They’d come and defend the gateway with ease, and Earth would never be man’s again. Dex clenched his teeth so hard, it hurt, and he saw Tubs’ gaze meet his, his face twisted in a smile right before he noticed the alien behind him.
Dex ran, abandoning his new ally. He heard Tubs cry out, heard the sound of the hunter’s shotgun blasting out. Then it was silent for a moment before a hideous alarm rang through the area. Dex moved as fast as he could, and he scrambled through the hole in the chain link. He wanted to wait to see if there was any chance that Tubs had evaded them, maybe taken all five adversaries down, but Dex accepted the man was dead.
His legs pumped hard, and he went the long way around toward the pier. He was panting and gasping by the time he untied the thick rope holding the canoe, and he tried not to think about the elation on Tubs’ face as he stuck it to the Occupation for the first time in his life.
Dex pulled the tablet out, letting it sit on his lap, the rain all but stopped finally. He paddled hard, shoving away from the pier as the boat headed the way it had come. The alarms were urgently sounding at the shipyard, meaning they’d be out searching for more attackers. He couldn’t wait any longer.
“Sorry, big guy. Thanks for your help,” Dex said, bringing the tablet to life. It showed eighteen activated explosives, plus their linked bombs they’d scattered throughout the base. One was flashing red, telling him it was offline. Seventeen would do the trick.
He glanced up toward the Overseers’ base, the lights shining brightly from their hundred foot tall posts, and he swallowed hard.
Dex pressed the icon, and hell came to Washington.
Alec
The tablet displayed the same message, and Alec tried to estimate the time they had until they were meant to meet in Detroit. How could Tom expect the troops to align in such a short period? Alec had no idea if Lina had marched an army of Freeborn toward Michigan, or if Soares and his brother had managed to convince a secret Roamer group to work against the Occupation.
At this point, they had less than three days left. Really two and a half if he rounded down.
“Can you put that away?” Becca asked. “The light is too bright.”
They’d driven to Las Vegas the day before but didn’t want to rush straight into action. Alec suggested some covert spying on the maintenance facility before they ran in guns blazing. He glanced at Izzy in the driver’s seat, and to Becca in the back, her eyes glistening as she stared at her previous home.
“It’s so strange seeing it from this direction. I spent the last five years inside that fence. and it looks so much smaller from the outside,” Becca told them.
Alec understood that only too well. It was an experience he shared with her.
“When do we go in?” Izzy asked impatiently.
“Soon.” The sun was going to rise in less than an hour, but so far, there was no movement in the maintenance yard.
“Why is it so quiet?” Alec asked. “Do you think they’ve closed it?”
Becca nodded from behind him. “If you’re right, they’re shutting everything down in preparation for their second-phase invasion.”
“By shutting down, you mean killing our people, right?” Izzy fidgeted in the driver’s seat. She looked older after just two days on the road. Alec realized she’d never had to do this while being stuck in the sanctuary of their home along the West Coast. It must be overwhelming for her, much like his first adventure with Monet had been on him.
“That’s my guess,” Alec said. The horde of seekers and trackers around LA were moving east, toward Phoenix. “If we can get this ship, we might be able to stop the tower in Phoenix and save the humans there.”
“How much time before the drones arrive?” Becca asked him.
It was hard to tell, but judging by their position and relative pace, he had an idea. “Ten hours.”
“Then we have ten hours to stop them,” Izzy said.
“Tell me again why you think you can get their ship running, Becca?” Alec asked. So far, she’d neglected to give them her exact reasoning. “I mean, if it was too broken for them to take with them, what makes you think we can fly it out of here?”
“I may have sabotaged it before I left,” she said with a grin.
“How so?” Izzy asked, staring blankly toward the facility.
“I pulled a coupler from the secondary engine chassis,” she said.
“And they wouldn’t have discovered that?” Alec asked.
“Nope. That coupler doesn’t show up on scans. I learned that early on when I tried everything to repair a ship and failed. One of the older guys told me half the components don’t make a lot of sense on the Overseers data systems. It stuck with me,” she said.
“And what, we plug in the coupler and it runs?” Izzy asked.
“That’s the plan.”
“Good. If we’re done hiding, let’s get to work. There’s no one here. We’ve scouted the entire place for hours,” Alec said, his patience wearing thin.
Izzy pressed her door open, selecting a gun from the console. Alec recovered his rifle from under the seat, and soon all three of them were out of the truck and walking along the side of the massive garage toward the outdoor facility.
There were no lights on, and Alec held his hand up, straining to hear anything out of place. All he heard was the howl of the wind. It was cool at night in the desert, but in less than a few hours, the sand and rock would be hot again. He preferred to be doing this now.
Becca led them along the fence and found the gate open, gently clinking in the wind. Her gasp brought Alec’s gun to rise, searching for a target. He only found dead bodies spread along the yard, the pale moonlight casting an ethereal glow over the corpses.
