Rise | Book 3 | Reclamation

by Ford, Devon C.

  Am I getting attached to the machine that hunted me across the country? It’s a machine. A thing. Grab hold of yourself…

  Soares’ sharp intake of breath snapped Cole to the present as he watched the alien stop by the door they’d been hiding behind for near on two days. It checked a device on its wrist, like a curved version of the tablets he and Soares had, then pulled a pistol from behind its back and hit the control panel to open the door.

  Neither of them breathed as it went low and took an exaggerated step inside to swing the weapon around in search of anything to kill before straightening up and returning to the corridor. The Tracker’s feed caught the face of the creature, and if their expressions were comparable to a human’s in any way the thing looked… disappointed. Like it was pissed that there was nothing hiding inside to kill.

  It was then that Cole realized no sound was being transmitted from the drone through the tablet. The alien stopped to check the device it wore again and tap at it before opening and closing its mouth and moving the thin, leathery lips over sharp, conical teeth.

  The thing was speaking through a communication device of some kind, and as they watched with their breath held, it walked faster than before, heading back the way it had come from.

  [APPROACHING DESTINATION IN 06.344 MINUTES]

  [PERSONNEL RECALLED TO FLIGHT DECK FOR FINAL APPROACH TASKS]

  Soares chuckled to himself, giving his own impression of how the unheard alien conversation went.

  “Hey, Joey, you, ah… you find anything” he said in a low voice, using an accent Cole hadn’t heard before. “Nah, nothin’ boss. Must be some kinda glitch or whatnot,” he answered himself in a variation of the same accent. “Well, quit goofin’ around and haul your ass back here; we gotta ship to park, capiche?”

  Cole couldn’t help himself and smiled at Soares’ little show, amazed that the man could find the energy to make a joke at that time before it dawned on him that he was making the joke because of the stress of their situation.

  “Six-point-three-four minutes,” Cole said. “What do we do then?”

  Lina

  Lina stared with wide-eyes and wonder at the ruined blackened wastes of a Shanghai harbor that had seen unspeakable carnage before she was born.

  Monet was beside her in the small craft that bumped over the waves. The engines were quiet, but still loud in the otherwise silent harbor. She looked upset.

  “What’s wrong?” Lina asked, raising her voice over the sound their movement over the water made.

  “I don’t like it,” Monet answered. “We should’ve waited until dark.”

  Lina said nothing. The decision to move immediately was Monet’s, but their plan only offered a narrow window to make the whole thing viable and the delay at sea had cost them dearly, forcing their hand. They were a day late already, and waiting for nightfall could make all the difference to others fighting around the world.

  Lina clutched her flask to her chest after a rogue wave a hand taller than the others jostled her and reminded them both how precarious their seating was.

  They’d asked one another the relevant questions before settling on the decision to go. They questioned if it was worth trying to reach their contact, but given the time delay, they couldn’t count on him being there. They couldn’t even count on him being alive.

  “Three klicks northwest,” Monet repeated for the third time since they’d left the boat. “Should be easy to cover that distance.”

  Lina said nothing. She knew the heart of their plan as well as her companion did, but unlike Monet, she didn’t take any comfort in repeating it out loud.

  “We should’ve waited until dark,” Monet said again.

  “Too late now,” Lina said, not quite under her breath but not loud enough to be heard as they skimmed across the water. Monet turned to the young man behind them, sitting on the rear of the inflatable boat and squinting ahead in deep concentration as his right hand made minor adjustments to the handle directing the tiny motor propelling them.

  “You know what to do, right?” she asked him. He nodded.

  “Drop us off and find somewhere to hide. Stay out of sight.”

  He nodded again but kept his eyes on the direction they were headed. Lina stared as the skeletons of tall structures loomed into clarity from the shadowy shapes they were when they first laid eyes on the shoreline.

