Cascade (Book 3): Mutant

by Phil Maxey

  “Large winged creatures a few miles off, perched high on some mountains,” whispered Mary.

  The creatures fluttered their large wings, and shrieked causing snow to fall from the peaks they were perched on. One of them took off, it’s heavy wings beating slowly. As it struggled to gain much height, the others near to it did the same, and together they swooped down low in the convoy’s direction.

  “Yup, I see them,” said Zach to Abbey’s pointing. “Cal, change places with Jacob, so you can get that rifle of yours out of the rear window. Fiona you got the left covered?”

  “Yes, all clear on this side,” just as she finished talking, five large shadows drifted across the road. The inhabitants of the vehicles, craned their necks to see above them, but it was hard to get a fix on where the flying creatures were.

  “Rob, can you see where they are? Over.”

  “They just seem to be circling overhead. Over.”

  “Just keep going everyone. Over.”

  Soon as with the E.L.F’s near the frozen river, these other creatures were left behind.

  After trying to search the skies around her, Abbey sat back in her seat. “The creatures out here, far from the large cities, seem less aggressive.”

  “It’s probably because they have not seen many humans, or even large metallic moving objects, they probably don’t know what to make of us, so they leave us alone,” replied Jacob.

  Zach glanced at the rocky cliffs that were now around them. “Let’s hope that continues.”

  Soon the ice covered rocks and hills drew back from the road and they entered a small town.

  Zach studied the infrequent homes and other barn like structures that lined up on both sides of the road. “This might be an opportunity to get some of those supplies you mentioned, Fiona.”

  A number of buildings all close together, came up in front of them on their right. Zach slowed, then stopped. A diner resided next to a larger double fronted convenience store. To the side of the store, a red pickup sat under a few feet of snow.

  “Bass, keep a few of your men covering the vehicles, let me know if there’s any nearby movement. Over.” Zach then turned to those in the Humvee. “Cal, Fiona, check out the diner, see if they have anything we can take. Jacob, Abbey, we will check out the store.”

  The bus doors slid open and Bass and a few soldiers climbed down, then ran best they could in the foot high snow, to both sides, looking down their gun’s sights. Snow gently fluttered down around them. Cal, and Fiona trekked towards the diner, while Zach, Abbey and Jacob approached the store. As they did, white frosted lumps a few feet high stood out in front of it.

  Zach carefully swept away snow from the frozen mound, revealing a motorbike. Abbey did the same to a similar heap a few feet away and got the same result. Jacob, tried looking through the misty front glass but it was so iced up it was hard to make anything out inside. Zach, leant his weight on the door, and pushed. With a cracking noise the door swung inwards and they were all struck by the pungent smell of rotting meat.

  A few yards to the stores right, Cal looked through the patterns of ice that smothered the diner’s window. Part of the left corner, was missing, and a heap of snow had turned to ice on the inside empty shelf. Fiona looked through the diner’s door. The inside consisted of a few tables and chairs, some of which were lying on their sides. Small bottles of ketchup and mustard were lined up neatly on a counter to the left, together with what looked like pastries, but were now dull green fur covered lumps, matching the color of the tiles on the walls.

  After some pushing, the door swung open, and Fiona’s gun led the way inside. On the walls, pictures of traditional looking cowboy’s riding furious beasts hung alongside certificates in gold frames.

  “I’ll check behind the counter, then we both check out back,” Fiona emphasized the word ‘both’. Cal started to look more himself, but he hadn’t remembered his nighttime rendering, and she didn’t want to take any chances.

  The shelves inside the store were mostly full still. Abbey walked over to a row containing bags of chips. “Not sure we should take these, but I sure do miss them.”

  Zach moved along the aisle to a red wood chipped door at the rear that was closed. The smell of rotten meat was even stronger here, and Zach put the sleeve of his jacket over his mouth briefly. Stepping back he clicked on his radio. “Rob, we could do with some help in here, there’s a lot of food we can grab. Over,” Rob agreed to the request.

