“All right. Speaking of acting, Midshipman Rachel Kaufman, you’re up next,” Frank said.
Rachel bounced up and down, hyping herself up. An elderly couple carting a wheelbarrow full of canned goods to an aid dispensary gave her a strange look.
“I know you need to get into it, but maybe tone down the Rocky impersonation, eh?” Frank said.
Rachel’s cheeks flushed. “Got it, got it. Okay, let’s do this.”
She marched at a brisk pace. The fatigues she’d been issued by the island’s makeshift garrison forces lent her an air of importance. Children playing ball in a parking lot stopped and watched her. One of them pointed, but Rachel ignored them. Frank followed her lead, trying to act like he was in a hurry. Of course, he was in a hurry.
The gates of the airfield rose before them at the end of the road. Two soldiers cradled M16s at a checkpoint. One stepped forward.
“Ma’am, I need you to stop right there,” the soldier said.
“We’ve got a situation,” Rachel said. “Potential civilian rescue.”
“We haven’t been notified of any immediate missions.”
She gave him a steely look. “You have now.”
Frank tried to mimic her expression, but he thought he probably just looked constipated. Rachel handed the guard a memo. Shepherd had forged Colonel Gregory Stockholm’s signature onto a new memo they’d drafted detailing an urgent helicopter search-and-rescue mission.
The soldier read the paper then narrowed his eyes as he examined Frank and Shepherd. “Why in the hell do you have civilians with you?”
Now it was Frank’s turn for a little role-play. He snapped to attention. “Lieutenant Leonard Gerald Craft, former member of the Virginia Air National Guard 192nd Fighter wing. I’m the one that flew in the Robinson last night.”
“The 192nd flies F-22A Raptors, not helicopters.”
“And unfortunately Raptors aren’t available on Kent,” Frank shot back. “Not great for rescuing civilians, either.”
The soldier looked at Shepherd next with a wary expression. “Little old to be flying, aren’t you?”
“Retired but not dead.” Shepherd scowled. “Twenty years in the First Heli flying Hueys out of Andrews. I still know what I’m doing.”
Frank wanted to applaud. Shepherd had missed his calling as an actor. He sounded like John Wayne. “Now can you let us through? We’ve got to get that bird in the sky. Got a whole family waiting for us outside Annapolis.”
“Where’s the rest of your rescue team?” the second soldier asked. “One midshipman ain’t going to cut it.”
Boot steps pounded down the street as Rory sprinted toward them. A pack bounced against his back, and he held another, larger bag under his right arm. “Ready to go!” he yelled, waving at them.
“There’s the rest of the team,” Frank said.
One of the soldiers looked up at Frank, concern in his eyes. “Just the four of you guys? Those monsters are even more dangerous than they look.”
“Trust me,” Frank said, “I know how to tango with ’em.”
The other soldier gestured into the airfield. “Then good luck and Godspeed.”
They ran to the Robinson, and Frank whipped open the side door. He helped Rory with his luggage. “Found everything?”
“Yep,” he said. “This stuff is goddamn heavy.” He slumped into a rear passenger seat. “But I grabbed an inflatable lifeboat, and we should have plenty of ammo.”
“Good,” Frank said, flicking the ignition switch. The rotors spun slowly. As they accelerated, the engines whined and their beat drowned out all other noise in the cabin. Frank handed everyone a headset. “Look, this is your last chance. I appreciate you guys getting me to the chopper, but you really don’t have to go. I can handle this on my own. Only takes one man to fly a helicopter.”
“Absolutely not,” Shepherd said. “The only way you’re making it to the Huntress is if you can refuel it somewhere. The airbases will be a lot more responsive to an army colonel like me than they will be to a covert ops guy whose service record has been classified.”
“And what if Kinsey told the people over there about you and us Hunters?”
“That’s a risk we’ll have to take.”
Frank glanced at the other two in the backseats.
“And you two?”
Rachel scowled as she fixed her harness. “There’s no way in hell you’re leaving us behind. Kinsey’s people have this place under control now.”
“And besides,” Rory added, “if you have to make an ocean landing, who the hell will sail your lifeboat?”
