Nomad Supreme

by Craig Martelle

The squad responded instantly, slapping pockets and pouches, wherever they carried their spares.

  “Finish them,” Char corrected. Terry’s shoulders hunched, his body language not signaling defeat, but not as confident as it was seconds prior.

  “How many?”

  “Four, I think.” She turned back to the two Werewolves snarling behind the squad. They nodded.

  Four and a number of humans, a big number.

  “How do we tell them apart? We can’t just kill the humans,” Terry retorted, angry at the situation, not the information or the person who delivered it.

  “You’ll be able to tell them apart. The humans will look sickly, frail. The Forsaken will look young and strong.” Char continued to stare into the tunnel.

  “We save as many of the humans as we can. The Forsaken all need to die. How can we kill them?”

  “Wood stakes through the heart,” Char replied.

  “Really?” He shook it off, before yelling over his shoulder. “Third squad! Sharpened sticks, at least twenty, thick as my thumb, you have two minutes to get them in here. Move!”

  As they stood there peering into the darkness, two minutes seemed like an eternity. Terry was counting in his head. When he reached one hundred and twenty, he yelled again. “Where are my vampire-killing stakes?”

  There was a great deal of shuffling and cursing outside the entrance and Blackie burst in as Hank wedged himself into the opening. Someone handed a bunch of hastily sharpened sticks over the bear and Blackbeard passed them out, three per person with extras going to the colonel and the major.

  “Bring the bear,” Terry said. Hank sniffed at Adams and Xandrie, who sniffed back and bared their teeth. Hank stood on his back legs and roared his disapproval of the shaggy beasts in front of him.

  Char walked back and grabbed the two Werewolves by the scruff of their necks and dragged them away, putting them in the middle. The sergeant, Jim, and Charlie were up front. Four squad members were between the Weres and Hank.

  Terry shook his head, “I think we’ve lost our element of surprise,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “That happened the moment those big bastards started squealing,” Char said, nodding toward the massive doors. These weren’t even the vault door. These were there to keep out most of the bad guys, but anyone with the right type of explosives could have taken the big doors down. It had taken them two hours to get through, and it was the easy one.

  Mark moved forward, ultra-cautiously. Terry wanted him to speed up, but as his first action, Mark needed to learn as he went. That gave Terry and Char time to look around. On the wall of the tunnel, there was a junction box that looked like a light switch.

  Light would make their lives a whole lot easier.

  Char tried it and with clunks and bangs, the lights came to life, sequentially, from where they stood downwards. The roadway into the mountain was wide, with sidewalks on either side. In one lane, it looked like a convoy had parked. The vehicles looked fresh, as if they would drive away at any moment.

  “There’s no one in or around the vehicles,” Char called out as Mark had started to issue orders to search and clear the trucks.

  Terry climbed into the back of the closest vehicle. The five-ton truck was facing downhill, as if someone drove the convoy in and locked the mountain doors behind themselves.

  He threw the flap open, revealing a stack of crates. AT-4s. Shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets. He used his knife to pop the top and look inside one of the olive drab wood crates, pulling out a sealed plastic case that said it contained one fully capable AT-4.

  He wore a big smile on his face as he looked at Char. “Bingo,” he told her, but her mind was elsewhere.

  With well-practiced hands, he opened the case, took the rocket out, did a quick check, and slung it over his shoulder.

  Terry knew that the Forsaken were inhumanly fast. He’d never be able to hit one with the slow moving rocket, but in case he needed to blow a door open, the AT-4 would come in handy, while also doing a number on anyone hiding inside a room breached by an AT-4 warhead.

  A total of twenty five-ton trucks, four HMMWV with turret guns, and a tanker sat in the silent convoy. The tanker was filled with diesel fuel.

  Terry had found his white whale, but just like Moby Dick, carrying his spoils away wasn’t going to be easy.

  ***

  Timmons stopped and stood on his back feet, trying to see out over the mass of confusion that was the classification yard, a place where trains were configured for movement elsewhere. On the WWDE, they must have been full and every other train in Chicago tried to squeeze in on top of them. It was a spaghetti mess of train cars.

