“Miss Dennison,” he said, turning back to watch his sector of responsibility. Skye stopped and stood beside him, dwarfed by the man’s size. Even without all the bulky gear – the soldiers called it battle rattle – Bracco was massive, a competitive weightlifter as well as a Ranger. His cinderblock of a jaw looked as solid as its descriptor, and Skye’s first thought upon seeing him in Chico was, steroids. She’d decided that the Army probably tested for that though, along with other drugs. That meant Corporal Bracco had developed his size and mass through fierce determination and punishing effort, and that made him a bit awe-inspiring. He was bigger than Carney had been, even bigger than her dead lover’s psychotic cellmate, TC.
Thinking of TC brought with it memories of the rape, and her subsequent execution of the son-of-a-bitch out on the deck of the aircraft carrier. And it made her think of Carney, mostly his handsome eyes, but also his gentle touch. Gone for only days now, their brief time together was beginning to take on a dreamlike quality. But it was a dream that brought on tears, and she roughly palmed them away. Better not to think of him, or her friends on Nimitz. She had to let them go. Their memories made her weak.
Bracco was only a couple of years older than Skye, but while listening to the conversations between the men she’d learned that several of them had been in either Afghanistan or Iraq. But Bracco wasn’t quiet and stern, something she expected from a combat veteran. Quite the contrary; he was friendly and smiled easily. She wondered if that meant he hadn’t seen much combat? Perhaps he was just better at concealing the pain. It made her think of the things she had seen and done, and the mark they had left on her.
“There’s food inside,” Skye said at last. “I’ll take over.”
The corporal nodded. “Hard to believe it’s January,” he said, his voice soft, as if the quiet of the night demanded it. “Even with the wind, I’ll bet it’s still in the upper forties.”
They both knew it would get a lot colder once they left the California lowlands and entered the mountains.
“We’d be freezing our asses off and up to our necks in snow by now back in Jersey,” he said, smiling. “Where’s home for you?”
Skye glanced at him and then looked away. “Your food’s getting cold.”
The big corporal hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and headed back toward the house, leaving Skye alone and staring into the night. With ample moonlight, her eye adjusted quickly and she took in her surroundings. The house was behind her, a large barn sat off to her right, and ahead of her was an expanse of field with a large copse of trees just inside a barbed wire fence running east to west. Beyond that was the road by which they’d arrived, a small group of people strung out on foot in a ragged line with plenty of space between each of them. The breeze rustled the high grasses in the field and made the black oak’s bare limbs whisper above her.
Skye changed her stance a bit to take weight off her right ankle. It hadn’t been a bad sprain, though painful during the first day, and now after another full day of walking it was starting to throb. She couldn’t afford to have an ankle slowing her down.
Chico was almost two days behind them now. That first afternoon, after leaving the airport, the Rangers made it as far as the outskirts of Oroville, where they’d spent a tense night in a barn. Captain Sallinger hadn’t wanted to go into the town itself, and now after hearing his story she knew why. It still crawled with the dead. They had encountered and shot down a few along the roads and in fields during their march, but the numbers had been manageable. With their current low levels of ammunition, Oroville would have been a slaughter, with them as the victims.
Sitting in the barn that night, the captain had a lot of questions for her, mostly about the bikers back in Chico. How many were there? How were they armed? What do you know about their armored vehicle? He’d appeared relieved when Skye explained how she had taken out the Bradley and its crew, and the officer seemed to look at her a little differently after that.
Skye answered his questions carefully, revealing nothing about Angie and Dean, her friends back on the Nimitz, certainly nothing about Carney. She knew it was obvious that she was leaving out large pieces of information, but she didn’t care, and the captain didn’t press. The captain was mostly concerned that the bikers might try to follow them. Skye thought about the bikers that had kidnapped little Leah West, and the kind of wrath Angie and Dean would have visited on them for snatching their little girl. All she told Sallinger was that she was confident the bikers were dead.
