Starboard! Starboard!"

  Trevor turned the gun sights to his right at Nina’s warning. A trio of Redcoats stood inside the windows of the electronics outlet, apparently thinking the darkness provided cover.

  The ‘copter’s gun fired again. Glass smashed, parts of the store’s ceiling fell, and the aliens broke apart. Trevor kept firing, strafing the prone Redcoats in the makeshift hospital ward: no prisoners would be taken today.

  Brewer radioed, "There’s a bunch of them in the other building!"

  Nina pulled the helicopter about. The tail rotor knocked over another portable light but she handled the beast with skill, hovering near ground level. Trevor swept the interior until nothing moved.

  "Boss! Check it out!" Tolbert yelled and pointed to the sky over the valley.

  Jon saw what Tolbert saw: a speck of light flying toward the overrun camp: the only one of the Redcoats' planes off the ground that night.

  He frantically waved toward the guardrail. Lori, seeing the signal, escorted Omar to the heart of the camp. The professor had spent a full day smoking cigarettes and observing the big guns from Shepherd’s watch point. While the machines themselves were based on complicated technology, Omar quickly demonstrated that operating the guns posed no challenge.

  With an unlit smoke in his mouth, Omar climbed into the gunner’s position on one of the mobile anti-air weapons. He scanned the strange symbols above buttons of various geometric shapes for three seconds, and then went to work.

  The barrel elevated, swerved side to side, then down, then up again. The control panel on the anti-aircraft weapon beeped and bleeped.

  "Omar…" Jon lead.

  The professor muttered, "What are they going to be doing, Mr. Brewer? No weapons are onboard those ships of their's. Nonetheless, I need one…moment…too…"

  With an electronic buzz, a thin line of energy flew from the big gun like an arrow made of light. It hit the flying ship, neatly cutting away its mid section as if magically turning the metal there to dust. The remaining pieces of the craft fell to Earth and exploded.

  After sweeping the camp one more time, Trevor and Nina tackled the Redcoat checkpoints one after another where they found alert but confused soldiers. It seemed their discipline worked against them. Had they abandoned their posts and rushed to the camp, the aliens would have thwarted Jon's small strike team and retained control of their artillery.

  Instead, the Apache preyed on small, clustered groups of sentries at scattered guard posts and dispatched them at the cost of fifty percent of the helicopter’s thirty-millimeter cannon ammunition and two Hellfire missiles.

  While the Apache sought out checkpoints, Omar taught a crash course in alien artillery. Forty-five minutes later the big guns fired again.

  Trevor and Nina took position near downtown and served as spotters.

  The first shots fell randomly around the city; the aim so poor that the Redcoats—huddled in their defensive positions—did not realize the artillery aimed for them.

  Until Omar and his gunners found their mark.

  The 1st Regiment, tightly packed inside the big "Bicentennial Building," suffered the worst. Artillery blasts shook the foundation and vaporized support pillars. The inexperienced Commander ordered the evacuation too late. The entire complex crumbled to pieces, killing nearly all the troops housed inside. Those not killed by the demolition, faced a horde of opportunistic ghouls.

  Shortly thereafter, Omar aimed for the 3rd and 4th Regiments along North Main Street.

  The human gunners did not handle the artillery pieces as expertly as the Redcoats. The difference in their success lay in the targets. The Redcoats had tried to stamp out a handful of guerrilla fighters by destroying entire blocks. Their chance of hitting those individuals had been relatively small compared to the size of the area targeted.

  In contrast, the Redcoats packed themselves tightly into their points. Every blue bolt that hit one those buildings caught at least some of the enemy soldiers in its blast radius.

  Discipline and doctrine were not the only Redcoat traits turned against them that night. The Redcoat artillery had been so intuitively designed that the humans not only learned fast how to fire effectively, but also had no trouble maintaining the barrage: the big energy guns ran on H2o and a special powdery compound added to the artillery much like mixing Kool-Aid into a pitcher of water.

  ---

  Dawn brought a dramatically changed battlefield.

  Trevor—in the Apache's gunner's seat—watched the landscape scroll below as they flew toward downtown after having refueled at the lake.

  Nina—steering the chopper on a steep bank over center city—craned her neck to look down at the broken Bicentennial Building. Omar's artillery barrage had scooped out the center and the outer walls collapsed in. Red-clothed cadavers lay throughout the wreckage.

  She said, "Looks even worse now that the sun's up. Most of them died at their posts."

  "Not all of them; look south."

  Nina did and saw two alien soldiers running from a dozen floating jellyfish creatures.

  "Poor bastards," she joked.

  "Hey, no, really, we should thank them. You know how many hostiles they took out in town? Hundreds; maybe thousands, I'll bet."

  They circled for another pass and then flew northeast toward the captured base camp.

  Nina said, "I think I saw something moving over by the boulevard. I want to—oh shit!"