“Do either of you even know how to sail?” Rachel said with a raised brow then looked at Shepherd. “Pardon my bluntness, sir.”
“Forgiven,” Shepherd said.
“All right,” Frank said. “Suit yourselves.” He glanced out the cockpit and saw one of the guards marching toward them. He was yelling something, but his voice was lost in the churn of the rotors. “Looks like United Hunters Airlines is going to make an early departure. Everybody strap in. Could be a bumpy ride.”
Frank pulled back on the cyclic, and the chopper lifted from the tarmac. The soldier continued waving, trying to beckon them back to Earth, but Frank pretended not to notice. He turned the radio off for now and banked away from Kent. They flew low over the coast, skimming the trees and the water to stay out of radar.
But no one pursued them. They probably didn’t deem him important enough to worry about. They wouldn’t expend their resources trying to chase him down. The real ones risking their asses were Shepherd, Rachel, and Rory. Shepherd had already given up on his plan to return to Fort Detrick when he’d heard that General Kinsey had installed his own garrison commander there. If he showed up at his old command now, he would be court-martialed or sent back to that underground prison in Virginia. The two midshipmen, however, risked dereliction of duty. Rachel insisted that she didn’t care, but Frank still worried.
They had all agreed on one thing: It was vital they did everything in their power to support the Hunters’ mission. It might be the only way to stop the Oni Agent and whoever was responsible for it.
Waves crested below, breaking into whitecaps near the shore. Trees rustled as the rotor wash flowed over them. Several Skulls emerged from the woods and gave chase, but they soon became discouraged as the chopper outran them. Frank flew inland, over the ruins of once-thriving towns and abandoned housing developments. Craters pocked the highways, and grass grew wild and high in untended lawns. Skulls were sifting through the rubble, searching for food. The monsters often cranked their heads up and looked hungrily at the chopper. A Goliath pushing aside sedans and trucks as if they were toys grabbed a chunk of concrete and threw it. Frank deftly avoided the missile, but he would feel a hell of a lot better when they could put more distance between them and the monsters.
Soon they approached the destination Frank had in mind: Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall Airport. A control tower jutted from a crisscross of terminals and runways. Planes were parked at their terminals as if they were ready to load their next batch of passengers. Many more lay in pieces in the grass near the edge of two runways, and ambulances and other emergency response vehicles were scattered across the tarmac. As they drew closer, Frank could better see the smaller objects spread between planes and vehicles. Bodies. More accurately, skeletons, torn apart and picked clean of meat. Lumbering between the corpses were the cause of those people’s deaths.
“Please tell me we aren’t landing in the middle of all these Skulls,” Rachel said.
“Nope,” Frank said cheerfully. He nodded to a hangar marked with huge black letters along the side that read Air Cargo Center. Several regional cargo planes and larger international planes, painted with the logos of various shipping companies, sat outside. And between them, Skulls wandered like ants at a picnic. “We’re landing in the middle of those Skulls.”
-32-
Meredith had seen some terrible and awe-inspiring things
in her life, but nothing compared to this.
“Holy shit,” she breathed.
The monstrosity rose out of the water. Its nostrils flared flat against its bony mask. Its eyes—goddamn near the size of basketballs—stared with an eerie calmness unlike the wrathful gaze characteristic of the Skulls. Imps hung off the monster by their spindly claws or skeletal tails. Massive horns roped out of the behemoth’s head, and bulky spikes stuck out from its shoulder, following a line down to its fists. The face of the creature looked vaguely like that of a gorilla’s, but this monstrous mutation was beyond anything she’d seen the Oni Agent achieve.
It was a goddamn Titan.
A nervous tingling crept through Meredith’s skin. She couldn’t believe this was the natural result of the Oni Agent. This was something far worse than the Goliaths and Droolers. The scientific explanations Lauren’s team had discovered for those creatures simply couldn’t apply to the Titan. Goliaths were the result of the abnormal bone growth affecting the pituitary glands and growth hormones. Droolers resulted from the Oni Agent overstimulating the cells and gastric glands in the stomach lining of some Skulls, increasing acid production to absurdly high levels. Droolers and Goliaths were simply side effects of the Oni Agent rearing up in some Skulls akin to how pharmaceutical drugs affected different people in various ways.
