“She’s stable,” Kate said.
“I don’t mean to be insensitive, but I have more questions,” Ringgold said.
“By all means, go ahead.”
“From your reports, I gather you can now listen in on the Variants organic network and potentially send messages through it, correct?”
“That’s what our preliminary results demonstrate,” Kate said. “Sammy is the genius behind the software portion.”
“Can you do what she did?”
“No,” Kate said. “Well…maybe.”
Ringgold thought about her next order, but she knew Kate would be up for the task. “I realize you’re all reeling from your losses, but I need you to test the technology you’ve developed.”
Beckham furrowed his brow. “In the field?”
“Yes,” Ringgold said.
Kate and Beckham exchanged a look.
“She’s not going without me,” he said.
“Of course not,” Ringgold said. “If you want to bring Parker, he can go or he can stay here with your children. I’ll leave it up to you. Either way, get some sleep. We move out when the sun is up.”
“I’ll go, too,” said Fischer. “On our way here, Cornelius and I organized a shipment of the seismic detection equipment I used in El Paso. I just need to know where to send it.”
“I know of just the place,” Festa said. “The outpost in lower Manhattan has repelled the most recent attack. It’s close to us, and they have access to tunnels with webbing you can tap into, Doctor Lovato.”
Fischer gave a nod and picked up his cowboy hat. “I’ll have the equipment shipped there immediately.”
“Good,” Ringgold said.
“Guess I’m going back to New York,” Beckham said. “Hopefully this time we’ll have better luck than we did with Operation Liberty.”
— 3 —
“We got contacts at our ten o’clock,” boomed Pete, his dreadlocks bouncing over his shoulder. He raised his gun.
Nick “Whiskey” Wisniewski stopped and turned toward his comrade. The man pointed into the darkness but Nick saw nothing. After leaving the University of Southern Maine, he and his crew of seven had trudged through the early morning hours on their way to the rendezvous point. They had already racked up five outpost soldier kills and still had a ways to go.
Despite the intensity of the bombings, there was a fair number of people that had escaped the blasts. His men were rounding them up now.
“There!” said Pete.
Nick spotted a man and woman dart out of a building. They started running. He took no pleasure in shooting them, but it had to be done.
He raised his M4 and lined the man up in his sights, then squeezed off a burst. The man went down still holding the hand of the woman. She tumbled to the ground next to him.
Then she let out an agonizing wail that was silenced when Pete slammed the butt of his gun into her forehead. Another man jogged over to retrieve her. With Pete’s help, they dragged her back to their gang of prisoners.
They already had ten rounded up and tied together in a line.
A man named Ray guarded them with a shotgun in one hand and a machete in the other. He had already hacked one man to death who tried to break free. The man’s butchered body was still tied to the line with the others, a reminder of what would happen if the prisoners tried anything.
Nick jogged over, changing his spent magazine as he ran. “Pete, we need to move. No more stopping to find people. Let’s get back to the vehicles before the military hits again.”
They had wiped Outpost Portland off the map, but it had come at a great cost. Over half their own soldiers were dead, and most of their vehicles destroyed.
The military had unexpectedly sacrificed their own in order to kill as many Variants and collaborators as possible. A ruthless act, which surprised Nick. Normally President Ringgold avoided collateral damage, but then again, maybe she hadn’t given the order.
Maybe there was someone else in charge of the war now.
Either way, this just proved what he already knew. The New Gods were winning, and soon the Allied States of America would no longer exist.
A Variant’s high-pitched shriek shattered the stillness of the pre-dawn hours.
The human prisoners huddled closer together. The sound might have bothered Nick, too, if the beasts weren’t still under the control of the Alpha in the area.
He wasn’t sure where the huge monster was now, but he had his remote to shock it into submission if it went rogue.
“Let’s grab Alfred and move out,” Pete said.
Nick returned to the place they had left Alfred a few minutes before. He had slumped against the car they had propped him against, unconscious from his burns.
The low rumble of a fighter jet forced Nick to scramble for cover next to his injured friend.
Scanning the sky, he waited for a glimpse of the jet, but the roar of the engines grew distant.
“Alfred,” Nick whispered, trying to rouse the older man.
“He’s in bad shape,” said Ray.
Nick reached down to check the bandages wrapped around Alfred’s right arm and his shoulder. Shrapnel had punched into his back. Those bandages were already soaked through with blood.
Pete pulled a dreadlock away from his face for a better look. Then he sighed. “He’s not going to make it.”
Alfred’s eyelids suddenly flitted open.
“I’ll make it,” he grumbled. “Don’t leave me behind.”
Nick bent down and scooped an arm under Alfred. He helped him stand, but Alfred winced in pain. He was a big man, and there was no way Nick could carry him all the way to the rendezvous point.
They set off with the other soldiers and their prisoners, moving slowly.
The next few city blocks had been hit hard by bombs. Foundations were all that remained of obliterated houses and businesses. Abandoned vehicles lay in the road, warped and charcoaled.
A graveyard of twisted corpses littered the asphalt of the next street. Clawed hands reaching skyward confirmed they were a pack of Variant thralls that had been caught in the inferno. Seeing the mangled corpses filled Nick with almost as much rage as seeing his dead brothers and sisters.
