“Barnes will hold them,” Lemke said. “We won’t lose the White House again.”
Beckham had faith in the men and women down there, but it was going to be a tough and bloody fight. He didn’t like abandoning them, but his family came first.
“Where are we headed?” yelled one of the pilots.
“Peaks Island!” Ringgold shouted back.
“Thank you,” Beckham said.
“Yes, thanks,” Horn added.
Beckham took a seat, trying to catch his breath and calm his thumping heart. Horn sat next to him, his big arms brushing up against Beckham.
“Everything’s going to be okay, boss,” he said. “We’ll get through this.”
Beckham wanted to believe that, but an update from one of the pilots shattered his hope.
“I’m hearing a ton of radio chatter,” said one of the pilots. “Sounds like the Variants are pounding the outposts.”
The reports continued to stream in over the seven-hour long flight to the island. By the time they were narrowing in on the location, outposts around the target cities were drowning in the masses of Variants descending on them.
“Change of plans,” said one of the pilots. “The science team and families have been evacuated from Peaks Island and are meeting us at Outpost Portland. So far the Variants are still being held back further west.”
Horn’s leg went back to rocking and Beckham closed his eyes, in an attempt to focus his mind and keep calm.
When they touched down, a group had gathered in the landing zone. Daylight had flooded over the outpost. Dozens of people waited outside, many of them children. Even more were trying to get through a wall of Marines that held them back.
Beckham could tell they weren’t going to be able to extract all of these people. Beckham and Horn jumped out into the cool morning air, navigating the thronging people as they hurried toward Sergeant Ruckley and a team of Marines surrounding the medical staff.
Army soldiers unloaded crates and boxes from several trucks. They carried them into the troop holds of other choppers that General Souza had sent. Several Black Hawks and even an Osprey had touched down.
“Javier! Kate!” Beckham yelled.
“Tasha! Jenny!” Horn shouted.
“Dad!” the girls called out, slipping between people.
Ginger and Spark barked and ran to Horn, their tails beating the air, oblivious to the threats closing in.
Beckham saw Javier next. His boy ran and wrapped his arms around him. Kate was talking to a Marine and pointing at the crates. When she finished giving orders, she hurried over and embraced Beckham and Javier.
Civilians began boarding the other birds, but combined with the equipment from Kate’s lab, they were already filling up. Marines fanned out to help hold back the growing crowd pressing against those already holding onto the perimeter.
Beckham looked for Timothy, Bo, and Donna. He spotted them in a group on the other side of the Marines.
“Take Javier to the chopper,” Beckham said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” Kate asked.
She followed his gaze to the crowd.
“I’ll see if I can get them on one of the choppers,” Beckham said.
Kate nodded and pulled Javier away while Beckham ran to the Marines running security. The crowd was shouting now, pushing at the Marines even more fervently.
In the background, he heard another shout. A glance over his shoulder confirmed it was Horn arguing with a Marine about allowing Ginger and Spark on the bird.
“They are coming with!” Horn yelled. He picked up Ginger under one arm and Spark under the other. “We’ll hold them to save space!”
The dogs barked, clearly distraught. They weren’t the only ones. Tasha and Jenny both cried even as the Marine gestured them all into the belly of the chopper.
Beckham continued to the gathering group of civilians the soldiers and Marines were fighting to keep at bay.
“Timothy, Bo, Donna!” he shouted.
They squeezed their way over to the other side of the crowd.
“They won’t let us through!” Donna said.
“Get back!” yelled a Marine.
“Let them through,” Beckham said. “They’re with me!”
Two of the Marines looked back at him, but they shook their heads.
“Sorry, Captain,” one said. “We have strict orders.”
An engine fired behind him, and rotors beat the air. He had just seconds to get on the bird himself. Donna stared at him, fear in her gaze.
“Please, Reed!” she cried. “We need to get out of here!”
“It’s going to be okay. This outpost is safe…” his words trailed off because he knew that was a lie.
No outpost was safe anymore.
“There will be another chopper,” Beckham said. “I’m so sorry.”
His heart kicked as he back peddled away, Donna, Bo, and Timothy all staring at him as he retreated.
“I’ll be back for you, I promise!” he shouted.
The guilt burned deep in his chest. He felt like he was abandoning them and running to hide like a coward as he turned to run toward the chopper.
The rotor wash whipped against his body. He looked over his shoulder one last time at the growing crowd of screaming civilians. Then he climbed inside and the crew chief shut the door, blocking the view of the friends he was leaving behind.
Beckham found his wife and son, and Horn and his girls. The dogs were squirming in their grips, but putting them down wasn’t an option in the tightly packed chopper.
“Timothy,” Tasha cried. “We can’t leave him!”
She grabbed Horn’s sleeve. “Dad, we can’t go without Timothy and the others.”
“Why can’t the others come?” Javier asked.
“There isn’t room in this load,” Beckham said.
Tasha wiped a tear from her eyes and turned away to get a view out the windows.
