V 11 - The Texas Run

by George W Proctor (UC) (epub)

  “What can we do about it?” Rick glanced back at Charlie.

  The Texan pursed his lips and shook his head as he glanced at the ruts again. “Ain’t much we can do. Just hope we can cover our trail again when we reach Cross—”

  “Charlie!”

  Sheryl Lee’s scream jerked the two men’s heads around. A gully fifteen feet wide loomed just beyond the hood of the jeep. The night and the flatness of the field had cloaked the treacherous trench.

  Charlie wrenched the steering wheel to the right.

  Too late!

  The jeep’s front left wheel dropped over the edge of the gully. A pounding heartbeat later, the rest of the vehicle followed the wheel down into the yawning chasm.

  Rick’s stomach leaped toward his throat. The jeep fell nose first, slowly tilting forward in the darkness. The Californian felt his body lift and float upward, weightless, as the jeep plummeted.

  In the next instant the front tires plowed into solid earth. Rick flew through the air until his shoulder collided with the back of Charlie’s seat.

  The rear of the jeep dropped and bounced. Bone-jarring shudders ran through the vehicle’s frame. Rick spilled into the back of the jeep, burying the sharp edges of the toolbox in his side. He groaned and someone whimpered above him. His head turned to find Sheryl Lee hanging draped over the back of her seat.

  Still the jeep’s motor purred and the four-wheel-drive vehicle moved. We’re bouncing along the bottom of the gully. The realization somehow penetrated the confusion whirling in his head.

  “Hot damn!” Charlie roared with relief. “Don’t ask me how, but we’re still alive and in one piece!”

  Rick managed to right himself as Sheryl Lee slumped back into her seat. Outside, the wails of the gully rose ten feet above the top of the jeep.

  The scream of twisting metal and shattering glass rent the night.

  “My God!” Charlie’s foot jammed the brake to the floorboard.

  Rick twisted about. Behind the jeep he saw the dark form of a pickup overturned in the gully. In their own fall he had completely forgotten about the convoy of trucks that blindly followed them.

  Ignoring the aches and bruises nagging at his body, Rick scrambled from the back of the jeep and ran sloshing through the water and mud at the bottom of the ditch. Above him he heard the squeal of brakes. He glanced up. The second truck in the caravan halted precariously close to the edge of the gully.

  “Back! Back up before the wall gives way!” he shouted, and waved his arms at the pickup.

  The driver above responded with a grinding of gears. He shifted into reverse and gunned his motor. The pickup disappeared behind the wall of earth rising above the young resistance fighter. A moment later the distinct metallic crunch of clashing bumpers sounded above the racing motor.

  Rick didn’t need to see to know what had happened. The track had plowed into the front of the pickup following it. It didn’t matter. A fender was nothing compared to the possibility of having two trucks piled on top of each other in the bottom of the gully.

  A moan came from the interior of the overturned pickup when Rick reached its side. Grabbing the passenger door with both hands, he tugged. The door opened two inches, then stopped. Another tug and the door creaked three inches wider. More pained groans came from inside.

  Then Charlie was there, reaching out and grasping the twisted edge of the door. “Together. We can get it open.”

  Rick nodded and pulled, with Charlie adding his strength to the task. Metal on metal ground in a tortured protest; the door swung open. Losing his balance in the mud, Rick tumbled in the darkness and dropped to his backside. Charlie fell into the mud beside him.

  “Dad, my dad.” A boy no more than fifteen years old spilled from the pickup. “My dad’s hurt bad. You got to get him out. He’s hurt real bad.”

  “Is everyone all right down there?” a man called from the top of the gully.

  Rick glanced up at the lip of the trench and saw a gathering crowd silhouetted against the sky as the drivers abandoned their trucks and rushed to the accident. He ignored them and picked himself up from the mud to follow Charlie back to the overturned truck’s open cab.

  While Sheryl Lee knelt beside the boy, Charlie ducked inside. Rick watched while the older man reached out a hand and touched the neck of a man hanging upside down over the truck’s steering wheel.