Becca crouched beside the first victim, and she cried without sound. “They were my friends. Dead. I could have…”
“You would have been killed with them, Becca. Come on, let’s find the coupler.” Alec helped her stand and kept his hand on her bicep, not wanting her to stray off mission. “Don’t look at them,” he said, but that was hard. There were at least thirty dead in this yard alone. They rounded a bend, and there she was. The Overseers’ monstrosity of a ship sat dark near the edge of the fence. It was even bigger than he remembered.
He recalled the horrible screeching sounds they made as they had torn through the skies above the Chicago warehouse, and he doubted Izzy Zhao had ever seen or heard one from the safety of her home.
“In here,” Becca said, heading into a storage unit. It was pitch black inside, and she tried to flip a switch. Nothing happened.
Izzy pulled her flashlight, stepping around them as she lit a path. The room smelled like death mixed with grease, and Alec blanched as he saw another two dead in the corner. A woman had a teenage girl cradled, the younger in front with a massive chest wound that had likely killed them both.
Becca headed to the opposite end of the room and slid a crate out of the way. Alec set his gun down and helped her. The box was heavy, and it scraped against the hard floor as they shoved it aside. Underneath, Becca lifted a compartment.
“This is where I hid stuff,” she said, her cheeks still wet. Her hand slid out, along with a bandana, and the metal component.
“What’s that?” Izzy asked, nodding to the piece of cloth.
“Never mind.” Becca shoved it into her pocket, and Alec didn’t want to press her about it. All that mattered was they had the coupler.
They returned outside, and Becca took them to the side of the ship. Alec craned his neck, peering up at the huge rough hull. Even seeing the vessel angered him, and he gritted his teeth as Becca manually opened a hatch on the rear of the ship. It seemed like all ancillary power was off, and Izzy used her beam to guide their entrance into the enemy craft.
Alec felt like he had been transported to another planet. There were rows upon rows of seats here, each bucket made for the Overseers’ bodies, not humans.
“This is where they sat?” Alec asked.
“
They have sleeping chambers on the other side,” Becca said, pointing past the seating section. “Garth always thought they might have come here while hibernating. He said bears do it in the winter and guessed that was the only way they could survive such a long journey.”
“How did you find out how far they come from?” Izzy asked.
“It’s on their star maps. Garth thinks it’s something like ten of our lifetimes. But it’s hard to tell. He’s only a mechanic, not a… what do you call it?” Becca asked.
Alec thought about it. “An astronomer.”
“Sure. Star doctor.” Becca ran through the ship, Alec close behind. She stopped past the empty seats, in a room with pillars of metal, boxes lining the walls from floor to ceiling. Izzy’s lights reflected the light off the shiny material, temporarily blinding Alec.
“Will they be alerted when the ship is activated?” Alec asked her.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“But they can’t tell who’s in it?” Izzy asked.
“No. Nothing like cameras on board. They never needed them,” she said confidently. “I think they have a way to record images from the exterior of the ship, though. Little help? This was much easier with two hands.”
Alec had almost forgotten that she’d cut off her own hand only a couple of weeks ago. She hardly seemed sick at all these days, but the mental wounds would still be fresh. He helped pry open the metal panel, and she passed the coupler to him. It was heavy in one hand, and she pointed at the spot to attach it. He needed both hands to jam it in, and she shoved it from behind, the device clicking into place.
Instantly, the ship hummed into life, the pillars glowing an angry orange. “This way.” Becca was already rushing from the room, and Izzy only shrugged at Alec, following the other girl to the front of the ship. Alec peered into different compartments on the way, the entire place feeling so alien to him. It was not what he’d expected. The back-up lights were on, the entire craft lit enough for Izzy to put her flashlight away.
The corridors were wide enough for three to stride side by side, the ceilings tall to accommodate the Overseers’ heights. As they entered what could only be the cockpit, or bridge, Alec could instantly smell them. It was the scent of animal musk and leather.
Alec’s gaze drifted to the bizarre seat in the center of the space, a long thick window cutting across the front of the bridge before it. “What the hell is this?”
“That’s the pilot’s seat.” Becca smiled.
It made no sense to him. There were levers and pedals under the hanging bucket. Becca must have caught his confusion, but she only grinned again as she powered everything up from a standing position near the seat. The console at least made sense, and was a glowing screen within arm’s reach of the chair.
The entire ship trembled and continued to shake, until it eventually eased to a low vibration as she adjusted the controls.
“And how on earth are you going to manage these backward pedals and contraptions?” Izzy asked, poking at the strapping with her finger.
“With a little help from my friends,” Becca told them.
Chapter 35
Cole
“Tracks go all the way to their construction site,” Renata said, leaning back as if gloating to Soares. “And you were expecting a few vagrants hiding out in the sewers?”
“Pretty much,” Cole muttered, earning a narrow-eyed glance from Soares. Cole bridled, feeling as though he’d just been chastised for interrupting the grown-ups talking. His nostrils flared, but he said nothing.
“And you’re sure of the logistics?” Soares pressed, turning to face Renata. Marisol sat beside the woman who had adopted her as she had so many others and answered for her.