  Gerard had insisted that the submarine had to remain in deep water to be safe, explaining that the harbor would be filled with boats and ships blocking their way. They’d stay out of the way, nose pointed toward home and ready to dive.

  The approaching forms came into focus one by one, totally blowing Lina’s mind. She’d seen the bones of the old world plenty and even thought herself immune to the wonder it caused her to imagine how people used to live, but this… she’d never even begun to come close to anything like this in her imagination.

  At ground level, where their planned route aimed them toward a straight edge marking the change from land to water, she saw far more destruction. The buildings of the docks were ruins, and those that stood were the ancient, blackened carcasses of things that had once been.

  She couldn’t help but equate these structures to the people who had once built them, imagining some like herself and Monet and Cole to be hurt and damaged but still refusing to give in and lie down before the aliens.

  Some were in shambles, piles of raw materials on the ground. Others were so broken by the fighting that they leaned over, ready to collapse with just one more push, whereas others seemed undamaged but cowered in the shadows of the destructed ones hoping nothing would notice them.

  “Whoa, watch it!” Monet hissed, snatching Lina’s attention in time for her to tighten her grip as the nose of the boat jerked aside, avoiding a diagonal spike of metal protruding from the calm surface of the water.

  “I saw it,” he said in a soft voice of admonishment. The hint of annoyance in his tone told her that she was overstepping and that she should leave the specialist tasks to the specialists.

  He slowed to a crawl to avoid any more obstructions. There were plenty of these as the boats in the harbor had been sunk where they were moored years ago. The rubber hull of the tiny boat bumped silently into the concrete wall beside a rusted ladder, and without ceremony or delay, the two women slipped ashore to set foot in China; the first Americans to do so in over two decades.

  Three kilometers is nothing. It was a ten-minute run. A half-hour walk.

  Three kilometers through the twisted, destroyed, wild and overgrown remains of what had been a city so vast neither of them had imagined anything like it before was most definitely something.

  It seemed as though they couldn’t walk ten paces without having to climb a pile of rubble or duck under a fallen beam. The undergrowth was thick, combining vines and stiff grasses that robbed them of their solid footing or threatened to trip them with each move of a boot. In other places, it was bare and lifeless as if the greenery had simply decided it didn’t like that place and agreed to avoid it.

  What should have taken them at worst two hours was taking them so much longer that it again threatened the viability of their mission.

  Monet stopped, sitting and resting her body against an upright slab of concrete that sat up in the road. She rested her own flask filled with the potentially debilitating strain of illness on her lap and pulled free a water bottle before uncapping it and taking a long pull. She withdrew the tablet from her pack and swiped through the screens, hoping that the communications program or their ability to access the drone locations would have magically reappeared, huffing at it in dismay as she stuffed it back in her bag.

  Lina knelt opposite her, copying the actions with her own water bottle, but froze with it to her lips so that a single stream of the clear liquid escaped to roll down her chin. Her eyes were wide, and her hand started to quiver, which quickly spread to the rest of her body.

  “What?” Monet asked. When Lina didn’t respond, she also froze, a
nd her heart rate increased to match the rapid breathing that started by itself.

  “What?” she whispered again, watching as Lina slowly withdrew the bottle from her mouth and spun the cap to fix it back on, all the time not taking her eyes from Monet.

  She stood, an inch at a time and moving so slowly, it must’ve taken a huge toll on her muscles, just as Monet’s breathing intensified and her chest heaved at a wavering hissing sound coming from behind her.

  “What is i—”

  “Don’t. Move,” Lina whispered, lifting her gun from beside her and aiming it above and to the right of Monet’s head.

  “You can’t fire that here! The ali—”

  The massive boom of the shotgun’s report echoed off in every direction before it came warbling back to their ears diminished by distance.

