The Tide (Book 5): Iron Wind

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  But this time, instead of just blood and guts, the blades kicked up dirt and grass. He had misjudged, and they scraped the ground, first bending, then warping, and then fracturing. One of the blade fragments impaled a Skull, and another cut through a torso, separating the creature into bleeding halves. Frank lost control. The nose of the chopper hit the earth, and Frank’s harness dug into his chest and shoulders. The fuselage tumbled across the grass, smashing into the Skulls. Pain surrounded Frank like a blinding flash of light. Glowing snowflakes sparkled in his vision. Glass shattered, sprinkling him with thousands of tiny daggers as he was tossed about in the cabin, and metal groaned and screeched.

  The bird slowed, sliding sideways. Frank’s vision wavered, teetering between darkness and the jarring red throb of the chopper’s interior emergency lights. His fingers fumbled for the harness. He felt around clumsily, the pain still echoing through his body. The harness unclicked, and he fell from the seat. He stared through the broken window on the pilot’s side of the chopper. A window that now faced the sky. A thousand tiny diamonds glimmered in the black.

  He heard a crackle and felt a whoosh of heat.

  Fire bad, said a voice inside his head. Frank jolted upright. He clambered over the seat to the broken window. Every joint seemed to resist his movements. The jagged shards of glass still lining the window bit into his flesh, drawing blood, as he hoisted himself from the cabin. Smoke irritated his eyes as the flames licked higher, dancing over the chopper’s interior.

  But the crackling fire wasn’t the only sound piercing his muddled senses.

  The howls of the Skulls he’d led away from the office redoubled out as they ran from across the airport. The burning chopper was acting as a lighthouse. And those monsters weren’t the only ones growling and shrieking. A handful of Skulls were still standing amid the bloodied debris of thrown limbs and heads from his desperate attack, continuing their assault on the office as if nothing had happened.

  One of the Skulls turned his direction and cocked its head, horns gleaming in the crimson glow of the spreading flames. Its mouth opened, and all the fury of hell escaped its gray lips as it bellowed. The monster sprinted straight toward Frank. His hand reached for the gun, but with the monster’s loping gait, a single shot through the thing’s face wouldn’t be easy.

  Frank climbed on top of the chopper and whipped open the side door. Black plumes of oily smoke enveloped him, threatening to send him into a coughing fit. He reached past the dancing flames and grabbed the strap of the duffel. He yanked it out even as fire leapt across its canvas. It was weighty and ungainly, filled as it was with canned goods and water bottles.

  Perfect.

  After leaping off the chopper, Frank tested the weight of the bag, swinging it in low arcs, tongues of flame still jutting from the bag like a terrifying medieval weapon. A charging Skull lowered its head and spread its claws wide. Frank could practically see the monster’s nerves firing and its muscles tensing under its organic armor as it prepared to leap at him.

  Steadying himself, Frank narrowed his eyes and took in a deep breath. The monster pounced. Frank swung the burning bag at it. The flames hissed and fanned as the bag slammed against the Skull. The creature’s claws and spikes snagged the bag from Frank’s grip. The Skull hit the ground, rolling. The water bottles spilled from the torn bag, but the burning canvas remained tangled in the Skull’s spikes. As it scrambled and batted at the flames, the conflagration spread to the surrounding grass, catching on the weeds dried out by neglect and the changing seasons. The beast growled in agony as its body was slowly consumed by the only thing hungrier than the Skulls.

  “I always liked my Skulls well done,” Frank muttered, wiping sweat from his forehead. He turned and ran toward the office.

  A new pain shot through him, stabbing through his heart and sending him gasping. The other Skulls were gone. And on the sidewalk lay the shattered remains of the front door.

  -22-

  Lauren pressed the defibrillator paddles against Tammy Weaver’s chest again. She delivered another jolt of electricity through the woman’s body. Tammy’s eyes rolled back, and her limbs twitched. The EKG machine whined and beeped in an uneven rhythm. As Divya recharged the defibrillator, Lauren prayed the woman wouldn’t need the aid of the crash cart again. She could almost see Tammy’s soul trying to leave her body. Maybe it was delirium brought on by exhaustion, or maybe she’d grown far more spiritual with all the death she’d been surrounded by lately, but Lauren silently pleaded with that soul to stay put.