  The door creaked as he pushed on it and a rush of cold air forced it’s way out. Opening it wider, he raised his gun and looked into a storage room bathed in cold blue light. A door at the opposite end was open, and wooden paneling hid behind a few rows of rust covered metal-shelving units, which icicles hung from.

  Zach looked across the room, trying to see where the source of the smell was coming from. He walked forward. Two large chest freezers sat to the left, both with their glossy tops lying open. Zach crept forward, and peered over the top into the first freezer, putrid, blue-grey clumps of organic material looked back at him. A month or so ago it would have been full of maggot’s but now the months old meat had become something else, partially preserved by the cold, but not enough to stop nature reclaiming it. He moved to the second freezer and looked in, what he saw made him raise his gun, but he quickly dropped it back to his side. A small dog partially frozen looked back at him, it’s dark watery eyes seemingly pleading for something that Zach could not give. It was then he realized he was standing on a dirt-covered piece of paper. Bending down he picked it up.

  “Benny, you have been my friend for twelve years, and I will not let you change like the rest. Soon I will be with you. Elroy.”

  Zach swallowed, his throat tightening, and his eyes began to moisten.

  Apart from extra bottles of ketchup and napkins, not much of use resided behind the diners counter, and Fiona and Cal were soon searching in the room that customers were not allowed entrance too, a small kitchen.

  “Check in the cupboards,” said Fiona walking to the end and looking through a rectangular piece of glass, which resided in a slim white external door. Outside the snow was falling more heavily, adding to the molded shapes, which lay in what was once an employee parking area.

  Cal was partially submerged in a small cupboard near the ground. “Got some cans of prunes and sweet corn.”

  “Good, pack them up, then let’s get out of here, maybe Zach’s having better luck.”

  Rob wrapped his arms around a large wooden box filled with cans and jars from the stores shelves, and walked back out into the white.

  “It’s coming down pretty bad out there, we should probably get going, we don’t want the vehicles to get stuck,” said Jacob who now had two backpacks instead of his original one.

  “I’ll see where Zach is,” said Abbey, walking up to the red door that Zach previously walked through. As she went to press on it, it opened and Zach emerged.

  “Got enough supplies?” said Zach.

  “Yeah, Rob’s taken a lot back to his bus, but there’s still a box to take, anything out the back? It sure does smell funky.”

  “Just rotten meat. Good, we should be going.”

  Zach picked up a second box, this one filled with bottled water, and they all walked back out into the snow. As soon as they were outside, they blinked a few times as the icy flakes dropped on their eyes and started to move towards the bus. It was then they noticed Bass and a soldier walking towards three huddled figures that were walking towards the vehicles from across the street.

  Bass raised his gun as he stomped forward in the foot deep fresh snow. “Stop, don’t come any further!”

  “Are you the military, can you help us?” the first of the figures, a heavily clothed man, staggered forward, one hand helping him keep his balance, the other around a woman, who in turn had her arms around an equally well wrapped up young girl.

  Bass put his gun over his shoulder, and went to walk forward, when there was a shriek, and a dark fo
rm swept by just a few inches in front of him, knocking him backwards. Dazed, he quickly regained his feet and looked back at the people, there was now one less. The man was gone. In his place, the woman and child were screaming, and droplets of crimson trailed off across the snow.

  Looking upwards, a large flying creature similar to the ones that were perched on the snow covered peaks near the river was ascending fast, the struggling man not seeming to slow the E.L.F down. The soldier behind Bass started firing, and Bass raised his gun, looking down its sights to do the same, but the creature was already merging with the low clouds. He looked back at the woman and child and ran forward.

  “We can’t do anything for him, come with me.”

  The woman’s grief made her heavy to pull, so Bass concentrated on the little girl, and picked her up in one swoop. “I will take your little girl, but we have to get back to the bus, there might be more.”