Today there had been more walking, the Ranger captain keeping them off the roads and sticking to the fields, finding concealment in trees when possible and cutting fences as necessary, but always heading southeast. They’d bypassed the tiny rural communities of Palermo and Honcut, and were now somewhere between Grass Valley and Nevada City. Sallinger said they’d find vehicles tomorrow and head for Interstate 80 before turning west into the mountains.
At some point during the day’s walk they’d thought they heard the distant beat of helicopter rotors, but no aircraft came into view and the sound hadn’t repeated. Out here in farm country, they encountered the dead infrequently, loners or pairs wandering the fields. When they came close to the team, the men would dispatch them with the tomahawks they all seemed to carry, conserving ammunition and avoiding making unnecessary noise. Moore, the black PFC, had given such a weapon to Skye during a break.
“I heard you tell the captain you used a machete,” Moore said, handing her the sturdy but lightweight hatchet. “This is better. It belonged to Corn.”
She hadn’t understood what he meant at the time, but after hearing Sallinger tell the story about the Oroville police station and the loss of their man, it made sense. She liked the weight and balance of the tomahawk, and it now rode in a ring on her belt. She planned to add a pistol as well, just as soon as she could find one. Maybe two.
As they traveled during the daytime, the Rangers were all business, rarely talking (and then only in soft voices) and communicating primarily with hand signals, a process to which Skye paid close attention. When they took a break or camped for the night, however, the men never seemed to shut up. Except for the master sergeant. The enlisted Rangers hammered her with questions about who she was, where she’d been and what she’d seen. They wanted to tell her all about themselves and their lives back home, as if it all still existed and was waiting for them once this situation was under control. Skye didn’t want to hear about their home towns and girlfriends, their funny Army stories or their worries about loved ones. She needed them, she understood that, and there were things about survival and combat that the Rangers could teach her, but she didn’t want to know them, to like them.
She knew they’d think she was a bitch, cold and unfriendly. So be it. She had to protect herself. And listening to their chatter gave her the impression that none of them, before their little trip from Nevada, had truly seen the horrors out here, been forced to kill the way she had, both the dead and the living. They were learning, sure, but had already lost two men in a week. It didn’t look good for them. Skye was an outsider, and that was the best thing to be. Yes, they were professionally trained, organized, and had seen some combat. She wouldn’t even try to compare herself to them. But she had decided that they lacked the mindset that had kept her alive this long. This bloody and horrific world had made her a survivor. Better not to be a part of their team. She didn’t want to see their faces in her dreams after they were all dead.
Movement across the nighttime field pulled her attention back to the present, and she brought the M4 up instantly, looking through the sights. She found what she was looking for quickly, settling the luminescent green chevrons of her combat optics on the thing lurching toward her across the field. It was a girl about her age, dressed in a tank top and shorts, her long hair matted against her face with dried blood. One shoulder sagged and she walked with a crooked stoop, shuffling through the high grass. The dead girl was making an eager croaking noise that could be hea
rd in the still night from fifty yards away.
Skye watched her through the rifle optics, thinking about how the common dead were so very different from the red-skinned Hobgoblin in Chico, the one that had pursued and nearly killed her. It had been fast, a physical creature and - most dangerous of all - able to think and learn. She shuddered at the memory of its weight on top of her, its madly clawing nails and lunatic screeches, the blindingly painful pressure as it tried to crush her skull with its hands. Skye squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the visual.
The dead girl continued at her slow, relentless gait, and as the thing closed on the young woman near the tree, Skye slung her rifle, waiting for it. When the corpse finally neared her and let out a moan, breaking into a gallop, Skye pulled her tomahawk and strode to meet it, swinging hard, burying the blade in the girl’s forehead. The body stiffened and fell, and Skye jerked the blade free, wiping it on the girl’s shirt. Then she walked back to the tree and resumed her watch.