  Or maybe this was business as usual for a busy classification yard. On the WWDE, when the EMP hit, everything not shielded stopped where it was.

  Did that mean the diesel engines were unaffected and kept the trains traveling?

  Ted and Timmons got dressed as the wolves spread out and started hunting rats.

  “Holy shit! Tanks,” Timmons said, pointing. Fourteen above ground storage tanks sat at the far end of the railyard. “I wonder what’s in there.”

  They turned the horses loose in a grassy area. To the north of them, there was open ground that had been O’Hare International Airport. The runways were now partially overgrown. The tails of aircraft stood at the long-abandoned terminal. One of the busiest airports in the world was empty and graveyard quiet.

  Timmons didn’t care about the airport. Those planes wouldn’t fly again. But the trains. He did some quick calculations in his head. Fifty tracks wide for a mile and guesstimated one hundred cars per mile, that was five thousand cars packed into the yard.

  Ted verbalized what Timmons felt. “That is one fuck-ton of trains.”

  “Okay, people, we start at one end, label the track with chalk or charcoal. We’re looking for what we call a Mini Cooper, a nuclear reactor that looks like a grossly oversized tanker car. It should be shiny silver, but they may have painted over it to hide it. So, you’re looking for an oversized tanker car.” Timmons started to point out where they should start with one person going down every other row, meeting at the far end, then doing it again until they were finished.

  Kiwi raised her hand. “What’s a tanker car?”

  Timmons took a deep breath. “Kids nowadays,” he said with a chuckle. He looked down the first couple lines and saw only cars carrying standard forty-foot shipping containers. Many had been broken into. By the fourth line, a series of tanker cars were lined up.

  “Here we go. This is a tanker car, made to carry liquids of all types. Here are the basic components to look for and the Mini Cooper won’t have things like this.” Timmons pointed to the top fittings and bottom fittings. “They have to have a way to fill the tank and then empty the tank. If you see things designed specifically for fluids, move on. Questions?”

  They looked at the tanker car for a while longer, gauging its size.

  “We start at this end and meet on the other end. Then do it all over again. Keep your eyes peeled, people,” Timmons cautioned.

  They lined up and started down the rows. Ted and Timmons jogged as they knew what they were looking for. Kiwi and Gerry took longer because they weren’t sure.

  One mile and it took nearly an hour for the younger people to finish. Timmons was beside himself and insisted that the humans check out the surrounding area and that Ted and Timmons would run through the yard.

  So they took off at Werewolf speed, while James, Lacy, Gerry, and Kiwi looked for something else to do. “Check the tanks?” James asked.

  No one disagreed, so that was where they went.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  After a quick check of the vehicles, Terry wondered what they could take with them, happy to have the challenge of too much modern firepower. He shook his head and gritted his teeth. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be buried in the bowels of the earth with his nanocytes coursing through some Forsaken’s body after it fed on him.

  He
wondered if his nanocytes would make it stronger. He decided it was best to keep his nanocytes to himself, sharing with Char as far as he’d go.

  Char heard the footsteps first, small ones coming from behind them. “Don’t leave me,” Kaeden called. Terry turned and hurried back, fury raged within him.

  “Kae, we are not leaving you, but you can’t be here with us. Blackbeard, you cover our six. Anyone gets past us, you kill them. Keep him with you.” Terry pulled one of his knives, flipped it over to hold it by the blade. He handed it to the boy.

  “You know how to use this?” he asked. The boy nodded. “Your job is to protect Hank. Anyone tries to hurt him, you stop them, do you understand?”

  Terry didn’t wait for the boy’s answer as echoes of a rifle’s report cascaded up the tunnel. Then more shots from multiple weapons as the squad fired en masse.

  Terry ran past the trucks as Char yelled to cease fire.

  Mark and the front members of first squad were kneeling, still holding their aim. A body was on the roadway ahead. Adams and Xandrie’s shaggy fur bounced as they ran past Char. They stopped to sniff at the man, then jogged ahead as if sensing game. Char started to run.