  As if fated, another shriek echoed around them, and the soldier behind started shooting upwards, others joined in the firing from near the bus. The woman, as if woken from a dream, leapt forward and ran with Bass back to the bus, both running inside. Bass returned the child to the woman, and ran back outside. There were now so many shrieks that they overlapped making it hard to know how many creatures were above their heads.

  A particularly loud shriek rang out and a large fluttering creature fell to the ground close to the bus almost disappearing into the snow, it’s legs scrambled to get a foothold, but more bullets slammed into it rendering it motionless.

  Zach waved to those still firing, to return to their vehicles. “We’re leaving!” he shouted but his words lost most of their strength in the orchestra of sound around him.

  With all back inside the vehicles, the engines roared and the two buses and Humvee pulled off, their wheels sliding against the snow. As the convoy sped off, the creatures surrounded the one that had been killed and preceded to tear into it.

  After passing through a few towns, the sparse few trees grew in number, until they were once again surrounded by pillars of bark and pine. The new woman’s name was Faith, and her daughters name was Gracie, although that was the only information they could gleam from them. They sat towards the back of the bus with the kids on and shivered even though they were wrapped in a blanket.

  In the Humvee, Fiona looked over the map. “If we keep up a good pace, we should only be in this forest for thirty minutes.”

  The wipers worked back and forth, pushing the increasingly heavy snowflakes from their view as they charged forward. In the last vehicle of the convoy, Rob, concentrated on the bus in front of him, making sure there was enough distance between them, that he could stop in the snow without crashing into it.

  Tyler leaned forward. “They’re getting too far ahead of us.”

  “I know what I’m doing, haven’t you got anything else to do.”

  Tyler looked at the floor, then turned and headed to a seat further back. The back half of the bus was almost entirely full of boxes and plastic containers. He preferred the other bus. Before it’s role as a people carrier in the apocalypse, it had sat in their family’s junkyard, mostly forgotten, but not to Tyler and his slightly older sister. To them it was a spaceship, and the mashed up cars around them enemy robots to be fought against. He had now lost two siblings. The magnitude of that was something that had to be suppressed until he was older and mature enough to think about it. As he sat on the checkered hessian seat, he observed his brother, his only brother and wondered what must be going through his mind. He had never seen him like how he was after Earl had died. In those dark few hours of grief Tyler had become the older brother. In some ways he felt like he now still was. He was more accepting of this new world, but Rob was tied to a past that only existed in their minds.

  Reaching into his pack, he pulled out a small notebook. It wasn’t as fancy as Dr. Joshi’s, but it still enabled him to keep a diary of what had happened, including rough drawings of some of the creatures they had encountered. Who knows maybe one day he could also be a scientist, like Raj.

  CHAPTER 19

  Raj sat back in the crumpled Humvee. He felt his face. The area around his noise felt warm and sticky, and a burning sensation was starting to take hold. The soldier in the front was only partially in his driving position, being that his helmeted head was lodged within the glass of the windscreen. For a moment only ringing and a distant muffled drone was all that Raj could hear, and then in a flash all the sounds of the battle ranging around him rushed in.

  They had started their journey leaving by the south gate with confidence. They had two battle tanks, lots of troops and even an attack helicopter. They even had a rudimentary system to take advantage of Raj’s sonic device. But it wasn’t long while traveling through the heavily built up cities on the west coast, in southern Oregon that they started to be attacked with an intensity that even Raj, traveling the arduous route to the camp he had just traveled found hard to believe.

  Tinley had transferred himself to a battle tank after the first attack, deeming the Humvee, not ‘appropriate’ for him.

  The initial thrust by multiple E.L.F’s happened around the city of Eugene, roughly fifty miles south of the Portland camp. They had lost around one hundred people in that attack, but within a day Raj stopped counting the losses in terns of individual people, and instead just recorded it as numbers of vehicles lost. A coach equaled roughly forty people, a bus similar, a motor home around twelve and so on.