After minutes of silence, there was a sudden, sharp twinge behind her blind eye. It made her wince and she slipped her fingertips up under the patch and pressed against the eyeball. The pressure seemed to help a little, but the pain was still there, and a dull ache had begun at the front of her brain. This was the second such twinge she’d had today. The first had passed quickly, but this one hurt more. Suddenly Skye feared that the mind-splitting headaches she’d experienced right after surviving the Slow Burn might be returning. The thought made her tremble.
She didn’t think she could go through that again.
FIVE
The Hobgoblin crouched at the edge of the trees and watched as the not-dead thing – a Skye she had heard it called – killed the dead thing with a single blow. The Skye gave off a delicious, nearly irresistible scent, and Red longed to kill it, to feel its hot blood jet across her own scarlet-hued skin. A mere fifty yards separated the two of them, just a sprint and the prey would be hers. The Hobgoblin’s muscles twitched, thighs tensing, but she resisted, settling back into a crouch, one fingernail idly clawing a line in the tree bark beside her. The Skye had a weapon that could kill at a distance. Better to wait.
Red was how she thought of herself, an association her rapidly developing brain made with both her skin shade and long hair. Reborn on a clear night not long ago, attached by a collar to a steel-cable dog run outside a church fortress, she knew that she had been like the other dead things once. Now she realized she was more. So much more. The dead things were insignificant compared to her; unthinking, slow, lacking any awareness of self. They could not and would not harm her. So very different. These words and ideas didn’t come to her as actual articulated language, but more as a series of instincts and sensations. But that was changing, too.
Red was learning more about the dead things. She thought they might be used.
That one in the field, just now killed by the Skye, had started out here in this small grove. It had stumbled through the trees and come to an unsteady halt when it saw the female Hobgoblin, staring at her and tilting its head as if curious. Red glared at it and growled, the sound a menacing rumble in her chest, but the dead thing just stood there. Red leaped at it and struck, ragged fingernails splitting the tight flesh of its face into four open, bloodless stripes, rocking its head to one side. The dead girl staggered, but did not strike back and did not retreat. Then it wandered a few steps, arms limp at its side as if unsure of what to do.
The smell of the Skye brought Red back to the edge of the trees, and her nostrils flared.
The dead girl croaked behind her.
Red went back to it, grabbed it by the neck and pushed it along before her. The creature went easily enough. At the edge of the trees she took it by the shoulders, turned it toward where the Skye was standing, and with a push propelled it out into the open.
The dead girl stumbled a few steps, stopped, then lifted its head. A moment later it was stalking across the field toward the Skye, croaking hungrily. The Skye killed it, of course, as Red knew she would. But the Hobgoblin had learned from the encounter.
Now as the hybrid crouched beside the tree, looking at the living female in the darkness (she could scent its gender, different from the male-things she traveled with) she saw the night world in tones of red and gray, the Skye’s heat source a bright crimson beside the tree, which showed up as a grayish pink. The Skye didn’t know how close Red was, and certainly didn’t know that they had been much closer than this at one point.
Only just last night, Red had been lying on her belly in the shadows beneath a car sitting up on cinderblocks, while the Skye and the male not-dead things stood nearby in a group, communicating with their incomprehensible but vaguely familiar noises. The urge to strike had almost overwhelmed her, and the Hobgoblin knew she could have killed most of them before they reacted. But not all, and she herself would have been destroyed. Along with her new, growing instincts came a measure of self-preservation, and though it was not as powerful as the need to kill, it nonetheless kept her in check. Instead of attacking, the female Hobgoblin lay there trembling, forcing herself to hold back, to listen.
To learn.
Besides, she wanted to kill the Skye slowly, wanted to enjoy her agony. Red didn’t understand why this female was so important to her, only knew that this particular kill had to be special. The desire to torment and inflict pain on this female, to devour her slowly while still alive, was like a fire in her chest, and she would obey the orders coming from her accelerating thoughts and reasoning.
She stiffened suddenly as a sharp odor hit her, carried on the air, close and downwind. Enraged that the source of this sense could get so close to her, would dare to get so close, she spun and bared her teeth, still crouching, tensed to spring. A growl started deep in her throat.