  “Go, now!” Lina said, dragging Monet to her feet as she hid her neck in her shoulders and dared to look behind her at the thing Lina had just shot. Headless, or at least with a section she’d illogically describe as “neck” blown away, lay the impossibly long body of an enormous snake. The head was beside the writhing, coiling body, and the wide hood was fanned out but limp. The mouth of the thing was big enough to hold a couple of hunting knives in place of fangs, so Lina didn’t think for a second it wasn’t up for the challenge of killing and eating a human.

  “They’ll have heard that,” Lina said pointlessly. “We need to move.”

  They didn’t get far.

  Not even a hundred paces from the place where they’d stopped—a hundred fast, reckless paces—they heard the sharp, whining buzz of a Seeker drone and Lina stole a glance over her shoulder to see it flying slowly and scanning the ground.

  Monet led them off the main drag and down what had once been a side street, which, oddly, was less obscured by the detritus of a dead city and made their progress faster.

  They looped around, taking advantage of the ability to run for a short distance before turning onto their path made the going tougher again, but as the dense vegetation came back to plague them, the lights of a facility shimmered in the near distance, showing up against the skyline as it began to darken into the beginnings of night.

  “Come on,” Monet whispered.

  Fan

  He saw the ships lifting from inside Shanghai’s city limits early in the morning as he walked the bright corridors from their residences to their workstations. The floor-to-ceiling windows allowed a lot of light and also a view of the terrible vessels screeching into the sky. There were three of them in total. Fan had only ever glimpsed one actively flying through the air, and that had been a few years ago.

  The fact that they were moving away now had Fan smiling. The Reclaimers’ plan must have been working, or the aliens were going to squash the last of the resistance. He moved into his station, the rest of the human workers clearly tired. Their eyes were puffy from the added workload, the barrage of interviews the aliens had given the slaves over the last couple days since the incident. Fan had been lucky they’d left him alone after answering a couple of simple questions, but he hadn’t seen Biyu or Chan since.

  Li stared through the glass of his supervisor’s office, and stood when two human guards came, an old, bent-over alien behind them. Fan watched with interest, pretending to work on the misters rolling through the conveyer toward him. The team had fixed the vats’ chemical composition quickly, faster than Fan would have guessed, but he was still proud to know that thousands of gallons of the product had to be disposed of first. Any delay might save lives, and Fan clung to that while his thoughts drifted to Biyu again.

  Li’s door pressed open by the armed guards, and his hands came up to his chest in a defensive position. Fan heard the supervisor’s words from across the room, the other workers pausing their tasks to listen in as well.

  “I don’t know who did it. I’ve been loyal this entire time!” Li shouted, his glasses sliding down his nose. Fan saw Li’s gaze flash to meet his own, and he looked away, hoping the alien hadn’t noticed the subtle interaction.

  They did. The two guards strode from the office, moving toward Fan, and he watched as the alien pulled a strange weapon, firing it at Li’s chest. A hole appeared, and the supervisor collapsed in a heap.

  “You!” The guard was familiar, but Fan didn’t recall his name. Only the hardened ones stayed. Maybe ten humans remained working on the alien’s side now. A gun pointed at Fan, and he swallowed, rising from his seat. The misters continued to pile up at his station, and a few overflowed, spilling onto the ground. No one moved.

  “I haven’t done anything,” Fan said softly.

  “We’ll see about that. With us,” the same guard said. The alien watched him from the exit, and none of the other workers attempted to assist Fan. Not that he’d expect them to. He kept his gaze on the floor as he walked, the other bulky guard shoving him from behind.

  When he walked by the alien, it stared down at him, its posture stooped, the smell emanating from the outsider overwhelming in the sterile space.

  The corridors felt tighter now, and he fought to keep from peering into the chemical vat manufacturing room as they passed it. The guards slowed as they reached an office near the end of the hall, across from the medical bay. Another office sat beside the one he was being ushered into, and he saw through the glass window of the door. Biyu sat in a chair, her head slumped over, a hole burned in her chest.