  “If you can reach him, we can get him out,” Rick said.

  “There’s no reason to move him, son,” Charlie said in a grim whisper. His hand came away from the man’s neck moist and dark. “Ben’s head went through the windshield. There ain’t much left of his neck.”

  The veteran fighter pilot backed away from the cab and stared at the youth in Sheryl Lee’s arms. His chest heaved, then sagged before he knelt and gently told the boy his father was no more.

  “No,” the boy shouted, attempting to deny reality. “It can’t be, Charlie. It can’t be.”

  “There’s nothing that can be done for him,” Charlie answered. “And we can’t stay, Billy. We’ve got to move from here. It ain’t the way none of us want it, but it’s the way it has to be.”

  The boy’s sobs drowned further denial. His head nodded, and he let Charlie help him from the ground and lead him toward the jeep.

  “We’re not goin’ anywhere yet.” This from Sheryl Lee, who stood and stared at Charlie. “We have to salvage what supplies we can from the back of the truck.”

  Charlie turned. Even in the night’s blackness, Rick could discern the glare of the man’s eyes.

  “You said it yourself, Charlie Scoggin.” Sheryl Lee stood firm. “Maybe not in the same words, but the meanin’ was the same. These medical supplies are more important than all of us. They’ve got to get through to Fort Worth and Dallas.”

  Rick’s gaze shifted to the overturned truck. Its rear end lay halfway up the opposite side of the gully. Three feet of clearance showed under most of the truck’s bed. The supplies could be salvaged.

  “She’s right, Charlie,” a woman said from above. “Ben didn’t die so that we could give his load to the snakes.”

  A mumble of agreement moved through the others standing at the top of the gully. One by one, men and women began to pick their way down the steep incline. A knife came from a pocket and severed one of the cords holding the tarpaulin to the truck’s bed. Within minutes boxes were being passed from hand to hand up the gully wall and added to the loads in the trucks above.

  The purples and grays of predawn gave way to a golden rose on the eastern horizon. Rick tossed a bushy cedar branch to Emmet Voss, who placed it on the bed of his pickup.

  “That should do it.” The rancher gave the concealed truck a final onceover. “Now all we have to do is pray the lizards don’t notice us from the air.”

  Rick nodded, his gaze moving over the small forest of cedars. The break was no more than a thicket of closely packed trees, none growing over fifteen feet into the air. He had never seen vegetation so dense. It was as if the cedars fought one another for possession of the sandy soil that anchored them.

  Here and there clearings did open among the cedars. To walk beyond these small patches of sand and rock, a person had to battle his way through a barrier of furry green branches. If he wasn’t careful within the break, it would be easy for him to lose his sense of direction and become lost in a matter of seconds, Rick realized.

  “This cedar break should keep us all hidden,” Charlie replied, tossing another limb into the pickup. “You and the missus get what sleep you can. Tilings start gettin’ tough tonight.”

  Start getting tough! Rick grimaced while he examined the cedar break that rose about him. And I thought tonight was bad.

  True to Charlie Scoggin’s plan, the convoy had made the Brazos River, although the veteran fighter pilot wasn’t certain whether they were in Palo Pinto or Parker County. He had led the trucks into this dense break of cedars and ordered his companions to park beneath the overgrown tree shrubs, then cut limb
s with which to conceal their vehicles from any Visitor patrols that might pass overhead.

  “It will get tougher,” Charlie said in a low voice as he and Rick walked to where Sheryl Lee and Billy Jennings waited beside a jeep heaped with cedar limbs. “A damn sight tougher than anybody expects.”

  Charlie then explained that if his calculations were correct, the caravan was a mere ninety minutes from the Fort Worth city limits. “The rest of the drive will have to be on roads. Startin’ with the one we find to get us across the river.”

  Drawing a deep breath, Charlie let it hiss slowly through his teeth. “I don’t like bein’ in the open like that, but I can’t see any way round it. We’re runnin’ out of country, with nothin’ but city ahead.”