  Raj resented Tinley more now, than even that first morning. There was a kind of insidiousness about the Colonel. He was nowhere to be seen when the shit hit the fan, but was quick to take credit for anything that went right. Raj felt like he was strapped to the front of a rocket that was heading full tilt into the sun, and there wasn’t much he could do to stop it. He had tried a few times to tell Tinley that they should split the convoy up into smaller parts, and that it’s size is making it an easy target, but Tinley would just act as if he did not hear the request.

  By time they reached the mountains of northern California, they had lost twenty-one vehicles, or eight hundred and forty men, women and children, reducing their cargo to around seventeen thousand people. Raj was resigned to the fact that most of them would not make it to Bravo. If only he could get a message to General Trow, or even Zach. Tinley needed to be relieved of command if these people had any hope of survival.

  “Dr. Joshi! You need to come with me,” said the soldier with blood trickling down his cheek, and his helmet sitting at an ungainly angle.

  Raj’s hand instinctively reached down and unbuckled the seat belt. He went to move and instantly winced as a pain shot through his shoulder.

  The soldier looked concerned. “Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t know, I think I’m ok, just my shoulders bruised,” Raj rotated, resisting the pain and placed his feet down on the smooth white ground outside the wall of the store they had just driven into. Luckily the six-foot high mound of snow along the wall had softened the impact, otherwise Raj was sure he would be dead, like his driver.

  They were in a small town, and the decision had been made to investigate this area to gather more supplies before heading deeper into the wilderness. The main convoy was still on the highway, which curved around the town to the south. Raj now regretted asking to go on this resupply mission.

  “I need to get you into the APC. Tinley will have my ass if anything happens to you.”

  “It’s okay Captain, I’m not dead yet.”

  The automatic fire had died down, and whatever had attacked them had retreated back into the snow-covered forests.

  Raj stood uneasily, and looked back one last time at the soldier he had spent a number of hours chatting too. “I’m sorry about your man, he…” Raj wasn’t sure what to say, he hardly knew the man, but felt that he should say something positive. “He was a good driver,” inside he cringed at the insufficient accolade, but his mind was still trying to absorb what had just happened.

  As
his vehicle, and three more, including an army truck entered the small picturesque town all seemed quiet. But just as they were slowing to find buildings to politely ransack, creatures emerged. Raj had not seen these types of E.L.F before, six-legged and each the size of a large car. Initially he thought they were normal bears, larger than a grizzly but still bears, and then within the fraction of a second that he realized they couldn’t be, he spotted the extra limbs. They jumped down from the roofs, slamming into the vehicles. His driver, accelerated, but one landed directly in front of them, and he turned to avoid the collision sending them into the building. While he was unconscious soldiers piled out of the APC, and took down the three creatures that had attacked them.

  As the Captain half dragged him towards the APC, looking anxiously at the roofs around them, Raj stopped, looking at the fallen carcass of the bear looking E.L.F.

  “Wait, I need to do something.”

  Walking across to the mound of warm, fur and teeth, he took out a vial from his backpack, and a syringe and plunged the needle into what looked like a soft area of tissue, extracting deep red blood.

  “Quickly, doctor,” the Captain’s anxiety took form in white mist from his mouth.

  Raj placed the sample and syringe away and climbed into the APC.

  CHAPTER 20

  The ride through the forested areas took longer than Fiona predicted, but was surprisingly uneventful. A few times, there had been movement in the high pines around them, but nothing that made them alter their course. Soon the forests and peaks were behind them and flat white plains stretched out for as far as the eye could see.

  “I wonder what they grew here,” Abbey looked sad watching the barren square patches of forgotten farmland pass by.

  “Potatoes, onions, sweet corn and similar,” said Jacob.

  “You know a lot for a small town sheriff,” replied Abbey, her words sounding more inquisitorial than intended.