“We’ll go back for them, I promise,” Beckham said.
“Are they going to be okay, Dad?” Javier asked.
“Yes, sweetie,” Kate said. She looked at Beckham, but he couldn’t hold her gaze and he didn’t know what to say to his son. Instead of responding, he turned to the window as the chopper moved over the ocean and into the morning sky.
While they flew to safety, the country was collapsing. He could almost see the flames of burning outposts in the distance.
The monsters had emerged from the shadows in the Allied States with their new ranks, overwhelming and destroying what humanity had worked so hard to rebuild.
Spreading like an inferno.
This time, Beckham feared the human race wouldn’t be able to stop them. That they had only delayed the inevitable eight years ago.
One thing was for certain—humanity had entered another dark age of extinction.
End of Book 1
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Chapter 1
SCAVENGERS
The Truth and The Light were murdering each other in droves.
Perry and his outfit waited on a dusty escarpment to pick over their dead.
It was the month of the Giver of Death. At night, the Deadmoon waned, and the days were short. The battle had begun later than usual today, and already the sun leaned westward. If it ran long, the crew might have to scavenge after dark. Boss Hauten did not like to scavenge after dark, and so h
e stood off to the side, fidgeting impatiently as he waited for the slaughter to be over.
Perry sat away from the ledge, his back against a comfortable rock. Around him, the rest of the outfit waited, holding quiet conversations and occasionally laughing at a joke. At twenty years old, Perry had already been on the crew for three years. That made him a middleman, with only a few others having more seniority than him.
First, there was Jax. He was a crotchety, white-bearded old fart that had been on Boss Hauten’s crew since time immemorial. He held the job of “chief primer,” and he guarded it jealously because it was easy work and he was ancient.
Second, there was Tiller.
Tiller was an ass, and he got along with nobody. Least of all Perry.
Lastly, there was Stuber.
While the rest of them waited, backed away from the edge of the cliff, hoping not to catch a stray round, Stuber stood at the edge in his battered armor and looked down at the battle that splayed out in the valley below. He watched the violence, always with an element of yearning, like a captured animal pines for the ferocity of the wilds.
The clasps on the back of his spaulders still had a bit of Stuber’s old sagum cape.
The cloth was now sun-faded. Almost pink.
But it had once been a bright red.
Red for The Truth.
Staring at the ex-legionnaire’s back, Perry felt a mix of unpleasant things rising up in his throat like gorge. Fear. Hatred. Loathing.
All things best kept hidden. It wouldn’t do for anybody to guess Perry’s past.
Stuber turned like he felt Perry’s gaze on him. Those predatory eyes of his stared out from the rocky promontory of his face. A broad grin split the dark growth of his short beard.
“Shortstack,” he beckoned with one massive hand. “Come watch.”
Perry shook his shaggy, brown head. “Nah. I’m good.”
Stuber’s face darkened. “Come watch. Don’t be bleeding vagina.”
Perry grunted irritably, but rose up from his comfortable rock. It was probably the best seat on this ridge, and he was being forced to give it up. He dusted the back of his pants off and took a few steps forward, hunching his head down as he did, thinking about stray rounds from the battle below.
“You remember what happened to Hinks?” Perry griped, remembering how the poor girl’s head had just seemed to cave in, like an invisible hammer had struck it.
“Hinks was an unlucky bitch,” Stuber said dismissively. “She’d barely come back from the ants the day before.” He snapped his fingers impatiently. “Come on. You’re going to miss the best part.”
Perry glanced behind him. Back to his comfy rock.
Tiller had already slid into place there. He crossed his booted feet and stretched himself with a great, dramatic sigh of pleasure. Then he smiled at Perry and mimed jacking off, completed by flinging an imaginary substance at Perry.
Perry’s fingers twitched, and his brain tried to dip into the place where it always went when conflict was imminent—a place of flowing, red momentum that existed deep in Perry’s brain—but the second that his body tensed to react to Tiller, a huge, callused hand grabbed Perry by the back of the neck and pulled him up to the edge of the cliff.
Stuber’s hands were like iron wrapped in sandpaper.
“Look,” Stuber commanded.
“I’ve seen it before.”
“You’ve never seen this before.”
“I have. Many times.”
“Every battle is different.”
“They look the same to me.”
“That’s because you’re a peon. Here it comes.”
Down below them, three or four miles away, the two armies prepared to converge. Blue on one side. Red on the other. Their sagum capes brilliant in the afternoon sun. Smoke coiled and wreathed them. Flak burst like black blooms in the sky above them. Mortars launched with a constant thumping rhythm and were shot out of the sky by the autoturrets. Gales of tracer fire scoured back and forth, lancing the crowds of men. Every once in a while a mortar shell would get through and a hole would appear in one battleline or another. Stuber didn’t seem to care which side it was—when the bodies blew apart, he laughed.