  Terry didn’t know what was going on, so he ran too, unsure of what he was running for or where.

  The body he passed was riddled with bullet holes. A man of indeterminate age, features sunken as if he hadn’t eaten in months. His body was mostly shriveled. The telltale sign of Vampire bites on his neck suggested they’d fed on him repeatedly.

  Not enough to kill him, but keep him in a state of living death.

  Terry ran faster. The Forsaken. The enemy of all mankind.

  They needed to die.

  Xandrie yipped as something blazed in from a side passage and chopped into her body. Adams barked and leapt, but the creature was already gone. Xandrie bolted in panic down a different passage.

  “Adams!” Char yelled, but he was gone, heading down the passage to the right after his mate.

  Char fired the pistol into the darkness to the left. A figure burst into the open, moving beyond Werewolf speed and diving directly for Char.

  Terry took a half-step and swung with all the power in his body. He stopped the creature cold, but it felt as if he’d punched a rock wall. The Forsaken grunted and dropped to the pavement. Char stomped his knee and then danced aside.

  He flipped backwards and flexed his shoulders as he raised his fists. Terry lunged forward, moving to maintain his balance over the balls of his feet. The creature’s eyes blazed red, Char’s glowed purple in the shadows of the side passage, and Terry’s glowed a faint red, getting stronger the deeper he backed the Forsaken into the side passage.

  “What the fuck are you?” the Vampire asked.

  “Are we alone?” Terry asked.

  “Yes,” Char answered.

  Terry pulled the rocket launcher from his shoulder, but the Vampire ran forward and grabbed it with both hands. Terry leaned back to hold the creature in place as he drove the silvered blade of his small knife into the rib cage of the Forsaken.

  The creature let go of the rocket and jumped on Terry, but the colonel twisted and spun, throwing his enemy into the wall. Terry moved to one side and Char moved to the other, trapping the Forsaken between them.

  “You’re going to take us to the others,” Terry growled.

  “I think not,” the man said, looking at his hands where vicious claws stood from the end of his fingers. He flexed his hands, not bothering to look at Char.

  “Since when have Werewolves grown so bold? You will die as your reward for freeing us from this prison.”

  Terry’s white whale was going to come at a steep price.

  ***

  The tank farm was mostly untouched. One tank had burned, probably decades earlier. They avoided that one, but the fire hadn’t reached the others. They climbed the stairs leading upward and at the top was a locked system that they couldn’t get into to see or smell what was inside.

  But they did have a great view and used it to look over the railyard at the airport. So much to see that they hadn’t seen before.

  Kiwi pointed toward the towers of Chicago. Black smoke drifted skyward. They couldn’t tell how far away it was, but Timmons needed to know.

  They hurried down the stairs circling the tank and ran into the railyard. They jogged along one side, looking between the lines of cars until they spotted the two men. James whistled, but Timmons motioned at them to join him and Ted.

  They jogged down the row where the two Werewolves stood leaning against a box car. They pointed to a tarpaulin-covered car that crowded over the space between the tracks.

  “Is that what I think it is?” James smiled. Two decades of sitting in the weather made the tarp frail. James and Lacy climbed the ladders to get atop the thing. Although they were ready to use their knives, it took little effort to rip the tarp free.

  Underneath was a shiny car, bulbous at the sides and standing far taller than the other cars of the train. It looked like a tanker but didn’t have any fittings. Everything on it looked to be stainless or higher grade steel. There was no rust on it. It looked pristine.

  Ted was all smiles.

  “There’s a fire.” James remembered as he stood near the top of the Mini Cooper. He pointed toward the city. Ted and Timmons climbed the reactor and looked eastward.

  “Time to go, humans,” Timmons called as they hurried from the car. Ted stroked the Mini Cooper’s sides lovingly as he walked next to it. Timmons started to run, in the direction opposite the fire. “Get the horses!” he yelled over his shoulder as they cleared the last of the rail cars and crawled under a pair that were wedged into a bottleneck with the other half of the yard.

