Forged From Ash - Book #7 of the Skinners Series

by Marcus Pelegrimas

  Cole had tried the eye drops created from Squam optical fluids personally. There were always a few seconds of burning followed by a prolonged period of seeing the world as smoky colors and moving shades. After what Frank had done to him, Cole wondered if his exposure to those drops had spoiled him for whatever was supposed to happen now. If so, he was still coming out ahead compared to the Skinner who’d blinded himself while creating the drops.

  Then, Cole felt a mild itching in his eyes. When he reached up to rub them, Frank grabbed his hand to stop it.

  “Leave it,” Frank said.

  It wasn’t long before the itch faded and Cole’s vision took on a vague shimmer. The effect was more noticeable when he moved his eyes from side to side, and bleary afterimages were left behind like misty trails.

  “You’ll see different colors,” Frank explained. “Most of the plants and native animals should be similar, but human scents will stand out from the rest. Other scents not indigenous to these woods will stand out as well.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much,” Cole said.

  “More than you had before.”

  “True. Now remember, these guys are armed to the teeth and crazy, so don’t pull any punches.”

  “You’re the one who got knocked around.”

  Cole reached up to feel the swollen portion of his face and a small cut from his fight with the guard. “I was just getting warmed up.”

  He and Frank discussed as much strategy they could in the short amount of time they had. Their plan was simple and relied heavily on being underestimated by the rest of the men in that prison. Since he hadn’t even laid eyes on the prison yet, Cole had his doubts about making it out of those woods in one piece.

  After Frank had dropped to all fours, pressed his belly to the ground and scurried through a dense section of bushes, Cole hunkered down and gave his eyes some time to adjust to the fumes that were drifting up into them. The fluid Frank had smeared on his cheek felt cool on his skin although his vision was partially blurred by the afterimages he was seeing. There were colors and textures imprinted upon the air that reminded him of the times he’d used the Skinner-created eye drops. Soon, he saw shades that didn’t belong with the others. He couldn’t decipher it all, but the discrepancies were as easy to pick out as a few words written in Chinese embedded in a page of hieroglyphics.

  Cole scrunched down as far as he could, gripping the halberd in both hands to drive its thorns deep into his palms.

  The movement he spotted between two trees about twenty yards away was so subtle that he would never have seen it if not for the colors he’d picked out drifting over that spot. A few seconds later, more of the inconsistent colors wafted through the air to lead his gaze to a patch of green that moved without disturbing a single leaf. Cole reached out with the forked end of the halberd to shake one of the bushes to his right. He made a rustling sound that was just loud enough to be heard and then narrowed his eyes so he could focus on any response that followed.

  The movement stopped, and the vague shape he’d picked out disappeared. The source of the color that had caught his attention drew closer like a torch that could only be tracked by smoke drifting up from an invisible flame. Cole reduced his breathing to a trickle of air. His body remained perfectly still as the unseen inconsistency drew ever closer.

  He heard something brush against the dirt.

  A portion of light between the lowest branches of another tree was blocked.

  Cole had no idea how anything could move that stealthily, but he knew it was coming his way. Instinct more than anything else told him when the unseen other was close enough. When Cole felt tension crackle against his skin, he lunged forward.

  For the first few moments of his charge, Cole thought he might stomp through some bushes, announce where he was to the world and wind up getting picked off by someone who wasn’t such a moron. Instead, he chalked up another victory for blind instinct when he cleared a tangle of branches and rammed into a solid form that looked like something spat out from the woods themselves. Instead of anything supernatural, however, Cole found a person wrapped from head to toe in loosely fitted clothing with leaves and branches stuck to a canvas web flowing down from a military helmet.

  Cole’s blade knocked against the long barrel of a rifle, angling it away from him until both weapons grated against each other. A face covered in black, green and brown paint scowled at him until the stock of the other man’s rifle pounded against Cole’s ribs. Cole absorbed a few more blows while positioning his weapon so the rifle was wedged between the tines of its forked end. He then leaned all of his weight behind the halberd in an attempt to leverage the rifle away from its owner.

  Once he was closer to the painted face, Cole could discern some features beneath the layers of camouflage. Unfortunately, he was also close enough for the rifle’s owner to snap their head forward to crack it against Cole’s nose. Grunting as pain stabbed through his face, Cole twisted the halberd around to pound the side of the blade flat against the guard’s temple. Not only did that make a satisfying thump, but something dropped from the guard’s ear.

  “Perimeter One, respond,” said a voice through the little earpiece that had been knocked loose.

  “What kind of defenses are in that prison?” Cole asked. When he didn’t get a reply, he angled the halberd so some of the thorns on its grip could rake against the other person’s cheek.

  “You’re dead,” the camouflaged soldier said in a distinctly feminine voice. “Both of you.”

  So the guards already knew how many they were up against. That wasn’t good.

  Positioning one of the longer thorns close to her eye, Cole said, “Answer the call and give the all clear.”

  “I’ll need that,” she said while nodding toward the fallen earpiece.