But the Titan was too enormous to be the result of out-of-whack growth hormones, and it would take a hell of a lot more than a few overactive cells to produce a monster of that size. Whatever this monster was, it seemed to be the evidence of some twisted genetic experiment. Something like the Titan couldn’t just be a side effect of the Oni Agent; it had to be deliberately designed.
Narrowing its eyes, the monster’s gaze swept over the Hunters. It regarded Meredith with an almost inquisitive glance, and she could practically feel the intelligence radiating off the creature. Its hands gripped the stern of the ferry, claws puncturing the deck, and cars slid toward it as the creature put its weight on the boat. Heavy bangs and thuds of crashing metal sounded out. But the Titan seemed unperturbed, almost lazy.
A hand grabbed Meredith’s shoulder, dragging her backward, and she tumbled into Dom’s chest. A delivery truck scraped past where she had been standing seconds ago.
“You all right?” Dom asked.
“So far,” Meredith said. She pushed herself up and then quickly sidestepped to avoid a Volkswagen with a cracked windshield rolling toward her.
“What the hell do we do, Chief?” Miguel called over the din of scraping cars. Imps hopped from the shoulders of the Titan. Their screeches were loud enough to rival the jarring crash of metal against metal around the tipping ferry.
Meredith could barely hear Dom’s order over the comms. “Open fire and move to the bow!”
She shouldered her rifle and took potshots at the Titan’s face. Between firing, she used a hand to steady herself on the railing, following it toward the bow.
“I don’t think bullets will cut it!” Andris barked between salvos. Jenna swept her rifle over a car, blasting at the smaller Skulls. Their bodies went cartwheeling away.
“No problem!” Glenn locked a grenade case into his barrel-mounted FN40 grenade launcher. The grenade flew from the wide barrel with a whoomph. It collided with the Titan’s chest in a furious ball of smoke and fire. Chips of bone flew from the cloud of billowing gray like shrapnel.
But as the humid breeze scattered the smoke, Meredith’s heart dropped. The devastating explosion would’ve leveled a squad of Skulls. It would’ve demolished a Drooler. And even a Goliath would have—and had—fallen to such a blast.
The Titan didn’t seem to notice the fresh cracks on its chest plates. It continued to look at the Hunters with that placid, almost sympathetic stare, as if this were all just a boring game. They would have to waste far too much ammunition—ammunition they were already low on to begin with—to even stand a chance of bringing this abomination down.
“No way. No fucking way.” She fired a three-round burst into the monster’s face. Bullets pinged off the thick armor, chipping off only a few insignificant fragments.
Miguel was aiming for the creature’s eyes like her. Their rifles chattered, and spent bullet casing rolled across the deck.
“To the lifeboat!” Dom yelled, his voice breaking over the comm link. “Starboard side.”
An Imp bounced toward Meredith. She drew her aim from the Titan and caught the Skull in her optics. The rifle kicked against her shoulder as she fired, but the rounds plunged into the rusted shell of a sedan as the monster leapt with all the deftness of a practiced acrobat.
The ferry lurched just as the Imp hurled itself at Meredith. She had no time to adjust her aim, and she ducked under the creature’s slashing talons and fanged maw. The monster collided with the gunwale behind her, and Meredith used the stock of her rifle to bash the back of the creature’s skull. It screamed at her, twisting its head around, and spittle flew over her tac vast. But another heavy blow launched the monster out over the river, and she heard the satisfying plop of its body dropping into water.
“Mere!” Dom’s voice bellowed.
Meredith turned to see a truck sliding sideways toward her. There was no time to get out of its path. She dropped, pressing herself flat to the deck. Rubber skidded on the wet metal of the deck. She willed herself to sink into the deck as the heavy four-by-four moved overhead. A piece of metal snagged on the back of her jacket and tugged her with the truck.
“Help!” she yelled into the comm link.