  Ted looked dismayed. “We’re not going to make it,” he sighed and sat down. Timmons closed his eyes.

  “Nope,” Timmons agreed. “He knows we’re here and he’s coming. A daywalker, might not be too powerful.”

  They started running again, to get free of the tracks and into the open, as a figure appeared not far away. He wore all black, long sleeves, long pants, and a wide-brimmed hat. The young humans hadn’t seen anything like it.

  Timmons and Ted had.

  The Vampires preferred the all black leather look to keep the sun off themselves. Even a few daywalkers had adopted the look so they didn’t appear as fourth or fifth generation Vamps.

  They wanted the mystique, but some of them were weak, weaker than a well-trained human. Some vampires could read minds. That would give him a distinct advantage over humans, no matter how well trained.

  Timmons turned to the four people. “I need you to think about sex, the best sex you’ve ever had, and keep thinking about it. Help each other out for fuck’s sake. It’s not hard. Haha! Maybe it should be, eh, Ted? We’ll take care of this joker,” Timmons said with false bravado as he joined Ted to stand between the Forsaken and the members of the FDG.

  James and Lacy were surprised at the order, but their minds instantly disappeared into their past. James couldn’t help it, even though he wanted to watch what was going on with the newcomer that they’d called the Forsaken.

  Gerry and Kiwi didn’t have any memories of sex. They both looked at each wondering what to do. Gerry pulled her to him and kissed her hard, then she pulled him away to a spot in the shade behind a boxcar.

  The wolf pack took their place at Ted’s side and everyone was ready.

  ***

  Xandrie was injured. The Forsaken had clawed her side, and it hurt like liquid fire had been poured into her chest. She’d raced down passage after passage, twisting and turning as she fled in pained terror. She couldn’t hear Adams anymore.

  She found a nook and crawled into it, licking her side before giving up and changing into human form where she could try to clean out the wound with her more agile human hands.

  “What brings you here, my pretty?” a cold voice spoke from the darkness.

  She tried to reach out, but the pain was messing with her se
nses. “Who’s there? Show yourself, pussy!”

  A young man appeared in the corridor, blocking her into the small room. She could barely discern his outline even with her Werewolf vision. To a human, it would look pitch black.

  “I have to thank you, sister, for what you and your comrades have done for us.” He let the remark hang. Xandrie changed back into Were form, wincing as she put weight on her front paw.

  In that moment he was on her, his claws jabbing against her throat. She struggled weakly. “Change back to human form or I’ll slice your head off right now.” His voice was soft, almost dainty, but the command wasn’t.

  Xandrie reverted to human form and hung limply in his arms as she summoned her courage and her strength. From far off she heard the footfalls of a Werewolf’s pads.

  “Adams!” she yelled before the claws clamped down and stopped her air.

  “As you wish,” he said, turning her around as he ducked and bit deeply into her neck while his claws sunk finger deep into her naked stomach. She gasped as he drained the life from her.

  She fell to the floor as he disappeared into the darkness.

  ***

  The Forsaken looked at his claws, smiled at Char, and then winced as a spasm from the wound that Terry had given him announced that it shouldn’t be forgotten. Char felt the impact through the etheric, too.

  “Xandrie’s dead,” she told Terry. He clenched his jaws. He thought of saying something witty, but decided that killing these things was in everyone’s best interest.

  “A Werewolf, pregnant with a strange human’s baby,” the Forsaken said.

  Terry was done talking, no matter the subject. He feinted with his left hand in a move too fast for the eye to follow. The Vamp’s hand raised defensively to block the attack. Terry’s second hand followed, slashing the fingers from the Forsaken’s hand.

  The creature jumped back against the tunnel wall. Terry’s spin kick caught him in the mid-section and crunched him against the stone. Char’s roundhouse caught him in the side of the head and knocked him down.

  Terry stepped back and cracked the whip tip into the Forsaken’s neck. He howled when the silver from Margie Rose’s old necklace burned him. Char leapt and drove her wooden stake under his rib cage and pounded it toward his heart. He jerked away before it went deep enough.