These were the creatures that were supposed to help them take back their land from the traitors, and every day more lost their lives to the very government that created them.
“We got a live one,” said Ray. He aimed his machete at a juvenile.
The armored shell had blackened, and its eyeballs had melted into gobs of mangled tissue. It growled and moaned, writhing in agony.
“Put it out of its misery,” Pete said.
Ray raised his machete. A crack to the skull ended the suffering. Its inhuman voice was replaced by a mechanical noise.
The thump, thump, thump of chopper blades.
“Contacts!” Pete said. “Everyone, off the road!”
The seven soldiers pulled the group of civilians into a ditch behind the remains of a collapsed building. Seconds after taking cover, two Black Hawk helicopters plunged through the smokescreen. They flew toward the city, door gunners opening up on targets Nick couldn’t see.
He started to raise his rifle but Pete held up an arm to stop him.
“Unless you’ve got an RPG I don’t know about, we don’t have the firepower to take those birds down,” he said.
“We can still take out those gunners…”
“Not without drawing them straight to us, we can’t,” Pete said. “This is not the time to make a move, so stand the fuck down.”
Alfred groaned in pain, and Nick crouched to check on him. Pete went around the side of the building with two other men for a better view.
A few of the prisoners mumbled to each other. Another three sobbed.
Ray held up his machete, still wet with blood. “Quiet, you fucking dogs. Another word and it will be your last.”
A woman sobbed, but Ray left her alone.
The choppers circled over the u
niversity campus for another five minutes before vanishing in the plumes of smoke. For another ten minutes, the bark of the machine guns and the howl of dying monsters filled the early morning.
Eventually the creatures quieted and so did the gunfire, leaving only the thump of the choppers. That too ended as the birds raced away from the campus.
A cool breeze rustled the leaves on the ground.
Pete returned and motioned for the group to keep moving. Nick helped Alfred up, but he was losing strength and blood. He leaned on Nick, heavier than before.
“Hang in there,” Nick said. “We’re almost back to the trucks.”
“I’m…” Alfred groaned and slumped, pulling Nick to the ground. They crashed to the dirt in a tangle of limbs.
Pete grabbed Nick and yanked him up. Alfred was lying on his side, eyes closed.
A touch to his neck confirmed his pulse was weak, and Nick could tell his friend was running out of time. If they didn’t get him medical attention soon, he would die.
“Leave him,” Pete said. “He’s not going to make it.”
Nick glared at Pete. “I’ll carry him.”
“You’d be carrying a corpse. He’ll only slow us down.”
“He’s still alive, man,” Nick said, trying to keep his voice low.
Pete gave Alfred a pitiful look. “Alfred’s service to the New Gods has come to an end.”
“Come on,” Ray said. “Those choppers might be back.”
Nick looked at the smoke-filled sky. They were right, but leaving Alfred felt wrong. The guy had been with them for years, serving with fierce loyalty.
“I’m sorry, brother,” Nick said. He patted Alfred on the shoulder and then stood. As he jogged away, he looked over his shoulder, watching Alfred’s chest move up and down slowly.
“Come on,” Pete said.
He led the group of prisoners and other soldiers through the burned streets.
Their trucks would hopefully be waiting at the rendezvous point about two miles away. For the next twenty minutes they jogged hard, stopping only once to help a female prisoner that had fallen.
Ray raised his machete to kill the woman but Pete stopped him.
“We’re almost back,” he said. “No more killing for now.”
Nick felt some relief. Too much of their own blood had been spilled tonight, and they had lost far too many potential converts.
Down the street, he noticed movement. A Variant climbed the side of a stone church. It skittered up a broken steeple and perched at the top, looking out over the ruins like a gargoyle.
Rearing back its bald skull, it released an unholy shriek. Dozens of its comrades answered the call, a message that they now controlled Outpost Portland.
“The New Gods will be pleased about tonight,” Pete said. “Very pleased, indeed.”
***
Beckham was lying in the creaking bed of the quarters he’d been assigned in the Long Island bunker. A pane of light slipped in under the closed door. Exhaustion gripped his body, but he couldn’t manage to stay asleep. By four in the morning, he had jerked awake multiple times from incessant nightmares.
At five, he gave up on even trying to close his eyes.
Kate rolled over on her back, staring at the cracked ceiling, unable to find sleep, too. Javier was the only one getting any shuteye in a cot across the room.
Beckham pushed his body up against Kate’s.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” he whispered.
She turned to face him. “You really believe that?”
“Yes.”
She stared at him in silence for a while before facing the ceiling again.
He wasn’t sure if she believed him, and hell, he wasn’t sure he believed himself. But he couldn’t lose hope. Confidence and optimism was a soldier’s surest path to victory, and as much as he had tried to retire, he was, and always would be, a warrior.
They finally got up an hour later, roused Javier, and told him they were being sent out again. He sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes, his hair ruffled.
“Am I going too?”
“I’m afraid not,” Kate said.
“You’re leaving me again?” he mumbled.