  The guard shoved him inside the other empty room, pointing at the chair across the table. Fan took the seat, hands shaking, and heartburn threatening to make him cough. The alien entered, and the second guard waited in the hall, locking the door behind him.

  The alien stood, chittering a few words out. The guard slammed a palm to the table. “He wants to know how you did it.”

  Fan gulped and considered how to answer.

  Chapter 30

  Alec

  They waited all day, and as the sun loomed farther west than east, they caught the first ping on the radar, sent from their Seeker network. They’d deployed twenty of the drones, each of them heading in a different direction to create a circle twenty miles around their camp.

  “Power up Big Ben!” Jack shouted from his position near the mountain entrance. Alec peered over to the trap Izzy and he’d set the day before, and suddenly, it felt like a foolish endeavor. It was a pit a hundred yards long, five across, and ten feet deep. They would have gone deeper but lacked the time, and with the ground frozen, it wasn’t easy work. Jack had given them some stinky fuel mixture one of his people created, and they soaked the hole with it.

  The ground shook as the immense weapon the Barony had brought to Norway activated, and they let the tarps around the wooden frame fall to the snow. It was impressive. The device moved and aimed toward the incoming fleet.

  Jack seemed poised, and he pointed at Alec, who grabbed the two-way radio. “Whittaker, you’re a go.”

  The ship rose from its parking spot, the American pilot using one of the Barony’s ships, the crown painted on the hull. The other two screeching crafts followed him, and the hovercars powered up, moving upwards in a cacophony of noise. The entire valley echoed with the terrible screams of the aliens’ engines, and soon all of their transports had been deployed.

  Whittaker headed toward the incoming fleet, and Alec looked at the tablet again, hitting it on his hand. “This can’t be right,” he said. The Seeker was showing twenty ships coming their way. That was too many. They could each be holding two hundred enemies. Their small group didn’t stand a chance.

  Jack must have seen his face, because he called to Alec, “Nothing changes. This is it. We can still do this.”

  Alec had once heard Tom say that a great leader never lets his people know when they’ve lost. It was the first step in plans unravelling. This had to be what Jack was playing at, and even though Alec didn’t want to die, there was no way he was giving up.

  Cole might have finished the job by now. Maybe that was another reason for the huge attack. Perhaps Monet a
nd Lina had cut off their mister supply. With their hard work and dedication to the cause, Alec was fired up to do his part. And that meant defending against this last alien fleet.

  He peered to the side where Izzy stood holding an SA80. He glanced to the hiding spots of his new French comrades, and could hardly see Maxime or Sylvie from their concealment, even though he knew where they were located.

  All of this helped calm Alec. Part of him wished to be in the ship with Whittaker, to fire everything they had at the vessels, but Renata was already doing that. Even from here, Alec heard the first shots deployed in the battle over Norway, and his skin crawled at the sound.

  It had begun.

  Jack

  The tablet showed one of his hovercars blink away from existence, but not before one of the enemy vessel was destroyed. He saw the streak of black smoke as the Barony’s lead ship fired at one of the attackers.

  “Come on. Keep them coming.” Jack stood a half mile from Big Ben, using the tablet to control her. The gun barrel moved with the slide of his finger, and he spotted the first target come within range. Somewhere up there, the Seekers were congregating, creating a barrier against the outside enemy vessels, using their limited firepower to attack and keep the aliens in line.

  Jack pressed the red button icon, and the giant device hummed with blue energy, reminding Jack of the gateways. It pulsed, letting out a whine before firing a massive bolt of power at the warship. It struck the alien vessel, sending it toward the mountain range, and Jack prepared for the next in line, striking it in the underbelly. The others must have understood what they’d encountered, because they began to break formation.

  Jack had hit four targets, and attempted to connect with a fifth when the tablet controls seized up. He tapped the screen, but it was frozen, nothing happening. “Bloody hell!” he shouted. The enemy was lowering, firing toward their structures, but they were empty, devoid of troops, just a diversion.