  Rick didn’t know what to say as he slipped into the jeep. Like everyone else in the caravan, he was in Charlie Scoggin’s hands. Even more so, he thought while he tried to clear a spot in the back of the jeep to stretch out on. I haven’t the slightest idea what Fort Worth or Dallas even looks like. Somehow he doubted that the city once portrayed by television’s prime-time soap opera Dallas was the city he hoped to live to see.

  As Billy Jennings made his own nest among the junk scattered over the back of the jeep, Rick folded an arm beneath his head to use as a pillow and closed his eyes.

  The whine of a Visitor squad vehicle sliced through the silence of the cedar break.

  Rick’s eyes opened, and he stared at the jeep’s top. Not one but two of the lizards’ ships passed overhead, moving from south to north. When the telltale high-pitched squeal of their gravity-defying engines faded in the distance, he slowly released an overly held breath. They had passed by without noticing the caravan hidden below.

  Charlie’s gaze caught and held Rick’s for several long moments. Although neither spoke, Rick knew the older man silently whispered the same prayer that moved through his mind—that the alien ships were merely on routine patrol and not searching for Wanda Sue’s missing cargo and passengers.

  Chapter 14

  Houston Mother Ship Commander Garth’s strides were brisk and sharp as he walked past the smoking ruins that had housed the South Fort Worth Processing Center only two hours ago.

  In spite of the early morning hour and the fact he had been dragged from a sound sleep to make the flight to Fort Worth, he maintained a strict military facade, one that bespoke strength and dignity. At the moment it was all he had to boost the morale of those who had fallen in defeat at the hands of resistance fighters.

  “A total of seventy-four of our forces died in the explosions,” a raven-haired lieutenant walking beside him said, rattling off the final tallies of the battle. “Included in those dead were the center’s Captain Maureen. Another twenty-five shock troopers were injured. ...”

  At least the officer in command had the decency to die in the fray, Garth thought with little comfort. Perhaps if the facts of what had happened here last night were bent a bit here, molded a little there, the captain’s death and those of her troops could be used. He would have to pass the seed of an idea blossoming in his mind along to his staff. The troops needed heroes who willingly sacrificed their lives to glorify the Great Leader arid his cause.

  “Engineering estimates it will take at least two weeks until another processing center is fully operational,” the

  lieutenant continued. “They suggest a site in an abandoned shopping mall about two miles to the southwest. ” Two nights ago the processing center in Dallas’ Cotton Bowl had been destroyed. And now this! Garth’s chest tightened. Something was up. Why had these human animals become so restless?

  “Should I tell Engineering to proceed with construction of the new center?”

  “Wha— Yes, yes immediately,” Garth replied, irritated by the break in his train of thought. “Lieutenant, it’s my understanding two members of the resistance were captured during last night’s attack.”

  “Yes, sir.” The young woman looked up at her commanding officer. “Major Lawrence is presently questioning the pair.”

  “I want to see them,” Garth said.

  “They’ve been taken to Fort Worth Processing Center Two,” the woman answered, as though taken totally off guard by the request.

  “Then I suggest that we are wasting valuable time remaining here, Lieutenant.” Garth turned and walked to his waiting squad vehicle.

  They’re merely children! Garth studied the faces that glared at him. Neither could be more than fifteen human years in age. Yet such hate twisted their dirty faces.

  However, not even the hate could conceal the fear he detected. Like an ugly little worm, it wiggled just below the surface of their defiant masks. Both the captives had reason to fear.

  “Major Lawrence, show them the photograph of the woman I seek,” Garth said.

  The officer extracted a color photograph from the breast pocket of his uniform and shoved it into the faces of his two captives.

  A hint of a smile lifted the comers of Garth’s mouth.

  They both knew the bitch’s offspring. Although neither spoke, he saw it in the way their eyes widened.

  “Major, begin with the female’s hands,” Garth ordered. “Work upward until the bones of the arms are splinters, then move on to the legs if necessary.”