  Trevor saw them, too: eight Redcoat soldiers standing in the parking lot of a Bowling Alley. They clearly held the helicopter in their sights.

  Nina turned hard and accelerated. Trevor tried to lock-on with the cannon but fired wildly as the chopper bucked.

  A volley fired toward the helicopter, but Nina's evasive flying avoided the meat of the shot. A glancing blow hit near the rear-rotor. Alarm bells and warning lights blared in the cockpit; Nina's feet furiously worked the suddenly limp pedals.

  "I got it, I got it," Nina's assurance sounded h
ollow.

  The chopper spun left, then right, all while descending dangerously fast first over residential roofs, then nearly into the side of a Wendy's restaurant.

  "We're going down! Hold on!"

  With a last second jerk on the stick, Nina turned a crash into a hard landing. They settled to a stop a few yards from the remains of the Redcoats' Kidder Street checkpoint.

  The two exited the cockpit, drew side arms, and inspected the damage.

  "She’ll fly again," Nina predicted as she ran her hand over the skin of the craft. "We just need to find some spare parts."

  Trevor changed the subject: "Good job up there."

  Nina smiled. "Yeah. You, too."

  They stared at one another for three long seconds, then nervously looked away.

  Trevor and Nina walked Kidder Street to the parking lot that had once been the Redcoats’ camp. Four of the alien airships, four big pieces of artillery, two tanker vehicles of a kind, and two mobile anti-aircraft guns sat in that parking lot.

  Omar shuffled between the guns and planes like an excited child on Christmas morning.

  Trevor and Nina approached Jon and Lori.

  Nina spoke first: "We kinda trashed the Apache and there's a squad of Redcoats still roaming the boulevard."

  Jon Brewer said, "Don’t worry about them. If something doesn't eat them by this afternoon, they'll be on the run out of the valley."

  Trevor gave Jon a solid handshake.

  "Well done…General. What’s our status?"

  "Stonewall and Bear have headed for the estate; they need to rest and refit before they can do anything more. Some other volunteers drove in a while ago and are helping search for enemy stragglers. Personally, I'm exhausted and it's damned cold out here. But you want to know something? I feel like I could do this all day."

  "Adrenaline," Lori said. "Winning something like this, the way the odds were stacked against us, it's like a drug, I suppose."

  A message came over the radio from Tolbert.

  "Yo, boss," he meant Brewer. "We found a couple of them holdin’ up in a corner bar. Could use some extra guns."

  Jon told Trevor: "Tolbert’s got a team searching over there," and he pointed to a residential neighborhood below the ridge and to the north before transmitting to Tolbert: "We can’t have them drinking our booze, now can we?"

  Jon slung his rifle, took a step in that direction, then turned to Nina. "Hey, you wanna help me out on this or is infantry work too good for the fly girl?"

  She shrugged and followed him, rifle in hand.

  Trevor stood with Lori Brewer and watched Nina and Jon walk across the parking lot, climb over the guardrail, and disappear down the grassy slope.

  "Hey," Lori put an arm on his shoulder. "How is it you knew this would work? How is it that we’re alive when we were outnumbered and outgunned?"

  "How did you know when you came up that ridge that you would wipe out this base and survive to tell the tale?"

  Lori answered, "I didn't know. Honestly, I was sure we were going to die."

  "Yet you did it anyway?"

  "Sure," she said and tried to smile. "It didn't seem like I had any other choice other than letting my husband get killed by himself."

  "Well there you go. It isn't that I knew it would work, it's that we didn't have any other choice."

  Tolbert's voice—from the radio—interrupted their conversation: "They're taking pot shots at us. Where’s our support?"

  Jon’s voice: "We’re coming. Over your right shoulder, cutting through the yard."

  Tolbert: "’Bout time."

  Trevor told Lori, "Your husband…he did a hell of a job."

  "Don’t tell him that; he’ll be impossible to live with."

  BANG.

  An explosion blasted from the neighborhood to the north. Trevor flinched, then saw a puff of smoke drifting from the far side of a house.

  His heart stopped as a message broadcast over the radio: "Nina is down! Nina is down!"

  Trevor instantly stepped toward the slope but caught himself. In the distance, the smoke rose and dissipated.

  Lori growled, "What are you waiting for? Get your ass down there, Trevor. Run…"

  Trevor, confusion and fear all over his face, glanced at Lori then moved toward the grassy slope. His walk grew into a jog.

  "Run! Go! Now!"

  His jog became a trot became a sprint. Trevor bound down the hill nearly falling as he pushed through dead stalks of grass. He stumbled over the railroad tracks and raced across a small street then hopped a decaying old metal fence into a backyard where he stopped at the base of a rear porch.

  In front of him, a block away, he saw the bar full of barricaded Redcoats. Jon, Tolbert and others fired into that bar neutralizing the threat. He did not see Nina.