There was another out there. Another like herself.
Scenting. Listening. Controlling her growl so she could hear it. Somewhere in the trees.
An object arced through the night and landed near her feet, and the female Hobgoblin nearly shrieked and charged, but forced herself to be still, to look instead. It was a rabbit with a snapped neck, fur wet with blood. She inhaled. It was a fresh kill.
The little one stepped out from her concealment within the trees then, only twenty feet away. She was dressed in the blood-soaked tatters of what had been a school uniform; plaid jumper and skirt over a once-white blouse. Blackened bite wounds had not so much torn her face apart as removed it, and glittering obsidian eyes stared back from the mass of destroyed tissue and white bone. There was nothing left to reveal whether or not she had been pretty, or even give an indication of her age (though her diminutive size suggested a third-grader or younger.) Limp black hair framed the horror that had been her face. The rest of her skin was the same crimson shade as the older Hobgoblin, and powerful muscles flexed beneath.
Red snarled and lowered further into a crouch, ready to spring. The maimed girl squatted, lowered her head so as not to look at the older Hobgoblin, and held out both hands. They were bloody with bits of fur caught between the fingers and under the nails.
Red snatched the rabbit off the ground and leaped, knocking the little girl over and grabbing her savaged face with one hand, squeezing as she pinned the intruder to the forest floor. The girl didn’t struggle, didn’t growl or try to fight back. She lay still, bloody hands still held upward.
Red sniffed at the little Hobgoblin, then at the rabbit. Still holding the newcomer down, she tore into the furry, still-warm carcass, devouring two-thirds of it in seconds, crushing the bones between her teeth. Instinct and images flashed red in her brain. This lacked the satisfaction of feeding on human flesh, and was far from the bliss that killing the Skye would bring, but it was meat, and it would do for now. She released the other Hobgoblin and dropped the remains of the rabbit in front of her, sitting back.
The girl rose to her knees and immediately consumed what was left of the small animal. Red watched her eat, still scenting, still trying to process the
rapid-fire images in her brain. They were the same, she and this girl, but this one wasn’t as strong as Red, and the newcomer knew it. It felt right.
A shard of moonlight caught something shiny around the smaller hobgoblin’s neck, a tiny image she had seen somewhere before. Something flared in her brain, and Red made a croaking sound.
The girl finished the rabbit and looked up at the noise.
Red croaked again, synapsis firing off in spectacular flashes. She raised her hand, examined it for a moment, and then the index finger straightened.
The little one cocked her head.
Hesitantly, Red’s index finger pointed at the girl. She croaked, croaked again, and then made a noise that might have sounded like cross.
One of the little one’s bloody hands rose slowly to touch the object hanging around her neck. She attempted to mimic the sound the older one had made. Red made the noise again. Cross. Again, the little one echoed.
Red knew she could destroy the newcomer if she so desired, though suspected the small female would not go without a fight, regardless of her submissiveness. She processed this, and with inarticulate thought, weighed between destruction and cooperation. Red extended a hand, and the girl lowered her head. Scarlet fingers touched matted black hair.
“Cross,” the Hobgoblin rasped.
And then they were two.
SIX
The low country was almost behind them. Captain Sallinger and Master Sergeant Cribbs had spent the morning scouting farms until they found vehicles that would suit the team’s needs – and would actually start – and it was just past noon when the Rangers started rolling. The captain had split them into two squads; in the lead was a silver, four-door Nissan Titan pickup truck with PFC Moore at the wheel, Sallinger riding shotgun and Skye and Cpl. Bracco in the rear seats. Behind them the master sergeant, PFC Rooker and Cole the SAW gunner rode in an orange California Highway Department utility truck, Rooker doing the driving. Checking abandoned cars and siphoning enough fuel to fill both trucks had taken the most time, but now the Rangers were able to stow their gear in the truck beds, leaving space in the cabs. Their feet were thankful for the respite from walking.
Omega Days (Book 5): The Feral Road Page 4