  “Ready,” Divya said in a low voice as the defibrillator indicated another full charge.

  Lauren lowered the paddles to Tammy’s skin and delivered another burst of electricity. The woman’s body jolted then went rigid.

  Come on, come on, Lauren thought.

  And then the most beautiful sound in the world pierced the thrum of the Huntress’s idling engines and Rich’s pleading and the medical team’s hushed voices as they planned what to do next. Tammy’s EKG resumed a normal, healthy rhythm, beeping with a soft, consistent beat. Lauren’s shoulders sagged. The pent-up anxiety escaped her through a long exhalation. Divya met her eyes, a smile full of bright-white teeth breaking against her warm-brown skin.

  “She’s stabilized,” Divya said.

  “She is,” Lauren said. “She is.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Rich said. “And thank you, Lauren. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  Rich leaned over and grabbed Tammy’s hand. She remained unconscious, but she was breathing on her own, and all vital signs on her biomonitors indicated she would be all right for now.

  “Peter, Divya, can you watch her?” Lauren asked.

  The two doctors nodded. Peter didn’t bother to look up as he recorded everything that had just happened in Tammy’s digital medical charts on a nearby computer. Lauren stood for a moment by Rich’s bedside, offering him a sympathetic look as she gazed into his eyes. They brimmed with tears.

  “Is she out of the woods?” he asked, his voice scratchy.

  “She’s stabilized, but it’s going to be a long road to recovery. Your immune systems are all shot, and that’s probably going to keep causing problems. But I promise you, we’ll do everything we possibly can. If you remember anything else about her medical history that might be useful, please let me know.”

  Rich nodded glumly, still holding Tammy’s limp hand. Normally, Lauren would wait by her patients’ bedsides, ensuring all their questions and concerns were answered. But she had more than just the lives of the Weavers’ weighing on her shoulders. She turned from the beds and ducked through the hatch to the lab. There she found Sean, his reddish hair messy, leaning over a computer screen next to the incubator with the organ-on-a-chip they’d set up to test the Phoenix Compound.

  “It’s done,” he said in almost a whisper.

  ***

  Kara sat at the mess table with Connor bouncing in the seat next to her. Earlier, she’d been convinced that sleep was beyond her grasp. Now, relentless tendrils of exhaustion were seeping through her. Only Connor’s delight at having two new friends to play with prevented her from acting on the almost overwhelming urge to retreat into her bunk and pass out.

  Navid, looking equally tired, held his head in his hand as he moved a white pawn across a chessboard. Connor laughed when Navid took his fingers off the piece and hungrily moved his knight into the pawn’s space, knocking it over with an exaggerated flourish.

  “Come on, Navid!” Connor said. “This’ll be the fourth game I win.”

  Kara chuckled. The boy had bragged about being the chess champion on his grade-school team. Kara could tell Navid had gone easy on him for the first couple of games, but now Navid was playing in earnest—and still losing to a ten-year-old.

  “I’m slipping,” Navid said, rubbing his eyes. “No amount of coffee is going to make me a better player at this point.”

  “You weren’t that good anyway,” Connor said with a laugh.

  “Whoa, t
hose are some fighting words,” Navid said, a grin cutting across his face.

  The boy stood on his chair, and Kara reached out to steady him as he held up his fists. He exclaimed, “I know tae kwon do. I’m a purple belt!”

  “Oh, man,” Navid said, “if your tae kwon do is as good as your chess, I already know who would win that fight.”

  The boy gave a wide smile that Kara couldn’t help but mirror. Navid, too, was beaming despite his drowsiness. Connor had gone through far too much in his family’s quest for survival than any child ever should. Despite it all, he still found joy and a bit of childlike bravado that Kara found she had to admire.

  All of that was quickly shattered when Sean burst into the mess hall.

  “We’ve got the results of the experiment,” he said, half out of breath.

  Kara jolted from the table, her heart already hammering, and Navid joined her, scooping Connor up.

  “An experiment?” Connor said, missing the gravity of the situation. “Like Bill Nye the Science Guy stuff?”