“Yes. We have it on good authority the tracks are in use closer to Detroit, and that they’re clear and undamaged up to that point.”
“How?” Cole asked.
“How what, dear?” Renata asked, unintentionally solidifying his feeling of being a kid at the adults’ table.
“How can you be certain the tracks are okay? There could’ve been damage since you last had people out there.”
“Cole,” Marisol said in a kinder tone that wasn’t patronizing. “We haven’t had people out there. We’ve jacked their surveillance ops. Did it years ago.”
“You’ve what?” Soares asked, leaning forward so much, his chair tipped up at the back.
“We have our finger well and truly embedded in their digital asses,” Renata said, reviving the smug half smile to her face. “Been watching their shit for years.”
“What else can you do with it?” Cole cut in before Soares could sour the mood by telling her she should’ve shared that capability. Renata shrugged.
“We can hear their communications, not that it does us much good.” Soares opened his mouth to speak, pausing as if unsure what he wanted to say first. “You speak birdbrain, Captain Soares?” Renata asked sarcastically.
“What we can do with it, even if we can’t understand what they’re saying, is disable their whole network. For a while, at least.”
Cole sat up like Soares had, leaning forward eagerly.
“See,” Marisol went on, “we’re kind of in their system in the background. Like we’re peering through a window over their shoulder. If we lean in to press a button, they’ll know we’re there in a second, right? So we stay as silent observers.”
“But if you touched, you could shut down their entire communications network?” Soares asked.
“For a couple days,” Renata answered, well aware of the tactical advantage that would offer them. “That was always our plan; run the train into Detroit, smash their little Narnia project—”
“What’s Narni—”
“—never mind. Run the train into Detroit, kill their network, smash the gateway, and head out before reinforcements show up and find us.”
“How does it work?” Soares asked. Renata explained that sending a signal to the central nexus forced the entire system to go into a deep self-diagnostic with no possible repair from the Overseers’ side. She explained it was like a kind of self-preservation protocol against being hacked.
Cole sat up and tried to follow what was being said, hating his uncle for abandoning him and not keeping him close to learn these things. He felt so far behind the curve that he may as well have been one of the animals surviving in the wild instead of who he was.
That issue, the one of who and what he was, stung him the most.
He still reeled from Soares telling him how he’d come into the world, three minutes ahead of Alec, which made him the big brother forever, and how Tom had been the target of the traitor who’d killed his father. His father. A concept he’d given up on long ago, and as for discovering that he had been wandering the wastelands as a kid while his brother was a slave working for the aliens threw him into despair if he thought about it for too long.
He imagined what might’ve happened if he and his brother hadn’t separated. If their uncle had raised them both at Cripple Creek or any of the dozen other places he didn’t know about where people roamed free and plotted their revenge for having their world stolen from them. He wondered what Soares really meant when he said he’d loved their mother, and what he would be like if the man next to him had been there like a stepfather.
He wondered—
“Yo! Earth to Cole!” Soares said, waving a hand over his face. He blinked, shaking his head out of the daydream.
“What?”
“You heard all that?” Soares asked him.
“Err, kinda,” he said, not wanting to admit that his mind had wandered.
“We can disable their communications network for two or three days. Days. I need to get this intel to Tom a-sap.”
“Slow down, jarhead,” Renata said. “You’re acting like we’ve agreed to go along with your plan as if we haven’t been cooking up our own forever. Can you imagine how long it took us to build that train? To make and store enough explosives to make it viable? How’s th
is? We decide if we’re willing to let you be part of our plan.”
Soares said nothing for a few seconds, and stared at her.
“I’ll make contact with Tom,” he said quietly, standing up to leave the room. He didn’t give Cole another word, just left him there with the one-handed generals of the one-handed army he’d never expected to find.
“So what were you hoping to find when you arrived?” Marisol asked him.
“Not this,” Cole answered with a chuckle and more honesty than they were expecting. “I mean, maybe a couple of hundred people we could ask to join with us, but not—”
“You mean the great Tom Mason’s plan required some cannon fodder?” Renata cut over him.
“Cannon fodder?”
“Great old general,” a man standing behind Renata’s chair said in an accent that he’d heard Lina do whenever she spoke about her father or the rest of her people. “Come make big promises and offer many good things.”
The others in the room laughed, making Cole’s chest fill with anger.
“This funny to you?” he asked, seeing the man’s face drop from laughter to a hostility equally as wild as his own. He lunged forward to the table and slammed the stump of his left arm on the top.
“Do you think this is funny?” he snarled. “What have you lost, little prince?”
“My parents,” Cole answered, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut but unable to as the emotional wound was still raw.
“My parents,” the thin man mocked him in a high-pitched whine. “I lost my entire family. My. Entire. Family. I had kids, little kids too. They’d be about your age by now if idiots like your uncle hadn’t—”
“Enough,” Renata said. She didn’t raise her voice. Didn’t round on the man like she’d use violence on him; she simply gave a single command in a quiet voice.
Salvation (Rise Book 2) Page 22