The two armies were within a hundred yards of each other now. Their front lines were shielded phalanxes that inched towards each other, gaining ground stride by stride while bursts of bullets clattered back and forth, searching for a chink in the wall of shields. A body would fall, and the fire would concentrate on that hole, trying to kill more of the men behind it, but in seconds another shield would appear to plug up the hole, the dead soldiers trampled under their comrades’ feet.
The two armies had closed the gap.
“Foreplay,” Stuber said. “If the battlefield were a whore’s bed, this is the part when you finally get to stick your dick in.”
Below them, the gunfire intensified.
The mortars silenced, the two sides too close now for the shelling to continue. The autoturrets turned their focus on the front lines. Hammered shields. Created holes.
The space between red and blue was filled with bright muzzle flashes and glowing tracers and billowing smoke. It crescendoed, madly, and then, all at once, there was a break. A release.
The two sides crushed into each other.
“Haha!” Stuber thrust his hips. “Yes!”
Perry thought of the dead, crushed underfoot in the melee, in the stabbing, in the contact shots that would blow them open from the big .458 rounds. He thought about the way the mud would be a slick red-brown as he sloshed through it later, the dusty world watered by thousands of gallons of blood, but it would never be enough to bring the earth back to life.
At the rear of the two armies, further back than even the autoturrets, two armored command modules hovered on their turbines above blocks of troops waiting in reserve. On the deck of the modules stood the paladins.
Demigods.
They wore the colors of their side. Watching. Commanding.
Perry had never seen one of them die.
***
“Dogs and ants and spiders!” Hauten yelled at them.
Their buggy trundled its way down the rocky slope towards the valley below. A warm wind blew crosswise down the valley, buffeting in Perry’s ears and making him squint against flying dust.
He could see the redness below. The floor of the valley had become a butcher’s house. Bodies strewn about. Both The Light and The Truth left their dead where they’d fallen.
How many dead in six hours’ worth of fighting?
Perry guesstimated that there were about a thousand bodies below.
Each body containing five liters of blood.
Draining.
Five thousand liters of blood in that valley.
“Dogs and ants and spiders!” Hauten bellowed over the wind and the rumble of the buggy’s tires, and the struggling whine of the electric drive.
The buggy teetered at a steep angle that made Perry’s insides feel watery and he clutched the roll bar nearest him.
“Keep your eyes peeled!” Hauten continued. “Watch what you grab! Watch where you put your feet! Don’t die, because I can’t afford to bury you!”
“What does he mean?”
Perry, still clinging to the rollbar as the buggy now listed to the right on what felt like a forty-five degree slope, looked over his tense shoulder at the girl riding next to him. Her name was Teran. She was new to the outfit. She’d come on with them at their last stop in Junction City. She claimed to have experience. Perry had discovered that that was a lie.
Perry doubted that Hauten had been fooled. Probably he kept her on because he thought he had a chance to fuck her. She was what they called “outfit pretty.” Which was to say, in a town amongst other women, you wouldn’t look twice. But in an outfit full of guys…yeah, you would.
“The crows come first, but they won’t do anything,” Perry answered, his voice wobbling with the shaking of the buggy. “Then the dogs. They smell the blo
od. They’re mean, but they won’t attack you unless you’re alone. Then the ants come up from underground. Don’t step on their hills—they’ll tear you up. Almost lost a girl a few months back because of that.”
Poor old Hinks.
“What about the spiders?”
“The spiders sometimes make nests in the shell casings. They jump out and catch the flies. But they’ll catch a finger too.”
Teran blinked a few times, facing forward. “Aren’t we supposed to collect the shell casings?”
“Yes.”
She processed this with a frown, and then seemed to hunker down. Her lips flattened into a grimly-determined line. The wind whipped a bit of her sandy hair into her eyes. She pulled it back and tucked it behind her ear, where it promptly came loose again.
The buggy lifted itself over a rock, and then started to tip.
Stuber, who rode on the backend of the vehicle slid to the left side and leaned out as a counterbalance.
Perry clenched down hard, knowing that if the buggy started to tumble, he’d be meat by the bottom. They all would be. Except for Stuber, who’d simply hop off the back.
Why did Hauten have to drive like such an idiot? There were a million other routes off the damn ridge, but of course, he had to take this one, because it was the shortest, and he was in a rush to make a profit.
All four tires touched the ground again.
Perry let the air out of his chest slowly.
A moment later, the ground began to level out.
“Why are you doing this anyways?” Perry asked her.
He half-expected a sharp response from Teran. Most women that he’d seen come onto the outfit knew that they were the outsiders and that Hauten was probably trying to fuck them. Hauten rarely hired a female that wasn’t outfit pretty. They were always a bit defensive, and Perry couldn’t blame them. That didn’t make them very pleasant to be around, but then again, there weren’t too many people on the outfit that were.
But Teran just shrugged. “All the places to make an honest living in Junction City were full up. So I figured I’d get on an outfit. This happened to be the outfit.”
Extinction Shadow Page 32