  Where is she?

  His eyes searched desperately; his mouth gaped…

  …Nina stood in the shadows of the porch holding an ice pack on a minor bump to her head. A stray Redcoat burst had hit a propane tank on a gas grille. The explosion merely knocked her to the ground. Jon left her behind with an instant-cold pack from his first aid kit.

  Trevor did not see her, but she saw him; she saw him come running around the house searching for her. She saw the look of desperation in his eyes. Nina saw his feelings, forced to the surface by fear. She took a step forward. The boards creaked and grabbed his attention.

  He saw her standing with the pack to her head. She did not need it, though. She tossed it aside at the same time that his look of desperation turned into a massive smile of relief.

  Then he caught himself. The smile vanished. For a moment, it appeared he would walk away; retreat.

  No. No more retreating.

  Instead, he walked in big, deliberate--almost angry--strides to the porch. He climbed the stairs. Nina backed into the corner. Her heart raced; she trembled.

  Trevor grabbed her shoulders and locked onto her eyes.

  "Now you listen to me!" He shouted. "I don’t want to be alone anymore! I don’t want to be afraid anymore!"

  She breathed a sigh and a sob all in one exhale as he continued, "I can’t spend every night thinking about you then every day running away from you!"

  She shook; her eyes watered.

  "Tell me to go away and I’ll go. But you have to tell me that because I’m done hiding from you!" He paused for only a split second then implored, "Say something! Say anything!"

  The words flooded out: "What do you want me to say? I’m afraid, damn it, I’m scared!"

  "We’re all scared!"

  Their words mixed.

  "I’ve never been like this before…I’m confused…and I keep wondering…I don’t want to be just a killer…"

  He pushed, "Tell me something Nina! Tell me to leave but tell me something!"

  "…and I betrayed you…and they made me hate you…but I think I love you!"

  The words slipped out; no conscious thought directed them.

  Everything stopped. All the mixed words. All the confusing emotions. Time halted.

  Nina Forest filled with fear. She had never felt vulnerable before and now she stood there with her heart wide open. He could have shattered her with a word. He could have killed her if he walked away.

  Trevor moved his arms from her shoulders to her back and gently pulled her in close; her face buried in his chest and the warmth of their hug chased away the cold of the day.

  She whispered softly, "I don’t know…I don’t even know what that means."

  "We’re going to find out," he stroked her hair. "We’re going to find out, together."

  24. Farewell

  The Apache buzzed over barren treetops with Nina at the helm. She scanned the horizon seeing the late morning sun, brown grass fields with isolated patches of ice and snow, and thin forests laid overtop a series of rolling hills. She did not see what they searched for.

  Three vehicles following an old dirt road emerged from a cluster of light woods and stopped at the edge of a cl
earing.

  The sound of the Apache somewhere in the sky filtered into the cabin of the lead Humvee. Trevor, riding in the passenger’s seat, worked the ‘send’ button on his radio.

  "Hey, hawk eye, see anything?"

  Nina’s bird banked and gained altitude.

  She answered, "Look, for the third time, I’ve got nothing up here."

  Trevor worked the radio again. "Well what am I paying you for?"

  Her static-laced reply: "You haven’t paid me a nickel."

  "Well, you haven’t earned it yet. Get on the stick and stop fooling’ around up there."

  A series of colorful descriptive phrases—proposals as to how Trevor could best carry his radio—scorched the airwaves.

  Trevor called to a different listener: "Jon, you doing’ better?"

  Brewer stood on the open face of a hill flanked by Tolbert and Cassy Simms. Specks of white snow lay on the ground around them. All three wore camouflage and carried motorcycle helmets. Three hovercraft bikes sat parked behind them.

  The elevated position afforded Jon a fantastic view of the countryside.

  Jon answered over the shared radio frequency, "Ah, that’s a negative, Trev. All I can see is a helicopter flying around sort of aimlessly out there, like it’s lost or something."

  More obscenities came from that pilot. Trevor, meanwhile, sat in the Humvee and let loose a series of frustrated mumbles. He warned the driver, Reverend Johnny, "If that lizard fed us a line I’ll rip its neck out."

  "That may be difficult, my friend. I believe our informer has long since departed this area as per your instructions. I must confess my surprise at your decision to let it live."

  "I was in a particularly good mood," Stone said in regards to the intelligent, bipedal lizard they had found on the outskirts of Shavertown and interrogated with the help of a Redcoat translation device. "Besides, if it’s right, there’s something pretty cool out here."

  Overhead, Nina stopped in the midst of mumbling and radioed, "I think I see something. Look, about a half-mile northwest of your position."

  Following her directions, the vehicles came upon a long, wide trench cutting across a meadow and ending at a bluff of red rock. A mound the size of a yacht rested there covered in upended soil and frosty snow. Nina’s chopper hovered above.