Meredith struggled, trying to find anything to help free her from the suicidal truck’s path toward the river. All around, cars were splashing into the river while the Imps screeched like cheerleaders from hell. She imagined the vehicle crashing into the water, tumbling into the darkness at the feet of the Titan. She would either drown or be crushed.
Not great.
“I’m stuck under this goddamned truck!” Meredith yelled again.
“Hold on!” Dom called back.
She listened for his boots, but the chaos prevented her from hearing anything more than the crashing vehicles and squawking Skulls. Then something dove under the car beside her.
“I got you!” Dom yelled, his face covered in specks of blood and mud. With one hand gripping the frame of the truck, he grabbed the jacket where Meredith couldn’t reach and pulled. The busted metal groaned as he tugged, but she was still stuck.
Gravity pulled the truck—and Meredith—down the slope of the deck.
“Shit!” she gasped. She could see the water now. The truck obscured most of her view, but she judged she had maybe a dozen yards before the river took her.
“It’s not coming loose!” Dom said, tugging at her jacket. His eyes narrowed, and his face scrunched in determination as he hung onto the bottom of the truck to keep pace with her. He pulled a knife from his thigh sheath and swiped at the fabric with the blade, but the jacket was designed to be tough.
Another vehicle crashed into the river, and water plumed up, splashing Meredith and Dom. They were fifteen feet from the stern, then ten feet. Five feet.
Meredith’s legs dangled in open air as two of the truck’s wheels fell over the side. Dom heaved one last time, and the jacket ripped. Meredith scrambled over to him as the truck plummeted into the water. Dom scrambled to his feet, and Meredith jolted up. The Titan ignored the unfolding drama.
“What the hell is it doing?” Dom asked as they dodged past another sedan.
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it,” Meredith said. It was too strange, too calm. It displayed none of the usual relentless aggression she expected from a Skull. It seemed content just to sabotage the Hunters’ efforts of traveling down the river.
“Hey, Chief! Meredith!” Miguel’s voice crackled over the comm link. “Lifeboats are ready. You two lovers, get your asses up here.”
The rattle of gunfire echoed out. Meredith and Dom bounded between cars. Puddles of blood pooled along the deck, and bones crunched as cars rolled
over the corpses of the Imps. Miguel waved at them from near the starboard bow. The rest of the team waited with their rifles scanning their surroundings. The groan of protesting metal sounded louder, and the Hunters jumped for handholds as the stern tilted sharply.
Meredith and Dom pushed forward, climbing the almost forty-five-degree angle. Most of the vehicles had already plummeted off the stern or were piled up against the gunwale where the Titan pressed down with its massive palms. Meredith’s muscles burned with each step, and pain stabbed through her left shoulder. She ignored the building agony for now. Painkillers could wait until she was off this godforsaken deathtrap of a boat.
“The fuck is that thing doing?” Terrence held a rope securing the lifeboat.
None of the Hunters fired at the Titan. The best they could hope to achieve was to plug the creature’s eyes and blind it. But from their vantage point and the angle of the ferry, the pilothouse and the rest of the passenger decks blocked the view of the monster’s face. The bow crept higher, and water made its way up the deck. The ferry was going under. They were sinking.
“On the lifeboat. Let’s move now!” Dom roared.
The Hunters leapt aboard the flimsy wooden boat. Meredith jumped onto one of the seats, and it cracked under her weight. She feared what the rotting seat meant for the condition of the craft.
At Dom’s order, Terrence began lowering the boat. The ropes whipped through the pulley system holding the lifeboat against the side of the ferry, and the craft began a free fall toward the river. A moment later, it hit the surface. Water sprayed up in huge fans. A leak sprung up almost at once through the bottom of the boat, and a puddle soon formed at Meredith’s boots.
“Here I come!” Terrence yelled, leaping from the ferry. His hands whirled as he fell and then plunged into the water. He disappeared into the murk in a ring of bubbles. Then he bobbed up, gasping for air and kicking to remain above the surface against the heavy burden of his equipment.
Meredith reached out and clutched the back of Terrence’s tac vest. She hauled him toward the lifeboat and helped him in.
The Tide (Book 5): Iron Wind Page 20