  Cole looked over to the little device, which gave the guard enough of an opportunity to sink a sharp jab into his stomach, kick him in the thigh and break away from him. Finding himself on one knee after the quick attack, Cole was certain her kick had been meant for a much more sensitive part of his anatomy. The jab was even deadlier than he’d first thought since it had been made with a small blade. A warm trickle of blood flowed from that spot, followed by the rush of healing serum in his body speeding to close the wound.

  Even though she was directly in front of him, the guard’s loose-fitted clothing and extensive camouflage made it difficult for Cole to get a firm grasp of just how muscular she was or what other weapons she might be carrying. “That’s a Skinner weapon,” she said while glancing at the halberd in Cole’s hand.

  “And that,” Cole replied while nodding toward the knife she’d scooped up off the ground, “is a letter opener,” Cole replied. “Wanna bet which of our weapons is better suited for this fight?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It won’t be just you and me fighting.”

  “How many more are we talking about?”

  She didn’t even start to get a word out before part of the trees behind her flowed outward to grab her around the neck. Frank’s scales were so perfectly attuned to the color of the guard’s camo that his yellow eyes seemed to float in space just behind and to the side of her head. The guard reached up to grab the arm encircling her neck and gouged Frank’s elbow with a wild stab from the little blade clenched in her fist. But the Squam had gotten too close and had sunk his grip in too deep for her to do much against it. In a matter of seconds, Cole could see the whites of her eyes as they rolled up into her head and she went limp in Frank’s grasp.

  “There are others coming,” Frank said as he lowered the guard to the ground. “But this one was the closest.”

  “Take that rifle,” Cole said.

  Frank looked down at the long rifle the guard had been carrying as if it was some form of alien life. “I am not a very good shot.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Just fire down toward the rest of those guys and get close enough to make them nervous. If you actually hit anyone, that’s a bonus. And unscrew that suppresso
r from the barrel. We want to make as much noise as possible.” Without waiting around for Frank carry out his orders, Cole hurried back to the spot where he’d left the Brown Precision Tactical. He scooped up the rifle and retraced his steps toward the spot where he and the camouflaged sniper had traded blows. Frank had already dragged the woman’s body into some bushes before disappearing into the trees once again. Instead of trying to find the Squam, Cole picked his way down a ridge to the north and waited for his partner to announce himself. He didn’t have to wait long.

  A high caliber shot cracked through the air, causing a few distant voices to bark orders back and forth. Cole followed the sounds of those other voices, which led him further along an anorexic footpath which took him deeper into the trees. He wanted to move faster, but the wavy scent smears drifting in front of his eyes had suddenly thinned out to almost nothing. When he pushed through the next layer of low-hanging branches, Cole almost stepped into empty air.

  Pulling in a sharp breath, he stopped and dug his front foot into the ground. If he’d been going any faster, his heel would have scraped right over the small lip of rock, and the rest of him would have fallen at least a hundred feet to a bed of logs and boulders below. Once he was no longer in danger of skidding over the edge, Cole took a moment to study Tensleep Canyon.

  The rocks were sandy brown mixed with a deep red and were angled almost directly perpendicular to the ground. The floor of the canyon less than a mile from where he’d perched was covered in thick grass. A charred passenger jet’s fuselage lay to the east. The rest of the plane was probably scattered across a good portion of the county. So many planes had gone down when The Breaking had been so aggressively forced onto humanity that finding a wreck wasn’t such an unusual thing. Cole held the Brown Precision rifle to his shoulder so he could study the wreckage through his scope.

  “That can’t be it,” he whispered to himself when he spotted a flimsy shelter built near the broken nosecone of the downed plane. Without moving the scope from his eye, he found a switch on its rounded side and moved it to a position that brought up a small display within the scope’s optics.

  “Or maybe it can.”

  Cole adjusted another ring built into the scope which gave him a greater magnification. High caliber gunshots could be heard further back within the woods, but he ignored them as he studied the shelter he’d found. A crooked grin showed on his face when he picked out a series of wires connecting the shelter to a blackened wall just inside the fuselage which was most likely the divider between the cockpit and passenger cabin. Thanks to the high resolution optics built into the scope, Cole could tell the wall was made from heavy scrap metal instead of the smoother steel that would have been used in the plane’s original construction. Wires leading from the wall to the shelter could have been salvaged from any number of places, and their presence told him that something was inside the fuselage other than boxes of stale honey roasted peanuts.

  The next series of shots that were fired came from a slightly different angle. Those were followed by shots from different sources as well as a few voices shouting back and forth to each other.

  “We got one pinned down,” one of the voices said. “Find the other!”

  Cole lowered the scope and looked straight down. Doing his best to ignore the swirling feeling in his gut, he studied the edge of the canyon until he found what he was after. A rope ladder was secured to a ledge by two posts and to the floor of the canyon by a steel bar embedded in the ground. He then traced an imaginary line back to the shelter. It wasn’t until he took a closer look at the fuselage itself before he whispered, “There you are.”

  A narrow pipe stuck out from the bottom of one of the windows looking into the plane’s passenger cabin. It could have been stuck there any time during the crash or sometime near impact. Protruding from the window only a few inches or so, the pipe was mostly covered by shredded strips of canvas. Thanks to Cole’s enhanced scope, he could just make out the face hovering above and behind the pipe inside the plane. Studying it a bit closer was enough to convince him that the pipe was actually a rifle barrel. He rested his left elbow on top of his bent knee and used that hand for support while taking aim with the Brown Precision.