“We won’t be gone long,” Beckham said. “You’re going to stay with Tasha, Jenny, Big Horn, and the dogs. It’ll be fun.”
“Fun?” Javier looked to his mom, completely alert now. “You want to tell Dad what fun means?”
She forced a smile.
“It will be more fun than where we’re going,” she said.
“I want to go with you,” Javier said. “I can help. I can fight.”
“Honey, it won’t be safe,” Kate said.
“You can protect the others here,” Beckham said. “Ginger and Spark need you, too. You can watch out for them, right?”
Javier shrugged, and Kate bent down to hug him.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“New York City,” Kate replied.
An hour later, he and Kate were on a Black Hawk flying toward the city with S.M. Fischer, his guards, and four soldiers. Beckham dreaded going back to where he had lost so many of his brothers and sisters eight years ago in Operation Liberty.
The apocalyptic landscape was worse than he remembered.
Entire city blocks had burned to piles of ashen debris and the crumbled remains of towers. Mountains of rubble were all that remained of some of the city’s most iconic landmarks. The city’s bridges were mostly non-existent, blown apart before Operation Liberty to keep the infected from spreading. All that had done was trap the living in the city.
He remembered stories of people trying to swim across the river only to drown. And then there were the people who had leapt off the rooftops to avoid the slashing talons of the beasts.
Pillars of smoke rose from lower Manhattan, evidence of the battle from the night before. The bird went higher, giving Beckham a fleeting view of what was left of the New York Public Library. The stairs and the front columns remained, but most of the walls and roof had collapsed inward.
A memory surfaced in his mind of the Variant hordes that had turned the building into an extended stay hotel. But it wasn’t the battle that had occurred here that filled him with despair—it was the police officer and the boy that Beckham and Horn had found inside the Bank of America tower during Operation Liberty.
This was where he had rescued Jake Temper and his son Timothy.
Now they were both gone.
Beckham lowered his head.
“Reed,” Kate said. She squeezed his hand. Her strength helped him find the courage to face the future.
Two Apache helicopters suddenly flew on the flanks of the Black Hawk. They raced ahead, and the pilots of the Black Hawk turned to follow.
“Nice escorts,” Fischer called out.
“Haven’t seen one of them for a while,” said Chase.
“Waste of fuel if you ask me,” added Tran. “Unless the Variants can fly like those freaks in Europe.”
“There could be bats out here,” Kate reminded him.
“Well, look at that,” said one of the pilots. “The Brooklyn Bridge is still intact.”
They flew over it. The bridge had indeed survived the past decade, but it wasn’t unscathed. A few of the vertical cables had snapped and pieces of the road had broken through, dropping into the water.
Multiple ships were docked along the piers to the bridge’s south. One was an old destroyer turned into a museum. There was also a cruise ship that had slammed ashore, smashing its bow. Scattered across the deck were what looked like piles of bodies.
But it wasn’t all death and destruction below.
The first signs of life came into view. Four Humvees escorted an old UPS truck through a street littered with broken vehicles and debris. Soldiers in turrets raked their weapons over the road. One man raised a hand to the chopper before Beckham lost sight of them.
The Apaches turned toward the city and flew over Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange
. Most of the massive towers here had sustained damage from rockets that had blown out the upper floors. The walls of the bottom floors were blackened from the firebombs that had almost killed Beckham in Operation Liberty.
“There it is,” said a pilot over the headset. “The 9/11 memorial is our LZ.”
The memorial was walled off along the streets from the debris of destroyed buildings.
As the chopper did a quick flyby, it became apparent the outpost survivors of the prior night’s battle had retreated block by block to a smaller, more defensible area. The smoke drifted from the east, rising from holes in the ground.
The outpost must have detonated bombs in the sewers and subways.
The Black Hawk descended toward the memorial. Two M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, both rare sights, were positioned at gates in the walls surrounding the site. Soldiers patrolled the platforms built behind the razor wire.
When the Black Hawk touched down, a crew chief opened the door. Beckham helped Kate out and away from the bird. Fischer almost lost his cowboy hat, but Tran snatched it and handed it back.
Three soldiers flanking a middle-aged woman with gray-streaked red hair waited across the lawn, their clothes whipping in the rotor wash.
The Apaches set down on rooftops nearby. The pilots climbed down from the cockpits and vanished from view as soldiers on the roofs stood guard around the precious birds.
“This way!” shouted the woman ahead. She led them through a maze of trees and past the dry memorial pools where they stopped.
The woman held out a hand and smiled, wrinkles forming next to her mouth that evidenced a lifetime of smoking. “Welcome to Outpost Lower Manhattan. I’m Commander Amber Massey.”
“Captain Reed Beckham.”
He shook her hand. He wasn’t surprised when he received a firm grip. Anyone who had held a place like this, in a city that had never been cleared of the monsters, was going to be strong.
“I’m Doctor Kate Lovato,” Kate said, introducing herself next. “My team is still in a classified location, but we’re here to do an advance inspection. We’ll need access to the closest tunnel with Variant webbing.”
Extinction Cycle: Dark Age Box Set | Books 1-4 Page 68