  “Not quite,” Kara said, striding toward the mess hall’s exit. She wanted to pepper Sean with questions about the results, but the most important one bubbled to the surface of her mind first. “How are Connor’s parents?”

  “They’re okay.” Sean guided them into the corridor. “Lauren said Connor could see them again. Tammy’s stabilized.”

  “Oh, good,” Navid said. They all marched back to the med bay, and the boy sprinted to his parents as soon as they were through the hatch.

  A flutter of longing trickled through Kara as she watched Rich wrap his arms around Connor and lift him up into the hospital bed. Her father was somewhere out in the Congo on his quest to stop the Oni Agent. She knew that was important—but shouldn’t his family be important too?

  Sean guided her and Navid into the lab before she could become too distracted by her thoughts. Lauren was already working on something in one of the biosafety cabinets. She didn’t even bother to greet them, so entranced by whatever it was she was doing.

  Sean turned a computer screen to face them and slumped onto a nearby stool, looking defeated. “Here’s what we found.”

  “No,” Navid said, taking in the information with a glance. “Goddammit, no.”

  Kara’s heart sank as she read the graphs and charts displayed on the monitor. The Phoenix Compound had done nothing to stop the spread of the prions from the Oni Agent. In fact, the prion levels had risen throughout the duration of the experiment, spreading and destroying the cell population in the plastic chip.

  “What do we do now?” Kara said, looking around at Lauren, then Sean, then Navid. As far as she was concerned, these were the best scientists in the world—maybe the only scientists left in the world—and it was up to them to find a cure or vaccine for the Oni Agent. She wanted them to have the answers. The Phoenix Compound had succeeded wildly in the computer simulations, but in the real world, it had failed. She didn’t understand why, and judging from the looks on their faces, neither did they.

  Her father was wandering through the jungle chasing an unknown enemy. The science team faced a microscopic enemy that still eluded their best efforts. And no one seemed to have any idea what to do. They were lost. All of them.

  And soon, as the Oni Agent devoured the last remaining survivors, humanity would be lost, too.

  -23-

  Dom leaned over the gunwale, his rifle trained on the gigantic monstrosity staring out of the trees at them. The monster bellowed loud enough to drown the noise from the straining diesel engines driving the ferry through the churning waters. Human-sized Skulls and tiny Imps still leapt from the riverbanks and the trees, caught up in their fervor and throwing themselves into the swirling current. The monstrous Skull picked up a normal one and swallowed it in a single gulp.

  “What the fuck?” Miguel said.

  The others still held a perimeter around the pilothouse. But even through their focus on defending the position, they appeared shaken by the colossal Skull.

  “Is that...is that a goddamn Goliath?” Jenna asked, her voice weak, shaky.

  “No,” Dom said. “That thing’s too fucking big to be a Goliath.”

  “Then what is it?” Glenn asked.

  Meredith scanned the ladders with her rifle, her finger still twitching next to her trigger guard. “The thing looks like Godzilla’s Skull cousin.”

  “All I know is I don’t want to stick around to find out,” Jenna said.

  “Agreed,” Dom said. “Terrence, full ahead!”

  Terrence steered the ferry deeper into the river, out of reach of the titanic Skull. The monster roared again. Its mouth looked like the entrance to a cave. Somewhere off in the distance, another bellow thundered in response. A third, then a fourth joined in the chorus. Was it instinct, or were they actually communicating with each other?

  “Don’t tell me there are more of ’em,” Terrence moaned, his hands tight on the wheel.

  “Of course there are,” Dom said. “Wouldn’t want to make this mission any easier, would we?”

  The monster continued to stare at them, but it didn’t give chase. The ferry turned around a bend in the river, blocking Dom’s view. He heard the echoing thuds of the creature stomping through the jungle once more.

  “Titan,” Miguel said, swiveling around to face the ladders leading up to the pilothouse again.

  “Huh?” Andris asked.

  “Titan,” Miguel repeated. “That’s what those things are.”

  “Then call me Perseus. Let me at ’em if those things come after us,” Glenn said through the corner of his tightly pressed lips. He locked a grenade case into the launcher mounted under the barrel of his gun.