  The high caliber shots from the woods behind Cole had come to a stop, but smaller caliber rounds were still being fired. A man’s voice rose to a surprised yelp and was quickly cut short. The smaller caliber shooting switched to full auto, and Frank shouted something in his native language. The reptilian dialect, which Cole had only found out about recently, could easily be mistaken for a series of hisses and croaks. In any language, the war cry would have spoken for itself. A few heavy impacts and one final solid thump put an end to the last bit of shooting.

  A few seconds later, Frank’s voice drifted in from behind Cole. “There were two more in these trees,” he said.

  “You handle them?” Cole asked.

  “I was able to knock one out, but had to kill the other.”

  “Were they Vigilant?”

  “They had the brand on their necks.”

  “Then I don’t give a shit what you had to do to them,” Cole said. “Just as long as they’re out of our way.”

  Frank moved in beside Cole to take a look at the bottom of the canyon. “Is that the prison?”

  “I think so,” Cole told him. “Either that or it’s just marking the entrance to some hole being used as a prison. I’ve seen more underground lairs than I care to remember. I don’t see anyone else up top with us. How about you?”

  Lifting his scaled snout, Frank sampled the air and panned his dark yellow eyes in both directions. He opened his mouth to talk, but only flicked his tongue out and pulled it back in again. Finally, he said, “There are no other humans in the vicinity, but there is one inside the wreckage of that plane.”

  “I see him. Or her. Either way, there’s a ladder that’ll take you down to the bottom.”

  “Take me to the bottom?”

  “Yeah. I’m guessing you can climb down it faster than I could. It’s anchored about fifty or sixty feet that way.”

  Without looking in the direction Cole pointed, Frank sighed, “I suppose I am the bait to get that sniper to show themselves?”

  “We both already see the sniper. Getting past them without being picked off is the tricky part. If there’s a chance for you to get down there and knock him out before I have to blow his head off, it’d be worth the risk.”

  “You mean worth risking me.”

  “Hey,” Cole said. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a bit rusty here. How long do you think I’d last without backup? If that’s the prison, we’re not even halfway done before we can get out of here. If anything happens to you, I don’t have much of a shot.”

  Frank studied the canyon top to bottom for a few more seconds before saying, “I have a better idea. It may take a while longer, but it should be worth it. Give me ten minutes, and then fire a shot into that plane.”

  “I do that and the sniper will probably zero in on me.”

  “How important is it to take the sniper alive?”

  Cole thought about all the things that could potentially screw them up if they walked into any Vigilant stronghold without knowing their security measures. There were explosives that could be rigged, alarms that could be tripped, any number of traps that could be sprung, and those were just the things that popped into mind after thinking for a few seconds. Even if the sniper had keys to a jail cell, that would make a world of difference in Cole being able to get out before any reinforcements arrived. “Ten minutes?” he asked. “You can’t go any faster than that?”

  “Just be ready to shoot,” Frank replied. “One of the windows near the tail would be good.”

  “Sure,” Cole grunted since the Squam had already scurried away. “You want fries with that?”

  Less than five minutes later, Cole heard a few pebbles clatter against the side of the canyon. It sounded as if they’d broken loose almost directly below his posit
ion. He leaned forward to glance down along the canyon wall.

  Nothing was there.

  The stuff that affected his sight had almost completely evaporated, but enough remained to add a trace amount of smearing to the world around him. What caught his attention wasn’t a color or texture that was out of place but a small space where there were no colors or textures whatsoever bleeding from the environment. Cole studied that spot until he was convinced it was just the first spot in his field of vision that had fully cleared. Then, that same portion of the canyon wall inched downward.

  Cole blinked to make sure he wasn’t seeing some kind of mirage after focusing on the same patch of nothing for too long. When the patch moved again, he grunted, “Holy crap.”

  He’d already known Frank could change his coloring to blend in with his surroundings. He’d seen the Squam pull that trick so well that he could remain unseen to someone who was staring straight at him. What Cole hadn’t known was that Frank could dig his claws into solid rock and climb down the wall of the canyon like some giant four-legged spider.

  After the rocks had clattered down into the canyon, anyone could have looked in Frank’s direction. Cole put the scope to his eye to check on the guard that remained inside the broken fuselage. He could still only see one rifle barrel emerging from a window, and it was still pointed in the same direction since the last time Cole had checked on it. There were no other ladders to be found, so the sniper was most likely watching the one stretching up to the top of the canyon. Cole kept the rifle pointed at the fuselage as he leaned over to glance down along the canyon wall. He couldn’t find Frank.

  “Shit,” Cole whispered. The only thing left for him was the plan. He checked his watch, saw there was still two minutes left before he was supposed to take his shot and gazed through the scope once more. Cole turned the ring on the scope to zoom out two notches. He still couldn’t find Frank anywhere on the wall or the ground below. The stuff beneath his eyes had completely evaporated, leaving him without a single ghostly smear to point him in one direction or another.