  Garth pivoted, walked from the interrogation room, and exited the processing center, leaving Major Lawrence to his pleasures. Outside, the Texas sun already burned like an inferno in the sky, and it was only nine in the morning. Even with the dark glasses he wore, the alien could only tolerate staring directly into its face a fraction of a second.

  The hum of an approaching squad vehicle pulled his attention to the north. He watched the craft settle atop a bulls-eye painted on the pavement to his left. The ship’s side door opened, its lower half swinging down to form an exit ramp.

  The first of the day's harvest, he thought while shock troopers prodded the human cargo from the interior of the ship and marched them into the processing center. Production will have to be increased here to make up for last night’s disaster.

  His gaze moved from the line of humans who shuffled in a drugged stupor toward the cold sleep awaiting them. The blasted ruins of what had once been Carswell Air Force Base surrounded him. Here were the seared skeletons of B-52 bombers, destroyed before the awkward craft could lift off from their runways.

  The site for the processing center was perfect. It served as a constant reminder to the humans that their resistance to Visitor domination was futile. How could they expect to be victorious when this bastion of their military might had been so easily destroyed?

  A cold finger tapped at his spine. Yet the humans did continue to struggle. The ruins of two processing centers were harsh testimony to just how effective their tactics could be.

  No, Garth shook his head. The human resistance fighters had gained nothing with their terroristic assaults on the centers. They only delayed the inevitable. The delay was minor in the overall scheme of the Great Leader’s plan for conquest. In the end every human being in both Dallas and Fort Worth, as well as those in the suburbs surrounding the cities, would one day shuffle his or her way into a processing center to sleep the cold sleep until the final fate of each was decided.

  “Commander Garth.”

  Major Lawrence’s voice wedged into the commander’s thoughts. Garth turned to see his fellow officer walk from the processing center.

  “You were correct in beginning the interrogation with the girl.” Lawrence grinned. “While she refused to do more than scream even as I started on her second arm, the male could not endure her suffering.”

  Garth smiled. “And?”

  “This female is Sheryl Lee Darcy.” Major Lawrence pointed to the photograph he still held. “She is the daughter of the resistance leader who died in Dallas yesterday. ”

  “I know that much, Major.” Garth grew impatient. “Did the boy know anything else?”

  “This Sheryl Lee Darcy and a companion are presently on a mission to secure medical su
pplies for the resistance forces in this sector,” the major continued. “The male knew nothing more except that she left this region more than a week ago.”

  Garth’s smile grew. How neatly the pieces fell into place. Not only had the woman been aboard the downed airplane discovered near Lubbock, but the plane had carried medical supplies. Both woman and cargo were now missing.

  If the daughter has half the spirit of the mother, then she will find—has found—a method of transporting those supplies into this sector, Garth silently speculated. His alien pulse quickened. Even now she comes to me. I can feel it!

  “The male also provided me with the location of the Fort Worth resistance headquarters,” Major Lawrence continued. “I have ordered an immediate raid.”

  “Good, good, Major,” Garth said, although he knew the raid would prove fruitless. Fearing that the captives might reveal their location, resistance leaders would have moved to a secondary hiding place by the time Major Lawrence’s shock troopers arrived. Still, he would accompany the major, just in case.

  It didn’t matter to Garth. The Fort Worth resistance was of little concern to him, not with the bitch’s offspring so near.

  “Major, I will require quarters here in Fort Worth for the next few days. You will arrange something for me?” Garth asked.

  “My own quarters within the processing center are yours for as long as you desire, Commander,” the major answered. “Shall I escort you to them?”

  “In a moment, Major, but first I need to communicate with the Mother Ship,” Garth answered. “I want to triple the aerial patrols between the Fort Worth and Lubbock sectors.”

  Chapter 15

  Rick awoke feeling like he had spent the night— no, day, he corrected himself—in a Tiirkish steam bath. He stretched and rammed a knee into the back of an unyielding jeep seat. Granting a curse, he rolled to the side to escape the obstacle and rammed his left elbow against the sharp-edged toolbox.