  “Son of Zeus or not,” Dom started, “don’t get any big ideas. We’ve got enough trouble on our own ship.”

  The Hunters waited. The Imps were still around here somewhere, skulking around the lower decks. Dom played his rifle over the shadows, his nerves on fire with anticipation. His ears perked with each creak of the ferry and slap of a wave against its hull. Normal Skulls wasted no time in running after prey. The monsters the Hunters were accustomed to hardly ever prowled around silently, either. Could these ones be different somehow? If they truly had been monkeys once, had the Oni Agent affected them differently?

  What the hell were they up to? The seconds ticked by, and still nothing happened. Maybe they were setting up an ambush, waiting for the Hunters to let curiosity get the better of them. Even so, Dom expected to hear the patter of their feet on the wrecked cars below.

  “Dom...?” a tentative voice called from the pilothouse.

  Dom turned slightly and looked at Renee through the open door. Under the bruises covering her face, he saw a worried expression. She held out a hand, pointing back at Dom.

  No, not at him. Above him. He swung his rifle up to the roof of the pilothouse. One of the monkey-like Imps was hanging there by its prehensile tail.

  “Son of a bitch,” Dom said, stepping back.

  The monster hissed and then sprang at him in a flurry of claws and slicing talons. He fired, and bullets lanced into its lithe frame, cracking through bone and tearing flesh. The little monster slammed against the bulkhead. Its body slid to the deck, leaving a trail of blood. It collapsed in a mangled heap of limbs, its maw hanging open. Even as the air escaped the defeated Skull’s lungs in a whispered death rattle, more Imps appeared along the roof of the pilothouse, hooting in a wild chorus. The bastards had crept all the way up here for a beautiful sneak attack. Dom would’ve admired their intelligence if they didn’t appear ready to rip his throat out.

  “Open fire!” Dom roared.

  The Hunters’ rifles blazed. Bullets punched into the Imps as the Hunters sidestepped their airborne attacks. They parried dagger-like claws with their rifles and kicked out with heavy boots. Dom brought down Skull after Skull. For every one he killed, another seemed to take its place. He clicked the selector on his rifle to full automatic and sprayed the relentless beasts w
ith a wave of lead as he retreated toward the gunwale, eager to put extra space between him and the beasts.

  His rifle’s bolt locked back. Empty.

  A Skull landed on the deck in front of him. Only three feet tall, it reared back and then pounced. Dom slammed the stock of his rifle against the monster’s chest, and it let out a high-pitched wheeze as it flew backward. To Dom’s astonishment, it forced itself back to its feet and prepared for another attack. The little bastards were tough despite their size.

  “Dom! Look out!” Meredith yelled as she jammed a fresh magazine home in her own rifle.

  Another Imp took advantage of Dom’s inattention and leapt from the roof. At the same time, the Imp he’d injured leapt at him from the deck. Both creatures aimed for Dom’s neck. He held his rifle sideways to block their attacks. The monsters collided with the rifle, and they clung to it, their heads snapping forward and their jaws gnashing. Dom crushed them between the bulkhead and the rifle. Their armor split open, releasing a spray of crimson liquid. It rained against Dom’s face, but he ignored the gore and let their bodies drop.

  “Reloading!” he yelled.

  The curses of the other Hunters and the chatter of their rifles sounded all around him as he changed the magazine. The others remained focused on the creatures pouncing on them from the roof. Miguel sprayed a blast of the Drooler-like acid from his prosthetic, dousing several of the Imps. Their weakened armor was no match for the bullets, fists, and rifle stocks that butted against them. The monsters fell in waves.

  Dom was reconsidering his initial assessment of their intelligence when the scratch of claws on metal sounded from the side of the ferry. A group of Imps was scaling the hull, using the portholes, rivets, and pockets of rust to reach the Hunters’ position.

  “Behind us!” Dom bellowed, hoping to be heard above the din of battle. He’d underestimated his enemy again. He was slowing down, both his body and his brain. Was he losing it, or was he just getting too old for this war? He sent a spray of bullets at the attackers, knocking them into the water. Their bodies disappeared with a splash, but dozens more were climbing up toward them.